Related papers: 3-Slot-Finality Protocol for Ethereum
In the field of distributed consensus and blockchains, the synchronous communication model assumes that all messages between honest parties are delayed at most by a known constant $\Delta$. Recent literature establishes that the…
The Ethereum platform supports the decentralized execution of smart contracts, i.e. computer programs that transfer digital assets between users. The most common language used to develop these contracts is Solidity, a Javascript-like…
Smart contracts provide the means to stipulate rules of interaction between mutually distrustful organizations. They encode contractual agreements on the basis of source code, which else need to be contractualized in natural language. While…
For applications of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols where the participants are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to identify participants who provably violate the…
We present an overview of hybrid Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG): a Proof-of-Stake checkpointing protocol overlaid onto Ethereum's Proof-of-Work blockchain. We describe its core functionalities and reward scheme, and explore its…
Dynamic participation has recently become a crucial requirement for devising permissionless consensus protocols. This notion, originally formalized by Pass and Shi (ASIACRYPT 2017) through their "sleepy model", captures the essence of a…
Ethereum is undergoing significant changes to its architecture as it evolves. These changes include its switch to PoS consensus and the introduction of significant infrastructural changes that do not require a change to the core protocol,…
Fueled by the growing popularity of proof-of-stake blockchains, there has been increasing interest and progress in permissioned consensus protocols, which could provide a simpler alternative to existing protocols, such as Paxos and PBFT. In…
The blockchain paradigm provides a mechanism for content dissemination and distributed consensus on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. While this paradigm has been widely adopted in industry, it has not been carefully analyzed in terms of its…
In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced…
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…
The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements,…
Conthereum is a concurrent Ethereum solution for intra-block parallel transaction execution, enabling validators to utilize multi-core infrastructure and transform the sequential execution model of Ethereum into a parallel one. This shift…
In May 2023, the Ethereum blockchain experienced its first inactivity leak, a mechanism designed to reinstate chain finalization amid persistent network disruptions. This mechanism aims to reduce the voting power of validators who are…
Safety and liveness are the two classical security properties of consensus protocols. Recent works have strengthened safety with accountability: should any safety violation occur, a sizable fraction of adversary nodes can be proven to be…
Ethereum has adopted a rollup-centric roadmap to scale by making rollups (layer 2 scaling solutions) the primary method for handling transactions. The first significant step towards this goal was EIP-4844, which introduced blob transactions…
This study investigates the rapid centralization of the Ethereum builder market under the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) architecture. We argue that existing research, by focusing predominantly on influential order flows, lacks a…
Modern blockchains increasingly rely on parallel execution to improve throughput. We show several industry and academic transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) struggle to simultaneously account for execution parallelism while remaining…
This paper presents Conflux, a fast, scalable and decentralized blockchain system that optimistically process concurrent blocks without discarding any as forks. The Conflux consensus protocol represents relationships between blocks as a…
Decentralization is widely recognized as a crucial characteristic of blockchains that enables them to resist malicious attacks such as the 51% attack and the takeover attack. Prior research has primarily examined decentralization in…