11 Search Results for "Zindros, Dionysis"

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.6
Foundations of Fiat-Denominated Loans Collateralized by Cryptocurrencies

Authors: Pavel Hubáček, Jan Václavek, and Michelle Yeo

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 361, 29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025)

Abstract
The rising importance of cryptocurrencies as financial assets pushed their applicability from an object of speculation closer to standard financial instruments such as loans. In this work, we initiate the study of secure protocols that enable fiat-denominated loans collateralized by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We provide limited-custodial protocols for such loans relying only on trusted arbitration and provide their game-theoretical analysis. We also highlight various interesting directions for future research.
Cite as

Pavel Hubáček, Jan Václavek, and Michelle Yeo. Foundations of Fiat-Denominated Loans Collateralized by Cryptocurrencies. In 29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 361, pp. 6:1-6:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{hubacek_et_al:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.6,
  author =	{Hub\'{a}\v{c}ek, Pavel and V\'{a}clavek, Jan and Yeo, Michelle},
  title =	{{Foundations of Fiat-Denominated Loans Collateralized by Cryptocurrencies}},
  booktitle =	{29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025)},
  pages =	{6:1--6:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-409-3},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{361},
  editor =	{Arusoaie, Andrei and Onica, Emanuel and Spear, Michael and Tucci-Piergiovanni, Sara},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.6},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-251796},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.6},
  annote =	{Keywords: Blockchains, Cryptocurrencies, DeFi, Loans, Mechanism design, Subgame Perfect Equilibrium, Rational analysis}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.4
pod: An Optimal-Latency, Censorship-Free, and Accountable Generalized Consensus Layer

Authors: Orestis Alpos, Bernardo David, Jakov Mitrovski, Odysseas Sofikitis, and Dionysis Zindros

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 356, 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025)

Abstract
This work addresses the inherent issues of high latency in blockchains and low scalability in traditional consensus protocols. We present pod, a novel notion of consensus whose first priority is to achieve the physically-optimal latency of 2δ, or one round-trip, i.e., requiring only one network trip (duration δ) for writing a transaction and one for reading it. To accomplish this, we first eliminate inter-replica communication. Instead, clients send transactions directly to all replicas, which independently process transactions and append them to local logs. Replicas assign a timestamp and a sequence number to each transaction in their logs, allowing clients to extract valuable metadata about the transactions and the system state. Later on, clients retrieve these logs and extract transactions (and associated metadata) from them. Necessarily, this construction achieves weaker properties than a total-order broadcast protocol, due to existing lower bounds. Our work models the primitive of pod and defines its security properties. We then show pod-core, a protocol that satisfies properties such as transaction confirmation within 2δ, censorship resistance against Byzantine replicas, and accountability for safety violations. We show that single-shot auctions can be realized using the pod notion and observe that it is also sufficient for other popular applications.
Cite as

Orestis Alpos, Bernardo David, Jakov Mitrovski, Odysseas Sofikitis, and Dionysis Zindros. pod: An Optimal-Latency, Censorship-Free, and Accountable Generalized Consensus Layer. In 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 356, pp. 4:1-4:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{alpos_et_al:LIPIcs.DISC.2025.4,
  author =	{Alpos, Orestis and David, Bernardo and Mitrovski, Jakov and Sofikitis, Odysseas and Zindros, Dionysis},
  title =	{{pod: An Optimal-Latency, Censorship-Free, and Accountable Generalized Consensus Layer}},
  booktitle =	{39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025)},
  pages =	{4:1--4:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-402-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{356},
  editor =	{Kowalski, Dariusz R.},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.4},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-248219},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.4},
  annote =	{Keywords: consensus, censorship resistance, accountability, auctions}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.19
Two-Tier Black-Box Blockchains and Application to Instant Layer-1 Payments

