Issue #21
Paper of the Week:
Paper Title: Interactive coin offerings.
TLDR:
Traditional analyses fail to estimate initial market valuation for new tokens, and the token issuers, on the other hand, face the unprecedented challenge of not knowing their buyers.
This work focuses exclusively on the typical situation in which an anonymous class of buyers wishes to purchase yet-to-be-generated ERC20 tokens over the Ethereum network in exchange for Ethereum’s native currency.
In this paper, an interactive construction is proposed that aims to establish an equilibrium of purchase amounts whose sum is satisfactory to all buyers at some uniform valuation.
The crowdsale process itself is used to reach a common view of the token’s present value since a liquid market for the new token does not exist prior to the crowdsale.
The protocol is fair in the sense that parties endowed with large amounts of capital or Ethereum mining power cannot gain either participation advantage or lower cost per percentage of total tokens.
Incentives will counteract buyers’ resistance to partake in an initially illiquid market.
In comparison to prior crowdsales, in the protocol buyers can withdraw their contributions after committing them to the sale, and it exploits sophisticated bookkeeping capabilities of smart contracts.
Authors: Jason Teutsch*, Vitalik Buterin†, and Christopher Brown‡,
Affiliations: * Truebit, † Ethereum Foundation, and ‡ Modular, Inc.
Security:
1. Paper Title: I Want to Forget: Fine-Grained Encryption with Full Forward Secrecy in the Distributed Setting.
Summary: A strongly secure and versatile encryption solution for multi-user systems that mitigates secret-key leakage in form of non-interactive full forward secrecy for each user, guarantees key anonymity such that ciphertexts do not reveal the respective public key, and minimizes effort of key management, and supporting fine-grained access control for an unbounded number of users.
Authors: David Derler*, Sebastian Ramacher†, Daniel Slamanig†, and Christoph Striecks†,
Affiliations: * DFINITY and † Austrian Institute of Technology.
Privacy:
1. Paper Title: Auditable Credential Anonymity Revocation Based on Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts.
Summary: A new auditable blind credential system based on privacy-preserving smart contracts, which provides a powerful auditability and neutrality for credential anonymity revocation.
Authors: Rujia Li*†, David Galindo†‡, and Qi Wang*,
Affiliations: * Southern University of Science and Technology, † University of Birmingham, and ‡ Fetch.AI.
Scalability:
1. Paper Title: Retrofitting a two-way peg between blockchains.
Summary: An updated paper presenting minor changes and corrections of an efficient, trustless, and retrofitting Dogethereum construction which requires no fork but rather employs economic collateral to achieve a “lock” operation in Dogecoin.
Authors: Jason Teutsch*, Michael Straka†, and Dan Boneh†,
Affiliations: * Truebit and † Stanford University.
Proofs:
No Papers.
Consensus Protocols:
No Papers.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: Bootstrapping a stable computation token.
Summary: This exposition describes a deployment method for the Truebit protocol, a blockchain enhancement which enables smart contracts to securely execute larger computations than the minimal gas limit permits.
Authors: Jason Teutsch*, Sami Mäkelä*, and Surya Bakshi*†,
Affiliations: * Truebit and † UIUC.
2. Paper Title: Industry Competition: The Blockchain Versus Centralized Authority.
Summary: This paper provides a model of industry competition between a traditional exchange platform (e.g., banks, auction houses, central security depositories, credit card companies, and so on) and a blockchain-based platform.
Authors: Jun Aoyagi*,
Affiliations: * University of California, Berkeley.
3. Paper Title: Venture Capital and the Performance of BlockchainTechnology-Based Firms: Evidence from Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).
Summary: This work shows that VCs are an important, value-increasing intermediary in the emerging blockchain sector.
Authors: Christian Fisch* and Paul P. Momtaz†,
Affiliations: * University of Trier and † UCLA.
Conferences:
Sep 02-05 - International Summer School on Security & Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies (Vienna)
Oct 05-06 Cryptoeconomic Systems Summit by MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA)
Oct 21-23 - Advances in Financial Technologies (Zurich) - Call for Papers
Oct 28-29 - CryptoEconomics Security Conference (Berkeley, CA) - Call for Papers
Jobs:
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Security, Privacy, Blockchain, Machine Learning - Liquidity Network
Researcher, Security Modelling and Distributed Protocol Design - Dfinity
“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.”
Thanks for reading! If we missed anything, shoot us an email so that we can feature it in our next newsletter!
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