Related papers: Proposer selection in EIP-7251
Since it takes time and effort to put a new product or service on the market, one would like to predict whether it will be a success. In general this is not possible, but it is possible to follow best practices in order to maximise the…
The widespread lack of broad source code verification on blockchain explorers such as Etherscan, where despite 78,047,845 smart contracts deployed on Ethereum (as of May 26, 2025), a mere 767,520 (< 1%) are open source, presents a severe…
The property of proportional representation in approval-based committee elections has appeared in the social choice literature for over a century, and is typically understood as avoiding the underrepresentation of minorities. However, we…
In 2021 Ethereum adjusted the transaction pricing mechanism by implementing EIP-1559, which introduces the base fee - a network fee that is burned and dynamically adjusts to the network demand. The authors of the Ethereum Improvement…
Blockchain's economic value lies in enabling financial and economic transactions without relying on trusted, centralized intermediaries. In practice, however, transactions pass through a fragmented chain of intermediaries before being…
Today's blockchains suffer from low throughput and high latency, which impedes their widespread adoption of more complex applications like smart contracts. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for smart contract execution. It…
A blockchain is a database of sequential events that is maintained by a distributed group of nodes. A key consensus problem in blockchains is that of determining the next block (data element) in the sequence. Many blockchains address this…
Ethereum's ideals of decentralization and censorship resistance are undermined in practice, motivating ongoing efforts to reestablish these properties. Existing proposals for fairness mechanisms depend on the assumption that a sufficient…
Consensus algorithms facilitate agreement on and resolution of blockchain functions, such as smart contracts and transactions. Ethereum uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which depends on financial incentives to ensure that…
The CAP theorem says that no blockchain can be live under dynamic participation and safe under temporary network partitions. To resolve this availability-finality dilemma, we formulate a new class of flexible consensus protocols,…
Privacy and anonymity of validators, especially regarding IP address linkability, are essential to protect the Ethereum network from various attacks. Network-level attacks, such as DoS, can interrupt validators and affect the overall…
In a single secret leader election protocol (SSLE), one of the system participants is chosen and, unless it decides to reveal itself, no other participant can identify it. SSLE has a great potential in protecting blockchain consensus…
The security of blockchain systems is fundamentally based on the decentralized consensus in which the majority of parties behave honestly, and the content verification process is essential to maintaining the robustness of blockchain…
This paper presents a fully coupled blockchain-assisted federated learning architecture that effectively eliminates single points of failure by decentralizing both the training and aggregation tasks across all participants. Our proposed…
Blockchains protect an ecosystem worth more than $500bn with strong security properties derived from the principle of decentralization. Is today's blockchain decentralized? In this paper, we empirically studied one of the least…
A Confirmation Rule, within blockchain networks, refers to an algorithm implemented by network nodes that determines (either probabilistically or deterministically) the permanence of certain blocks on the blockchain. An example of…
Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and…
Bitcoin and Ethereum, whose miners arguably collectively comprise the most powerful computational resource in the history of mankind, offer no more power for processing and verifying transactions than a typical smart phone. The system…
This paper examines the economic and security implications of Proof-of-Stake (POS) designs, providing a survey of POS design choices and their underlying economic principles in prominent POS-blockchains. The paper argues that…
The LMD GHOST consensus protocol is a critical component of proof-of-stake Ethereum. In its current form, this protocol is brittle, as evidenced by recent attacks and patching attempts. We propose Goldfish, a new protocol that satisfies key…