Authors: Michele Ciampi, Yun Lu, Rafail Ostrovsky, and Vassilis Zikas

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
Common blockchain protocols are monolithic, i.e., their security relies on a single assumption, e.g., honest majority of hashing power (Bitcoin) or stake (Cardano, Algorand, Ethereum). In contrast, so-called optimistic approaches (Thunderella, Meshcash) rely on a combination of assumptions to achieve faster transaction liveness. We revisit, redesign, and augment the optimistic paradigm to a tiered approach. Our design assumes a primary (Tier 1) and a secondary (Tier 2, also referred to as fallback) blockchain, and achieves full security also in a tiered fashion: If the assumption underpinning the primary chain holds, then we guarantee safety, liveness and censorship resistance, irrespectively of the status of the fallback chain. And even if the primary assumption fails, all security properties are still satisfied (albeit with a temporary slow down) provided the fallback assumption holds. To our knowledge, no existing optimistic or tiered approach preserves both safety and liveness when any one of its underlying blockchain (assumptions) fails. The above is achieved by a new detection-and-recovery mechanism that links the two blockchains, so that any violation of safety, liveness, or censorship resistance on the (faster) primary blockchain is temporary - it is swiftly detected and recovered on the secondary chain - and thus cannot result in a persistent fork or halt of the blockchain ledger. We instantiate the above paradigm using a primary chain based on proof of reputation (PoR) and a fallback chain based on proof of stake (PoS). Our construction uses the PoR and PoS blockchains in a mostly black-box manner - where rather than assuming a concrete construction we distil abstract properties on the two blockchains that are sufficient for applying our tiered methodology. In fact, choosing reputation as the resource of the primary chain opens the door to an incentive mechanism - which we devise and analyze - that tokenizes reputation in order to deter cheating and boost participation (on both the primary/PoR and the fallback/PoS blockchain). As we demonstrate, such tokenization in combination with interpreting reputation as a built-in system-wide credit score, allows for embedding in our two-tiered methodology a novel mechanism which provides collateral-free, multi-use payment-channel-like functionality where payments can be instantly confirmed.
Cite as

Michele Ciampi, Yun Lu, Rafail Ostrovsky, and Vassilis Zikas. Two-Tier Black-Box Blockchains and Application to Instant Layer-1 Payments. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 19:1-19:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{ciampi_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.19,
  author =	{Ciampi, Michele and Lu, Yun and Ostrovsky, Rafail and Zikas, Vassilis},
  title =	{{Two-Tier Black-Box Blockchains and Application to Instant Layer-1 Payments}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{19:1--19:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.19},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247380},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.19},
  annote =	{Keywords: Fault tolerant blockchain, instantly confirmed payments}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.9
Money in Motion: Micro‑Velocity and Usage of Ethereum’s Liquid Staking Tokens

Authors: Benjamin Kraner, Luca Pennella, Nicolò Vallarano, and Claudio J. Tessone

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
We introduce a micro-velocity framework for analysing the on-chain circulation of Lido’s liquid-staking tokens, stETH, and its wrapped ERC-20 form, wstETH. By reconstructing full transfer and share-based accounting histories, we compute address-level velocities and decompose them into behavioural components. Despite their growing importance, the micro-level monetary dynamics of LSTs remain largely unexplored. Our data reveal persistently high velocity for both tokens, reflecting intensive reuse within DeFi. Yet activity is highly concentrated: a small cohort of large addresses, likely institutional accounts, are responsible for most turnover, while the rest of the users remain largely passive. We also observe a gradual transition in user behavior, characterized by a shift toward wstETH, the non-rebasing variant of stETH. This shift appears to align with DeFi composability trends, as wstETH is more frequently deployed across protocols such as AAVE, Spark, Balancer, and SkyMoney. To make the study fully reproducible, we release (i) an open-source pipeline that indexes event logs and historical contract state, and (ii) two public datasets containing every Transfer and TransferShares record for stETH and wstETH through 2024-11-08. This is the first large-scale empirical characterisation of liquid-staking token circulation. Our approach offers a scalable template for monitoring staking asset flows and provides new, open-access resources to the research community.
Cite as

