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Ethereum is currently the second largest blockchain by market capitalization and a popular platform for cryptocurrencies. As it has grown, the high value present and the anonymity afforded by the technology have led Ethereum to become a…
Lending protocols are one of the main applications of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), enabling crypto-assets loan markets with a total value estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Unlike traditional lending systems, these protocols…
Due to the increasing interest in blockchain technology for fostering secure, auditable, decentralized applications, a set of challenges associated with this technology need to be addressed. In this letter, we focus on the delay associated…
Total Value Locked (TVL) aims to measure the aggregate value of cryptoassets deposited in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols. Although blockchain data is public, the way TVL is computed is not well understood. In practice, its…
Coded blockchains have acquired prominence as a promising solution to reduce storage costs and facilitate scalability. Within this class, Luby Transform (LT) coded blockchains are an appealing choice for scalability owing to the…
This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of two dominant blockchain consensus mechanisms, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), evaluated across seven critical metrics: energy use, security, transaction speed,…
Current blockchain protocols (e.g., Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake) secure the ledger yet cannot measure validator trustworthiness, allowing subtle misconduct that is especially damaging in decentralized-finance (DeFi) settings. We…
Blockchain is an emerging decentralized data collection, sharing and storage technology, which have provided abundant transparent, secure, tamper-proof, secure and robust ledger services for various real-world use cases. Recent years have…
Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems. Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of…
Blockchain technology promises to democratize finance and promote social equity through decentralization, but questions remain about whether current implementations advance or hinder these goals. Through a mixed-methods study combining…
We propose and compare two approaches to identify smart contracts as token systems by analyzing their public bytecode. The first approach symbolically executes the code in order to detect token systems by their characteristic behavior of…
The application of Bitcoin enables people to understand blockchain technology gradually. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency that does not rely on third-party credit institutions, and the core of Bitcoin's underlying technology is…
Today's world is organized based on merit and value. A single global currency that's decentralized is needed for a global economy. Bitcoin is a partial solution to this need, however it suffers from scalability problems which prevent it…
Consensus protocols used today in blockchains often rely on computational power or financial stakes - scarce resources. We propose a novel protocol using social capital - trust and influence from social interactions - as a non-transferable…
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…
Blockchains are modern distributed systems that provide decentralized financial capabilities with trustable guarantees. Smart contracts are programs written in specialized programming languages running on a blockchain and govern how tokens…
With the development of decentralized finance (DeFi), lending protocols have been increasingly proposed in the market. A comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of lending protocol is essential to the DeFi market participants. Due to the…
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…
This paper presents an empirical analysis of Steemit, a key representative of the emerging incentivized social media platforms over Blockchains, to understand and evaluate the actual level of decentralization and the practical effects of…
Smart contracts are self-executing programs on a blockchain to ensure immutable and transparent agreements without the involvement of intermediaries. Despite the growing popularity of smart contracts for many blockchain platforms like…