BROUGHT TO YOU BY
Issue #117
Paper of the Week:
Paper Title: Resurrecting Address Clustering in Bitcoin.
TLDR:
Blockchain analysis is essential for understanding how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are used in practice, and address clustering is a cornerstone of blockchain analysis.
However, current techniques rely on heuristics that have not been rigorously evaluated or optimized.
This paper tackles several challenges of change address identification and clustering.
First, it builds a ground truth set of transactions with known change from the Bitcoin blockchain that can be used to validate the efficacy of individual change address detection heuristics.
Equipped with this data set, it develops new techniques to predict change outputs with low false positive rates.
After applying the proposed prediction model to the Bitcoin blockchain, it analyzes the resulting clustering and develops ways to detect and prevent cluster collapse.
Finally, it assesses the impact the proposed enhanced clustering has on two exemplary applications.
Authors: Malte Möser* and Arvind Narayanan*,
Affiliations: * Princeton University.
Security:
1. Paper Title: Mithril: Stake-based Threshold Multisignatures.
Summary: A new stake-based primitive which allows the aggregation of individual signatures into a compact multisignature provided the stake that supports a given message exceeds a stake threshold.
Authors: Pyrros Chaidos* and Aggelos Kiayias†‡,
Affiliations: * National & Kapodistrian University of Athens and † University of Edinburgh, and ‡ IOHK.
2. Paper Title: Publicly Auditable MPC-as-a-Service with succinct verification and universal setup.
Summary: The first efficient construction for auditable MPC that has a one time universal setup.
Authors: Sanket Kanjalkar*, Ye Zhang†, Shreyas Gandlur‡, and Andrew Miller§,
Affiliations: * Blockstream Research, † New York University, ‡ Princeton University, and § University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.
Privacy:
No papers.
Scalability:
No papers.
Proofs:
1. Paper Title: Darlin: A proof carrying data scheme based on Marlin.
Summary: A recursive SNARK for a Latus sidechain of Zendoo blockchain.
Authors: Ulrich Haböck*, Alberto Garoffolo*, and Daniele Di Benedetto*,
Affiliations: * Horizen Labs.
2. Paper Title: ECLIPSE: Enhanced Compiling method for Pedersen-committed zkSNARK Engines.
Summary: New constructions for zero-knowledge commit-and-prove SNARKs (CP- SNARKs) with a universal updatable SRS.
Authors: Diego F. Aranha*, Emil Madsen Bennedsen†, Matteo Campanelli*, Chaya Ganesh‡, Claudio Orlandi*, and Akira Takahashi*,
Affiliations: * Aarhus University, † Concordium, and ‡ Indian Institute of Science.
Consensus:
1. Paper Title: Proof-of-Stake Mining Games with Perfect Randomness.
Summary: This work investigates the incentive compatibility of longest-chain proof-of-stake protocols with access to perfect external randomness, completely independent of the blockchain.
Authors: Matheus V. X. Ferreira* and S. Matthew Weinberg*
Affiliations: * Princeton University.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: Bitcoin Price Forecast Using Quantitative Models.
Summary: In front of strong volatility and apparently incomprehensible price movements, the principal three factors that move the price of the Bitcoin, the scarcity, the demand and the cost of production, can be really useful to understand the dynamics of the bitcoin price movements.
Authors: Daniele Bernardi* and Ruggero Bertelli†
Affiliations: * Diaman Partners Ltd and † University of Siena.
Research Talks:
Upcoming Events:
Decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin workshop at IFIP Networking 2021.
ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2021). Call for Papers
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (CBT 2021). Call for Papers
Jobs:
Thanks to our sponsor
Protocol Labs
The Protocol Labs Research team is pretty enthusiastic about making knowledge free and accessible. If you want to see some presentations on recent research, they have a public Research Seminar Series. You can see dozens of previous talks on YouTube, and/or sign up here to get invited to future talks. And if your talk was featured in this newsletter, and you'd like to present it, they're welcoming requests to speak at research@protocol.ai. Join the Protocol Labs team!
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.