Related papers: Imperfect Commitment in Maximal Extractable Value …
Blockchains face inherent limitations when communicating outside their own ecosystem, largely due to the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) 3f+1 security model. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a promising mitigation because they allow…
Strategies related to the blockchain concept of Extractable Value (MEV/BEV), such as arbitrage, front-, or back-running create strong economic incentives for network nodes to reduce latency. Modified nodes, that minimize transaction…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
High-stakes auctions are often preceded by nonbinding communication between bidders and the seller. Motivated by these practices, this paper examines a two-period model in which two bidders send private cheap talk messages to the seller…
Ethereum's upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade introduces EIP-7732 enshrined Proposer--Builder Separation (ePBS), which improves the block production pipeline by addressing trust and scalability challenges. Yet it also creates a new liveness risk:…
Sequential auctions for identical items with unit-demand, private-value buyers are common and often occur periodically without end, as new bidders replace departing ones. We model bidder uncertainty by introducing a probability that a…
In this paper, we explore remarkable similarities between multi-transactional behaviors of smart contracts in cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and classical problems of shared-memory concurrency. We examine two real-world examples from the…
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…
Lately, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), i.e., uniquely discernible assets on a blockchain, have skyrocketed in popularity by addressing a broad audience. However, the typical NFT auctioning procedures are conducted in various, ad hoc ways,…
We study the communication complexity of truthful combinatorial auctions, and in particular the case where valuations are either subadditive or single-minded, which we denote with $\mathsf{SubAdd}\cup\mathsf{SingleM}$. We show that for…
Classic BFT consensus protocols guarantee safety and liveness for all clients if fewer than one-third of replicas are faulty. However, in applications such as high-value payments, some clients may want to prioritize safety over liveness.…
Financial speculators often seek to increase their potential gains with leverage. Debt is a popular form of leverage, and with over 39.88B USD of total value locked (TVL), the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending markets are thriving.…
We investigate a family of bugs in blockchain-based smart contracts, which we call event-ordering (or EO) bugs. These bugs are intimately related to the dynamic ordering of contract events, i.e., calls of its functions on the blockchain,…
Ethereum's Gas mechanism attempts to set transaction fees in accordance with the computational cost of transaction execution: a cost borne by default by every node on the network to ensure correct smart contract execution. Gas encourages…
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
Many prominent smart-contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit. This pattern of…
We study blockchain trade-intent auctions, which currently intermediate about USD 10 billion in trades each month. These auctions are combinatorial because executing multiple trade intents jointly generates additional efficiencies. However,…
Ethereum's ideals of decentralization and censorship resistance are undermined in practice, motivating ongoing efforts to reestablish these properties. Existing proposals for fairness mechanisms depend on the assumption that a sufficient…
We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…