Related papers: A Secure Sequencer and Data Availability Committee…
Trading on decentralized exchanges has been one of the primary use cases for permissionless blockchains with daily trading volume exceeding billions of U.S.~dollars. In the status quo, users broadcast transactions and miners are responsible…
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…
The rise of crypto-currencies has spawned great interest in their underlying technology, namely, Blockchain. The central component in a Blockchain is a shared distributed ledger. A ledger comprises series of blocks, which in turns contains…
Transactions submitted through the blockchain peer-to-peer (P2P) network may leak out exploitable information. We study the economic incentives behind the adoption of blockchain dark venues, where users' transactions are observable only by…
This work addresses the inherent issues of high latency in blockchains and low scalability in traditional consensus protocols. We present pod, a novel notion of consensus whose first priority is to achieve the physically-optimal latency of…
Public blockchains have spurred the growing popularity of decentralized transactions and smart contracts, but they exhibit limitations on the transaction throughput, storage, and computation. To avoid transaction gridlock, public…
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…
Strategic mining attacks, such as selfish mining, exploit blockchain consensus protocols by deviating from honest behavior to maximize rewards. Markov Decision Process (MDP) analysis faces scalability challenges in modern digital economics,…
Blockchain consensus protocols enable participants to agree on consistent views of the blockchain that may be ahead or behind relative to each other but do not fork into different chains. A number of recently popular…
The AI Control research agenda aims to develop control protocols: safety techniques that prevent untrusted AI systems from taking harmful actions during deployment. Because human oversight is expensive, one approach is trusted monitoring,…
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…
Blockchains are distributed secure ledgers to which transactions are issued continuously and each block of transactions is tightly coupled to its predecessors. Permissioned blockchains place special emphasis on transactions throughput. In…
Blockchains are intended to be immutable, so an attacker who is able to delete transactions through a chain reorganization (a malicious reorg) can perform a profitable double-spend attack. We study the rate at which an attacker can execute…
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…
The rapid development of blockchain technology has driven the widespread application of decentralized applications (DApps) across various fields. However, DApps cannot directly access external data and rely on oracles to interact with…
In the context of decentralized blockchains, accurately simulating the outcome of order flow auctions (OFAs) off-chain is challenging due to adversarial sequencing, encrypted bids, and frequent state changes. Existing approaches, such as…
Blockchain provides the unique and accountable channel for financial forensics by mining its open and immutable transaction data. A recent surge has been witnessed by training machine learning models with cryptocurrency transaction data for…
The convergence of blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) enables secure, decentralised, and verifiable data exchange across distributed smart environments. However, traditional blockchain frameworks suffer from inherent scalability…
Propagation latency is inherent to any distributed network, including blockchains. Typically, blockchain protocols provide a timing buffer for block propagation across the network. In leader-based blockchains, the leader -- block proposer…
Despite their increasing popularity, blockchains still suffer from severe scalability limitations. Recently, Ethereum proposed a novel approach to block validation based on Data Availability Sampling (DAS), that has the potential to improve…