Related papers: SoK: Speedy Secure Finality
Ethereum Research team has proposed a family of Casper blockchain consensus protocols for Ethereum 2.0. It has been shown in the literature that Casper Friendly Finality Gadget (Casper FFG) for Ethereum 2.0's beacon network cannot achieve…
We outline two dishonest strategies that can be cheaply executed on the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, even by validators holding less than one-third of the total stake: malicious chain reorganizations ("reorgs") and finality delays. In a…
There has been recently a lot of progress in designing efficient partially synchronous BFT consensus protocols that are meant to serve as core consensus engines for Proof of Stake blockchain systems. While the state-of-the-art solutions…
Bitcoin has attracted everyone's attention and interest recently. Ethereum (ETH), a second generation cryptocurrency, extends Bitcoin's design by offering a Turing-complete programming language called Solidity to develop smart contracts.…
The LMD GHOST consensus protocol is a critical component of proof-of-stake Ethereum. In its current form, this protocol is brittle, as evidenced by recent attacks and patching attempts. We propose Goldfish, a new protocol that satisfies key…
As the number of decentralized applications and users on Ethereum grows, the ability of the blockchain to efficiently handle a growing number of transactions becomes increasingly strained. Ethereums current execution model relies heavily on…
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,…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
Ethereum's transaction pool (mempool) dynamics and fee market efficiency critically affect transaction inclusion, validator workload, and overall network performance. This research empirically analyzes gas price variations, mempool…
The availability-finality dilemma says that blockchain protocols cannot be both available under dynamic participation and safe under network partition. Snap-and-chat protocols have recently been proposed as a resolution to this dilemma. A…
Today's blockchains suffer from low throughput and high latency, which impedes their widespread adoption of more complex applications like smart contracts. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for smart contract execution. It…
Smart contracts written in Solidity are programs used in blockchain networks, such as Etherium, for performing transactions. However, as with any piece of software, they are prone to errors and may present vulnerabilities, which malicious…
We use historical data to estimate the potential benefit of speculative techniques for executing Ethereum smart contracts in parallel. We replay transaction traces of sampled blocks from the Ethereum blockchain over time, using a simple…
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…
Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a modular, permissioned blockchain widely adopted in enterprise settings. Enhancing its throughput and latency remains challenging, as optimization decisions made in one phase of the transaction lifecycle can…
Ethereum is a permissionless blockchain ecosystem that supports execution of smart contracts, the key enablers of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, the expressiveness of Ethereum smart contracts is a…
The adoption of blockchain-based distributed computation platforms is growing fast. Some of these platforms, such as Ethereum, provide support for implementing smart contracts, which are envisioned to have novel applications in a broad…
As the significance of blockchain innovation grows and the focus on scalability intensifies, rollup technology has emerged as a promising approach to tackle these scalability concerns. Nonetheless, rollups encounter restrictions when…
We present an overview of hybrid Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG): a Proof-of-Stake checkpointing protocol overlaid onto Ethereum's Proof-of-Work blockchain. We describe its core functionalities and reward scheme, and explore its…
We present "Gasper," a proof-of-stake-based consensus protocol, which is an idealized version of the proposed Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. The protocol combines Casper FFG, a finality tool, with LMD GHOST, a fork-choice rule. We prove safety,…