Benjamin Kraner, Luca Pennella, Nicolò Vallarano, and Claudio J. Tessone. Money in Motion: Micro‑Velocity and Usage of Ethereum’s Liquid Staking Tokens. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 9:1-9:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{kraner_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.9,
  author =	{Kraner, Benjamin and Pennella, Luca and Vallarano, Nicol\`{o} and Tessone, Claudio J.},
  title =	{{Money in Motion: Micro‑Velocity and Usage of Ethereum’s Liquid Staking Tokens}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{9:1--9:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.9},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247285},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.9},
  annote =	{Keywords: DeFi, Ethereum, Proof-of-Stake, Liquid Staking, Money Velocity, Inflation}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.15
Beyond Optimal Fault-Tolerance

Authors: Andrew Lewis-Pye and Tim Roughgarden

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
One of the most basic properties of a consensus protocol is its fault-tolerance - the maximum fraction of faulty participants that the protocol can tolerate without losing fundamental guarantees such as safety and liveness. Because of its importance, the optimal fault-tolerance achievable by any protocol has been characterized in a wide range of settings. For example, for state machine replication (SMR) protocols operating in the partially synchronous setting, it is possible to simultaneously guarantee consistency against α-bounded adversaries (i.e., adversaries that control less than an α fraction of the participants) and liveness against β-bounded adversaries if and only if α + 2β ≤ 1. This paper characterizes to what extent "better-than-optimal" fault-tolerance guarantees are possible for SMR protocols when the standard consistency requirement is relaxed to allow a bounded number r of consistency violations, each potentially leading to the rollback of recently finalized transactions. We prove that bounded rollback is impossible without additional timing assumptions and investigate protocols that tolerate and recover from consistency violations whenever message delays around the time of an attack are bounded by a parameter Δ^* (which may be arbitrarily larger than the parameter Δ that bounds post-GST message delays in the partially synchronous model). Here, a protocol’s fault-tolerance can be a non-constant function of r, and we prove, for each r, matching upper and lower bounds on the optimal "recoverable fault-tolerance" achievable by any SMR protocol. For example, for protocols that guarantee liveness against 1/3-bounded adversaries in the partially synchronous setting, a 5/9-bounded adversary can always cause one consistency violation but not two, and a 2/3-bounded adversary can always cause two consistency violations but not three. Our positive results are achieved through a generic "recovery procedure" that can be grafted on to any accountable SMR protocol and restores consistency following a violation while rolling back only transactions that were finalized in the previous 2Δ^* timesteps.
Cite as

Andrew Lewis-Pye and Tim Roughgarden. Beyond Optimal Fault-Tolerance. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 15:1-15:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{lewispye_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.15,
  author =	{Lewis-Pye, Andrew and Roughgarden, Tim},
  title =	{{Beyond Optimal Fault-Tolerance}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{15:1--15:23},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.15},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247341},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.15},
  annote =	{Keywords: Distributed computing, consensus, recovery}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.16
Nakamoto Consensus from Multiple Resources

