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Much of the recent excitement around decentralized finance (DeFi) comes from hopes that DeFi can be a secure, private, less centralized alternative to traditional finance systems. However, people moving to DeFi sites in hopes of improving…
The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…
Public blockchains provide a decentralized method for storing transaction data and have many applications in different sectors. In order for users to track transactions, a simple method is to let them keep a local copy of the entire public…
Traditional financial institutions face inefficiencies that can be addressed by distributed ledger technology. However, a primary barrier to adoption is the privacy concerns surrounding publicly available transaction data. Existing private…
We consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows---implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract---successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this work, cross-chain…
Digitisation is often viewed as beneficial to a user. Whereas traditionally, people would physically have to identify to a service, pay for a ticket in cash, or go into a library to access a book, people can now achieve all of this through…
Widely used payment splitting apps allow members of a group to keep track of debts between members by sending charges for expenses paid by one member on behalf of others. While offering a great deal of convenience, these apps gain access to…
Permissionless blockchains offer many advantages but also have significant limitations including high latency. This prevents their use in important scenarios such as retail payments, where merchants should approve payments fast. Prior works…
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic…
Energy storage provides an effective way of shifting temporal energy demands and supplies, which enables significant cost reduction under time-of-use energy pricing plans. Despite its promising benefits, the cost of present energy storage…
Opening up data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices for public utilization can maximize their economic value. Challenges remain in the trustworthiness of the data sources and the security of the trading process,…
Most cryptocurrencies rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) "mining" for resistance to Sybil and double-spending attacks, as well as a mechanism for currency issuance. Hashcash PoW has successfully secured the Bitcoin network since its inception,…
Digital transactions currently exceed trillions of dollars annually, yet traditional paper-based agreements remain a bottleneck for automation, enforceability, and dispute resolution. Natural language contracts introduce ambiguity, require…
Programmable blockchains have long been a hot research topic given their tremendous use in decentralized applications. Smart contracts, using blockchains as their underlying technology, inherit the desired properties such as verifiability,…
The Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled a wide range of sectors to interact effectively with their consumers in order to deliver seamless services and products. Despite the widespread availability of (IoT) devices and their Internet…
Digital identities are increasingly important for mediating not only digital but also physical service transactions. Managing such identities through centralized providers can cause both availability and privacy concerns: single points of…
In the UK, the Bank of England and HM Treasury are exploring a potential UK retail CBDC, the digital pound, with one of their motivations being the potential role of the digital pound as an anchor for monetary and financial stability. In…
The availability of high-fidelity energy networks brings significant value to academic and commercial research. However, such releases also raise fundamental concerns related to privacy and security as they can reveal sensitive commercial…
Blockchain technology enforces the security, robustness, and traceability of operations of Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs). In particular, transparency ensures that all data is publicly available, fostering trust among…
Increased collaborative production and dynamic selection of production partners within industry 4.0 manufacturing leads to ever-increasing automatic data exchange between companies. Automatic and unsupervised data exchange creates new…