Related papers: Optimistic MEV in Ethereum Layer 2s: Why Blockspac…
Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and…
While quantitative automation related to trading crypto-assets such as ERC-20 tokens has become relatively commonplace, with services such as 3Commas and Shrimpy offering user-friendly web-driven services for even the average crypto trader,…
Billions of dollars are lost every year in DeFi platforms by transactions exploiting business logic or accounting vulnerabilities. Existing defenses focus on static code analysis, public mempool screening, attacker contract detection, or…
Ethereum, a leading blockchain platform, has revolutionized the digital economy by enabling decentralized transactions and the execution of smart contracts. Ethereum transactions form the backbone of its network, facilitating peer-to-peer…
There has been a growing interest in shared sequencing solutions, in which transactions for multiple rollups are processed together. Their proponents argue that these solutions allow for better composability and can potentially increase…
Understanding the economic intent of Ethereum transactions is critical for user safety, yet current tools expose only raw on-chain data or surface-level intent, leading to widespread "blind signing" (approving transactions without…
Ethereum 2.0 is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and a widely used smart contract platform. Therefore, examining the reliability of Ethereum 2.0's incentive mechanism is crucial, particularly its effectiveness in…
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…
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…
We propose a novel framework for off-chain execution and verification of computationally-intensive smart contracts. Our framework is the first solution that avoids duplication of computing effort across multiple contractors, does not…
We outline two dishonest strategies that can be cheaply executed on the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, even by validators holding less than one-third of the total stake: malicious chain reorganizations ("reorgs") and finality delays. In a…
In the Ethereum network, miners are incentivized to include transactions in a block depending on the gas price specified by the sender. The sender of a transaction therefore faces a trade-off between timely inclusion and cost of his…
Gas is the transaction-fee metering system of the Ethereum network. Users of the network are required to select a gas price for submission with their transaction, creating a risk of overpaying or delayed/unprocessed transactions in this…
MEV attacks have been an omnipresent evil in the blockchain world, an implicit tax that uninformed users pay for using the service. The problem arises from the miners' ability to reorder and insert arbitrary transactions in the blocks they…
As a key enabler of Web3, Ethereum has long faced scalability challenges. The recent EIP-4844 upgrade aims to alleviate the scalability issue by introducing the ''blob'', a new data structure for Layer-2 rollups that enables off-chain…
We introduce a micro-velocity framework for analysing the on-chain circulation of Lidos liquid-staking tokens, stETH, and its wrapped ERC-20 form, wstETH. By reconstructing full transfer and share-based accounting histories, we compute…
To improve transaction rates, many cryptocurrencies have implemented so-called ''Layer-2'' transaction protocols, where payments are routed across networks of private payment channels. However, for a given transaction, not every network…
We present a comprehensive analysis of the implications of artificial latency in the Proposer-Builder Separation framework on the Ethereum network. Focusing on the MEV-Boost auction system, we analyze how strategic latency manipulation…
Ethereum 2.0, as the preeminent smart contract blockchain platform, guarantees the precise execution of applications without third-party intervention. At its core, this system leverages the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to excess value captured by miners (or validators) from users in a cryptocurrency network. This excess value often comes from reordering users' transactions to maximize fees or from inserting new…