Related papers: Commitment Attacks on Ethereum's Reward Mechanism
Blockchains have popularized automated market makers (AMMs). An AMM exchange is an application running on a blockchain which maintains a pool of crypto-assets and automatically trades assets with users governed by some pricing function that…
Blockchains offer strong security guarantees, but they cannot protect the ordering of transactions. Powerful players, such as miners, sequencers, and sophisticated bots, can reap significant profits by selectively including, excluding, or…
In 2021 Ethereum adjusted the transaction pricing mechanism by implementing EIP-1559, which introduces the base fee - a network fee that is burned and dynamically adjusts to the network demand. The authors of the Ethereum Improvement…
Block-chain world is very dynamic and there is need for strong governance and underlying technology architecture to be robust to face challenges. This paper considers Ethereum, a leading block chain. We deep dive into the nature of this…
This paper presents a study of the Poof-of-Stake (PoW) Ethereum consensus protocol, following the recent switch from Proof-of-Work (PoS) to Proof-of-Stake within Merge upgrade. The new protocol has resulted in reduced energy consumption and…
Many blockchain networks aim to preserve the anonymity of validators in the peer-to-peer (P2P) network, ensuring that no adversary can link a validator's identifier to the IP address of a peer due to associated privacy and security…
We propose a new, more potent attack on decentralized exchanges. This attack leverages absolute commitments, which are commitments that can condition on the strategies made by other agents. This attack allows an adversary to charge monopoly…
The immutability of smart contracts on blockchain platforms like Ethereum promotes security and trustworthiness but presents challenges for updates, bug fixes, or adding new features post-deployment. These limitations can lead to…
Smart contract-enabled blockchains allow building decentralized applications in which mutually-distrusted parties can work together. Recently, oracle services emerged to provide these applications with real-world data feeds. Unfortunately,…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
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 security of blockchain systems is fundamentally based on the decentralized consensus in which the majority of parties behave honestly, and the content verification process is essential to maintaining the robustness of blockchain…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to a wide class of economic attacks to public blockchains, where adversaries with the power to reorder, drop or insert transactions in a block can "extract" value from smart contracts. Empirical…
Ethereum 2.0, as the preeminent smart contract blockchain platform, guarantees the precise execution of applications without third-party intervention. At its core, this system leverages the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which…
Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) drives the prosperity of the blockchain ecosystem. By strategically including, excluding, or reordering transactions within blocks, block producers can extract additional value, which in turn incentivizes…
Cryptocurrency miners have great latitude in deciding which transactions they accept, including their own, and the order in which they accept them. Ethereum miners in particular use this flexibility to collect MEV-Miner Extractable Value-by…
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…
Initially introduced to Ethereum via Flashbots' MEV-boost, Proposer-Builder Separation allows proposers to auction off blockspace to a market of transaction orderers, known as builders. PBS is currently available to validators through the…
We present a comprehensive analysis of the implications of artificial latency in the Proposer-Builder Separation framework on the Ethereum network. Focusing on the MEV-Boost auction system, we analyze how strategic latency manipulation…