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The trustless nature of permissionless blockchains renders overcollateralization a key safety component relied upon by decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Nonetheless, factors such as price volatility may undermine this mechanism. In…
Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems. Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of…
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…
Within just four years, the blockchain-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has accumulated a peak total value locked (TVL) of more than 253 billion USD. This surge in DeFi's popularity has, unfortunately, been accompanied by many…
With the increasing adoption of decentralized information systems based on a variety of permissionless blockchain networks, the choice of consensus mechanism is at the core of many controversial discussions. Ethereum's recent transition…
Since the inception of permissionless blockchains with Bitcoin in 2008, it became apparent that their most well-suited use case is related to making the financial system and its advantages available to everyone seamlessly without depending…
Financial markets are undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Technological advances have brought major improvements to the operations of financial services. While these advances promote improved accessibility and convenience,…
Currently cryptocurrencies and Decentralized Finance (DeFi), which enable financial services on public blockchains, represents a new growing trend in finance. In contrast to financial markets, ruled by traditional corporations, DeFi is…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a blockchain powered peer-to-peer financial system, is mushrooming. Two years ago the total value locked in DeFi systems was approximately 700m USD, now, as of April 2022, it stands at around 150bn USD. The…
This paper presents OVer, a framework designed to automatically analyze the behavior of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols when subjected to a "skewed" oracle input. OVer firstly performs symbolic analysis on the given contract and…
This paper presents a study of the Poof-of-Stake (PoW) Ethereum consensus protocol, following the recent switch from Proof-of-Work (PoS) to Proof-of-Stake within Merge upgrade. The new protocol has resulted in reduced energy consumption and…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has become one of the most successful applications of blockchain and smart contracts. The DeFi ecosystem enables a wide range of crypto-financial activities, while the underlying smart contracts often contain…
Ethereum's transaction pool (mempool) dynamics and fee market efficiency critically affect transaction inclusion, validator workload, and overall network performance. This research empirically analyzes gas price variations, mempool…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) refers to financial services that are not necessarily related to crypto-currencies. By employing blockchain for security and integrity, DeFi creates new possibilities that attract retail and institution users,…
Decentralized applications (dApps) in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) face a fundamental tension between regulatory compliance requirements like Know Your Customer (KYC) and maintaining decentralization and privacy. Existing permissioned DeFi…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) services are moving traditional financial operations to the Internet of Value (IOV) by exploiting smart contracts, distributed ledgers, and clever heterogeneous transactions among different protocols. The…
Initially introduced to Ethereum via Flashbots' MEV-boost, Proposer-Builder Separation allows proposers to auction off blockspace to a market of transaction orderers, known as builders. PBS is currently available to validators through the…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is a prominent Sybil control mechanism for blockchain-based systems. In "e-PoS: Making PoS Decentralized and Fair," Saad et al. (TPDS'21) introduced a new Proof-of-Stake protocol, e-PoS, to enhance PoS applications'…
Decentralized finance, i.e., DeFi, has become the most popular type of application on many public blockchains (e.g., Ethereum) in recent years. Compared to the traditional finance, DeFi allows customers to flexibly participate in diverse…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…