Related papers: Ethereum's Proposer-Builder Separation: Promises a…
Following the publication of Bitcoin's arguably most famous attack, selfish mining, various works have introduced mechanisms to enhance blockchain systems' game theoretic resilience. Some reward mechanisms, like FruitChains, have been shown…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…
Authorization is challenging in distributed systems that cannot rely on the identification of nodes. Proof-of-work offers an alternative gate-keeping mechanism, but its probabilistic nature is incompatible with conventional security…
In this article, we develop an interdisciplinary analysis of MEV which desires to merge the gap that exists between technical and legal research supporting policymakers in their regulatory decisions concerning blockchains, DeFi and…
Mining blocks in a blockchain using the \textit{Proof-of-Work} consensus protocol involves significant risk, as network participants face continuous operational costs while earning infrequent capital gains upon successfully mining a block.…
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
Unlike Ethereum, which was conceived as a general-purpose smart-contract platform, Bitcoin was designed primarily as a transaction ledger for its native currency, which limits programmability for conditional applications. This constraint is…
Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are fundamental performance measures of any blockchain system in addition to its security. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying…
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…
Motivated by proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains such as Ethereum, two key desiderata have recently been studied for Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) state-machine replication (SMR) consensus protocols: Finality means that the protocol retains…
Bitcoin and Ethereum, whose miners arguably collectively comprise the most powerful computational resource in the history of mankind, offer no more power for processing and verifying transactions than a typical smart phone. The system…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) systems face critical challenges, including excessive energy consumption and the centralization of mining power among entities with expensive hardware. Static mining pools exacerbate these issues by reducing competition…
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…
Censorship resistance with short-term inclusion guarantees is an important feature of decentralized systems, missing from many state-of-the-art and even deployed consensus protocols. In leader-based protocols the leader arbitrarily selects…
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…
This paper examines how various categories of Ethereum stakers respond to changes in the consensus issuance schedule, and the potential impact of such changes on the composition of the staking market. To this end, we have develop and…
This publication describes the block winner selection process that will be used in a novel Proof-of-Useful-Work blockchain for High Energy Physics that the authors are currently working on. Instead of spamming hashing operations to mine…
Blockchains rely on a consensus among participants to achieve decentralization and security. However, reaching consensus in an online, digital world where identities are not tied to physical users is a challenging problem. Proof-of-work…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
Gasper, the consensus protocol currently employed by Ethereum, typically requires 64 to 95 slots -- the units of time during which a new chain extending the previous one by one block is proposed and voted -- to finalize. This means that…