Bitcoin's design promises resilience through decentralization, yet the physical infrastructure supporting the network creates hidden dependencies. We present the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin's resilience to submarine cable failures, using 11 years of P2P network data (2014--2025) and 68 verified cable fault events. Applying a Buldyrev-style cascade model at country level, we find that Bitcoin's clearnet (non-TOR) critical failure threshold $p_c \approx 0.72$--$0.92$ for random failures, meaning the vast majority of inter-country cables must fail before significant node disconnection. Targeted attacks are an order of magnitude more effective ($p_c = 0.05$--$0.20$). To address the majority of nodes now using TOR with unobservable locations, we develop a 4-layer multiplex model incorporating TOR relay infrastructure. Because relay bandwidth concentrates in well-connected European countries, TOR adoption increases resilience under current relay geography ($Δp_c \approx +0.02$--$+0.10$) rather than introducing hidden fragility. Empirical validation confirms weak physical-layer coupling: 87% of historical cable faults caused less than 5% node impact. We contribute: (1) a multiplex percolation framework for overlay-underlay coupling, including a 4-layer TOR relay model; (2) the first empirical measurement of Bitcoin's physical-layer resilience over a decade; and (3) evidence that TOR adoption amplifies resilience, with distributional bounds quantifying uncertainty under partial observability.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating the shift from an Internet of information to an Internet of Agents (IoA), where autonomous entities discover services, negotiate, execute tasks, and exchange value. Yet today's agents are still confined to platform silos and proprietary interfaces, lacking a common stack for interoperability, trust, and pay-per-use settlement. This article proposes \textit{Agent-OSI}, a functional interoperability architecture for a decentralized IoA, whose core contribution is agent-to-agent (A2A) communication and a Web-compatible, backend-agnostic settlement protocol built on HTTP 402 (Payment Required); identity, verifiable execution, and semantic orchestration are treated as boundary layers with interfaces to existing standards. We treat HTTP 402 as an application-layer challenge-response primitive -- analogous to HTTP 401 for authentication -- whose settlement backend (escrow contract, payment channel, or signed off-chain receipt) is a pluggable choice, instantiated via a blockchain escrow in our prototype. We implement a prototype and evaluate its communication and settlement performance. Results show that, for generative workloads, end-to-end latency is dominated by task execution rather than settlement confirmation, and that keeping negotiation and delivery off the settlement backend reduces per-session settlement cost by approximately 51\% relative to a more on-chain baseline.
Tingxuan Su, Haoxiang Luo, Ruichen Zhang, Yinqiu Liu · 6 authors
Next-generation communication networks are characterized by integrated ultra-high reliability, ultra-low latency, massive connectivity, and ubiquitous coverage. However, this paradigm faces significant structural challenges of liquidity and security. Liquidity issues arise from prohibitive upfront costs of network resources, which strain the limited capital and financial flexibility. This also limits the deployment of the resource- and investment-intensive security solutions, bringing security issues. Security vulnerabilities arise from the decentralized architecture as well, particularly threats posed by Byzantine nodes. To address these dual challenges, we propose a novel framework utilizing Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization for tokenizing network resources. RWA tokenization uses blockchain to convert ownership rights of real-world assets into digital tokens that can be programmed, divided, and traded. We then analyze the criteria for identifying suitable assets. Through a case study on dynamic spectrum allocation, we demonstrate the superior performance of this RWA approach. Particularly under conditions of resource scarcity, it can exhibit strong resilience against collusion and default attacks. Finally, we delineate fruitful avenues for future research in this nascent field.
With the advent of blockchain technology, the number of proposals has boomed. The network traffic imposed by these blockchain proposals increases the cost of hosting nodes. Unfortunately, as of today, we are not aware of any comparative study of the bandwidth consumption of blockchains. In this paper, we propose the first empirical comparison of blockchain bandwidth consumption. To this end, we measure the network traffic of blockchain network nodes of five blockchain protocols: Algorand, Aptos, Avalanche, Redbelly and Solana. We study the variation over time, differentiate the receiving and sending traffic and analyze how this traffic varies with the number of nodes and validators. We conclude that the transport protocol is the main factor impacting the network traffic, segregating node roles helps reduce traffic and different blockchains are differently impacted by the network size.
