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The classical theory of efficient allocations of an aggregate endowment in a pure-exchange economy has hitherto primarily focused on the Pareto-efficiency of allocations, under the implicit assumption that transfers between agents are…
We argue that the current POW based consensus algorithm of the Bitcoin network suffers from a fundamental economic discrepancy between the real world transaction (txn) costs incurred by miners and the wealth that is being transacted. Put…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising technology that enhances the efficiency of mobile blockchain networks, by enabling miners, often acted by mobile users (MUs) with limited computing resources, to offload resource-intensive mining…
Algorithmic Mechanism Design attempts to marry computation and incentives, mainly by leveraging monetary transfers between designer and selfish agents involved. This is principally because in absence of money, very little can be done to…
Modern data stores achieve scalability by partitioning data into shards and fault-tolerance by replicating each shard across several servers. A key component of such systems is a Transaction Certification Service (TCS), which atomically…
Blockchain protocols differ in fundamental ways, including the mechanics of selecting users to produce blocks (e.g., proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) and the method to establish consensus (e.g., longest chain rules vs. BFT-inspired…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
Distributional collision resistance is a relaxation of collision resistance that only requires that it is hard to sample a collision $(x,y)$ where $x$ is uniformly random and $y$ is uniformly random conditioned on colliding with $x$. The…
In blockchain systems, fair transaction ordering is crucial for a trusted and regulation-compliant economic ecosystem. Unlike traditional State Machine Replication (SMR) systems, which focus solely on liveness and safety, blockchain systems…
A menu description exposes strategyproofness by presenting a mechanism to player $i$ in two steps. Step (1) uses others' reports to describe $i$'s menu of potential outcomes. Step (2) uses $i$'s report to select $i$'s favorite outcome from…
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…
The Bitcoin protocol prevents the occurrence of double-spending (DS), i.e. the utilization of the same currency unit more than once. At the same time a DS attack, where more conflicting transactions are generated, might be performed to…
Many aspects of blockchain-based decentralized finance can be understood as an extension of classical distributed computing. In this paper, we trace the evolution of two interrelated notions: failure and fault-tolerance. In classical…
Payment channels allow transactions between participants of the blockchain to be executed securely off-chain, and thus provide a promising solution for the scalability problem of popular blockchains. We study the online network design…
Blockchain protocols implement total-order broadcast in a permissionless setting, where processes can freely join and leave. In such a setting, to safeguard against Sybil attacks, correct processes rely on cryptographic proofs tied to a…
While many researchers adopt a sharding approach to design scaling blockchains, few works have studied the transaction placement problem incurred by sharding protocols. The widely-used hashing placement algorithm renders an overwhelming…
Inspired by Bitcoin, many different kinds of cryptocurrencies based on blockchain technology have turned up on the market. Due to the special structure of the blockchain, it has been deemed impossible to directly trade between traditional…
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
Cryptocurrencies have garnered much attention in recent years, both from the academic community and industry. One interesting aspect of cryptocurrencies is their explicit consideration of incentives at the protocol level. Understanding how…