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Given the large adoption and economical impact of permissionless blockchains, the complexity of the underlying systems and the adversarial environment in which they operate, it is fundamental to properly study and understand the emergent…
Designing an efficient difficulty control algorithm is an essential problem in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains because the network hash rate is randomly changing. This paper proposes a general difficulty control algorithm and provides…
Blockchains are decentralized and immutable databases that are shared among the nodes of the network. Although blockchains have attracted a great scale of attention in the recent years by disrupting the traditional financial systems, the…
Validators in permissionless, large-scale blockchains, such as Ethereum, are typically payoff-maximizing, rational actors. Ethereum relies on in-protocol incentives, like rewards for correct and timely votes, to induce honest behavior and…
The properties of tokens within the Ethereum blockchain, such as their current prices, trade volumes, and potential future values, have been the subjects of numerous studies. Employing social networks and graphs, as powerful tools for…
Many of today's crypto currencies use blockchains as decentralized ledgers and secure them with proof of work. In case of a fork of the chain, Bitcoin's rule for achieving consensus is selecting the longest chain and discarding the other…
As decentralized applications on permissionless blockchains are prevalent, more and more latency-sensitive usage scenarios emerged, where the lower the latency of sending and receiving messages, the better the chance of earning revenue. To…
A smart grid is an important application in Industry 4.0 with a lot of new technologies and equipment working together. Hence, sensitive data stored in the smart grid is vulnerable to malicious modification and theft. This paper proposes a…
Today's blockchains suffer from low throughput and high latency, which impedes their widespread adoption of more complex applications like smart contracts. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for smart contract execution. It…
The Ethereum ecosystem was maintained by a distributed global network of computers that required massive amounts of computational power. Previous work on estimating the energy use and emissions of the Ethereum network has relied on top-down…
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are increasingly deployed on distributed ledgers, yet systematic cross-platform evidence on their operational behavior remains limited. We present an empirical benchmarking study of three prominent…
We propose a model suggesting that honest-but-rational consensus participants may play timing games, and strategically delay their block proposal to optimize MEV capture, while still ensuring the proposal's timely inclusion in the canonical…
Ensuring security for highly dynamic peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has always been a challenge, especially for services like online transactions and smart devices. These networks experience high churn rates, making it difficult to maintain…
In blockchain, bribery is an inevitable problem since users with various goals can bribe miners by transferring cryptoassets. To alleviate the negative effects of such collusion, Ethereum blockchain implemented new transaction fee mechanism…
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,…
It is widely accepted that Ethereum mining is highly centralized. Nonetheless, centralization has been mostly characterized by exclusively looking at the influence that independent miners or mining pools can have over the network. Moreover,…
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…
As transaction fees skyrocket today, blockchains become increasingly expensive, hurting their adoption in broader applications. This work tackles the saving of transaction fees for economic blockchain applications. The key insight is that…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
In Ethereum, the ledger exchanges messages along an underlying Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network to reach consistency. Understanding the underlying network topology of Ethereum is crucial for network optimization, security and scalability.…