Related papers: (Im)possibility of Incentive Design for Challenge-…
Bitcoin-NG is among the first blockchain protocols to approach the \emph{near-optimal} throughput by decoupling blockchain operation into two planes: leader election and transaction serialization. Its decoupling idea has inspired a new…
Blockchains face a scalability limitation, partly due to the throughput limitations of consensus protocols, especially when aiming to obtain a high degree of decentralization. Layer 2 Rollups (L2s) are a faster alternative to conventional…
Training against white-box deception detectors has been proposed as a way to make AI systems honest. However, such training risks models learning to obfuscate their deception to evade the detector. Prior work has studied obfuscation only in…
In the past decade, blockchain has shown a promising vision greatly to build the trust without any powerful third party in a secure, decentralized and salable manner. However, due to the wide application and future development from…
Recent works of Roughgarden (EC'21) and Chung and Shi (SODA'23) initiate the study of a new decentralized mechanism design problem called transaction fee mechanism design (TFM). Unlike the classical mechanism design literature, in the…
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, users compete in a transaction fee auction to get their transactions confirmed in the next block. A line of recent works set forth the desiderata for a "dream" transaction fee mechanism (TFM),…
We discuss the issue of what we call {\em incentive mismatch}, a fundamental problem with public blockchains supported by economic incentives. This is an open problem, but one potential solution is to make application portable. Portability…
We propose a smart contract that allows two mutually distrusting parties to transact any non-digital good or service by deploying a smart contract on a blockchain to act as escrow. The contract settles disputes by letting parties wager that…
The rise of smart contract systems such as Ethereum has resulted in a proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications including applications that store and manage a wide range of data. Current smart contracts are designed to be…
Proof-of-Work mining is intended to provide blockchains with robustness against double-spend attacks. However, an economic analysis that follows from Budish (2018), which considers free entry conditions together with the ability to rent…
Proof of work blockchain protocols using multiple hash types are considered. It is proven that the security region of such a protocol cannot be the AND of a 51\% attack on all the hash types. Nevertheless, a protocol called Merged Bitcoin…
The security of blockchain protocols is a combination of two properties: safety and liveness. It is well known that no blockchain protocol can provide both to sleepy (intermittently online) clients under adversarial majority. However,…
Payment channels networks drastically increase the throughput and hence scalability of blockchains by performing transactions \emph{off-chain}. In an off-chain payment, parties deposit coins in a channel and then perform transactions…
A recent trend in multi-party computation is to achieve cryptographic fairness via monetary penalties, i.e. each honest player either obtains the output or receives a compensation in the form of a cryptocurrency. We pioneer another type of…
Relay Mining presents a scalable solution employing probabilistic mechanisms, crypto-economic incentives, and new cryptographic primitives to estimate and prove the volume of Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) made from a client to a server.…
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies rely on a balance of security and fairness in order to maintain a sustainable ecosystem of miners and users. Users demand fast and consistent transaction confirmation, and in exchange drive the adoption…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
Blockchain technology is among the fastest-growing technologies in the world today. It has been adopted in diverse areas but mostly in financial systems, such as Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Therefore, it is a niche that has attracted interest…
Validators in permissionless, large-scale blockchains, such as Ethereum, are typically payoff-maximizing, rational actors. Ethereum relies on in-protocol incentives, like rewards for correct and timely votes, to induce honest behavior and…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) is a promising approach for designing efficient blockchains, where block proposers are randomly chosen with probability proportional to their stake. A primary concern with PoS systems is the "rich getting richer"…