Authors: Mirza Ahad Baig, Christoph U. Günther, and Krzysztof Pietrzak

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
The blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain "record" the amount of work W that went into creating them through proofs of work. When honest parties control a majority of the work, consensus is achieved by picking the chain with the highest recorded weight. Resources other than work have been considered to secure such longest-chain blockchains. In Chia, blocks record the amount of disk-space S (via a proof of space) and sequential computational steps V (through a VDF). In this paper, we ask what weight functions Γ(S,V,W) (that assign a weight to a block as a function of the recorded space, speed, and work) are secure in the sense that whenever the weight of the resources controlled by honest parties is larger than the weight of adversarial parties, the blockchain is secure against private double-spending attacks. We completely classify such functions in an idealized "continuous" model: Γ(S,V,W) is secure against private double-spending attacks if and only if it is homogeneous of degree one in the "timed" resources V and W, i.e., αΓ(S,V,W) = Γ(S,α V, α W). This includes the Bitcoin rule Γ(S,V,W) = W and the Chia rule Γ(S,V,W) = S ⋅ V. In a more realistic model where blocks are created at discrete time-points, one additionally needs some mild assumptions on the dependency on S (basically, the weight should not grow too much if S is slightly increased, say linear as in Chia). Our classification is more general and allows various instantiations of the same resource. It provides a powerful tool for designing new longest-chain blockchains. E.g., consider combining different PoWs to counter centralization, say the Bitcoin PoW W₁ and a memory-hard PoW W₂. Previous work suggested to use W₁+W₂ as weight. Our results show that using e.g., √{W₁}⋅ √{W₂} or min{W₁,W₂} are also secure, and we argue that in practice these are much better choices.
Cite as

Mirza Ahad Baig, Christoph U. Günther, and Krzysztof Pietrzak. Nakamoto Consensus from Multiple Resources. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 16:1-16:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{baig_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.16,
  author =	{Baig, Mirza Ahad and G\"{u}nther, Christoph U. and Pietrzak, Krzysztof},
  title =	{{Nakamoto Consensus from Multiple Resources}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{16:1--16:23},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.16},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247353},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.16},
  annote =	{Keywords: Nakamoto Consensus, Heaviest-chain Rule, Resource Theory}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.17
Fully-Fluctuating Participation in Sleepy Consensus

Authors: Yuval Efron, Joachim Neu, and Toniann Pitassi

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
Proof-of-work allows Bitcoin to boast security amidst arbitrary fluctuations in participation of miners throughout time, so long as, at any point in time, a majority of hash power is honest. In recent years, however, the pendulum has shifted in favor of proof-of-stake-based consensus protocols. There, the sleepy model is the most prominent model for handling fluctuating participation of nodes. However, to date, no protocol in the sleepy model rivals Bitcoin in its robustness to drastic fluctuations in participation levels, with state-of-the-art protocols making various restrictive assumptions. In this work, we present a new adversary model, called external adversary. Intuitively, in our model, corrupt nodes do not divulge information about their secret keys. In this model, we show that protocols in the sleepy model can meaningfully claim to remain secure against fully fluctuating participation, without compromising efficiency or corruption resilience. Our adversary model is quite natural, and arguably naturally captures the process via which malicious behavior arises in protocols, as opposed to traditional worst-case modeling. On top of which, the model is also theoretically appealing, circumventing a barrier established in a recent work of Malkhi, Momose, and Ren.
Cite as

Yuval Efron, Joachim Neu, and Toniann Pitassi. Fully-Fluctuating Participation in Sleepy Consensus. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 17:1-17:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{efron_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.17,
  author =	{Efron, Yuval and Neu, Joachim and Pitassi, Toniann},
  title =	{{Fully-Fluctuating Participation in Sleepy Consensus}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{17:1--17:22},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.17},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247362},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.17},
  annote =	{Keywords: Sleepy Consensus, fully-fluctuating dynamic Participation}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.31
Trustless Bridges via Random Sampling Light Clients

