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Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…
Ethereum smart contracts hold tens of billions of USD in DeFi and NFTs, yet comprehensive security analysis remains difficult due to unverified code, proxy-based architectures, and the reliance on manual inspection of complex execution…
Bitcoin's (BTC) Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) has been a source of vulnerability for incentive attacks such as selfish mining, block withholding and coin hopping strategies. In this paper, first, we rigorously study the short-term…
Ethereum is a permissionless blockchain ecosystem that supports execution of smart contracts, the key enablers of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, the expressiveness of Ethereum smart contracts is a…
Our aim in this paper is to investigate the profitability of double-spending (DS) attacks that manipulate an a priori mined transaction in a blockchain. It was well understood that a successful DS attack is established when the proportion…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) generates hundreds of thousands of tokens per training step, with rollout generation dominating the computational cost. The overall token budget can be controlled along two main…
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…
Ethereum has been a cornerstone of the decentralized ecosystem, with rollup-based scaling solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism significantly expanding its capabilities. These rollups enhance scalability and foster innovation, but their…
In 2021 Ethereum adjusted the transaction pricing mechanism by implementing EIP-1559, which introduces the base fee - a network fee that is burned and dynamically adjusts to the network demand. The authors of the Ethereum Improvement…
The emergence of decentralized finance has transformed asset trading on the blockchain, making traditional financial instruments more accessible while also introducing a series of exploitative economic practices known as Maximal Extractable…
Smart contracts are software programs featuring both traditional applications and distributed data storage on blockchains. Ethereum is a prominent blockchain platform with the support of smart contracts. The smart contracts act as…
Recent studies have shown that LLMs are vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, where adversarial inputs like spelling errors or non-semantic prompts trigger endless outputs without generating an [EOS] token. These attacks can…
Gas is the transaction-fee metering system of the Ethereum network. Users of the network are required to select a gas price for submission with their transaction, creating a risk of overpaying or delayed/unprocessed transactions in this…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
We develop a general and practical framework to address the problem of the optimal design of dynamic fee mechanisms for multiple blockchain resources. Our framework allows to compute policies that optimally trade-off between adjusting…
Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts…
The advent of Ethereum 2.0 has introduced significant changes, particularly the shift to Proof-of-Stake consensus. This change presents new opportunities and challenges for arbitrage. Amidst these changes, we introduce BriDe Arbitrager, a…
Proof-of-Work mining is intended to provide blockchains with robustness against double-spend attacks. However, an economic analysis that follows from Budish (2018), which considers free entry conditions together with the ability to rent…
This study quantifies the potential non-atomic MEV on Layer-2 (L2) blockchains by measuring the arbitrage opportunities between cross-rollup and DEX-CEX. Over recent years, we observe a shift in trading activities from Ethereum to rollups,…
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…