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Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Based on the Nakamoto consensus, Bagaria, Kannan, Tse, Fanti, and Viswanath proposed the Prism protocol in 2018 and showed that it achieves near-optimal blockchain…
Bitcoin and other similar digital currencies on blockchains are not ideal means for payment, because their prices tend to go up in the long term (thus people are incentivized to hoard those currencies), and to fluctuate widely in the short…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Cryptocurrencies have gained tremendous popularity over the past few years. The purpose of this study is to try to understand the factors that are driving cryptocurrency-related trading activities. Focusing on the well-established…
A bitcoin \textit{covenant} is a mechanism to enforce conditions on future bitcoin transactions. A bitcoin \textit{vault} is a specific type of covenant transaction that enforces a time-lock on the transfer of control of funds to a hot…
Blockchain technology promises to democratize finance and promote social equity through decentralization, but questions remain about whether current implementations advance or hinder these goals. Through a mixed-methods study combining…
In the cryptographic currency Bitcoin, all transactions are recorded in the blockchain - a public, global, and immutable ledger. Because transactions are public, Bitcoin and its users employ obfuscation to maintain a degree of financial…
Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
Public blockchains should be able to scale with respect to the number of nodes and to the transactions workload. The blockchain scalability trilemma has been informally conjectured. This is related to scalability, security and…
A major issue for many applications of blockchain technology is the tension between immutability and compliance to regulations. For instance, the GDPR in the EU requires to guarantee, under some circumstances, the right to be forgotten.…
A key performance metric in blockchains is the latency between when a transaction is broadcast and when it is confirmed (the so-called, confirmation latency). While improvements in consensus techniques can lead to lower confirmation…
Security bugs and trapdoors in smart contracts have been impacting the Ethereum community since its inception. Conceptually, the 1.45-million Ethereum's contracts form a single "gigantic program" whose behaviors are determined by the…
Bitcoin is the world's first decentralized digital currency. Its main technical innovation is the use of a blockchain and hash-based proof of work to synchronize transactions and prevent double-spending the currency. While the qualitative…
Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are…
Blockchain has become particularly popular due to its promise to support business-critical services in very different domains (e.g., retail, supply chains, healthcare). Blockchain systems rely on complex middleware, like Ethereum or…
This paper contextualises the common queries of "why is crypto crashing?" and "why is crypto down?", the research transcends beyond the frequent market fluctuations to unravel how cryptocurrencies fundamentally work and the step-by-step…
An important aspect of the propagation delay in blockchain networks is the block verification time, which is also responsible for the so-called verifier's dilemma. Models for the block verification time can help to understand and improve…
Recent advances in the blockchain research have been made in two important directions. One is refined resilience analysis utilizing game theory to study the consequences of selfish behaviors of users (miners), and the other is the extension…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…