The emergence of decentralized finance has transformed asset trading on the blockchain, making traditional financial instruments more accessible while also introducing a series of exploitative economic practices known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). Concurrently, decentralized finance has embraced rollup-based Layer-2 solutions to facilitate asset trading at reduced transaction costs compared to Layer-1 solutions such as Ethereum. However, rollups lack a public mempool like Ethereum, making the extraction of MEV more challenging. In this paper, we investigate the prevalence and impact of MEV on Ethereum and prominent rollups such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync over a nearly three-year period. Our analysis encompasses various metrics including volume, profits, costs, competition, and response time to MEV opportunities. We discover that MEV is widespread on rollups, with trading volume comparable to Ethereum. We also find that, although MEV costs are lower on rollups, profits are also significantly lower compared to Ethereum. Additionally, we examine the prevalence of sandwich attacks on rollups. While our findings did not detect any sandwiching activity on popular rollups, we did identify the potential for cross-layer sandwich attacks facilitated by transactions that are sent across rollups and Ethereum. Consequently, we propose and evaluate the feasibility of three novel attacks that exploit cross-layer transactions, revealing that attackers could have already earned approximately 2 million USD through cross-layer sandwich attacks.
This paper explores how KRYPT uses smart contracts and the Ethereum Blockchain to facilitate transfers of Ethereum in a novel way. Through the use of blockchain technology, KRYPT guarantees asset transactions that are safe, transparent, and effective. By using private keys and encryption, users may benefit from increased security, which allays worries about theft or hacking. The removal of middlemen also simplifies the transfer procedure, and real-time tracking guarantees safe and timely delivery of payments. By giving users on the Ethereum Blockchain more security, effectiveness, and control, KRYPT is a major development in Ethereum transactions. Keywords— Blockchain, Smart-Contract, Ethereum, EVM, ERC20 Token, Ethereum Blockchain.
This paper presents an innovative application of blockchain technology utilizing smart contracts to offer crop recommendations tailored to the agricultural community.Leveraging Ethereum's solidity language, we developed a decentralized system enabling farmers to access real-time data on crop selections made by their peers.The system aggregates information on crop preferences and land allocations, facilitating informed decision-making for individual farmers.Our implementation ensures data integrity and transparency, crucial for fostering trust among users.Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in providing accurate and timely crop recommendations, thereby enhancing agricultural productivity and sustainability.Our findings highlight the potential of blockchain technology to revolutionize traditional agricultural practices by fostering collaboration and data-driven decision-making.We conclude by discussing future avenues for research and adoption, emphasizing the scalability and accessibility of our proposed solution in addressing broader agricultural challenges.
Cryptocurrency is a unique digital signature which is allotted to every individual that is a part of this whole network. This digital signature is used to identify which users have participated in the transaction. The capacity of each block is almost 1 Mb so each block can store in its thousands of transactions. At present time used some crptocurrencies Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC); Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH);Tether (CRYPTO:USDT);BinanceCoin(CRYPTO:BNB);USDCoin (CRYPTO:USDC);XRP(CRYPTO:XRP);Terra (CRYPTO:LUNA);Solana (CRYPTO:SOL); Cardano(CRYPTO:ADA);Avalanche (CRYPTO:AVAX) Bitcoin is considered the first cryptocurrency created, and other individual cryptocurrencies are known as “altcoins” (a combo word derived from "alternative coin").The concept of Crypto-currency and bitcoin were first proposed in 2008 by someone using the pseudonym Santoshi Nakamoto,who described how cryptology and an open distributed ledger can be combined into digital currency application(Nakamoto 2008).The main aim of this research paper to conclude that how much extent benefit to the economy and society from the crypto-currency. And secondory aim is to judge legal acceptance of the cryptocurrencyin the various countries.
Blockchain technology is a revolutionary concept that has transformed various industries, offering decentralized and secure solutions for data management. At its core, a blockchain is a distributed and immutable ledger that records transactions across a network of computers. One of the key features of blockchain is its transparency, as each participant in the network has access to the same information. The application of blockchain technology extends across diverse sectors, with finance being the most promising and well-known application domain. Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, rely on blockchain to facilitate secure and transparent transactions. The decentralized nature of blockchain eliminates the need for intermediaries, reducing transaction costs and increasing efficiency. Beyond finance, blockchain is making significant strides in supply chain management. The emergence of blockchain technology has paved the way for a transformative innovation in the realm of digital transactions: smart contracts. These self-executing contracts encoded in blockchain have garnered significant attention for their potential to revolutionize the way agreements are made, executed, and enforced. This paper explores the concept of smart contracts, delving into the underlying technology, finding applications across various industries, legal implications, and future prospects.
