Related papers: Collusion-Resilience in Transaction Fee Mechanism …
Blockchain technology has spawned a vast ecosystem of digital currencies with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) -- digital forms of fiat currency -- being one of them. An important feature of digital currencies is facilitating…
Given the low throughput of blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, scalability - the ability to process an increasing number of transactions - has become a central focus of blockchain research. One promising approach is the parallelization…
We initiate the study of transaction fee mechanism design for blockchain protocols in which multiple block producers contribute to the production of each block. Our contributions include: - We propose an extensive-form (multi-stage) game…
In blockchain applications, transaction confirmation is often treated as usability friction to be minimized or removed. However, confirmation also marks the boundary between deliberation and irreversible commitment, suggesting it may play a…
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…
Blockchains rely on a consensus among participants to achieve decentralization and security. However, reaching consensus in an online, digital world where identities are not tied to physical users is a challenging problem. Proof-of-work…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
Client diversity is a cornerstone of blockchain resilience, yet most networks suffer from a dangerously skewed distribution of client implementations. This monoculture exposes the network to very risky scenarios, such as massive financial…
Blockchain systems often employ proof-of-work consensus protocols to validate and add transactions into hashchains. These protocols stimulate competition among miners in solving cryptopuzzles (e.g. SHA-256 hash computation in Bitcoin) in…
Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…
Fair exchange protocols let two mutually distrustful parties exchange digital data in a way that neither party can cheat. They have various applications such as the exchange of digital items, or the exchange of digital coins and digital…
Off-chain protocols (channels) are a promising solution to the scalability and privacy challenges of blockchain payments. Current proposals, however, require synchrony assumptions to preserve the safety of a channel, leaking to an adversary…
As an emerging decentralized secure data management platform, blockchain has gained much popularity recently. To maintain a canonical state of blockchain data record, proof-of-work based consensus protocols provide the nodes, referred to as…
Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol $\Pi$. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each…
Off-Chain transactions allow for the immediate transfer of Cryptocurrency between two parties, without delays or unavoidable transaction fees. Such capabilities are critical for mainstream Cryptocurrency adaption. They allow for the…
Longest-chain blockchain protocols, such as Bitcoin, guarantee liveness even when the number of actively participating users is variable, i.e., they are adaptive. However, they are not safe under network partitions, i.e., they do not…
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…
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…
Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but…
Trading on decentralized exchanges has been one of the primary use cases for permissionless blockchains with daily trading volume exceeding billions of U.S.~dollars. In the status quo, users broadcast transactions and miners are responsible…