Related papers: A Fast Confirmation Rule (aka Fast Synchronous Fin…
Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has emerged as a contemporary competitive as well as complementary to traditional centralized finance systems. As of 23rd January 2024, per Defillama approximately USD 55 billion is the total value locked on the…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
Blockchain-based consensus protocols present the opportunity to develop new protocols, due to their novel requirements of open participation and explicit incentivization of participants. To address the first requirement, it is necessary to…
We consider blockchain in dynamic networks. We define the Blockchain Decision Problem. It requires miners that maintain the blockchain to confirm whether a particular block is accepted. We establish the necessary conditions for the…
Fast Paxos is an algorithm for consensus that works by a succession of rounds, where each round tries to decide a value $v$ that is consistent with all past rounds. Rounds are started by a coordinator process and consistency is guaranteed…
In the given technology-driven era, smart cities are the next frontier of technology, aiming at improving the quality of people's lives. Many research works focus on future smart cities with a holistic approach towards smart city…
We present "Gasper," a proof-of-stake-based consensus protocol, which is an idealized version of the proposed Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. The protocol combines Casper FFG, a finality tool, with LMD GHOST, a fork-choice rule. We prove safety,…
Existing permissioned blockchain systems designate a fixed and explicit group of committee nodes to run a consensus protocol that confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes. Unfortunately, when such a permissioned blockchain runs…
Despite their development for over a decade, a key problem blockchains are still facing is scalability in terms of throughput, typically limited to a few transactions per second. A fundamental factor limiting this metric is the propagation…
Existing Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols address only threshold failures, where the participating nodes fail independently of each other, each one fails equally likely, and the protocol's guarantees follow from a simple…
In this paper we present the initial design of Minerva consensus protocol for Truechain and other technical details. Currently, it is widely believed in the blockchain community that a public chain cannot simultaneously achieve high…
Blockchain-based IoT systems can manage IoT devices and achieve a high level of data integrity, security, and provenance. However, incorporating the existing consensus protocols in many IoT systems limits scalability and leads to high…
Optimistic responsiveness -- the ability of a consensus protocol to operate at the speed of the network -- is widely used in consensus protocol design to optimize latency and throughput. However, blockchain applications incentivize…
Efficient and reliable block propagation on the Bitcoin network is vital for ensuring the scalability of this peer-to-peer network. To this end, several schemes have been proposed over the last few years to speed up the block propagation,…
As the significance of blockchain innovation grows and the focus on scalability intensifies, rollup technology has emerged as a promising approach to tackle these scalability concerns. Nonetheless, rollups encounter restrictions when…
Blockchain received a vast amount of attention in recent years and is still growing. The second generation of blockchain, such as Ethereum, allows execution of almost any program in Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), making it a global…
Ethereum relies on a peer-to-peer overlay network to propagate information. The knowledge of Ethereum network topology holds the key to understanding Ethereum's security, availability, and user anonymity. From a measurement perspective, an…
Threshold cryptography is essential for many blockchain protocols. For example, many protocols rely on threshold common coin to implement asynchronous consensus, leader elections, and provide support for randomized applications. Similarly,…
Transaction fee markets are essential components of blockchain economies, as they resolve the inherent scarcity in the number of transactions that can be added to each block. In early blockchain protocols, this scarcity was resolved through…