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Given the low throughput of blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, scalability - the ability to process an increasing number of transactions - has become a central focus of blockchain research. One promising approach is the parallelization…
State-of-the-art large language models require specialized hardware and substantial energy to operate. As a consequence, cloud-based services that provide access to large language models have become very popular. In these services, the…
Transaction fee plays an important role in determining the priority of transaction processing in public blockchain systems. Owing to the observability of unconfirmed transactions, a strategic user can postpone his transaction broadcasting…
In recent years, Ethereum gained tremendously in popularity, growing from a daily transaction average of 10K in January 2016 to an average of 500K in January 2020. Similarly, smart contracts began to carry more value, making them appealing…
Ethereum's scalability limitations pose significant challenges for the adoption of decentralized applications (dApps). Zero-Knowledge Rollups (ZK Rollups) present a promising solution, bundling transactions off-chain and submitting validity…
Participation in permissionless blockchains results in competition over system resources, which needs to be controlled with fees. Ethereum's current fee mechanism is implemented via a first-price auction that results in unpredictable fees…
Rollups have emerged as a promising approach to improving blockchains' scalability by offloading transactions execution off-chain. Existing rollup solutions either leverage complex zero-knowledge proofs or optimistically assume execution…
Blockchain systems come with the promise of being inclusive for a variety of decentralized applications (DApps) that can serve different purposes and have different urgency requirements. Despite this, the transaction fee mechanisms…
Limited scalability and transaction costs are, among others, some of the critical issues that hamper a wider adoption of distributed ledger technologies (DLT). That is particularly true for the Ethereum blockchain, which, so far, has been…
We study an auction with $m$ identical items in a context where $n$ agents can arbitrarily commit to strategies. In general, such commitments non-trivially change the equilibria by inducing a metagame of choosing which strategies to commit…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world systems, making it critical to understand their vulnerabilities. While data poisoning attacks during RLHF/DPO alignment have been studied empirically, their theoretical…
The agent--tool interaction loop is a critical attack surface for modern Large Language Model (LLM) agents. Existing denial-of-service (DoS) attacks typically function at the user-prompt or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) context layer…
In blockchain, bribery is an inevitable problem since users with various goals can bribe miners by transferring cryptoassets. To alleviate the negative effects of such collusion, Ethereum blockchain implemented new transaction fee mechanism…
The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…
Zero-knowledge rollups rely on provers to generate multi-step state transition proofs under strict finality and availability constraints. These steps require expensive hardware (e.g., GPUs), and finality is reached only once all stages…
Layer-2 (L2) blockchains inherit Ethereums security guarantees while reducing gas fees. As a result, they are gaining traction among traders at Automated Market Makers (AMMs), sparking debate over whether they contribute to liquidity…
This study tackles the computational challenges of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) for a restricted class of problems. It is motivated by the Last Revealer Attack (LRA), which undermines fairness in some Proof-of-Stake (PoS)…
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…
In this paper we show that, using only mild assumptions, previously proposed multidimensional blockchain fee markets are essentially optimal, even against worst-case adversaries. In particular, we show that the average welfare gap between…
Consensus algorithms facilitate agreement on and resolution of blockchain functions, such as smart contracts and transactions. Ethereum uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which depends on financial incentives to ensure that…