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Blockchain offers a decentralized, immutable, transparent system of records. It offers a peer-to-peer network of nodes with no centralised governing entity making it unhackable and therefore, more secure than the traditional paper-based or…
As a promising implementation model of payment channel network (PCN), payment channel hub (PCH) could achieve high throughput by providing stable off-chain transactions through powerful hubs. However, existing PCH schemes assume hubs…
Many prominent smart-contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit. This pattern of…
Confidential high-performance computing orchestrates workloads across federated domains, yet existing frameworks rely on high-overhead user-space library operating systems or assume single-host execution. We propose \codename, an…
Over the last years, Ethereum has evolved into a public platform that safeguards the savings of hundreds of millions of people and secures more than $650 billion in assets, placing it among the top 25 stock exchanges worldwide in market…
Decentralized marketplace applications demand fast, cheap and easy-to-use cryptocurrency payment mechanisms to facilitate high transaction volumes. The standard solution for off-chain payments, state channels, are optimized for frequent…
We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. To date, threshold cryptosystems have been considered under permissioned settings…
Security bugs and trapdoors in smart contracts have been impacting the Ethereum community since its inception. Conceptually, the 1.45-million Ethereum's contracts form a single "gigantic program" whose behaviors are determined by the…
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…
Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. They allow multiple agents to route payments through one another. So far, the topology and…
In cryptocurrencies, transaction fees are typically exclusively paid in the native platform currency. This restriction causes a wide range of challenges, such as deteriorated user experience, mandatory rent payments by decentralized…
Distributed ledger systems (i.e., blockchains) have received a lot of attention. They promise to enable mutually untrusted participants to execute transactions while providing the immutability of the data and censorship resistance. Although…
Today's blockchains suffer from low throughput and high latency, which impedes their widespread adoption of more complex applications like smart contracts. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for smart contract execution. It…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
Payment channel hub (PCH), by leveraging a powerful hub to reliably provide off-chain payment services, offers an effective enhancement to payment channel networks (PCNs). However, existing approaches typically rely on a single hub to relay…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
Public blockchains inherently offer low throughput and high latency, motivating off-chain scalability solutions such as Payment Channel Networks (PCNs). However, existing PCNs suffer from liquidity fragmentation-funds locked in one channel…
In this paper, we consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows -- implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract -- successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this…
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have long been criticized for their high computational and storage overhead. Unfortunately, while a number of proposals address the energy consumption of existing Proof-of-Work deployments, little…
Randomness beacons based on Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) are increasingly proposed for blockchains and distributed systems, promising publicly verifiable delay and bias resistance. Existing analyses, however, treat adversaries purely…