Healthcare is a critical area where blockchain technology (BT) is being heralded as a potential game-changer for facilitating secure and efficient data sharing. The purpose of this review is to examine BT applications, performance challenges, and solutions in healthcare. To begin, This review paper explores popular blockchain networks for data exchange, encompassing both public and permissioned platforms, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. This paper analyzes the potential applications of BT's decentralized, immutable, and smart contract capabilities in healthcare settings, including secure and interoperable health data exchange, patient consent management, drug supply chain oversight, and clinical trial management. The healthcare industry might greatly benefit from the increased privacy, transparency, and accessibility that these technologies provide. Despite BT's promising medical uses, the technology is not without its drawbacks. High energy consumption, throughput, and scalability are all concerns. We wrapped up by discussing the solutions that have been implemented, including consensus processes, scalability measures like sharding, and off-chain transactions that are designed to mitigate the drawbacks.
Blockchain is a modern technology that has revolutionized the way society interacts and trades. It could be defined as a chain of blocks that stores information with digital signatures in a distributed and decentralized network. This technique was first adopted for the creation of digital crypto currencies, such as Bit coin and Ethereum. However, research and industrial studies have recently focused on the opportunities that blockchain provides in various other application domains to take advantage of the main features of this technology, such as: decentralization, persistency, anonymity, and auditability. This paper reviews the use of blockchain in several interesting fields, namely: finance, healthcare, information systems, wireless networks, Internet of Things, smart grids, governmental services, and military/defense. In addition, our paper identifies the challenges to overcome, to guarantee better use of this technology.
Ulysse Pavloff, Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni
In May 2023, the Ethereum blockchain experienced its first inactivity leak, a mechanism designed to reinstate chain finalization amid persistent network disruptions. This mechanism aims to reduce the voting power of validators who are unreachable within the network, reallocating this power to active validators. This paper investigates the implications of the inactivity leak on safety within the Ethereum blockchain. Our theoretical analysis reveals scenarios where actions by Byzantine validators expedite the finalization of two conflicting branches, and instances where Byzantine validators reach a voting power exceeding the critical safety threshold of one-third. Additionally, we revisit the probabilistic bouncing attack, illustrating how the inactivity leak can result in a probabilistic breach of safety, potentially allowing Byzantine validators to exceed the one-third safety threshold. Our findings uncover how penalizing inactive nodes can compromise blockchain properties, particularly in the presence of Byzantine validators capable of coordinating actions.
William Sánchez, Larue Linder, Robert C. Miller, Amelia Hood · 5 authors
Introduction: Scientists use donated biospecimens to create organoids, which are miniature copies of patient tumors that are revolutionizing precision medicine and drug discovery. However, biobanking platforms remove donor identifiers to protect privacy, precluding patients from benefiting from their contributions or sharing information that may be relevant to research outcomes. Decentralized biobanking (de-bi) leverages blockchain technology to empower patient engagement in biospecimen research. We describe the creation of the first de-bi prototype for an organoid biobanking use case. Methods: We designed and developed a proof-of-concept non-fungible tokens (NFTs) framework for an organoid research network of patients, physicians, and scientists within a synthetic dataset modeled on a real-world breast cancer organoid ecosystem. Our implementation deployed multiple smart contracts on Ethereum test networks, minting NFTs representing each stakeholder, biospecimen, and organoid. The system architecture was designed to be composable with established biobanking programs. Results: Our de-bi prototype demonstrated how NFTs representing patients, physicians, scientists, and organoids may be united in a privacy-preserving platform that builds upon relationships and transactions of existing biobank research networks. The mobile application simulated key features, enabling patients to track their biospecimens, view organoid images and research updates from scientists, and allow physicians to participate in peer-to-peer communications with basic scientists and patients alike, all while ensuring compliance with de-identification requirements. Discussion: We demonstrate proof-of-concept for a web3 platform engaging patients, physicians, and scientists in a dynamic research community, unlocking value for a model organoid ecosystem. This initial prototype is a critical first step for advancing paradigm-shifting de-bi technology that provides unprecedented transparency and suggests new standards for equity and inclusion in biobanking. Further research must address feasibility and acceptability considering the ethical, legal, economic, and technical complexities of organoid research and clinical translation.
