Welcome to zk Capital’s Newsletter!
“Significant advancements and innovations in the blockchain space are constantly being achieved by academic researchers. We are committed to helping share and spread this research. In our newsletter, we aim to provide a list of publications that will help guide the community with the latest research in the blockchain space.
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. To tackle this issue, we’ve put together a categorized list of academic papers that can guide our subscribers and keep them up to date.”
Issue #4
This Week in Security:
1. Paper Title: Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges.
Summary: This work highlights the large, complex risks created by transaction-ordering dependencies in smart contracts and the ways in which traditional forms of financial-market exploitation are adapting to and penetrating blockchain economies.
Authors: Philip Daian*, Steven Goldfeder*, Tyler Kell*, Yunqi Li†, Xueyuan Zhao‡, Iddo Bentov*, Lorenz Breidenbach§, and Ari Juels*,
Affiliations: * Cornell Tech, † UIUC, ‡ CMU, § ETH.
2. Paper Title: A Case Study of Execution of Untrusted Business Process on Permissioned Blockchain.
Summary: This work investigates the feasibility of the execution of a real-world business process on the permissioned access-controller blockchain.
Authors: Vahid Pourheidari*, Sara Rouhani*, and Ralph Deters,
Affiliations: * University of Saskatchewan.
3. Paper Title: Flint for Safer Smart Contracts.
Summary: A new statically-typed programming language specifically designed for writing robust smart contracts enforcing safe and predictable code.
Authors: Franklin Schrans*, Daniel Hails*, Alexander Harkness*, Sophia Drossopoulou*, and Susan Eisenbach*,
Affiliations: * Imperial College London.
4. Paper Title: A Security Reference Architecture for Blockchains.
Summary: A security reference architecture based on models that demonstrate the stacked hierarchy of various threats (similar to the ISO/OSI hierarchy) as well as threat-risk assessment using ISO/IEC 15408.
Authors: Ivan Homoliak*, Sarad Venugopalan*, Qingze Hum*, and Pawel Szalachowski*,
Affiliations: * Singapore University of Technology and Design.
This Week in Privacy:
1. Paper Title: Lelantus: Towards Confidentiality and Anonymity of Blockchain Transactions from Standard Assumptions.
Summary: An anonymous payment system with small proof sizes, short verification times and without requiring a trusted setup.
Authors: Aram Jivanyan*,
Affiliations: * Zcoin.
This Week in Scalability:
1. Paper Title: SoK: Off The Chain Transactions.
Summary: The first paper to structure the complete rich and multifaceted body of research on layer-two transactions.
Authors: Lewis Gudgeon*, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez†, Stefanie Roos‡, Patrick McCorry§, and Arthur Gervais*+,
Affiliations: * Imperial College London, † TU Wien, ‡ TU Delft, § King’s College London, and + Liquidity Network.
2. Paper Title: Thinkey: A Scalable Blockchain Architecture.
Summary: A distributed blockchain architecture that enables efficient, secure and highly scalable transaction handling using a proposed four- layer encapsulation system structure and a double-layer chain architecture.
Authors: Shan Chen†, Weiguo Dai*, Yuanxi Dai*, Hao Fu*, Yang Gao*, Jianqi Guo*, Haoqing He*, and Yuhong Liu‡,
Affiliations: * Beijing Thinkey Science and Technology Ltd, † Georgia Institute of Technology, and ‡ Santa Clara University.
3. Paper Title: Building Scalable Decentralized Payment Systems.
Summary: A novel scaling direction that is composed of well-known and studied components is then introduced.
Authors: John Adler* and Mikerah Quintyne-Collins†,
Affiliations: * ConsenSys and † ChainSafe.
This Week in Proofs:
No papers.
This Week in Consensus Protocols:
No papers.
This Week in Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: Initial Crypto-Asset Offerings (ICOs), Tokenization and Corporate Governance.
Summary: This paper examines in depth the opportunities and risks raised by ICOs, tokenization and distributed ledger technology in terms of corporate governance.
Authors: Stéphane Blemus* and Dominique Guegan*,
Affiliations: * Université Paris.
2. Paper Title: Cheap Signals in Security Token Offerings.
Summary: This paper examines whether companies conducting an STO make use of cheap signals to influence investment behaviour and if such use of cheap signals is effective.
Authors: Lennart Ante* and Ingo Fiedler*,
Affiliations: * University of Hamburg.
3. Paper Title: Bitcoins, Cryptocurrencies and BlockChains.
Summary: This paper reviews recent developments to show that the privacy provided by bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies attracts criminals and facilitates illegal activities that are counter- productive to the maintenance of a peace-seeking, prosperous society.
Authors: Jack Clark Francis*,
Affiliations: * Zicklin School of Business.
Thanks for reading! If we missed anything, shoot us an email so that we can feature it in our next newsletter!
This newsletter is for informational purposes only. This content does not in any way constitute an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any investment solution or recommendation to buy or sell a security; nor it is to be taken as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. In fact, none of the information in this or other content on zk Capital should be relied on in any manner as advice. None of the authors, contributors, or anyone else connected with zk Capital, in any way whatsoever, can be responsible for your use of the information contained in this newsletter.