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Dissecting the EIP-2930 Optional Access Lists
(2024)Ethereum introduced Transaction Access Lists (TALs) in 2020 to optimize gas costs during transaction execution. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of TALs in Ethereum, focusing on adoption, quality, and gas savings. Analyzing a full month of mainnet data with 31,954,474 transactions, we found that only 1.46% of transactions included a TAL, even though 42.6% of transactions would have benefited from it. On average, access ...Conference Paper -
A Fair and Resilient Decentralized Clock Network for Transaction Ordering
(2024)Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) ~ 27th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2023)Traditional blockchain design gives miners or validators full control over transaction ordering, i.e., they can freely choose which transactions to include or exclude, as well as in which order. While not an issue initially, the emergence of decentralized finance has introduced new transaction order dependencies allowing parties in control of the ordering to make a profit by front-running others’ transactions. In this work, we present the ...Conference Paper -
DeFi and NFTs Hinder Blockchain Scalability
(2024)Lecture Notes in Computer Science ~ Financial Cryptography and Data SecurityMany classical blockchains are known to have an embarrassingly low transaction throughput, down to Bitcoin's notorious seven transactions per second limit. Various proposals and implementations for increasing throughput emerged in the first decade of blockchain research. But how much concurrency is possible? In their early days, blockchains were mostly used for simple transfers from user to user. More recently, however, decentralized ...Conference Paper -
Short Squeeze in DeFi Lending Market: Decentralization in Jeopardy?
(2024)Lecture Notes in Computer Science ~ Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2023 International Workshops: Voting, CoDecFin, DeFi, WTSC, Bol, Brač, Croatia, May 5, 2023, Revised Selected PapersAnxiety levels in the Aave community spiked in November 2022 as Avi Eisenberg performed an attack on Aave. Eisenberg attempted to short the CRV token by using funds borrowed on the protocol to artificially deflate the value of CRV. While the attack was ultimately unsuccessful, it left the Aave community scared and even raised question marks regarding the feasibility of large lending platforms under decentralized governance. In this work, ...Conference Paper -
Ethereum's Proposer-Builder Separation: Promises and Realities
(2023)IMC '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement ConferenceWith Ethereum's transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake in September 2022 came another paradigm shift, the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) scheme. PBS was introduced to decouple the roles of selecting and ordering transactions in a block (i.e., the builder), from those validating its contents and proposing the block to the network as the new head of the blockchain (i.e., the proposer). In this landscape, proposers are the ...Conference Paper -
An Empirical Study of Market Inefficiencies in Uniswap and SushiSwap
(2023)Lecture Notes in Computer ScienceDecentralized exchanges are revolutionizing finance. With their ever-growing increase in popularity, a natural question that begs to be asked is: how efficient are these new markets? We find that nearly 30% of analyzed trades are executed at an unfavorable rate. Additionally, we observe that, especially during the DeFi summer in 2020, price inaccuracies across the market plagued DEXes. Uniswap and SushiSwap, however, quickly adapt to ...Conference Paper -
The Potential of Self-Regulation for Front-Running Prevention on DEXes
(2023)The transaction ordering dependency of the smart contracts building decentralized exchanges (DEXes) allow for predatory trading strategies. In particular, front-running attacks present a constant risk for traders on DEXes. Whereas legal regulation outlaws most front-running practices in traditional finance, such measures are ineffective in preventing front-running on DEXes due to the absence of a central authority. While novel market ...Conference Paper -
DeFi and NFTs Hinder Blockchain Scalability
(2023)Many classical blockchains are known to have an embarrassingly low transaction throughput, down to Bitcoin's notorious seven transactions per second limit.Various proposals and implementations for increasing throughput emerged in the first decade of blockchain research. But how much concurrency is possible? In their early days, blockchains were mostly used for simple transfers from user to user. More recently, however, decentralized finance ...Conference Paper -
Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Consensus Layer: Participation and Decentralization
(2023)In September 2022, Ethereum transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) during "the merge" - making it the largest PoS cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. With this work, we present a comprehensive measurement study of the current state of the Ethereum PoS consensus layer on the beacon chain. We perform a longitudinal study of the history of the beacon chain. Our work finds that all dips in network participation ...Conference Paper -
FnF-BFT: A BFT protocol with provable performance under attack
(2023)Lecture Notes in Computer Science ~ Structural Information and Communication ComplexityWe introduce FNF-BFT, the first partially synchronous BFT protocol with performance guarantees under truly byzantine attacks during stable networking conditions. At its core, FNF-BFT parallelizes the execution of requests by allowing all replicas to act as leaders independently. Leader parallelization distributes the load over all replicas. Consequently, FNF-BFT fully utilizes all correct replicas’ processing power and increases throughput ...Conference Paper