Related papers: Towards Understanding and Characterizing the Arbit…
Algorithmic trading is well studied in traditional financial markets. However, it has received less attention in centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) attributed the $2010$ flash crash, one of…
The rapid growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) has led to the widespread use of automated agents, or bots, within blockchain ecosystems like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Solana. While these bots enhance market efficiency and…
This thesis presents techniques to investigate transactions in uncharted cryptocurrencies and services. Cryptocurrencies are used to securely send payments online. Payments via the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, use pseudonymous addresses…
In recent years, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) grows rapidly due to the development of blockchain technology and smart contracts. As of March 2023, the estimated global cryptocurrency market cap has reached approximately $949 billion.…
This student paper introduces a novel methodology for the detection and analysis of multihop cross-chain arbitrage opportunities, wherein multihop denotes arbitrage sequences involving more than two transactional steps across distinct…
Reentrancy, a notorious vulnerability in smart contracts, has led to millions of dollars in financial loss. However, current smart contract vulnerability detection tools suffer from a high false positive rate in identifying contracts with…
Decentralized cryptocurrencies feature the use of blockchain to transfer values among peers on networks without central agency. Smart contracts are programs running on top of the blockchain consensus protocol to enable people make…
Smart Contracts (SCs) publicly deployed on blockchain have been shown to include multiple vulnerabilities, which can be maliciously exploited by users. In this paper, we present extorsionware, a novel attack exploiting the public nature of…
The production of counterfeit money has a long history. It refers to the creation of imitation currency that is produced without the legal sanction of government. With the growth of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, there is expanding evidence…
In recent years, Ethereum gained tremendously in popularity, growing from a daily transaction average of 10K in January 2016 to an average of 500K in January 2020. Similarly, smart contracts began to carry more value, making them appealing…
In online auctions, fraudulent behaviors such as shill bidding pose significant risks. This paper presents a conceptual framework that applies dynamic, behavior-based penalties to deter auction fraud using blockchain smart contracts. Unlike…
Ponzi schemes are financial frauds which lure users under the promise of high profits. Actually, users are repaid only with the investments of new users joining the scheme: consequently, a Ponzi scheme implodes soon after users stop joining…
Cross-Chain bridges have become the most popular solution to support asset interoperability between heterogeneous blockchains. However, while providing efficient and flexible cross-chain asset transfer, the complex workflow involving both…
This study presents a review of research on social media bot detection. Social media bots are used by political and criminal actors for mass distribution of political messages, as well as rumors, conspiracy theories, and other forms of…
With the introduction of memory-bound cryptocurrencies, such as Monero, the implementation of mining code in browser-based JavaScript has become a worthwhile alternative to dedicated mining rigs. Based on this technology, a new form of…
Pyramid schemes are investment scams in which top-level participants in a hierarchical network recruit and profit from an expanding base of defrauded newer participants. Pyramid schemes have existed for over a century, but there have been…
The prevalence of maximal extractable value (MEV) in the Ethereum ecosystem has led to a characterization of the latter as a dark forest. Studies of MEV have thus far largely been restricted to purely on-chain MEV, i.e., sandwich attacks,…
Recent years have witnessed explosive growth in blockchain smart contract applications. As smart contracts become increasingly popular and carry trillion dollars worth of digital assets, they become more of an appealing target for…
Cyclic arbitrage chances exist abundantly among decentralized exchanges (DEXs), like Uniswap V2. For an arbitrage cycle (loop), researchers or practitioners usually choose a specific token, such as Ether as input, and optimize their input…
Smart contract is the building block of blockchain systems that enables automated peer-to-peer transactions and decentralized services. With the increasing popularity of smart contracts, blockchain systems, in particular Ethereum, have been…