Related papers: BRC20 Snipping Attack
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) markets are one of the fastest growing digital markets today, with the sales during the third quarter of 2021 exceeding $10 billions! Nevertheless, these emerging markets - similar to traditional emerging…
In this paper, we present a protocol for facilitating trust-less cross-chain cryptocurrency transfers that preserve privacy of bridge withdrawals. We leverage zero-knowledge primitives that are commonly used to design cryptocurrency mixing…
This paper presents LinSBFT, a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocol with the capacity of processing over 2000 smart contract transactions per second in production. LinSBFT applies to a permissionless, public blockchain system, in which…
Shilling is the use of artificial bids to make competition appear stronger and push prices upward. We study repeated first-price auctions in which shilling affects feedback but not allocation: the learner wins or loses against the real…
The Payment Protocol standard BIP70, specifying how payments in Bitcoin are performed by merchants and customers, is supported by the largest payment processors and most widely-used wallets. The protocol has been shown to be vulnerable to…
Marketplace companies rely heavily on experimentation when making changes to the design or operation of their platforms. The workhorse of experimentation is the randomized controlled trial (RCT), or A/B test, in which users are randomly…
Since the creation of Bitcoin, transaction tracking is one of the prominent means for following the movement of Bitcoins involved in illegal activities. Although every Bitcoin transaction is recorded in the blockchain database, which is…
Routing attacks remain practically effective in the Internet today as existing countermeasures either fail to provide protection guarantees or are not easily deployable. Blockchain systems are particularly vulnerable to such attacks as they…
A proof of the security of the Bitcoin protocol is made rigorous, and simplified in certain parts. A computational model in which an adversary can delay transmission of blocks by time $\Delta$ is considered. The protocol is generalized to…
Sharding is a prominent technique for scaling blockchains. By dividing the network into smaller components known as shards, a sharded blockchain can process transactions in parallel without introducing inconsistencies through the…
The Lightning Network, a payment channel network with a market cap of over 192M USD, is designed to resolve Bitcoin's scalability issues through fast off-chain transactions. There are multiple Lightning Network client implementations, all…
The surging interest in blockchain technology has revitalized the search for effective Byzantine consensus schemes. In particular, the blockchain community has been looking for ways to effectively integrate traditional Byzantine…
Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols…
In this brief, we conduct a complex-network analysis of the Bitcoin transaction network. In particular, we design a new sampling method, namely random walk with flying-back (RWFB), to conduct effective data sampling. We then conduct a…
Bitcoin, as well as many of its successors, require the whole transaction record to be reliably acquired by all nodes to prevent double-spending. Recently, many blockchains have been proposed to achieve scale-out throughput by letting nodes…
Bitcoin recently introduced a new protocol for the encryption of peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. The protocol, known as V2 P2P transport, represents a big step towards securing the overlay network against various previously-known attack…
We provide a game-theoretic analysis of the problem of front-running attacks. We use it to distinguish attacks from legitimate competition among honest users for having their transactions included earlier in the block. We also use it to…
BitCoin transactions are malleable in a sense that given a transaction an adversary can easily construct an equivalent transaction which has a different hash. This can pose a serious problem in some BitCoin distributed contracts in which…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of…