Marcin Wątorek, Paweł Szydło, Jarosław Kwapień, Stanisław Drożdż
The non-fungible token (NFT) market emerges as a recent trading innovation leveraging blockchain technology, mirroring the dynamics of the cryptocurrency market. The current study is based on the capitalization changes and transaction volumes across a large number of token collections on the Ethereum platform. In order to deepen the understanding of the market dynamics, the collection-collection dependencies are examined by using the multivariate formalism of detrended correlation coefficient and correlation matrix. It appears that correlation strength is lower here than that observed in previously studied markets. Consequently, the eigenvalue spectra of the correlation matrix more closely follow the Marchenko-Pastur distribution, still, some departures indicating the existence of correlations remain. The comparison of results obtained from the correlation matrix built from the Pearson coefficients and, independently, from the detrended cross-correlation coefficients suggests that the global correlations in the NFT market arise from higher frequency fluctuations. Corresponding minimal spanning trees (MSTs) for capitalization variability exhibit a scale-free character while, for the number of transactions, they are somewhat more decentralized.
Mental health is an important aspect of well-being as it encompasses emotional, psychological and social well-being. The use of patient portals in mental health care has gained attention as a potential tool to improve access to care for individuals with mental illness. Patient portals may be vulnerable to unauthorized access if appropriate security measures are not put in place. This study leverages blockchain technology to create tamper-proof patient records. The proposed solution uses an on-chain database that stores hashes and the actual medical record of a patient as well as an off-chain solution that handles encryption of each user’s medical record using their respective keys in a trustless manner before they are uploaded on-chain. A secure smart contract hosted on the Ethereum and the Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm was used to ensure patient privacy. The research employed the Comparative Analysis Research Methodology as the research methodology and the Kanban methodology as the software development methodology. The research project concludes that the proposed solution addresses the current security issues and data privacy concerns in patient data. The decentralized nature of blockchain ensures security, transparency and tamper-proof storage of information. Further research is needed for future advancements, like integrating blockchain-based patient portals with wearable devices and IoT.
Matija Piškorec, Anton Ivashkevich, Said Haji Abukar, Lundrim Azemi · 7 authors
In this paper we describe a prototype of a blockchain-in-a-box system which allows users to easily bootstrap the whole Ethereum Proof-of-Work (PoW) network running on multiple Raspberry Pi nodes - an inexpensive modular computers. Users are able to orchestrate the whole blockchain network using a single web based interface, for example they are able to set the topology of the peer-to-peer (P2P) connections and control the initialization parameters. Each Raspberry Pi has a screen attached which visualizes current state of local blockchain, allowing users to easily visualize the consensus of the network in real time. We show how this platform can be used to perform experiments on consensus quality while using different P2P topologies. Similar experiments can be used for demonstration purposes in a workshop or other educational settings.
The project titled “Rise Together: A Crowdfunding platform” introduces a groundbreaking Crowdfunding Platform on the Ethereum blockchain, revolutionizing traditional fundraising models. Leveraging smart contracts for seamless automation and execution of campaigns, the platform ensures transparency, security, and efficiency. Ethereum's decentralization eliminates intermediaries, reducing costs, and enhancing accessibility. Key features include a user-friendly interface, contribution tracking, and real time campaign monitoring. Utilizing Ether as the native cryptocurrency streamlines contributions, offering a secure and standardized means of support. Positioned at the intersection of blockchain and fundraising, this project contributes to the evolution of decentralized finance, showcasing Ethereum's potential for secure, inclusive, and innovative crowdfunding. Key Words: Rise Together, Crowdfunding, Blockchain, Smart Contract, Transparency, Decentralization, Wallet Integration.
Viktor Valaštín, Roman Bitarovský, Kristián Košťál, Ivan Kotuliak
Blockchain is a technology that is often used to share data and assets. However, in the decentralized ecosystem, blockchain-based systems can be utilized to share information and assets without the traditional barriers associated with solo responsibility, e.g., multi-sig wallets. This paper describes an innovative approach to blockchain networks based on a non-fungible token that behaves as an account (NFTAA). The key novelty of this article is using NFTAA to leverage the unique properties of NFTs to manage your ownership better and effectively isolate them to improve the security, transparency, and even interoperability possibilities. Additionally, the account-based solution gives us the ability and flexibility to cover regular use cases such as staking and liquid equities, but also practical composability. This article offers a simple implementation, which allows developers and researchers to choose the best solution for their needs in demand of abstract representation in any use case.
