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The scalability problem has been one of the most significant barriers limiting the adoption of blockchains. Blockchain sharding is a promising approach to this problem. However, the sharding mechanism introduces a significant number of…
Many Ethereum smart contracts rely on block attributes such as block.timestamp or blockhash to generate random numbers for applications like lotteries and games. However, these values are predictable and miner-manipulable, creating the Bad…
Ethereum is a distributed blockchain that can execute smart contracts, which inter-communicate and perform transactions automatically. The execution of smart contracts is paid in the form of gas, which is a monetary unit used in the…
Leading language model (LM) providers like OpenAI and Anthropic allow customers to fine-tune frontier LMs for specific use cases. To prevent abuse, these providers apply filters to block fine-tuning on overtly harmful data. In this setting,…
In PCNs, nodes that forward payments between a source and a receiver are paid a small fee if the payment is successful. The fee is a compensation for temporarily committing funds to the payment. However, payments may fail due to…
Blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and several others execute complex transactions in blocks through user-defined scripts known as smart contracts. To append a correct block into blockchain, miners execute these transactions of smart…
On March 13, 2024, Ethereum implemented EIP-4844, designed to enhance its role as a data availability layer. While this upgrade reduces data posting costs for rollups, it also raises concerns about its impact on the consensus layer due to…
The introduction of blobs through EIP-4844 has significantly reduced the Data Availability (DA) costs for rollups on Ethereum. However, due to the fixed size of blobs at 128 KB, rollups with low data throughput face a dilemma: they either…
Proto-Danksharding, proposed in Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844), aims to incrementally improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain by introducing a new type of transaction known as blob-carrying transactions. These…
Blockchain received a vast amount of attention in recent years and is still growing. The second generation of blockchain, such as Ethereum, allows execution of almost any program in Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), making it a global…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
This paper presents a comprehensive framework for transaction posting and pricing in Layer 2 (L2) blockchain systems, focusing on challenges stemming from fluctuating Layer 1 (L1) gas fees and the congestion issues within L2 networks.…
Financial speculators often seek to increase their potential gains with leverage. Debt is a popular form of leverage, and with over 39.88B USD of total value locked (TVL), the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending markets are thriving.…
Ethereum smart contracts operate in a concurrent environment where multiple transactions can be submitted simultaneously. However, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) enforces sequential execution of transactions within each block to prevent…
Since 2016, sharding has become an auspicious solution to tackle the scalability issue in legacy blockchain systems. Despite its potential to strongly boost the blockchain throughput, sharding comes with its own security issues. To ease the…
Transaction ordering attacks extract billions of dollars annually from decentralized finance users in the form of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols guarantee total order but place no…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
Scalability has been a bottleneck for major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Despite the significantly improved scalability claimed by several high--profile blockchain projects, there has been little effort to understand how their…
Layer 2 rollups are rapidly absorbing DeFi activity, securing over $40 billion and accounting for nearly half of Ethereum's DEX volume by Q1 2025, yet their MEV dynamics remain understudied. We address this gap by defining and quantifying…
Evaluating and predicting the performance of large language models (LLMs) in multi-turn conversational settings is critical yet computationally expensive; key events -- e.g., jailbreaks or successful task completion by an agent -- often…