Related papers: Using "Failure Costs" to Guarantee Execution Quali…
The use of blockchains for automated and adversarial trading has become commonplace. However, due to the transparent nature of blockchains, an adversary is able to observe any pending, not-yet-mined transactions, along with their execution…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
Popular blockchains such as Ethereum and several others execute complex transactions in blocks through user-defined scripts known as smart contracts. Serial execution of smart contract transactions/atomic-units (AUs) fails to harness the…
This paper provides threshold policies with tight guarantees for online selection with convex cost (OSCC). In OSCC, a seller wants to sell some asset to a sequence of buyers with the goal of maximizing her profit. The seller can produce…
Participation in permissionless blockchains results in competition over system resources, which needs to be controlled with fees. Ethereum's current fee mechanism is implemented via a first-price auction that results in unpredictable fees…
Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…
Blockchains face inherent limitations when communicating outside their own ecosystem, largely due to the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) 3f+1 security model. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a promising mitigation because they allow…
We study the problem of the execution of a moderate size order in an illiquid market within the framework of a solvable Markovian model. We suppose that in order to avoid impact costs, a trader decides to execute her order through a unique…
Blockchain applications that rely on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) have increasingly become energy inefficient with a staggering carbon footprint. In contrast, energy-efficient alternative consensus protocols such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS) may…
Many blockchains such as Ethereum execute all incoming transactions sequentially significantly limiting the potential throughput. A common approach to scale execution is parallel execution engines that fully utilize modern multi-core…
In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run…
We study the economics of transaction reverts on Ethereum rollups and show that they are not accidental failures but equilibrium outcomes of MEV strategies. Using execution traces from major L2s, we find that over 80% of reverted…
A blockchain replaces central counterparties with time-consuming consensus protocols to record the transfer of ownership. This settlement latency slows cross-exchange trading, exposing arbitrageurs to price risk. Off-chain settlement,…
Financial regulators have long-standing concerns about fully decentralized exchanges that run 'on-chain' without any obvious regulatory hooks. The popularity of Uniswap, an automated market makers (AMM), made these concerns a reality. AMMs…
We study a new "laminated" queueing model for orders on batched trading venues such as decentralised exchanges. The model aims to capture and generalise transaction queueing infrastructure that has arisen to organise MEV activity on public…
The industrial market continuously needs reliable solutions to secure autonomous systems. Especially as these systems become more complex and interconnected, reliable security solutions are becoming increasingly important. One promising…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
Federated learning may be subject to both global aggregation attacks and distributed poisoning attacks. Blockchain technology along with incentive and penalty mechanisms have been suggested to counter these. In this paper, we explore…
As an emerging decentralized secure data management platform, blockchain has gained much popularity recently. To maintain a canonical state of blockchain data record, proof-of-work based consensus protocols provide the nodes, referred to as…
We argue that recent developments in proof-of-work consensus mechanisms can be used in accordance with advancements in formal verification techniques to build a distributed payment protocol that addresses important economic drawbacks from…