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Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…
On September 15, 2022, the Ethereum network adopted a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. We study the impact on the network and competing platforms in a two month event window around the Beacon chain merge. We find that the…
Maximal extractable value (MEV) in which block proposers unethically gain profits by manipulating the order in which transactions are included within a block, is a key challenge facing blockchains such as Ethereum today. Left unchecked, MEV…
Block-chain world is very dynamic and there is need for strong governance and underlying technology architecture to be robust to face challenges. This paper considers Ethereum, a leading block chain. We deep dive into the nature of this…
Understanding the economic intent of Ethereum transactions is critical for user safety, yet current tools expose only raw on-chain data or surface-level intent, leading to widespread "blind signing" (approving transactions without…
The vulnerability of false data injection attacks on real-time electricity pricing for the power grid market has been recently explored. Previous work has focused on the impact caused by attackers that compromise pricing signals and send…
We analyze the economic incentives generated by the proof-of-stake mechanism discussed in the Ethereum Casper upgrade proposal. Compared with proof-of-work, proof-of-stake has a different cost structure for attackers. In Budish (2018),…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
Blockchain offers a decentralized, immutable, transparent system of records. It offers a peer-to-peer network of nodes with no centralised governing entity making it unhackable and therefore, more secure than the traditional paper-based or…
Mining is the important part of the blockchain used the proof of work (PoW) on its consensus, looking for the matching block through testing a number of hash calculations. In order to attract more hash computing power, the miner who finds…
The rapid growth of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) boosts the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, attacks towards DeFi applications (apps) are increasing. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing smart contract vulnerability…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) represents a pivotal challenge within the Ethereum ecosystem; it impacts the fairness, security, and efficiency of both Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) networks. MEV arises when miners or validators manipulate…
Phishing detection on Ethereum has increasingly leveraged advanced machine learning techniques to identify fraudulent transactions. However, limited attention has been given to understanding the effectiveness of feature selection strategies…
A smart contract that is deployed to a blockchain system like Ethereum is, under reasonable circumstances, expected to be immutable and tamper-proof. This is both a feature (promoting integrity and transparency) and a bug (preventing…
Users bid in a transaction fee mechanism (TFM) to get their transactions included and confirmed by a blockchain protocol. Roughgarden (EC'21) initiated the formal treatment of TFMs and proposed three requirements: user incentive…
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
The Ethereum blockchain network is a decentralized platform enabling smart contract execution and transactions of Ether (ETH) [1], its designated cryptocurrency. Ethereum is the second most popular cryptocurrency with a market cap of more…