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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…
In proof-of-work based blockchains such as Ethereum, verification of blocks is an integral part of establishing consensus across nodes. However, in Ethereum, miners do not receive a reward for verifying. This implies that miners face the…
Global illicit fund flows exceed an estimated $3.1 trillion annually, with stablecoins emerging as a preferred laundering medium due to their liquidity. While decentralized protocols increasingly adopt zero-knowledge proofs to obfuscate…
Most online lotteries today fail to ensure the verifiability of the random process and rely on a trusted third party. This issue has received little attention since the emergence of distributed protocols like Bitcoin that demonstrated the…
Blockchains are decentralized; are they genuinely? We analyze blockchain decentralization's often-overlooked but quantifiable dimension: geospatial distribution of transaction processing. Blockchains bring with them the potential for…
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'…
Several recent proposals implicitly or explicitly suggest making use of randomized transaction ordering within a block to mitigate centralization effects and to improve fairness in the Ethereum ecosystem. However, transactions and blocks…
Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are one of the main building blocks for securing communications over the Internet. Currently, PKIs are under the control of centralized authorities, which is problematic as evidenced by numerous incidents…
Our work focuses on the design of a scalable permissionless blockchain in the proof-of-stake setting. In particular, we use a distributed hash table as a building block to set up randomized shards, and then leverage the sharded architecture…
Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which…
As the number of decentralized applications and users on Ethereum grows, the ability of the blockchain to efficiently handle a growing number of transactions becomes increasingly strained. Ethereums current execution model relies heavily on…
Dynamically distributed inflation is a common mechanism used to guide a blockchain's staking rate towards a desired equilibrium between network security and token liquidity. However, the high sensitivity of the annual percentage yield to…
Achieving the equilibrium between scalability, sustainability, and security while keeping decentralization has prevailed as the target solution for decentralized blockchain applications over the last years. Several approaches have been…
We present a novel method for a multi-party, zero-trust validator infrastructure deployment arrangement via smart contracts to secure Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. The proposed arrangement architecture employs a combination of…
User transactions on Ethereum's peer-to-peer network are at risk of being attacked. The smart contracts building decentralized finance (DeFi) have introduced a new transaction ordering dependency to the Ethereum blockchain. As a result,…
While online interactions and exchanges have grown exponentially over the past decade, most commercial infrastructures still operate through centralized protocols, and their success essentially depends on trust between different economic…
Financial markets are undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Technological advances have brought major improvements to the operations of financial services. While these advances promote improved accessibility and convenience,…
The rise of Decentralized Finance ("DeFi") on the Ethereum blockchain has enabled the creation of lending platforms, which serve as marketplaces to lend and borrow digital currencies. We first categorize the activity of lending platforms…
Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies are gaining unprecedented popularity and understanding. Meanwhile, Ethereum is gaining a significant popularity in the blockchain community, mainly due to the fact that it is designed in a way that enables…
A key component of blockchain technology is the ledger, viz., a database that, unlike standard databases, keeps in memory the complete history of past transactions as in a notarial archive for the benefit of any future test. In…