Related papers: Mitigating Challenges in Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake…
In September 2022, Ethereum transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) during "the merge" - making it the largest PoS cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. With this work, we present a comprehensive…
This paper presents a study of the Poof-of-Stake (PoW) Ethereum consensus protocol, following the recent switch from Proof-of-Work (PoS) to Proof-of-Stake within Merge upgrade. The new protocol has resulted in reduced energy consumption and…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
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…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional risks that are not captured by standard PoS economic security…
On September 15, 2022, the Ethereum network adopted a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. We study the impact on the network and competing platforms in a two month event window around the Beacon chain merge. We find that the…
Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning…
Ethereum 2.0, as the preeminent smart contract blockchain platform, guarantees the precise execution of applications without third-party intervention. At its core, this system leverages the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which…
With the increasing adoption of decentralized information systems based on a variety of permissionless blockchain networks, the choice of consensus mechanism is at the core of many controversial discussions. Ethereum's recent transition…
Blockchain applications that rely on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) have increasingly become energy inefficient with a staggering carbon footprint. In contrast, energy-efficient alternative consensus protocols such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS) may…
Achieving the equilibrium between scalability, sustainability, and security while keeping decentralization has prevailed as the target solution for decentralized blockchain applications over the last years. Several approaches have been…
With Ethereum's transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake in September 2022 came another paradigm shift, the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) scheme. PBS was introduced to decouple the roles of selecting and ordering transactions in…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols have emerged as a compelling paradigm for organizing distributed ledger systems. In proof-of-stake (PoS), a subset of stakeholders participate in validating a growing ledger of transactions. For the…
The Proof of Efficient Liquidity (PoEL) protocol, designed for specialised Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus-based blockchains that incorporate intrinsic DeFi applications, aims to support sustainable liquidity bootstrapping and network…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
In the Proof of Stake (PoS) Ethereum ecosystem, users can stake ETH on Lido to receive stETH, a Liquid Staking Derivative (LSD) that represents staked ETH and accrues staking rewards. LSDs improve the liquidity of staked assets by…
Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed to solve this issue. Tackling scalability while preserving the security and decentralization of the network is a…
Current blockchain consensus protocols -- notably, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) -- deliver global agreement but exhibit structural constraints. PoW anchors security in heavy computation, inflating energy use and imposing…