Authors: Bhargav Nagaraja Bhatt, Fatemeh Shirazi, and Alistair Stewart

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
The increasing number of blockchain projects introduced annually has led to a pressing need for secure and efficient interoperability solutions. Currently, the lack of such solutions forces end-users to rely on centralized intermediaries, contradicting the core principle of decentralization and trust minimization in blockchain technology. We propose a decentralized and efficient interoperability solution (aka Bridge Protocol) that operates without additional trust assumptions, relying solely on the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) properties of the two chains being connected. In particular, relayers (actors that exchange messages between networks) are permissionless and decentralized, hence eliminating any single point of failure. We introduce Random Sampling, a novel technique for on-chain light clients to efficiently follow the history of PoS blockchains by reducing the signature verifications required. Here, the randomness is drawn on-chain, for example, using Ethereum’s RANDAO. We analyze the security of the bridge from a crypto- economic perspective and provide a framework to derive the security parameters. This includes handling subtle concurrency issues and randomness bias in strawman designs. While the protocol is applicable to various PoS chains, we demonstrate the protocol’s practical feasibility by showcasing an instantiated bridge between Polkadot and Ethereum (currently deployed), and discuss some practical security challenges. Furthermore, we evaluate the efficiency of our on-chain light client verifier (implemented as an Ethereum smart contract) against SNARK-based approaches, demonstrating significantly lower gas costs for signature verification - even for validator sets up to 10⁶.
Cite as

Bhargav Nagaraja Bhatt, Fatemeh Shirazi, and Alistair Stewart. Trustless Bridges via Random Sampling Light Clients. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 31:1-31:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{bhatt_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.31,
  author =	{Bhatt, Bhargav Nagaraja and Shirazi, Fatemeh and Stewart, Alistair},
  title =	{{Trustless Bridges via Random Sampling Light Clients}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{31:1--31:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.31},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247503},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.31},
  annote =	{Keywords: PoS Blockchains, Trustless Bridges, Light Clients, Decentralised Relayers, RANDAO Bias}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.8
A Circuit Approach to Constructing Blockchains on Blockchains

Authors: Ertem Nusret Tas, David Tse, and Yifei Wang

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 316, 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024)

Abstract
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of blockchains, each with an open ledger that anyone can read from and write to. In this multi-chain world, an important question emerges: how can we build a more secure overlay blockchain by reading from and writing to a given set of blockchains? Drawing an analogy with switching circuits, we approach the problem by defining two basic compositional operations between blockchains, serial and triangular compositions, and use these operations as building blocks to construct general overlay blockchains. Under the partially synchronous setting, we have the following results: 1) the serial composition, between two certificate-producing blockchains, yields an overlay blockchain that is safe if at least one of the two underlay blockchains is safe and that is live if both of them are live; 2) the triangular composition between three blockchains, akin to parallel composition of switching circuits, yields an overlay blockchain that is safe if all underlay blockchains are safe and that is live if over half of them are live; 3) repeated composition of these two basic operations can yield all possible tradeoffs of safety and liveness for an overlay blockchain built on an arbitrary number of underlay chains. The results are also extended to the synchronous setting.
Cite as

Ertem Nusret Tas, David Tse, and Yifei Wang. A Circuit Approach to Constructing Blockchains on Blockchains. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 8:1-8:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{tas_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2024.8,
  author =	{Tas, Ertem Nusret and Tse, David and Wang, Yifei},
  title =	{{A Circuit Approach to Constructing Blockchains on Blockchains}},
  booktitle =	{6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024)},
  pages =	{8:1--8:25},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-345-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{316},
  editor =	{B\"{o}hme, Rainer and Kiffer, Lucianna},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.8},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-209442},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.8},
  annote =	{Keywords: interchain consensus protocols, serial composition, triangular composition, circuits}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.14
Proofs of Proof-Of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity

Authors: Shresth Agrawal, Joachim Neu, Ertem Nusret Tas, and Dionysis Zindros

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 282, 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023)

Abstract
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security risks. A malicious provider can mislead the wallet by faking payments and balances, or censoring transactions. On the other hand, light clients, which are not in popular use today, allow decentralization, but are concretely inefficient, often with asymptotically linear bootstrapping complexity. This poses a dilemma between decentralization and performance. We design, implement, and evaluate a new proof-of-stake (PoS) superlight client with concretely efficient and asymptotically logarithmic bootstrapping complexity. Our proofs of proof-of-stake (PoPoS) take the form of a Merkle tree of PoS epochs. The verifier enrolls the provers in a bisection game, in which honest provers are destined to win once an adversarial Merkle tree is challenged at sufficient depth. We provide an implementation for mainnet Ethereum: compared to the state-of-the-art light client construction of Ethereum, our client improves time-to-completion by 9×, communication by 180×, and energy usage by 30× (when bootstrapping after 10 years of consensus execution). As an important additional application, our construction can be used to realize trustless cross-chain bridges, in which the superlight client runs within a smart contract and takes the role of an on-chain verifier. We prove our construction is secure and show how to employ it for other PoS systems such as Cardano (with fully adaptive adversary), Algorand, and Snow White.
Cite as

