Related papers: Balancing incentives in committee-based blockchain…
We study an auction with $m$ identical items in a context where $n$ agents can arbitrarily commit to strategies. In general, such commitments non-trivially change the equilibria by inducing a metagame of choosing which strategies to commit…
We study a robust, i.e. in presence of malicious participants, multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem where multiple participants are distributed on a fully decentralized blockchain, with the possibility of some being malicious. The rewards…
Blockchains have sparked global interest in recent years, gaining importance as they increasingly influence technology and finance. This thesis investigates the robustness of blockchain protocols, specifically focusing on Ethereum…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, are increasingly adopting layer-2 scaling solutions to improve transaction throughput and reduce fees. One popular layer-2 approach is the Optimistic Rollup, which relies on a mechanism known as a…
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…
Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but…
Censorship resilience is a fundamental assumption underlying the security of blockchain protocols. Additionally, the analysis of blockchain security from an economic and game theoretic perspective has been growing in popularity in recent…
Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering…
We study the incentives behind double-spend attacks on Nakamoto-style Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. In these systems, miners are allowed to choose which transactions to reference with their block, and a common strategy for selecting…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol $\Pi$. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each…
Optimistic responsiveness -- the ability of a consensus protocol to operate at the speed of the network -- is widely used in consensus protocol design to optimize latency and throughput. However, blockchain applications incentivize…
The selfish mining attack, arguably the most famous game-theoretic attack in blockchain, indicates that the Bitcoin protocol is not incentive-compatible. Most subsequent works mainly focus on strengthening the selfish mining strategy, thus…
Blockchains revolutionized centralized sectors like banking and finance by promoting decentralization and transparency. In a blockchain, information is transmitted through transactions issued by participants or applications. Miners…
In the past decades, the blockchain technology has attracted tremendous attention from both academia and industry. The popularity of blockchain networks was originated from a crypto-currency to serve as a decentralized and tamperproof…
Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…
Mining fairness in blockchain refers to equality between the computational resources invested in mining and the block rewards received. There exists a dilemma wherein increasing the transaction processing capacity of a blockchain…
We propose a model suggesting that honest-but-rational consensus participants may play timing games, and strategically delay their block proposal to optimize MEV capture, while still ensuring the proposal's timely inclusion in the canonical…
Bitcoin-NG, a scalable blockchain protocol, divides each block into a key block and many micro blocks to effectively improve the transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG has a special incentive mechanism (i.e. splitting transaction fees…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…