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Smart contracts are programs that are executed on the blockchain and can hold, manage and transfer assets in the form of cryptocurrencies. The contract's execution is then performed on-chain and is subject to consensus, i.e. every node on…
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…
Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional risks that are not captured by standard PoS economic security…
Demand for blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is far larger than supply, necessitating a mechanism that selects a subset of transactions to include "on-chain" from the pool of all pending transactions. This paper investigates the…
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…
Ethereum's Gas mechanism attempts to set transaction fees in accordance with the computational cost of transaction execution: a cost borne by default by every node on the network to ensure correct smart contract execution. Gas encourages…
Blockchain technology is widely expected to reduce transaction costs by automating contract enforcement and eliminating intermediaries; yet, the execution costs imposed by network congestion have received little attention in the operations…
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…
Proof-of-Work~(PoW) based blockchains typically allocate only a tiny fraction (e.g., less than 1% for Ethereum) of the average interarrival time~($\mathbb{I}$) between blocks for validating transactions. A trivial increase in validation…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
A growing number of products use layer 2 solutions to expand the capabilities of primary blockchains like Ethereum, where computation is off-loaded from the root chain, and the results are published to it in bulk. Those include optimistic…
A transaction fee mechanism (TFM) is an essential component of a blockchain protocol. However, a systematic evaluation of the real-world impact of TFMs is still absent. Using rich data from the Ethereum blockchain, the mempool, and…
Public blockchains implement a fee mechanism to allocate scarce computational resources across competing transactions. Most existing fee market designs utilize a joint, fungible unit of account (e.g., gas in Ethereum) to price otherwise…
As the significance of blockchain innovation grows and the focus on scalability intensifies, rollup technology has emerged as a promising approach to tackle these scalability concerns. Nonetheless, rollups encounter restrictions when…
As of July 15, 2023, Ethererum, which is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain [1] has around 410 Billion USD in total assets on chain (popularly referred to as total-value-locked, TVL) but has only 33 Billion USD worth of ETH staked in…
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…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…
The Ethereum platform allows developers to implement and deploy applications called Dapps onto the blockchain for public use through the use of smart contracts. To execute code within a smart contract, a paid transaction must be issued…
Rollup protocols have recently received significant attention as a promising class of Layer 2 (L2) scalability solutions. By utilizing the Layer 1 (L1) blockchain solely as a bulletin board for a summary of the executed transactions and…