Issue #89
Paper of the Week:
Paper Title: Adaptive layer-two dispute periods in blockchains.
TLDR:
Second-layer or off-chain protocols increase the throughput of permissionless blockchains by enabling parties to lock funds into smart-contracts and perform payments through peer-to-peer communication, only resorting to the smart- contracts for protection against fraud.
Current protocols have fixed time periods during which participants can dispute any fraud attempts. However, current blockchains have limited transaction processing capacity, so a fixed dispute period will not always be sufficient to deter all fraudulent behaviour in an off- chain protocol.
This work describes how to set adaptive dispute periods that accommodate the congestion and capacity of the underlying blockchain.
Adaptive dispute periods ensure that users retain the opportunity to dispute fraudulent behaviours during blockchain congestion, while increasing second-layer protocol efficiency by reducing dispute period lengths when the number of disputes is low.
The work describes a non-interactive argument system for setting adaptive dispute periods under the current Ethereum Virtual Machine, and discusses how to efficiently integrate built-in support for adaptive dispute periods in any blockchain.
It empirically demonstrates that an adaptive-dispute second-layer protocol can handle a larger number of disputes and prevent more fraud than its non-adaptive counterparts even when users are slow to issue disputes, due to denial of service or blockchain congestion.
Authors: Rami Khalil* and Naranker Dulay*,
Affiliations: * Imperial College London.
Security:
1. Paper Title: SoK: Lending Pools in Decentralized Finance.
Summary: This work proves some general properties of lending pools, such as the correct handling of funds to precisely describe vulnerabilities and attacks.
Authors: Massimo Bartoletti*, James Hsin-yu Chiang†, Alberto Lluch-Lafuente†,
Affiliations: * Universita degli Studi di Cagliari and † Technical University of Denmark.
Privacy:
1. Paper Title: Manta: Privacy Preserving Decentralized Exchange.
Summary: The first Decentralized Anonymous eXchange scheme based on automated market maker (AMM) and zkSNARK.
Authors: Shumo Chu*†, Qiudong Xia†‡, and Zhenfei Zhang,
Affiliations: * UC Santa Barbara, † Manta Network, and ‡ University of Science and Technology of China.
Scalability:
1. Paper Title: Lockable Signatures for Blockchains: Scriptless Scripts for All Signatures.
Summary: The notion of lockable signatures as the cornerstone to construct PCNs resulting in a PCN protocol that does not require any special scripts and is compatible with any signature scheme.
Authors: Sri Aravinda Krishnan Thyagarajan* and Giulio Malavolta†,
Affiliations: * Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and † Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy.
Proofs:
No papers.
Consensus:
1. Paper Title: Game-Theoretically Fair Leader Election in O(log log n) Rounds under Majority Coalitions.
Summary: Can we (approximately) match the fairness of the tournament tree protocol in sub-logarithmically many rounds?
Authors: Kai-Min Chung, T-H. Hubert Chan, Ting Wen, and Elaine Shi*,
Affiliations: * Carnegie Mellon University.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: Disappearing Volatility of Bitcoin.
Summary: This work shows that bitcoin return fluctuations are lower than those of roughly 900 different stocks in the S&P1500 and 190 stocks in the S&P500.
Authors: Mieszko Mazur*,
Affiliations: * IESEG School of Management.
2. Paper Title: Freedom to (Smart) Contract: The Myth of Code and BlockchainGovernance Law.
Summary: The only thing a smart contract truly adds to traditional contracts is automated execution that is enforced by the blockchain’s consensus mechanism; this may provide some efficiency to the legal system by streamlining basic performance but it cannot be the only form of governance over smart contracts
Authors: Tiffany Sillanpaa*,
Affiliations: * New York University School of Law.
Conferences, Journals, & CFPs:
Conferences’ Videos:
Jobs:
RFPs:
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