Related papers: Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Me…
Blockchain protocols often seek to procure computationally challenging work from a decentralized set of participants. While there are simple procurement auctions that result in the minimal cost of acquisition and maximal efficiency, they…
Transactional memory (TM) is an inherently optimistic abstraction: it allows concurrent processes to execute sequences of shared-data accesses (transactions) speculatively, with an option of aborting them in the future. Early TM designs…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
Public-key quantum money is a cryptographic proposal for using highly entangled quantum states as currency that is publicly verifiable yet resistant to counterfeiting due to the laws of physics. Despite significant interest, constructing…
Stablecoins, which are primarily intended to function as a global reserve of value are insubstantial in their design and present many failure points. The primary mechanism to enable these coins to hold on to a fixed value is by backing them…
Traditional blockchain design gives miners or validators full control over transaction ordering, i.e., they can freely choose which transactions to include or exclude, as well as in which order. While not an issue initially, the emergence…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods have successfully been used in many applications in engineering, statistics and physics. However, these are seldom used in financial option pricing literature and practice. This paper presents SMC method…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
Payment channel networks like Bitcoin's Lightning network are an auspicious approach for realizing high transaction throughput and almost-instant confirmations in blockchain networks. However, the ability to successfully make payments in…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
Decentralized cryptocurrency systems, known as blockchains, have shown promise as infrastructure for mutually distrustful parties to agree on transactions safely. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchains and their variants suffer from the…
The seminal result of Impagliazzo and Rudich (STOC 1989) gave a black-box separation between one-way functions and public-key encryption: informally, a public-key encryption scheme cannot be constructed using one-way functions as the sole…
Though voting-based consensus algorithms in Blockchain outperform proof-based ones in energy- and transaction-efficiency, they are prone to incur wrong elections and bribery elections. The former originates from the uncertainties of…
Blockchain enables peer-to-peer transactions in cyberspace without a trusted third party. The rapid growth of Ethereum and smart contract blockchains generally calls for well-designed Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate limited…
This paper introduces a game-theoretic model tailored for reward distribution on crowd-sourced computing platforms. It explores a repeated game framework where miners, as computation providers, decide their computation power contribution in…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising technology that alleviates blockchain scalability by shifting the transaction load from the blockchain to the PCN. Nevertheless, the network topology has to be carefully designed to maximise…
Pricing options is an important problem in financial engineering. In many scenarios of practical interest, financial option prices associated to an underlying asset reduces to computing an expectation w.r.t.~a diffusion process. In general,…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
Payment channel is a protocol which allows cryptocurrency users to route multiple transactions through network without committing them to the main blockchain network (mainnet). This ability makes them the most prominent solution to…