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A transaction fee mechanism (TFM) is an essential component of a blockchain protocol. However, a systematic evaluation of the real-world impact of TFMs is still absent. Using rich data from the Ethereum blockchain, the mempool, and…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
Transaction fee markets are essential components of blockchain economies, as they resolve the inherent scarcity in the number of transactions that can be added to each block. In early blockchain protocols, this scarcity was resolved through…
As the number of decentralized applications and users on Ethereum grows, the ability of the blockchain to efficiently handle a growing number of transactions becomes increasingly strained. Ethereums current execution model relies heavily on…
Blockchain enables peer-to-peer transactions in cyberspace without a trusted third party. The rapid growth of Ethereum and smart contract blockchains generally calls for well-designed Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate limited…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to excess value captured by miners (or validators) from users in a cryptocurrency network. This excess value often comes from reordering users' transactions to maximize fees or from inserting new…
We present a novel framework for analyzing blockchain consensus mechanisms by modeling blockchain growth as a Partially Observable Stochastic Game (POSG) which we reduce to a set of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs)…
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…
Blockchain's economic value lies in enabling financial and economic transactions without relying on trusted, centralized intermediaries. In practice, however, transactions pass through a fragmented chain of intermediaries before being…
Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally…
Proof-of-Work~(PoW) based blockchains typically allocate only a tiny fraction (e.g., less than 1% for Ethereum) of the average interarrival time~($\mathbb{I}$) between blocks for validating transactions. A trivial increase in validation…
In this paper, we review the undercutting attacks in the transaction-fee-based regime of proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains with the longest chain fork-choice rule. Next, we focus on the problem of fluctuations in mining revenue and the mining…
As a key enabler of Web3, Ethereum has long faced scalability challenges. The recent EIP-4844 upgrade aims to alleviate the scalability issue by introducing the ''blob'', a new data structure for Layer-2 rollups that enables off-chain…
This paper examines the economic and security implications of Proof-of-Stake (POS) designs, providing a survey of POS design choices and their underlying economic principles in prominent POS-blockchains. The paper argues that…
Trading on decentralized exchanges has been one of the primary use cases for permissionless blockchains with daily trading volume exceeding billions of U.S.~dollars. In the status quo, users broadcast transactions and miners are responsible…
Contemporary blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute transactions serially by miners and validators and determine the Proof-of-Work (PoW). Such serial execution is unable to exploit modern multi-core resources efficiently, hence…
The high electricity consumption of cryptocurrencies that rely on proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithms has raised serious environmental concerns due to its association with carbon emissions and strain on energy grids. There has been…
In 2021 Ethereum adjusted the transaction pricing mechanism by implementing EIP-1559, which introduces the base fee - a network fee that is burned and dynamically adjusts to the network demand. The authors of the Ethereum Improvement…
We study the feasibility, profitability, and prevalence of sandwich attacks on Ethereum rollups with private mempools. First, we extend a formal model of optimal front- and back-run sizing, relating attack profitability to victim trade…
The rapid growth of Blockchain and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has introduced new challenges and vulnerabilities that threaten the integrity and efficiency of the ecosystem. This study identifies critical issues such as Transaction Order…