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For applications of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols where the participants are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to identify participants who provably violate the…
Layer 2 rollups improve throughput and fees, but can reintroduce risk through operator discretion and information asymmetry. We ask which operator and governance designs produce ethically problematic user risk. We adapt Ethical Risk…
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…
This study analyzes proposer-builder data and MEV-Boost payment data following the Ethereum merge in September 2022 to identify patterns of multi-block MEV. Our findings reveal fewer multi-slot sequences of builders than predicted by a…
An open distributed system can be secured by requiring participants to present proof of work and rewarding them for participation. The Bitcoin digital currency introduced this mechanism, which is adopted by almost all contemporary digital…
Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum: one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are used to increase individual validators' profits and delay consensus decisions, and one…
Context: Smart contracts are computerized self-executing contracts that contain clauses, which are enforced once certain conditions are met. Smart contracts are immutable by design and cannot be modified once deployed, which ensures…
Ethereum is currently the main blockchain ecosystem providing decentralised trust guarantees for applications ranging from finance to e-government. A common criticism of blockchain networks has been their energy consumption and operational…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the…
Blockchain technology has revolutionized contractual processes, enhancing efficiency and trust through smart contracts. Ethereum, as a pioneer in this domain, offers a platform for decentralized applications but is challenged by the…
The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements,…
The Ethereum blockchain utilizes the EIP-1559 algorithm to manage transaction inclusion and block assembly. However, EIP-1559 and much of the existing literature study this problem from a static perspective, focusing on price evolution…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) is a promising approach for designing efficient blockchains, where block proposers are randomly chosen with probability proportional to their stake. A primary concern with PoS systems is the "rich getting richer"…
Many of today's crypto currencies use blockchains as decentralized ledgers and secure them with proof of work. In case of a fork of the chain, Bitcoin's rule for achieving consensus is selecting the longest chain and discarding the other…
Rollups have become the de facto scalability solution for Ethereum, securing more than $55B in assets. They achieve scale by executing transactions on a Layer 2 ledger, while periodically posting data and finalizing state on the Layer 1,…
Upgradable smart contracts play an important role in the decentralized application ecosystem, to support routine maintenance, security patching, and feature additions. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on proxy-based upgradable…
Ethereum's current Gasper consensus mechanism, which combines the Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree (LMD-GHOST) fork choice rule with the probabilistic Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) finality overlay,…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
Efficient transfers to many recipients present a host of issues on Ethereum. First, accounts are identified by long and incompressible constants. Second, these constants have to be stored and communicated for each payment. Third, the…
On September 15, 2022, the Ethereum network adopted a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. We study the impact on the network and competing platforms in a two month event window around the Beacon chain merge. We find that the…