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network plays important roles in emergency communications. However, it is challenging to design reliable routing strategies that ensure low latency, energy efficiency, and security in the dynamic and attack-prone environments. To this end, we design a secure routing architecture integrating software-defined networking (SDN) for centralized control and blockchain for tamper-proof trust management. In particular, a novel security degree metric is introduced to quantify the UAV trustworthiness. Based on this architecture, we propose a beam search-proximal policy optimization (BSPPO) algorithm, where beam search (BS) pre-screens the high-security candidate paths, and proximal policy optimization (PPO) performs hop-by-hop routing decisions to support dynamic rerouting upon attack detections. Finally, extensive simulations under varying attack densities, packet sizes, and rerouting events demonstrate that BSPPO outperforms PPO, BS-Q learning, and BS-actor critic in terms of delay, energy consumption, and transmission success rate, showing the outstanding robustness and adaptability.
Despite being under development for over 15 years, transaction throughput remains one of the key challenges confronting blockchains, which typically has a cap of a limited number of transactions per second. A fundamental factor limiting this metric is the network latency associated with the block propagation throughout of the underlying peer-to-peer network, typically formed through random connections. Accelerating the dissemination of blocks not only improves transaction rates, but also enhances system security by reducing the probability of forks. This paper introduces SCRamble: a decentralized protocol that significantly reduces block dissemination time in blockchain networks. SCRamble's effectiveness is attributed to its innovative link selection strategy, which integrates two heuristics: a scoring mechanism that assesses block arrival times from neighboring peers, and a second heuristic that takes network latency into account.
The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has led to growing concerns about data security and user privacy in the interactions within distributed systems. Decentralized Applications (DApps) in distributed systems consist of on-chain and off-chain functions, where on-chain functions are smart contracts running in the blockchain network, while off-chain functions operate outside the blockchain. Since smart contracts cannot access off-chain information, they cannot verify whether the off-chain functions, i.e. the software components, they interact with have been tampered or not. As a result, establishing mutual trust between the on-chain smart contracts and the off-chain functions remains a significant challenge. To address the challenge, this paper introduces TeeMAF, a generic framework for mutual attestation between on-chain and off-chain functions, leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), specifically Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), SCONE (a TEE container on top of Intel SGX), and remote attestation technologies. This ensures that the deployed off-chain functions of a DApp execute in a provably secure computing environment and achieve mutual attestation with the interacting on-chain functions. Through a security analysis of TeeMAF, the reliability of deployed DApps can be verified, ensuring their correct execution. Furthermore, based on this framework, this paper proposes a decentralized resource orchestration platform (a specific DApp) for deploying applications over untrusted environments. The system is implemented on Ethereum and benchmarked using Hyperledger Caliper. Performance evaluation focusing on throughput and latency demonstrates that, compared to platforms without a mutual attestation scheme, the performance overhead remains within an acceptable range.
This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a decentralized system for issuing and verifying academic certificates based on blockchain technology. The proposed solution addresses common limitations of traditional certification models, such as susceptibility to forgery, reliance on centralized infrastructures, and inefficient verification processes. The system is built on the TRON blockchain and integrates smart contracts written in Solidity, a decentralized web application (dApp) for user interaction, and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for decentralized storage of certificate metadata. The methodology comprised architectural design, smart contract development, and the implementation of a web-based interface, followed by functional, security, performance, and usability evaluations. Experimental results show that the system correctly supports certificate issuance and public verification, enforces access control, and resists common misuse scenarios. Performance analysis indicates low confirmation latency and negligible transaction costs, making the solution suitable for large-scale academic environments. Additionally, usability assessment using the System Usability Scale (SUS) resulted in a score of 76.67, indicating good user acceptance. Overall, the results demonstrate the technical feasibility and practical viability of the proposed approach, highlighting the TRON blockchain as an effective and cost-efficient infrastructure for decentralized academic certification systems.
Autonomous AI agents lack traceable accountability mechanisms, creating a fundamental dilemma where systems must either operate as ``downgraded tools'' or risk real-world abuse. This vulnerability stems from the limitations of traditional key-based authentication, which guarantees neither the operator's physical identity nor the agent's code integrity. To bridge this gap, we propose BAID (Binding Agent ID), a comprehensive identity infrastructure establishing verifiable user-code binding. BAID integrates three orthogonal mechanisms: local binding via biometric authentication, decentralized on-chain identity management, and a novel zkVM-based Code-Level Authentication protocol. By leveraging recursive proofs to treat the program binary as the identity, this protocol provides cryptographic guarantees for operator identity, agent configuration integrity, and complete execution provenance, thereby effectively preventing unauthorized operation and code substitution. We implement and evaluate a complete prototype system, demonstrating the practical feasibility of blockchain-based identity management and zkVM-based authentication protocol.