Zhiyang Chen, Ye Liu, Sidi Mohamed Beillahi, Yi Li · 5 authors
Smart contract transactions associated with security attacks often exhibit distinct behavioral patterns compared with historical benign transactions before the attacking events. While many runtime monitoring and guarding mechanisms have been proposed to validate invariants and stop anomalous transactions on the fly, the empirical effectiveness of the invariants used remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we studied 23 prevalent invariants of 8 categories, which are either deployed in high-profile protocols or endorsed by leading auditing firms and security experts. Using these well-established invariants as templates, we developed a tool Trace2Inv which dynamically generates new invariants customized for a given contract based on its historical transaction data. We evaluated Trace2Inv on 42 smart contracts that fell victim to 27 distinct exploits on the Ethereum blockchain. Our findings reveal that the most effective invariant guard alone can successfully block 18 of the 27 identified exploits with minimal gas overhead. Our analysis also shows that most of the invariants remain effective even when the experienced attackers attempt to bypass them. Additionally, we studied the possibility of combining multiple invariant guards, resulting in blocking up to 23 of the 27 benchmark exploits and achieving false positive rates as low as 0.32%. Trace2Inv outperforms current state-of-the-art works on smart contract invariant mining and transaction attack detection in terms of both practicality and accuracy. Though Trace2Inv is not primarily designed for transaction attack detection, it surprisingly found two previously unreported exploit transactions, earlier than any reported exploit transactions against the same victim contracts.
Sandra Johnson, Kerrie Mengersen, Patrick O'Callaghan, Anders L. Madsen
Immediate settlement, or single-slot finality (SSF), is a long-term goal for Ethereum. The growing active validator set size is placing an increasing computational burden on the network, making SSF more challenging. EIP-7251 aims to reduce the number of validators by giving stakers the option to merge existing validators. Key to the success of this proposal therefore is whether stakers choose to merge their validators once EIP-7251 is implemented. It is natural to assume stakers participate only if they anticipate greater expected utility (risk-adjusted returns) as a single large validator. In this paper, we focus on one of the duties that a validator performs, viz. being the proposer for the next block. This duty can be quite lucrative, but happens infrequently. Based on previous analysis, we may assume that EIP-7251 implies no change to the security of the protocol. We confirm that the probability of a validator being selected as block proposer is equivalent under each consolidation regime. This result ensures that the decision of one staker to merge has no impact on the opportunity of another to propose the next block, in turn ensuring there is no major systemic change to the economics of the protocol with respect to proposer selection.
The rapid development of large machine learning (ML) models requires a massive amount of training data, resulting in booming demands of data sharing and trading through data markets. Traditional centralized data markets suffer from low level of security, and emerging decentralized platforms are faced with efficiency and privacy challenges. In this paper, we propose OmniLytics+, the first decentralized data market, built upon blockchain and smart contract technologies, to simultaneously achieve 1) data (resp., model) privacy for the data (resp. model) owner; 2) robustness against malicious data owners; 3) efficient data validation and aggregation. Specifically, adopting the zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup paradigm, OmniLytics+ proposes to secret share encrypted local gradients, computed from the encrypted global model, with a set of untrusted off-chain servers, who collaboratively generate a ZK proof on the validity of the gradient. In this way, the storage and processing overheads are securely offloaded from blockchain verifiers, significantly improving the privacy, efficiency, and affordability over existing rollup solutions. We implement the proposed OmniLytics+ data market as an Ethereum smart contract [41]. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of OmniLytics+ in training large ML models in presence of malicious data owner, and the substantial advantages of OmniLytics+ in gas cost and execution time over baselines.
Krzysztof Gogol, Johnnatan Messias, Maria Inês Silva, Benjamin Livshits
Late 2023 witnessed significant user activity on EVM chains, resulting in a surge in transaction activity and putting many rollups into the first live test. While some rollups performed well, some others experienced downtime during this period, affecting transaction finality time and gas fees. To address the lack of empirical research on rollups, we perform the first study during a heightened activity during the late 2023 transaction boom, as attributed to inscriptions - a novel technique that enables NFT and ERC-20 token creation on Bitcoin and other blockchains. We observe that minting inscription-based meme tokens on zkSync Era allows for trading at a fraction of the costs, compared to the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks. We also found that the increased transaction activity, over 99% attributed to the minting of new inscription tokens, positively affected other users of zkSync Era, resulting in lowered gas fees. Unlike L1 blockchains, ZK rollups may experience lower gas fees with increased transaction volume. Lastly, the introduction of blobs - a form of temporary data storage - decreased the gas costs of Ethereum rollups, but also raised a number of questions about the security of inscription-based tokens.
