Related papers: 3-Slot-Finality Protocol for Ethereum
The adoption of blockchain-based distributed computation platforms is growing fast. Some of these platforms, such as Ethereum, provide support for implementing smart contracts, which are envisioned to have novel applications in a broad…
Smart contracts are programs that are executed on the blockchain and can hold, manage and transfer assets in the form of cryptocurrencies. The contract's execution is then performed on-chain and is subject to consensus, i.e. every node on…
Ethereum has been a cornerstone of the decentralized ecosystem, with rollup-based scaling solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism significantly expanding its capabilities. These rollups enhance scalability and foster innovation, but their…
We investigate the time to consensus in Nakamoto blockchains. Specifically, we consider two competing growth processes, labeled \emph{honest} and \emph{adversarial}, and determine the time after which the honest process permananetly exceeds…
Existing Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocols face significant challenges in the consortium blockchain scenario. On the one hand, we can make little assumptions about the reliability and security of the underlying Internet. On the…
Existing fair exchange protocols usually neglect consideration of cost when assessing their fairness. However, in an environment with non-negligible transaction cost, e.g., public blockchains, high or unexpected transaction cost might be an…
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…
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…
Maximal extractable value (MEV) in which block proposers unethically gain profits by manipulating the order in which transactions are included within a block, is a key challenge facing blockchains such as Ethereum today. Left unchecked, MEV…
This study explores the intricacies of waiting games, a novel dynamic that emerged with Ethereum's transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based block proposer selection protocol. Within this PoS framework, validators acquire a distinct…
Demand for blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is far larger than supply, necessitating a mechanism that selects a subset of transactions to include "on-chain" from the pool of all pending transactions. This paper investigates the…
Sharding is a promising blockchain scaling solution. But it currently suffers from high latency and low throughput when it comes to cross-shard transactions, i.e., transactions that require coordination from multiple shards. The root cause…
Proto-Danksharding, proposed in Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844), aims to incrementally improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain by introducing a new type of transaction known as blob-carrying transactions. These…
Smart contracts are programs that execute inside blockchains such as Ethereum to manipulate digital assets. Since bugs in smart contracts may lead to substantial financial losses, there is considerable interest in formally proving their…
Proof-of-stake blockchains require consensus protocols that support Dynamic Availability and Reconfiguration (so-called DAR setting), where the former means that the consensus protocol should remain live even if a large number of nodes…
Existing Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols address only threshold failures, where the participating nodes fail independently of each other, each one fails equally likely, and the protocol's guarantees follow from a simple…
In proof-of-work based blockchains such as Ethereum, verification of blocks is an integral part of establishing consensus across nodes. However, in Ethereum, miners do not receive a reward for verifying. This implies that miners face the…
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…
Decentralization has an important geographic dimension that conventional metrics, such as stake distribution, often overlook. Validator location affects resilience to regional shocks (e.g., outages, natural disasters, or government…
The performance of existing permissionless smart contract platforms such as Ethereum is limited by the consensus layer. Prism is a new proof-of-work consensus protocol that provably achieves throughput and latency up to physical limits…