Related papers: Commitment Attacks on Ethereum's Reward Mechanism
Blockchain systems that settle financial transactions face a structural tension: the single validator that assembles each block holds unilateral power over transaction inclusion and ordering. Traditional markets curb this very power through…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
Blockchain consensus mechanisms have relied on algorithms such as Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) to ensure network functionality and integrity. However, these approaches struggle with adaptability for decision-making where the…
TrueBit is a protocol that uses interactive verification to allow a resource-constrained computation environment like a blockchain to perform much larger computations than usual in a trusted way. As long as a single honest participant is…
Consensus protocols inherently rely on the notion of leader election, in which one or a subset of participants are temporarily elected to authorize and announce the network's latest state. While leader election is a well studied problem,…
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, users compete in a transaction fee auction to get their transactions confirmed in the next block. A line of recent works set forth the desiderata for a "dream" transaction fee mechanism (TFM),…
In Tendermint blockchains, the proof-of-stake mechanism and the underlying consensus algorithm entail a dynamic fault model that implies that the active validators (nodes that sign blocks) may change over time, and a quorum of these…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
As of July 15, 2023, Ethererum, which is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain [1] has around 410 Billion USD in total assets on chain (popularly referred to as total-value-locked, TVL) but has only 33 Billion USD worth of ETH staked in…
Propagation latency is inherent to any distributed network, including blockchains. Typically, blockchain protocols provide a timing buffer for block propagation across the network. In leader-based blockchains, the leader -- block proposer…
Traditional single-proposer blockchains suffer from miner extractable value (MEV), where validators exploit their serial monopoly on transaction inclusion and ordering to extract rents from users. While there have been many developments at…
Ethereum smart contracts are programs that are deployed and executed in a consensus-based blockchain managed by a peer-to-peer network. Several re-entrancy attacks that aim to steal Ether, the cryptocurrency used in Ethereum, stored in…
The successive generations of consensus algorithms have progressively shifted the performance bottleneck of blockchains to the execution layer. While recent works address this by parallelizing transaction execution, they often overlook the…
The gas mechanism in Ethereum charges the execution of every operation to ensure that smart contracts running in EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) will be eventually terminated. Failing to properly set the gas costs of EVM operations allows…
Blockchain enables peer-to-peer transactions in cyberspace without a trusted third party. The rapid growth of Ethereum and smart contract blockchains generally calls for well-designed Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate limited…
The adoption of blockchain based distributed ledgers is growing fast due to their ability to provide reliability, integrity, and auditability without trusted entities. One of the key capabilities of these emerging platforms is the ability…
It is now common to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) by having humans manually vote to evaluate model outputs, in contrast to typical benchmarks that evaluate knowledge or skill at some particular task. Chatbot Arena, the most popular…
Smart contracts are software programs featuring both traditional applications and distributed data storage on blockchains. Ethereum is a prominent blockchain platform with the support of smart contracts. The smart contracts act as…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
Turing completeness has made Ethereum smart contracts attractive to blockchain developers and attackers alike. To increase code security, many tools can now spot most known vulnerabilities$-$at the cost of production efficiency. Recent…