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Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
Transaction fee markets are essential components of blockchain economies, as they resolve the inherent scarcity in the number of transactions that can be added to each block. In early blockchain protocols, this scarcity was resolved through…
Smart Contracts and transactions allow users to implement elaborate constructions on cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many of these constructions, including operational payment channels and atomic swaps, use a building…
Smart contract platforms facilitate the development of important and diverse distributed applications in a simple manner. This simplicity stems from the inherent utility of employing the state of smart contracts to store, query and verify…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
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,…
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, transactions represent the primary mechanism that the external world can use to trigger a change of blockchain state. Transactions serve as key sources of evidence and play a vital role in…
A rollup network is a type of popular "Layer 2" scaling solution for general purpose "Layer 1" blockchains like Ethereum. Rollups networks separate execution of transactions from other aspects like consensus, processing transactions off of…
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…
Many blockchains such as Ethereum execute all incoming transactions sequentially significantly limiting the potential throughput. A common approach to scale execution is parallel execution engines that fully utilize modern multi-core…
Sharding is a prominent technique for scaling blockchains. By dividing the network into smaller components known as shards, a sharded blockchain can process transactions in parallel without introducing inconsistencies through the…
Numerous blockchain applications are designed with tasks that naturally have finite durations, and hence, a double-spending attack (DSA) on such blockchain applications leans towards being conducted within a finite timeframe, specifically…
Late 2023 witnessed significant user activity on EVM chains, resulting in a surge in transaction activity and putting many rollups into the first live test. While some rollups performed well, some others experienced downtime during this…
Eclipse attacks isolate blockchain nodes by monopolizing their peer-to-peer connections. The attacks were extensively studied in Bitcoin (SP'15, SP'20, CCS'21, SP'23) and Monero (NDSS'25), but their practicality against Ethereum nodes…
Blockchains have sparked global interest in recent years, gaining importance as they increasingly influence technology and finance. This thesis investigates the robustness of blockchain protocols, specifically focusing on Ethereum…
Despite the popularity of Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) because of their use in wide areas of applications such as payment channels, atomic swaps, etc, their use in exchange is still questionable. This is because of its incentive…
Liquidity providers (LPs) on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) can protect themselves from adverse selection risk by updating their positions more frequently. However, repositioning is costly, because LPs have to pay gas fees for each update.…
While Ethereum has successfully achieved dynamic availability together with safety, a fundamental delay remains between transaction execution and immutable finality. In Ethereum's current Gasper protocol, this latency is on the order of 15…
We study the incentives behind double-spend attacks on Nakamoto-style Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. In these systems, miners are allowed to choose which transactions to reference with their block, and a common strategy for selecting…
MEV attacks have been an omnipresent evil in the blockchain world, an implicit tax that uninformed users pay for using the service. The problem arises from the miners' ability to reorder and insert arbitrary transactions in the blocks they…