Issue #45
Paper of the Week:
Paper Title: Smart Contract Derivatives.
TLDR:
Smart contracts on blockchain platforms have limited capabilities even when developed in Turing Complete languages such as Solidity. They are executed in their own isolated environment, with full access to their own state, but limited access to what is happening in the rest of the blockchain system.
This work puts forth a mechanism which allows so-called derivative smart contracts to read the (potentially private) state of other, so-called underlying, smart contracts, inspect any events they have fired and when, and more generally react arbitrarily to any changes in the execution.
The underlying contract may not be designed (or willing) to work with the derivative contract and hence the proposed mechanism allows it to remain agnostic to the interaction.
This work develops the proposed solution in the form of a Solidity contract which can be used as an oracle to create a derivative contract.
Three options for the instantiation of the oracle contract are given: (i) based on a special Solidity feature and is the cheapest to implement and use, (ii) based on the BTCRelay design and requires helpful users to submit every block to this oracle contract, and (ii) draws from the design in this and harnesses the power of Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof- of-Work (NIPoPoWs) for efficiency.
Authors: Kostis Karantias*, Aggelos Kiayias*‡, and Dionysis Zindros*†,
Affiliations: * IOHK, † University of Athens, ‡ University of Edinburgh.
Security:
1. Paper Title: Efficient Fair Multiparty Protocols using Blockchain and Trusted Hardware.
Summary: This paper has demonstrated attacks on the fairness properties of the various multiparty protocols described here and here; these attacks are only effective, if we weaken the security of their underlying sub-protocol.
Authors: Souradyuti Paul* and Ananya Shrivastava†,
Affiliations: * Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai and † Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar.
Privacy:
No papers.
Scalability:
1. Paper Title: Zendoo: a zk-SNARK Verifiable Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol Enabling Decoupled and Decentralized Sidechains.
Summary: A construction for Bitcoin-like blockchain systems that allows the creation and communication with sidechains of different types without knowing their internal structure.
Authors: Alberto Garoffolo*, Dmytro Kaidalov†, and Roman Oliynykov†,
Affiliations: * Horizen and † IOHK Research.
2. Paper Title: BatPay: a gas efficient protocol for the recurrent micropayment of ERC20 tokens.
Summary: A proxy scaling solution for the transfer of ERC20 tokens.
Authors: Hartwig Mayer*, Ismael Bejarano*, Daniel Fernandez†, Gustavo Ajzenman†, Nicolas Ayala†, Nahuel Santoalla†, Carlos Sarraute†, Ariel Futoransky‡.
Affiliations: * CoinFabrik, † Wibson, ‡ Disarmista.
Proofs:
1. Paper Title: Stacked Garbling for Disjunctive Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
Summary: A privacy- free circuit garbling scheme that can be used with the JKO GC-ZKP protocol to construct more efficient ZKP.
Authors: David Heath and Vladimir Kolesnikov,
Affiliations: * Georgia Institute of Technology.
Consensus:
1. Paper Title: Succinctly Reconstructed Distributed Signatures and Balanced Byzantine Agreement.
Summary: The first two BA protocols with Õ(1) balanced communication, offering a tradeoff between setup and cryptographic assumptions.
Authors: Elette Boyle*, Ran Cohen†, Aarushi Goel‡,
Affiliations: * IDC Herzliya, † Northeastern University, and ‡ Johns Hopkins University.
2. Paper Title: Comparison of Decentralization in DPoS and PoW Blockchains.
Summary: This paper presents a comparison study of the level of decentralization in Bitcoin and in Steem, a leading Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) blockchain.
Authors: Chao Li* and Balaji Palanisamy†,
Affiliations: * Beijing Jiaotong University and † University of Pittsburgh.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: Blockchain Governance: What We Can Learn From the Economics of Corporate Governance.
Summary: The aim of this paper is to draw on institutional governance theory—including corporate governance—to provide insights into the core considerations in designing blockchain governance mechanisms.
Authors: Darcy W.E. Allen* and Chris Berg*,
Affiliations: * RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub.
2. Paper Title: Smart Contracts for Securities Transactions on the DLT Platform (Blockchain): Legal Obstacles and Regulatory Challenges.
Summary: This paper discusses how smart contracts can be used for securities transactions on the DLT network.
Authors: Joseph Lee*,
Affiliations: * University of Exeter.
Upcoming Conferences:
Feb 10-14 - Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2020(Malaysia)
Feb 19-21 - Stanford Blockchain Conference 2020 (Palo Alto)
March 07-08 - Cryptoeconomic Systems Conference 2020 by MIT Press (Boston)
April 13-16 - The 2nd IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (IEEE DAPPS 2020) (Oxford)
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“Significant research in the blockchain space is constantly being achieved by academic researchers. Unfortunately, a lot of this research is overlooked due to the massive numbers of papers being generated and the way they are being promoted and published. We’ve put together a categorized list of academic papers that can guide our subscribers and keep them up to date.”
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