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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…
As transaction fees skyrocket today, blockchains become increasingly expensive, hurting their adoption in broader applications. This work tackles the saving of transaction fees for economic blockchain applications. The key insight is that…
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 work, cross-chain…
Sealed-bid auctions play a crucial role in blockchain ecosystems. Previous works introduced viable blockchain sealed-bid auction protocols, leveraging timed commitments for bid encryption. However, a crucial challenge remains unresolved in…
Blockchains offer a decentralized and secure execution environment strong enough to host cryptocurrencies, but the state-replication model makes on-chain computation expensive. To avoid heavy on-chain workloads, systems like Truebit and…
Process (or workflow) execution on blockchain suffers from limited scalability; specifically, costs in the form of transactions fees are a major limitation for employing traditional public blockchain platforms in practice. Research, so far,…
The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state…
Scalability problems in programmable blockchains have created a strong demand for secure methods that move the bulk of computation outside the blockchain. One of the preferred solutions to this problem involves off-chain computers that…
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…
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
Maximal Extractable Value, or MEV, remains a structural threat to blockchain fairness because a block producer can often observe pending transactions and unilaterally decide their ordering or inclusion. Existing mitigations hide transaction…
Users bid in a transaction fee mechanism (TFM) to get their transactions included and confirmed by a blockchain protocol. Roughgarden (EC'21) initiated the formal treatment of TFMs and proposed three requirements: user incentive…
Multi-party data management and blockchain systems require data sharing among participants. To provide resilient and consistent data sharing, transactions engines rely on Byzantine FaultTolerant consensus (BFT), which enables operations…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
Rollups have become the de facto scalability solution for Ethereum, securing more than $55B in assets. They achieve scale by executing transactions on a Layer 2 ledger, while periodically posting data and finalizing state on the Layer 1,…
Sharding is used to address the performance and scalability issues of the blockchain protocols, which divides the overall transaction processing costs among multiple clusters of nodes. Shards require less storage capacity and communication…
In this paper, we review the undercutting attacks in the transaction-fee-based regime of proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains with the longest chain fork-choice rule. Next, we focus on the problem of fluctuations in mining revenue and the mining…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) has become a critical issue for blockchain ecosystems, as it enables validators or block proposers to extract value by ordering, including or censoring users' transactions. This paper aims to present a formal…
Milionis et al.(2023) studied the rate at which automated market makers leak value to arbitrageurs when block times are discrete and follow a Poisson process, and where the risky asset price follows a geometric Brownian motion. We extend…
Distributed ledger systems, such as blockchains, rely on consensus protocols that commit ordered messages for processing. In practice, message ordering within these systems is often reward-driven. This raises concerns about fairness,…