Related papers: The Free Option Problem of ePBS
Modern blockchains guarantee that submitted transactions will be included eventually; a property formally known as liveness. But financial activity requires transactions to be included in a timely manner. Unfortunately, classical liveness…
This paper proposes a novel maximum-likelihood (ML) soft-decision decoding framework for linear block codes, termed error-building decoding (EBD). The complete decoding process can be performed using only the parity-check matrix, without…
Client diversity is a cornerstone of blockchain resilience, yet most networks suffer from a dangerously skewed distribution of client implementations. This monoculture exposes the network to very risky scenarios, such as massive financial…
The beacon chain is the backbone of the Ethereum's evolution towards a proof-of-stake-based scalable network. Beacon clients are the applications implementing the services required to operate the beacon chain, namely validators, beacon…
Since the Merge update upon which Ethereum transitioned to Proof of Stake, it has been touted that it resulted in lower power consumption and increased security. However, even if that is the case, can this state be sustained? In this paper,…
Zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs) must reconcile a fundamental contradiction: the Ethereum Virtual Machine was designed for transparent sequential execution, while zero-knowledge proofs require algebraic circuit…
Cryptocurrency miners have great latitude in deciding which transactions they accept, including their own, and the order in which they accept them. Ethereum miners in particular use this flexibility to collect MEV-Miner Extractable Value-by…
We study the liquid democracy problem, where each voter can either directly vote to a candidate or delegate his voting power to a proxy. We consider the implementation of liquid democracy on the blockchain through Ethereum smart contract…
Airdrops are a popular mechanism used by blockchain protocols to bootstrap communities, reward early adopters, and decentralize token distribution. Despite their widespread adoption, the effectiveness of airdrops in achieving long-term user…
Proposer anonymity in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains is a critical concern due to the risk of targeted attacks such as malicious denial-of-service (DoS) and censorship attacks. While several Secret Single Leader Election (SSLE) mechanisms…
This paper presents a multi-contract blockchain framework for inter-provider agreements in 6G networks, emphasizing performance analysis under a realistic Proof-of-Stake (PoS) setting on Ethereum's Sepolia testnet. We begin by quantifying…
The prosperity of decentralized finance motivates many investors to profit via trading their crypto assets on decentralized applications (DApps for short) of the Ethereum ecosystem. Apart from Ether (the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum),…
Safety and liveness are the two classical security properties of consensus protocols. Recent works have strengthened safety with accountability: should any safety violation occur, a sizable fraction of adversary nodes can be proven to be…
As one of the representative blockchain platforms, Ethereum has attracted lots of attacks. Due to the existed financial loss, there is a pressing need to perform timely investigation and detect more attack instances. Though multiple systems…
The Ethereum blockchain network enables transaction processing and smart-contract execution through levies of transaction fees, commonly known as gas fees. This framework mediates economic participation via a market-based mechanism for gas…
As all software, blockchain nodes are exposed to faults in their underlying execution stack. Unstable execution environments can disrupt the availability of blockchain nodes interfaces, resulting in downtime for users. This paper introduces…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
Recently, several works conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains under several network attacks. All these attacks translate into showing that the assumptions of these blockchains can be violated in theory or under…
Custom currencies (ERC-20) on Ethereum are wildly popular, but they are second class to the primary currency Ether. Custom currencies are more complex and more expensive to handle than the primary currency as their accounting is not…
The increasing adoption of blockchain technology has led to a growing demand for higher transaction throughput. Traditional blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, execute transactions sequentially within each block, limiting scalability.…