Related papers: Proposer selection in EIP-7251
Bitcoin has attracted everyone's attention and interest recently. Ethereum (ETH), a second generation cryptocurrency, extends Bitcoin's design by offering a Turing-complete programming language called Solidity to develop smart contracts.…
This study tackles the computational challenges of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) for a restricted class of problems. It is motivated by the Last Revealer Attack (LRA), which undermines fairness in some Proof-of-Stake (PoS)…
Electing democratic representatives via voting has been a common mechanism since the 17th century. However, these mechanisms raise concerns about fairness, privacy, vote concealment, fair calculations of tally, and proxies voting on their…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
We analyze maximal extractable value in multiple concurrent proposer blockchains, where multiple blocks become data available before their final execution order is determined. This concurrency breaks the single builder assumption of…
Many of today's crypto currencies use blockchains as decentralized ledgers and secure them with proof of work. In case of a fork of the chain, Bitcoin's rule for achieving consensus is selecting the longest chain and discarding the other…
Delegation of cryptographic signing rights has found many application in the literature and the real world. However, despite very advanced functionalities and specific use cases, existing solutions share the natural limitation that the…
Ethereum smart contracts are public, immutable and distributed and, as such, they are prone to vulnerabilities sourcing from programming mistakes of developers. This paper presents SAFEVM, a verification tool for Ethereum smart contracts…
Ethereum clients execute transactions in a sequential order prescribed by the consensus protocol. This is a safe and conservative approach to blockchain transaction processing which forgoes running transactions in parallel even when doing…
Consensus protocols inherently rely on the notion of leader election, in which one or a subset of participants are temporarily elected to authorize and announce the network's latest state. While leader election is a well studied problem,…
Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 was recently implemented to transform Ethereum's transaction fee market. EIP-1559 utilizes an algorithmic update rule with a constant learning rate to estimate a base fee. The base fee reflects…
There exist many forms of Blockchain finality conditions, from deterministic to probabilistic terminations. To favor availability against consistency in the face of partitions, most blockchains only offer probabilistic eventual finality:…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
Smart contracts are computer programs that run on blockchain platforms, with Solidity being the most widely used language for their development. As blockchain technology advances, smart contracts have become increasingly important across…
As blockchain technology continues to evolve and mature, smart contracts have become a key driving force behind the digitization and automation of transactions. Smart contracts greatly simplify and refine the traditional business…
Many blockchain platform are subject to maximal value extraction (MEV), and users on the platform are losing money while sending transactions because the transaction order can be manipulated to extract value from them. Consensus protocols…
Demand for blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is far larger than supply, necessitating a mechanism that selects a subset of transactions to include "on-chain" from the pool of all pending transactions. This paper investigates the…
Smart contracts are programs running on cryptocurrency (e.g., Ethereum) blockchains, whose popularity stem from the possibility to perform financial transactions, such as payments and auctions, in a distributed environment without need for…
Consensus is one of the most fundamental distributed computing problems. In particular, it serves as a building block in many replication based fault-tolerant systems and in particular in multiple recent blockchain solutions. Depending on…
The emerging blockchain protocols provide a decentralized architecture that is suitable of supporting Internet of Things (IoT) interactions. However, keeping a local copy of the blockchain ledger is infeasible for low-power and…