Objective: Using a variety of datasets from the Ethereum documentation and Smart Contract Dataset repository, this study tackles the crucial problem of classifying smart contract vulnerabilities. Methods: Our study uses a three-module method and focuses on the Resource 3 Dataset, which contains over 2,000 Ethereum smart contracts, including inherited contracts. The groundwork for deep learning model training is laid in Module 1 by extracting bytecode from Solidity files and creating images thereafter. In Colab, Module 2 entails importing data, pre-processing, SMOTE balancing, and building three deep learning models: CNN, XCEPTION, and EfficientNet-B2. Module 3 is a Flask-based web application created in Visual Studio Code that enables vulnerability predictions, bytecode extraction, and user interaction. Findings: With an overall accuracy of 71 percent, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) displays its effectiveness in classifying vulnerabilities. Although the accuracy of XCEPTION and EfficientNet-B2 is 69% and 75%, respectively, the latter is the top performer. Novelty & Applications: The online application adds to the comprehensive examination of smart contract security by giving users an easy-to-use interface. The EfficientNet-B2 model stands out as a dependable tool for precise vulnerability classification, and this study advances our understanding of and efforts to mitigate vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts. Keywords: Smart Contracts, Vulnerability Classification, Ethereum, Deep Learning, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)
In this paper, we present a detailed approach and implementation to prove Ethereum full node using recursive SNARK, distributed general GKR and Groth16. Our protocol's name is Sisu whose architecture is based on distributed Virgo in zkBridge with some major improvements. Besides proving signature aggregation, we provide solutions to 2 hard problems in proving Ethereum full node: 1) any public key is valid under previous beacon state and 2) all public keys are pairwise distinct. Our solution does not require worker-to-worker communication and therefore reduce total worker-to-worker network traffic from terabyte of data to zero compared to zkBridge. This makes our approach suitable for emerging distributed prover markets and more decentralized compared to zkBridge. Our design is highly parallelable and capable of running on GPU for most parts.
Extensive research on Nakamoto-style consensus protocols has shown that network delays degrade the security of these protocols. Established results indicate that, perhaps surprisingly, maximal security is achieved when the network is as small as two nodes due to increased delays in larger networks. This contradicts the very foundation of blockchains, namely that decentralization improves security. In this paper, we take a closer look at how the network scale affects security of Nakamoto-style blockchains. We argue that a crucial aspect has been neglected in existing security models: the larger the network, the harder it is for an attacker to control a significant amount of power. To this end, we introduce a probabilistic corruption model to express the increasing difficulty for an attacker to corrupt resources in larger networks. Based on our model, we analyze the impact of the number of nodes on the (maximum) network delay and the fraction of adversarial power. In particular, we show that (1) increasing the number of nodes eventually violates security, but (2) relying on a small number of nodes does not provide decent security provisions either. We then validate our analysis by means of an empirical evaluation emulating hundreds of thousands of nodes in deployments such as Bitcoin, Monero, Cardano, and Ethereum Classic. Based on our empirical analysis, we concretely analyze the impact of various real-world parameters and configurations on the consistency bounds in existing deployments and on the adversarial power that can be tolerated while providing security. As far as we are aware, this is the first work that analytically and empirically explores the real-world tradeoffs achieved by current popular Nakamoto-style deployments.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading cryptocurrencies have undergone significant price fluctuations, prompting widespread interest in the interdependence and spillover effects among cryptocurrency markets, as well as in identifying the key cryptocurrencies that drive market movements. This study contributes to the existing literature by utilising innovative vector wavelet coherence (VWC) and wavelet local multiple correlation (WLMC) frameworks to investigate the time-frequency co-movements among four cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, and Binance). By exploring the co-movements across multiple time scales over a period from 01/01/2020 to 10/04/2023 through continuous and discrete wavelet coherency analysis, we identify four key empirical findings. Firstly, the returns connectedness is stronger than the volatility connectedness. Secondly, high-frequency co-movements are more erratic and correspond to positive and negative unexpected news, while low-frequency co-movements vary with changes in US monetary policy. Thirdly, Tether and Binance exhibit the weakest returns and volatility connectedness with other cryptocurrencies. Lastly, Ethereum and Tether (not Bitcoin) are the primary cryptocurrencies that account for returns and volatility movements in the market. We discuss the implications of these findings for various stakeholders in cryptocurrency markets.