Related papers: When Priority Fails: Revert-Based MEV on Fast-Fina…
Trading through decentralized exchanges (DEXs) has become crucial in today's blockchain ecosystem, enabling users to swap tokens efficiently and automatically. However, the capacity of miners to strategically order transactions has led to…
Rollups have emerged as a promising approach to improving blockchains' scalability by offloading transactions execution off-chain. Existing rollup solutions either leverage complex zero-knowledge proofs or optimistically assume execution…
The MEV-Boost block auction contributes approximately 90% of all Ethereum blocks. Between October 2023 and March 2024, only three builders produced 80% of them, highlighting the concentration of power within the block builder market. To…
In blockchain networks, the strategic ordering of transactions within blocks has emerged as a significant source of profit extraction, known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). The transition from spam-based Priority Gas Auctions to…
Modern blockchains increasingly rely on parallel execution to improve throughput. We show several industry and academic transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) struggle to simultaneously account for execution parallelism while remaining…
The successive generations of consensus algorithms have progressively shifted the performance bottleneck of blockchains to the execution layer. While recent works address this by parallelizing transaction execution, they often overlook the…
The rise of Ethereum has lead to a flourishing decentralized marketplace that has, unfortunately, fallen victim to frontrunning and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) activities, where savvy participants game transaction orderings within a…
This study explores the intricacies of waiting games, a novel dynamic that emerged with Ethereum's transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based block proposer selection protocol. Within this PoS framework, validators acquire a distinct…
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…
Scalability has been a bottleneck for major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Despite the significantly improved scalability claimed by several high--profile blockchain projects, there has been little effort to understand how their…
Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs -- interactive protocols executed on Ethereum to resolve conflicting claims about the rollup's state -- to scale Ethereum securely. To mitigate against potential censorship of protocol moves, fraud…
There are $n$ players who compete by timing their actions. An opportunity appears randomly on a time interval. Whoever takes an action the fastest after the opportunity has arisen wins. The occurrence of the opportunity is observed only…
User transactions on Ethereum's peer-to-peer network are at risk of being attacked. The smart contracts building decentralized finance (DeFi) have introduced a new transaction ordering dependency to the Ethereum blockchain. As a result,…
This paper investigates how pricing schemes can achieve efficient allocations in blockchain systems featuring multiple transaction queues under a global capacity constraint. I model a capacity-constrained blockchain where users submit…
We study the impact of exchange rate volatility on cost efficiency and market structure in a cross-section of banks that have non-trivial exposures to foreign currency (FX) operations. We use unique data on quarterly revaluations of FX…
Gasper, the consensus protocol currently employed by Ethereum, typically requires 64 to 95 slots -- the units of time during which a new chain extending the previous one by one block is proposed and voted -- to finalize. This means that…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) searching has gained prominence on the Ethereum blockchain since the surge in Decentralized Finance activities. In Ethereum, MEV extraction primarily hinges on fee payments to block proposers. However, in…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on Ethereum has undergone significant transformations since its emergence during the DeFi summer of 2020. With the introduction of Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), the transaction…
We frame Ethereum transactions reverted by invariants-require(<invariant>)/ assert(<invariant>)/if (<invariant>) revert statements in the contract implementation-as a positive signal of active on-chain defenses. Despite their value, the…