Shresth Agrawal, Joachim Neu, Ertem Nusret Tas, and Dionysis Zindros. Proofs of Proof-Of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity. In 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 282, pp. 14:1-14:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)

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@InProceedings{agrawal_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2023.14,
  author =	{Agrawal, Shresth and Neu, Joachim and Tas, Ertem Nusret and Zindros, Dionysis},
  title =	{{Proofs of Proof-Of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity}},
  booktitle =	{5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023)},
  pages =	{14:1--14:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-303-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{282},
  editor =	{Bonneau, Joseph and Weinberg, S. Matthew},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.14},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-192037},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.14},
  annote =	{Keywords: Proof-of-stake, blockchain, light client, superlight, bridge, Ethereum}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.Tokenomics.2019.7
Cryptocurrency Egalitarianism: A Quantitative Approach

Authors: Dimitris Karakostas, Aggelos Kiayias, Christos Nasikas, and Dionysis Zindros

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 71, International Conference on Blockchain Economics, Security and Protocols (Tokenomics 2019)

Abstract
Since the invention of Bitcoin one decade ago, numerous cryptocurrencies have sprung into existence. Among these, proof-of-work is the most common mechanism for achieving consensus, whilst a number of coins have adopted "ASIC-resistance" as a desirable property, claiming to be more "egalitarian," where egalitarianism refers to the power of each coin to participate in the creation of new coins. While proof-of-work consensus dominates the space, several new cryptocurrencies employ alternative consensus, such as proof-of-stake in which block minting opportunities are based on monetary ownership. A core criticism of proof-of-stake revolves around it being less egalitarian by making the rich richer, as opposed to proof-of-work in which everyone can contribute equally according to their computational power. In this paper, we give the first quantitative definition of a cryptocurrency’s egalitarianism. Based on our definition, we measure the egalitarianism of popular cryptocurrencies that (may or may not) employ ASIC-resistance, among them Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero. Our simulations show, as expected, that ASIC-resistance increases a cryptocurrency’s egalitarianism. We also measure the egalitarianism of a stake-based protocol, Ouroboros, and a hybrid proof-of-stake/proof-of-work cryptocurrency, Decred. We show that stake-based cryptocurrencies, under correctly selected parameters, can be perfectly egalitarian, perhaps contradicting folklore belief.
Cite as

Dimitris Karakostas, Aggelos Kiayias, Christos Nasikas, and Dionysis Zindros. Cryptocurrency Egalitarianism: A Quantitative Approach. In International Conference on Blockchain Economics, Security and Protocols (Tokenomics 2019). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 71, pp. 7:1-7:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)

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@InProceedings{karakostas_et_al:OASIcs.Tokenomics.2019.7,
  author =	{Karakostas, Dimitris and Kiayias, Aggelos and Nasikas, Christos and Zindros, Dionysis},
  title =	{{Cryptocurrency Egalitarianism: A Quantitative Approach}},
  booktitle =	{International Conference on Blockchain Economics, Security and Protocols (Tokenomics 2019)},
  pages =	{7:1--7:21},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-108-5},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{71},
  editor =	{Danos, Vincent and Herlihy, Maurice and Potop-Butucaru, Maria and Prat, Julien and Tucci-Piergiovanni, Sara},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.Tokenomics.2019.7},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-119715},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Tokenomics.2019.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: blockchain, egalitarianism, cryptocurrency, economics, proof-of-work, proof-of-stake}
}
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