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Blockchain technology has been gaining great interest from a variety of sectors, including healthcare, supply chain and cryptocurrencies. However, Blockchain suffers from its limited ability to scale (i.e. low throughput and high latency).…
In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run…
Distributed immutable ledgers, or blockchains, allow the secure digitization of evidential transactions without relying on a trusted third-party. Evidential transactions involve the exchange of any form of physical evidence, such as money,…
Blockchain has been praised for its capacity to hold data in a decentralized and tamper-proof way. It also supports the execution of code through blockchain's smart contracts, adding automation of actions to the network with high…
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…
Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains offer promising alternatives to traditional Proof of Work (PoW) systems, providing scalability and energy efficiency. However, blockchains operate in a decentralized manner and the network is composed of…
We present a novel method for a multi-party, zero-trust validator infrastructure deployment arrangement via smart contracts to secure Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. The proposed arrangement architecture employs a combination of…
Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency that records alltransactions in a distributed append-only public ledger calledblockchain. The security of Bitcoin heavily relies on the incentive-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) based distributed consensus…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
Accountability, the ability to provably identify protocol violators, gained prominence as the main economic argument for the security of proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols. Rollups, the most popular scaling solution for blockchains, typically…
While cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications continue to gain popularity, their energy cost is evidently becoming unsustainable. In most instances, the main cost comes from the required amount of energy for the Proof-of-Work, and this…
Security and privacy in Direct Load Control (DLC) is a fundamental challenge in smart grids. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework to increase security and privacy of DLC. We propose a method whereby participating nodes…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
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…
Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…
In recent years, the confidentiality of smart contracts has become a fundamental requirement for practical applications. While many efforts have been made to develop architectural capabilities for enforcing confidential smart contracts, a…
Cryptocurrencies are poised to revolutionize the modern economy by democratizing commerce. These currencies operate on top of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. Existing permissionless blockchain-based protocols offer unparalleled…
Smart contracts are blockchain-based algorithms that execute when specific criteria are satisfied. They are often used to automate the implementation of an agreement so that all parties may be confident of the conclusion right away, without…
Smart Contracts are programs running logic in the Blockchain network by executing operations through immutable transactions. The Blockchain network validates such transactions, storing them into sequential blocks of which integrity is…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising technology that alleviates blockchain scalability by shifting the transaction load from the blockchain to the PCN. Nevertheless, the network topology has to be carefully designed to maximise…