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Decentralization has been widely acknowledged as a core virtue of blockchains. However, in the past, there have been few measurement studies on measuring and comparing the actual level of decentralization between existing blockchains using…
Distributed ledger technologies have opened up a wealth of fine-grained transaction data from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. This allows research into problems like anomaly detection, anti-money laundering, pattern mining and…
Previous studies have shown that cryptography is hard for developers to use and misusing cryptography leads to severe security vulnerabilities. We studied relevant vulnerability reports on the HackerOne bug bounty platform to understand…
Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…
The security of blockchain systems based on Proof of Work relies on mining. However, mining suffers from unstable revenue, prompting many miners to form cooperative mining pools. Most existing mining pools operate in a centralized manner,…
Scalability has been a bottleneck for major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Despite the significantly improved scalability claimed by several high--profile blockchain projects, there has been little effort to understand how their…
Blockchain recently became very popular due to its use in cryptocurrencies and potential application in various domains (e.g., retail, healthcare, insurance). The smart contract is a key part of blockchain systems and specifies an agreement…
We argue that the current POW based consensus algorithm of the Bitcoin network suffers from a fundamental economic discrepancy between the real world transaction (txn) costs incurred by miners and the wealth that is being transacted. Put…
Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) are one of the most important infrastructures in the world of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and are generally considered more reliable than centralized exchanges (CEXs). However, some well-known decentralized…
The bitcoin peer-to-peer network has drawn significant attention from researchers, but so far has mostly focused on publicly visible portions of the network, i.e., publicly reachable peers. This mostly ignores the hidden parts of the…
With the advent of decentralised digital currencies powered by blockchain technology, a new era of peer-to-peer transactions has commenced. The rapid growth of the cryptocurrency economy has led to increased use of transaction-enabling…
Blockchain technologies underpin an expanding ecosystem of decentralized applications, financial systems, and infrastructure. However, the fundamental networking layer that sustains these systems, the peer-to-peer layer, of all but the top…
Rug pull scams have emerged as a persistent threat to cryptocurrency, causing significant financial losses. A typical scenario involves scammers deploying honeypot contracts to attract investments, restricting token sales, and draining the…
Extensive research on Nakamoto-style consensus protocols has shown that network delays degrade the security of these protocols. Established results indicate that, perhaps surprisingly, maximal security is achieved when the network is as…
We analyzed the associations between Bitcoin transactions and addresses to cluster address and further find groups of addresses controlled by the same entity. It revealed the vulnerabilities of Bitcoin anonymity mechanism, which could be…
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and…
In blockchains, mempool controls transaction flow before consensus, denial of whose service hurts the health and security of blockchain networks. This paper presents MPFUZZ, the first mempool fuzzer to find asymmetric DoS bugs by exploring…
Mining blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol is well-known to be resource-consuming. A miner bears the operational cost, mainly electricity consumption and IT gear, of mining, and is compensated by a…
Cryptocurrency has seen an explosive growth in recent years, thanks to the evolvement of blockchain technology and its economic ecosystem. Besides Bitcoin, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been distributed on blockchains, while hundreds…
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are immutable and transferable tokens on blockchain networks, have been used to certify the ownership of digital images often grouped in collections. Depending on individual interests, wallets explore and…