Related papers: (Im)possibility of Incentive Design for Challenge-…
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,…
Blockchains have become immensely popular and are high on the list of national and international research and innovation agenda's. This is partly caused by the numerous interesting applications, combined with the promise of full…
Crowdsourcing has emerged as a paradigm for leveraging human intelligence and activity to solve a wide range of tasks. However, strategic workers will find enticement in their self-interest to free-ride and attack in a crowdsourcing contest…
Proof-of-Stake systems randomly choose, on each round, one of the participants as a consensus leader that extends the chain with the next block such that the selection probability is proportional to the owned stake. However, distributed…
Blockchain has become a popular emergent technology in many industries. It is suitable for a broad range of applications, from its base role as an immutable distributed ledger to the deployment of distributed applications. Many…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
Transaction fee mechanism design is a new decentralized mechanism design problem where users bid for space on the blockchain. Several recent works showed that the transaction fee mechanism design fundamentally departs from classical…
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, difficulty algorithms serve the crucial purpose of maintaining a stable transaction throughput by dynamically adjusting the block difficulty in response to the miners' constantly changing computational power.…
Given the parallels between game theory and consensus, it makes sense to intelligently design blockchain or DAG protocols with an incentive-compatible-first mentality. To that end, we propose a new blockchain or DAG protocol enhancement…
Motivated by the great success and adoption of Bitcoin, a number of cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are becoming increasingly popular. Although existing blockchain-based cryptocurrency schemes can ensure reasonable…
Decentralization, which has backed the hyper growth of many blockchains, comes at the cost of scalability. To understand this fundamental limitation, this paper proposes a quantitative measure of blockchain decentralization, and discusses…
Lending protocols are one of the main applications of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), enabling crypto-assets loan markets with a total value estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Unlike traditional lending systems, these protocols…
Game theory is often used as a tool to analyze decentralized systems and their properties, in particular, blockchains. In this note, we take the opposite view. We argue that blockchains can and should be used to implement economic…
A smart contract on a blockchain cannot keep a secret because its data is replicated on all nodes in a network. To remedy this problem, it has been suggested to combine blockchains with trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel…
We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. To date, threshold cryptosystems have been considered under permissioned settings…
Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs -- interactive protocols executed on Ethereum to resolve conflicting claims about the rollup's state -- to scale Ethereum securely. To mitigate against potential censorship of protocol moves, fraud…
One of the most innovative aspects of blockchain technology consists in the introduction of an incentive layer to regulate the behavior of distributed protocols. The designer of a blockchain system faces therefore issues that are akin to…
Blockchains are widely used for secure transaction processing, but their scalability remains limited, and existing multichain designs are typically static even as demand and capacity shift. We cast blockchain configuration as a multiagent…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…