Related papers: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Consensus Layer: Participa…
Like most modern blockchain networks, Ethereum has relied on economic incentives to promote honest participation in the chain's consensus. The distributed character of the platform, together with the "randomness" or "luck" factor that both…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols have emerged as a compelling paradigm for organizing distributed ledger systems. In proof-of-stake (PoS), a subset of stakeholders participate in validating a growing ledger of transactions. For the…
Since the Merge update upon which Ethereum transitioned to Proof of Stake, it has been touted that it resulted in lower power consumption and increased security. However, even if that is the case, can this state be sustained? In this paper,…
Geospatial decentralization is essential for blockchains, ensuring regulatory resilience, robustness, and fairness. We empirically analyze five major Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains: Aptos, Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, and Sui, revealing…
As of July 15, 2023, Ethererum, which is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain [1] has around 410 Billion USD in total assets on chain (popularly referred to as total-value-locked, TVL) but has only 33 Billion USD worth of ETH staked in…
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal 3675 (EIP-3675) marks a significant shift, transitioning from a Proof of Work (PoW) to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This transition resulted in a staggering 99.95% decrease in energy…
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…
Blockchain technology enables secure, transparent data management in decentralized systems, supporting applications from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to tokenizing real-world assets like property. Its scalability and sustainability hinge…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is a prominent Sybil control mechanism for blockchain-based systems. In "e-PoS: Making PoS Decentralized and Fair," Saad et al. (TPDS'21) introduced a new Proof-of-Stake protocol, e-PoS, to enhance PoS applications'…
Current blockchain consensus protocols -- notably, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) -- deliver global agreement but exhibit structural constraints. PoW anchors security in heavy computation, inflating energy use and imposing…
Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and…
We describe a prototype of a fully capable Ethereum Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain network running on multiple Raspberry Pi (RPi) computers. The prototype is easy to set up and is intended to function as a completely standalone system,…
With Ethereum's transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake in September 2022 came another paradigm shift, the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) scheme. PBS was introduced to decouple the roles of selecting and ordering transactions in…
Lending protocols in decentralized finance enable the permissionless exchange of capital from lenders to borrowers without relying on a trusted third party for clearing or market-making. Interest rates are set by the supply and demand of…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) has emerged as a natural alternative to the resource-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain, as was recently seen with the Ethereum Merge. PoS-based blockchains require an initial stake distribution among the…
Decentralized systems built around blockchain technology promise clients an immutable ledger. They add a transaction to the ledger after it undergoes consensus among the replicas that run a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) or Byzantine Fault-Tolerant…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain.…
Ethereum is currently the main blockchain ecosystem providing decentralised trust guarantees for applications ranging from finance to e-government. A common criticism of blockchain networks has been their energy consumption and operational…
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…
The blockchain data structure maintained via the longest-chain rule---popularized by Bitcoin---is a powerful algorithmic tool for consensus algorithms. Such algorithms achieve consistency for blocks in the chain as a function of their depth…