Related papers: FastSet: Parallel Claim Settlement
Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which…
This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of…
The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state…
FastPay allows a set of distributed authorities, some of which are Byzantine, to maintain a high-integrity and availability settlement system for pre-funded payments. It can be used to settle payments in a native unit of value…
Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted,…
SPEEDEX is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that lets participants securely trade assets without giving any single party undue control over the market. SPEEDEX offers several advantages over prior DEXes. It achieves high throughput -- over…
A typical blockchain protocol uses consensus to make sure that mutually mistrusting users agree on the order in which their operations on shared data are executed. However, it is known that asset transfer systems, by far the most popular…
A blockchain is a distributed ledger for recording transactions, maintained by many nodes without central authority through a distributed cryptographic protocol. All nodes validate the information to be appended to the blockchain, and a…
Many of the problems that arise in the context of blockchains and decentralized finance can be seen as variations on classical problems of distributed computing. The smart contract model proposed here is intended to capture both the…
Fueled by the growing popularity of proof-of-stake blockchains, there has been increasing interest and progress in permissioned consensus protocols, which could provide a simpler alternative to existing protocols, such as Paxos and PBFT. In…
One of the main bottlenecks of blockchains is smart contract execution. To increase throughput, modern blockchains try to execute transactions in parallel. Unfortunately, however, common blockchain use cases introduce read-write conflicts…
Classical and contemporary distributed consensus protocols, may they be for binary agreement, state machine replication, or blockchain consensus, require all protocol participants in a peer-to-peer system to agree on exactly the same…
A Unitychain is a novel blockchain-like structure that drastically improves transaction scalability and security while maintaining ongoing network performance, even if participating nodes are required to perform a new Distributed Key…
The Hypersyn protocol is a new type of permissionless and peer-to-peer payment network that is based on the concept of mutual credit and mutual arbitrage. Unlike blockchain-based systems, Hypersyn does not rely on any consensus algorithm.…
Katal is a new blockchain that provides a standard way to build and deploy decentralized financial applications. It brings together all the components necessary for the backend of a financial application, namely: a high-performance…
Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…
A decentralized online petition system enables individuals or groups to create, sign, and share petitions without a central authority. Using blockchain technology, these systems ensure the integrity and transparency of the petition process…
Ethereum clients execute transactions in a sequential order prescribed by the consensus protocol. This is a safe and conservative approach to blockchain transaction processing which forgoes running transactions in parallel even when doing…
Today's blockchains suffer from low throughput and high latency, which impedes their widespread adoption of more complex applications like smart contracts. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for smart contract execution. It…
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,…