Related papers: Securing Proof of Stake Blockchains: Leveraging Mu…
Proof of work (PoW), the most popular consensus mechanism for Blockchain, requires ridiculously large amounts of energy but without any useful outcome beyond determining accounting rights among miners. To tackle the drawback of PoW, we…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
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).…
Blockchains have sparked global interest in recent years, gaining importance as they increasingly influence technology and finance. This thesis investigates the robustness of blockchain protocols, specifically focusing on Ethereum…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
Proof-of-Work is a consensus algorithm where miners solve cryptographic puzzles to mine blocks and obtain a reward through some Block Reward Mechanism (BRM). PoW blockchain faces the problem of centralization due to the formation of mining…
Strategic mining attacks, such as selfish mining, exploit blockchain consensus protocols by deviating from honest behavior to maximize rewards. Markov Decision Process (MDP) analysis faces scalability challenges in modern digital economics,…
Permissionless blockchains achieve consensus while allowing unknown nodes to join and leave the system at any time. They typically come in two flavors: proof of work (PoW) and proof of stake (PoS), and both are vulnerable to attacks. PoS…
Proof of Work (PoW) has extensively served as the foundation of blockchain's security, consistency, and tamper-resistance. However, long has it been criticized for its tremendous and inefficient utilization of computational power and…
We introduce and study reward sharing schemes (RSS) that promote the fair formation of {\em stake pools}\ in collaborative projects that involve a large number of stakeholders such as the maintenance of a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Popular distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems using proof-of-work (PoW) for Sybil attack resistance have extreme energy requirements, drawing stern criticism from academia, businesses, and the media. DLT systems building on…
Blockchains have witnessed widespread adoption in the past decade in various fields. The growing demand makes their scalability and sustainability challenges more evident than ever. As a result, more and more blockchains have begun to adopt…
A blockchain is a decentralized ledger where all transactions are recorded. For having a reliable blockchain and double-spending prevention, we need a decentralized consensus and agreement on a blockchain. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work (PoW).…
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.…
Cryptocurrency exchanges use proofs of liabilities (PoLs) to prove to their customers their liabilities committed on-chain, thereby enhancing their trust in the service. Unfortunately, a close examination of currently deployed and academic…
Financial fraud cases are on the rise even with the current technological advancements. Due to the lack of inter-organization synergy and because of privacy concerns, authentic financial transaction data is rarely available. On the other…
Blockchain technology is a breakthrough in changing the ways of business and organization operations, in which the consensus problem is challenging with practical constraints, such as computational power and consensus standard. In this…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…