Related papers: Optimal RANDAO Manipulation in Ethereum
Two MEV builders now produce nearly 80\% of Ethereum blocks. Block builders have the ability to reorder transactions on the blockchain in a way that can be harmful to participants. We estimate they would pay in the aggregate nearly \$14…
Optimization methods are used to determine equilibria of investment in cryptocurrencies. The basic assumptions involve existence of a core group (the "wealthy") that fears the loss of substantial assets through government seizure.…
Layer-2 (L2) blockchains inherit Ethereums security guarantees while reducing gas fees. As a result, they are gaining traction among traders at Automated Market Makers (AMMs), sparking debate over whether they contribute to liquidity…
We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. To date, threshold cryptosystems have been considered under permissioned settings…
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…
We introduce the problem of regret minimization in adversarial multi-dueling bandits. While adversarial preferences have been studied in dueling bandits, they have not been explored in multi-dueling bandits. In this setting, the learner is…
Ethereum prospered the inception of a plethora of smart contract applications, ranging from gambling games to decentralized finance. However, Ethereum is also considered a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerable smart contracts…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules for round-robin tournaments of $n$ competitors. Specifically, $n$ competitors are competing for a prize, and a tournament rule $r$ maps the result of all $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches…
We study a security threat to adversarial multi-armed bandits, in which an attacker perturbs the loss or reward signal to control the behavior of the victim bandit player. We show that the attacker is able to mislead any no-regret…
We consider the stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit problem with adversarial corruptions. We provide a simple combinatorial algorithm that can achieve a regret of $\tilde{O}\left(C+d^2K/\Delta_{min}\right)$ where $C$ is the total amount of…
Ethereum clients execute transactions in a sequential order prescribed by the consensus protocol. This is a safe and conservative approach to blockchain transaction processing which forgoes running transactions in parallel even when doing…
In this paper, we consider an online optimization problem over $T$ rounds where at each step $t\in[T]$, the algorithm chooses an action $x_t$ from the fixed convex and compact domain set $\mathcal{K}$. A utility function $f_t(\cdot)$ is…
A canonical setting for non-monetary online resource allocation is one where agents compete over multiple rounds for a single item per round, with i.i.d. valuations and additive utilities across rounds. With $n$ symmetric agents, a natural…
Price benchmarks are used to incorporate market price trends into contracts, but their use can create opportunities for manipulation by parties involved in the contract. This paper examines this issue using a realistic and tractable model…
We study balanced exchange problems in which agents with responsive preferences are endowed with multiple indivisible objects and can trade without transfers (e.g. shift exchange, time-banking). Eliciting full preferences over bundles is…
We derive near-optimal per-action regret bounds for sleeping bandits, in which both the sets of available arms and their losses in every round are chosen by an adversary. In a setting with $K$ total arms and at most $A$ available arms in…
Strategic behavior against sequential learning methods, such as "click framing" in real recommendation systems, have been widely observed. Motivated by such behavior we study the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB) under…
A proof of work (PoW) blockchain protocol distributes rewards to its participants, called miners, according to their share of the total computational power. Sufficiently large miners can perform selfish mining - deviate from the protocol to…
Selling reserved instances (or virtual machines) is a basic service in cloud computing. In this paper, we consider a more flexible pricing model for instance reservation, in which a customer can propose the time length and number of…
Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum: one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are used to increase individual validators' profits and delay consensus decisions, and one…