Related papers: Sedna: Sharding transactions in multiple concurren…
A blockchain is a database of sequential events that is maintained by a distributed group of nodes. A key consensus problem in blockchains is that of determining the next block (data element) in the sequence. Many blockchains address this…
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…
With the development of decentralized consensus protocols, permissionless blockchains have been envisioned as a promising enabler for the general-purpose transaction-driven, autonomous systems. However, most of the prevalent blockchain…
Maximal Extractable Value, or MEV, remains a structural threat to blockchain fairness because a block producer can often observe pending transactions and unilaterally decide their ordering or inclusion. Existing mitigations hide transaction…
Maximal extractable value (MEV) in which block proposers unethically gain profits by manipulating the order in which transactions are included within a block, is a key challenge facing blockchains such as Ethereum today. Left unchecked, MEV…
MEV attacks have been an omnipresent evil in the blockchain world, an implicit tax that uninformed users pay for using the service. The problem arises from the miners' ability to reorder and insert arbitrary transactions in the blocks they…
The advent of decentralized trading markets introduces a number of new challenges for consensus protocols. In addition to the `usual' attacks -- a subset of the validators trying to prevent disagreement -- there is now the possibility of…
Traditional blockchains grant the miner of a block full control not only over which transactions but also their order. This constitutes a major flaw discovered with the introduction of decentralized finance and allows miners to perform MEV…
The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success but also encountered many challenges. One of the challenges has been the long confirmation time. Another challenge is the lack of incentives at certain steps of the…
Fueled by the growing popularity of proof-of-stake blockchains, there has been increasing interest and progress in permissioned consensus protocols, which could provide a simpler alternative to existing protocols, such as Paxos and PBFT. In…
With the large increase in the adoption of blockchain technologies, their underlying peer-to-peer networks must also scale with the demand. In this context, previous works highlighted the importance of ensuring efficient and resilient…
Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted,…
Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which…
Privacy is one of the essential pillars for the widespread adoption of blockchains, but public blockchains are transparent by nature. Modern analytics techniques can easily subdue the pseudonymity feature of a blockchain user. Some…
For permissionless blockchains, scalability is paramount. While current technologies still fail to address this problem fully, many research works propose sharding or other techniques that extensively adopt parallel processing of…
Consensus protocols used today in blockchains often rely on computational power or financial stakes - scarce resources. We propose a novel protocol using social capital - trust and influence from social interactions - as a non-transferable…
Caching content over CDNs or at the network edge has been solidified as a means to improve network cost and offer better streaming experience to users. Furthermore, nudging the users towards low-cost content has recently gained momentum as…
Most of today's online services (e.g., social networks, search engines, market places) are centralized, which is recognized as unsatisfactory by a majority of users for various reasons (e.g., centralized governance, censorship, loss of…
Traditionally, blockchain systems involve sharing transaction information across all blockchain network participants. Clearly, this introduces barriers to the adoption of the technology by the enterprise world, where preserving the privacy…
The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state…