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In the light of the recent fame of Blockchain technologies, numerous proposals and projects aiming at better practical viability have emerged. However, formally assessing their particularities and benefits has proven to be a difficult task.…
Blockchain is based on a P2P network, supporting decentralized consensus of current cryptocurrencies. Since bitcoin and altcoins all utilize an underlying blockchain, they are therefore greatly affected by the performance of the P2P…
Many prominent smart-contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit. This pattern of…
A major challenge in blockchain sharding protocols is that more than 95% transactions are cross-shard. Not only those cross-shard transactions degrade the system throughput but also double the confirmation time, and exhaust an already…
Blockchain, like any other complex technology, needs a strong testing methodology to support its evolution in both research and development contexts. Setting up meaningful tests for permissionless blockchain technology is a notoriously…
Blockchains are decentralized; are they genuinely? We analyze blockchain decentralization's often-overlooked but quantifiable dimension: geospatial distribution of transaction processing. Blockchains bring with them the potential for…
Due to the increasing interest in blockchain technology for fostering secure, auditable, decentralized applications, a set of challenges associated with this technology need to be addressed. In this letter, we focus on the delay associated…
The Lightning Network (LN) is one of the most promising off-chain scaling solutions for Bitcoin, as it enables off-chain payments which are not subject to the well-known blockchain scalability limit. In this work, we introduce CLoTH, a…
Longest-chain blockchain protocols, such as Bitcoin, guarantee liveness even when the number of actively participating users is variable, i.e., they are adaptive. However, they are not safe under network partitions, i.e., they do not…
In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Binance, Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus (CBC) protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a…
Censorship resistance with short-term inclusion guarantees is an important feature of decentralized systems, missing from many state-of-the-art and even deployed consensus protocols. In leader-based protocols the leader arbitrarily selects…
The Bitcoin Lightning network is a mechanism to enable fast and inexpensive off-chain Bitcoin transactions using peer-to-peer (P2P) channels between nodes that can also be composed into a routing path. Although the resulting possible…
Blockchains have seen growing traction with cryptocurrencies reaching a market cap of over 1 trillion dollars, major institution investors taking interests, and global impacts on governments, businesses, and individuals. Also growing…
Blockchain, which is a technology for distributedly managing ledger information over multiple nodes without a centralized system, has elicited increasing attention. Performing experiments on actual blockchains are difficult because a large…
Blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and several others execute complex transactions in blocks through user-defined scripts known as smart contracts. To append a correct block into blockchain, miners execute these transactions of smart…
The sharing economy is centralizing services, leading to misuses of the Internet. We can list growing damages of data hacks, global outages and even the use of data to manipulate their owners. Unfortunately, there is no decentralized web…
In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run…
Blockchain is a technology uniquely suited to support massive number of transactions and smart contracts within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, thanks to the decentralized accounting mechanism. In a blockchain network, the states of…
We design and validate new block propagation protocols for the peer-to-peer (P2P) network of the Bitcoin blockchain. Despite its strong protection for security and privacy, the current Bitcoin blockchain can only support a low number of…
Recently, the blockchain technique was put in the spotlight as it introduced a systematic approach for multiple parties to reach consensus without needing trust. However, the application of this technique in practice is severely restricted…