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In permissionless blockchains, transaction issuers include a fee to incentivize miners to include their transactions. To accurately estimate this prioritization fee for a transaction, transaction issuers (or blockchain participants, more…
Network-level privacy is the Achilles heel of financial privacy in cryptocurrencies. Financial privacy amounts to achieving and maintaining blockchain- and network-level privacy. Blockchain-level privacy recently received substantial…
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…
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…
Ethereum's ideals of decentralization and censorship resistance are undermined in practice, motivating ongoing efforts to reestablish these properties. Existing proposals for fairness mechanisms depend on the assumption that a sufficient…
Peer-to-peer (p2p) networks are not independent of their peers, and the network efficiency depends on peers contributing resources. Because shared resources are not free, this contribution must be rewarded. Peers across the network may…
Modern blockchains support a variety of distributed applications beyond cryptocurrencies, including smart contracts -- which let users execute arbitrary code in a distributed and decentralized fashion. Regardless of their intended…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
Blockchain networks provide a reliable trust anchor to decentralized applications (DApps) backed by smart contracts. The Ethereum ecosystem now encompasses most blockchain networks that provide compatible support for smart contracts code.…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
We introduce EtherBee, a global dataset integrating detailed Ethereum node metrics, network traffic metadata, and honeypot interaction logs collected from ten geographically diverse vantage points over three months. By correlating node data…
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…
This paper presents a novel staking coopetition design aimed at incentivizing decentralization and continuous growth of economic security within a proof-of-stake system. Staking rewards follow a nonlinear mapping relative to stake size.…
Blockchains have sparked global interest in recent years, gaining importance as they increasingly influence technology and finance. This thesis investigates the robustness of blockchain protocols, specifically focusing on Ethereum…
The transition of Ethereum from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism introduces a transformative approach to blockchain validation, offering enhanced scalability, energy efficiency, and security. However, this…
Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum: one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are used to increase individual validators' profits and delay consensus decisions, and one…
Blockchain is based on a P2P network, supporting decentralized consensus of current cryptocurrencies. Since bitcoin and altcoins all utilize an underlying blockchain, they are therefore greatly affected by the performance of the P2P…
Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain systems that supports more than half a million transactions every day and fosters miscellaneous decentralized applications with its Turing-complete smart contract machine. Whereas it remains…
Ethereum clients execute transactions in a sequential order prescribed by the consensus protocol. This is a safe and conservative approach to blockchain transaction processing which forgoes running transactions in parallel even when doing…
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…