Related papers: Unconditionally Safe Light Client
The core premise of permissionless blockchains is their reliable and secure operation without the need to trust any individual agent. At the heart of blockchain consensus mechanisms is an explicit cost (whether work or stake) for…
We improve the fundamental security threshold of eventual consensus Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain protocols under the longest-chain rule by showing, for the first time, the positive effect of rounds with concurrent honest leaders. Current…
Smart contracts are programs that are executed on the blockchain and can hold, manage and transfer assets in the form of cryptocurrencies. The contract's execution is then performed on-chain and is subject to consensus, i.e. every node on…
The Proof of Efficient Liquidity (PoEL) protocol, designed for specialised Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus-based blockchains that incorporate intrinsic DeFi applications, aims to support sustainable liquidity bootstrapping and network…
Securing the traceability of products in the supply chain is an urgent issue. Recently, supply chain systems that use public blockchain (PBC) have been proposed. In these systems, PBC is used as a common database shared between supply chain…
Light clients are essential for scalable blockchain systems because they verify data availability without downloading full blocks. In data availability sampling based systems, sampled cells are retrieved from a peer-to-peer network and…
In this paper, we propose a trust-centric privacy-preserving blockchain for dynamic spectrum access in IoT networks. To be specific, we propose a trust evaluation mechanism to evaluate the trustworthiness of sensing nodes and design a…
This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of…
We study long-term equilibria that arise in the token monetary policy, or tokenomics, design of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain systems that engage utility maximizing users and validators. Validators are system maintainers who get rewarded…
The beacon chain is the backbone of the Ethereum's evolution towards a proof-of-stake-based scalable network. Beacon clients are the applications implementing the services required to operate the beacon chain, namely validators, beacon…
Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are fundamental performance measures of any blockchain system in addition to its security. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying…
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. Byzantine…
Blockchain technology emerged with the advent of Bitcoin and rapidly developed over the past few decades, becoming widely accepted and known by the public. However, in the past decades, the massive adoption of blockchain technology has yet…
Constrained devices in IoT networks often require to outsource resource-heavy computations or data processing tasks. Currently, most of those jobs are done in the centralised cloud. However, with rapidly increasing number of devices and…
For preserving privacy, blockchains can be equipped with dedicated mechanisms to anonymize participants. However, these mechanism often take only the abstraction layer of blockchains into account whereas observations of the underlying…
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…
Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally…
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…
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…
Blockchain offers an innovative approach to storing information, executing transactions, performing functions, and establishing trust in an open environment. Many consider blockchain as a technology breakthrough for cryptography and…