Related papers: Prrr: Personal Random Rewards for Blockchain Repor…
Although peer prediction markets are widely used in crowdsourcing to aggregate information from agents, they often fail to reward the participating agents equitably. Honest agents can be wrongly penalized if randomly paired with dishonest…
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external tools such as search engines to solve complex agentic tasks that require reasoning and external knowledge retrieval. Recently, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR)…
Off-chain protocols (channels) are a promising solution to the scalability and privacy challenges of blockchain payments. Current proposals, however, require synchrony assumptions to preserve the safety of a channel, leaking to an adversary…
Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…
Simple commit-reveal beacons are vulnerable to last-revealer strategies, and existing descriptions often leave accountability and recovery mechanisms unspecified for practical deployments. We present Commit-Reveal$^2$, a layered design for…
Due to its minimal energy requirement the PoS consensus protocol has become an attractive alternative to PoW in modern cryptocurrencies. In this protocol the chance of being selected as a block proposer in each round is proportional to the…
Smart contract-enabled blockchains allow building decentralized applications in which mutually-distrusted parties can work together. Recently, oracle services emerged to provide these applications with real-world data feeds. Unfortunately,…
Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) entails a variety of approaches for aligning models with human intent to alleviate the burden of reward engineering. However, most previous PbRL work has not investigated the robustness to…
In the light of the recent fame of Blockchain technologies, numerous proposals and projects aiming at better practical viability have emerged. However, formally assessing their particularities and benefits has proven to be a difficult task.…
"Pay-per-last-$N$-shares" (PPLNS) is one of the most common payout strategies used by mining pools in Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies. As with any payment scheme, it is imperative to study issues of incentive compatibility of miners…
Smart contracts, the cornerstone of blockchain technology, enable secure, automated distributed execution. Given their role in handling large transaction volumes across clients, miners, and validators, exploring concurrency is critical.…
Incentive mechanisms are central to the functionality of permissionless blockchains: they incentivize participants to run and secure the underlying consensus protocol. Designing incentive-compatible incentive mechanisms is notoriously…
Optimistic responsiveness -- the ability of a consensus protocol to operate at the speed of the network -- is widely used in consensus protocol design to optimize latency and throughput. However, blockchain applications incentivize…
Mining blocks in a blockchain using the \textit{Proof-of-Work} consensus protocol involves significant risk, as network participants face continuous operational costs while earning infrequent capital gains upon successfully mining a block.…
Single-bridge blockchain solutions enable cross-chain communication. However, they are associated with centralization and single-point-of-failure risks. This paper proposes Proof of Success and Reward Distribution (PSCRD), a novel…
Blockchains have witnessed widespread adoption in the past decade in various fields. The growing demand makes their scalability and sustainability challenges more evident than ever. As a result, more and more blockchains have begun to adopt…
Most modern electronic devices can produce a random number. However, it is difficult to see how a group of mutually distrusting entities can have confidence in any such hardware-produced stream of random numbers, since the producer could…
A proof-of-randomness (PoR) protocol is presented as a fair and low energy-cost consensus mechanism for blockchains. Each network node of a blockchain may use a true random number generator (TRNG) and hash algorism to fulfil the PoR…
As a trusted middleware connecting the blockchain and the real world, the blockchain oracle can obtain trusted real-time price information for financial applications such as payment and settlement, and asset valuation on the blockchain.…
Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol $\Pi$. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each…