Related papers: Obelia: Scaling DAG-Based Blockchains to Hundreds …
The security of many Proof-of-Stake (PoS) payment systems relies on quorum-based State Machine Replication (SMR) protocols. While classical analyses assume purely Byzantine faults, real-world systems must tolerate both arbitrary failures…
Several blockchain consensus protocols proposed to use of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to solve the limited processing throughput of traditional single-chain Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. Many such protocols utilize a random…
We address the problem of fairness and transparency in online marketplaces selling digital content, where all parties are not actively participating in the trade. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of VADER, a highly…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
Blockchain technology ensures secure and trustworthy data flow between multiple participants on the chain, but interoperability of on-chain and off-chain data has always been a difficult problem that needs to be solved. To solve the problem…
Scalable oversight protocols aim to empower evaluators to accurately verify AI models more capable than themselves. However, human evaluators are subject to biases that can lead to systematic errors. We conduct two studies examining the…
Blockchain is maintained as a global log between a network of nodes and uses cryptographic distributed protocols to synchronize the updates. As adopted by Bitcoin and Ethereum these update operations to the ledger are serialized, and…
Blockchains face a scalability limitation, partly due to the throughput limitations of consensus protocols, especially when aiming to obtain a high degree of decentralization. Layer 2 Rollups (L2s) are a faster alternative to conventional…
We show that a replicated state machine (such as a blockchain protocol) can retain liveness in a strategic setting even while facing substantial ambiguity over certain events. This is implemented by a complementary protocol called "Machine…
As blockchain technology continues to evolve and mature, smart contracts have become a key driving force behind the digitization and automation of transactions. Smart contracts greatly simplify and refine the traditional business…
Most of today's online services (e.g., social networks, search engines, market places) are centralized, which is recognized as unsatisfactory by a majority of users for various reasons (e.g., centralized governance, censorship, loss of…
Existing blockchain systems scale poorly because of their distributed consensus protocols. Current attempts at improving blockchain scalability are limited to cryptocurrency. Scaling blockchain systems under general workloads (i.e.,…
Large-scale computational experiments, often running over weeks and over large datasets, are used extensively in fields such as epidemiology, meteorology, computational biology, and healthcare to understand phenomena, and design high-stakes…
Agreement protocols are crucial in various emerging applications, spanning from distributed (blockchains) oracles to fault-tolerant cyber-physical systems. In scenarios where sensor/oracle nodes measure a common source, maintaining output…
Proof-of-Work~(PoW) based blockchains typically allocate only a tiny fraction (e.g., less than 1% for Ethereum) of the average interarrival time~($\mathbb{I}$) between blocks for validating transactions. A trivial increase in validation…
Order fairness in distributed ledgers refers to properties that relate the order in which transactions are sent or received to the order in which they are eventually finalized, i.e., totally ordered. The study of such properties is…
An outstanding problem in the design of distributed ledgers concerns policies that govern the manner in which users interact with the network. Network usability is crucial to the mainstream adoption of distributed ledgers, particularly for…
In traditional public blockchain networks, transaction fees are only allocated to full nodes (i.e., miners). However, the lack of relay rewards reduces the willingness of light nodes to relay transactions, especially in the…
Public blockchains should be able to scale with respect to the number of nodes and to the transactions workload. The blockchain scalability trilemma has been informally conjectured. This is related to scalability, security and…
Permissionless blockchain protocols are known to consume an outrageous amount of computing power and suffer from a trade-off between latency and confidence in transaction confirmation. The recently proposed Algorand blockchain protocol…