Related papers: How Exclusive are Ethereum Transactions? Evidence …
Blockchain's economic value lies in enabling financial and economic transactions without relying on trusted, centralized intermediaries. In practice, however, transactions pass through a fragmented chain of intermediaries before being…
In permissionless blockchains, transaction issuers include a fee to incentivize miners to include their transactions. To accurately estimate this prioritization fee for a transaction, transaction issuers (or blockchain participants, more…
Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain systems that supports more than half a million transactions every day and fosters miscellaneous decentralized applications with its Turing-complete smart contract machine. Whereas it remains…
Ethereum's transaction pool (mempool) dynamics and fee market efficiency critically affect transaction inclusion, validator workload, and overall network performance. This research empirically analyzes gas price variations, mempool…
This study investigates the rapid centralization of the Ethereum builder market under the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) architecture. We argue that existing research, by focusing predominantly on influential order flows, lacks a…
In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study of smart contract dependencies, analyzing over 41 million contracts and 11 billion interactions on Ethereum up to December 2024. Our results yield four key insights: (1) 59% of…
Two MEV builders now produce nearly 80\% of Ethereum blocks. Block builders have the ability to reorder transactions on the blockchain in a way that can be harmful to participants. We estimate they would pay in the aggregate nearly \$14…
Recently, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms on Ethereum are booming, and numerous traders are trying to capitalize on the opportunity for maximizing their benefits by launching front-running attacks and extracting Miner Extractable…
Several recent proposals implicitly or explicitly suggest making use of randomized transaction ordering within a block to mitigate centralization effects and to improve fairness in the Ethereum ecosystem. However, transactions and blocks…
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 recent years, we have seen a great deal of both academic and practical interest in the topic of vulnerabilities in smart contracts, particularly those developed for the Ethereum blockchain. While most of the work has focused on detecting…
Existing fair exchange protocols usually neglect consideration of cost when assessing their fairness. However, in an environment with non-negligible transaction cost, e.g., public blockchains, high or unexpected transaction cost might be an…
Blockchain enables peer-to-peer transactions in cyberspace without a trusted third party. The rapid growth of Ethereum and smart contract blockchains generally calls for well-designed Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate limited…
Ethereum, as a representative of Web3, adopts a novel framework called Proposer Builder Separation (PBS) to prevent the centralization of block profits in the hands of institutional Ethereum stakers. Introducing builders to generate blocks…
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…
It is widely accepted that Ethereum mining is highly centralized. Nonetheless, centralization has been mostly characterized by exclusively looking at the influence that independent miners or mining pools can have over the network. Moreover,…
Ethereum has adopted a rollup-centric roadmap to scale by making rollups (layer 2 scaling solutions) the primary method for handling transactions. The first significant step towards this goal was EIP-4844, which introduced blob transactions…
As the largest public blockchain-based platform supporting smart contracts, Ethereum has accumulated a large number of user transaction records since its debut in 2014. Analysis of Ethereum transaction records, however, is still relatively…
Currently, over 90% of Ethereum blocks are built using MEV-Boost, an auction that allows validators to sell their block-building power to builders who compete in an open English auction in each slot. Shortly after the merge, when MEV-Boost…
Currently, Gasper, the implemented consensus protocol of Ethereum, takes between 64 and 95 slots to finalize blocks. Because of that, a significant portion of the chain is susceptible to reorgs. The possibility to capture MEV (Maximum…