Public blockchains inherently offer low throughput and high latency, motivating off-chain scalability solutions such as Payment Channel Networks (PCNs). However, existing PCNs suffer from liquidity fragmentation-funds locked in one channel cannot be reused elsewhere-and channel depletion, both of which limit routing efficiency and reduce transaction success rates. Multi-party channel (MPC) constructions mitigate these issues, but they typically rely on leaders or coordinators, creating single points of failure and providing only limited flexibility for inter-channel payments. We introduce Hypergraph-based Multi-Party Payment Channels (COALESCE), a new off-chain construction that replaces bilateral channels with collectively funded hyperedges. These hyperedges enable fully concurrent, leaderless intra- and inter-hyperedge payments through verifiable, proposer-ordered DAG updates, offering significantly greater flexibility and concurrency than prior designs. Hence our, design eliminates routing dependencies, avoids directional liquidity lock-up, and does not require central monitoring services such as watchtowers. Our implementation on a 150-node intra-hyperedge achieves a transaction success rate of approximately 94% under heavy load (larger payment sizes), while full hyperedge evaluation over a 15,000-node network sustains success rates in the range of 85% to 95%, without HTLC expiry or routing failures, highlighting the robustness of COALESCE.
Matteo Bjornsson, Taylor Hardin, Taylor Heinecke, Marcin Furtak · 6 authors
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) rely on distributed consensus mechanisms to reach agreement over the order of transactions and to provide immutability and availability of transaction data. Distributed consensus suffers from performance limitations of network communication between participating nodes. BLOCKY ZipperChain guarantees immutability, agreement, and availability of transaction data, but without relying on distributed consensus. Instead, its construction process transfers trust from widely-used, third-party services onto ZipperChains's correctness guarantees. ZipperChain blocks are built by a pipeline of specialized services deployed on a small number of nodes connected by a fast data center network. As a result, ZipperChain transaction throughput approaches network line speeds and block finality is on the order of 500 ms. Finally, ZipperChain infrastructure creates blocks centrally and so does not need a native token to incentivize a community of verifiers.
Taki E. M. Abedesselam, Fabio Giacomelli, Francesco Pasquale, Michele Salvi
We study a random process over graphs inspired by the way payments are executed in the Lightning Network, the main layer-two solution on top of Bitcoin. We first prove almost tight upper and lower bounds on the time it takes for a payment failure to occur, as a function of the number of nodes and the edge capacities, when the underlying graph is complete. Then, we show how such a random process is related to the edge-betweenness centrality measure and we prove upper and lower bounds for arbitrary graphs as a function of edge-betweenness and capacity. Finally, we validate our theoretical results by running extensive simulations over some classes of graphs, including snapshots of the real Lightning Network.
The OPC UA protocol is becoming the de facto standard for Industry 4.0 machine-to-machine communication. It stands out as one of the few industrial protocols that provide robust security features designed to prevent attackers from manipulating and damaging critical infrastructures. However, prior works showed that significant challenges still exists to set up secure OPC UA deployments in practice, mainly caused by the complexity of certificate management in industrial scenarios and the inconsistent implementation of security features across industrial OPC UA devices. In this paper, we present Pk-IOTA, an automated solution designed to secure OPC UA communications by integrating programmable data plane switches for in-network certificate validation and leveraging the IOTA Tangle for decen- tralized certificate distribution. Our evaluation is performed on a physical testbed representing a real-world industrial scenario and shows that Pk-IOTA introduces a minimal overhead while providing a scalable and tamper-proof mechanism for OPC UA certificate management.
Software services are crucial for reliable communication and networking; therefore, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is important to ensure these systems stay reliable and perform well in cloud-native environments. SRE leverages tools like Prometheus and Grafana to monitor system metrics, defining critical Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for maintaining high service standards. However, a significant challenge arises as many developers often lack in-depth understanding of these tools and the intricacies involved in defining appropriate SLIs and SLOs. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel SRE platform, called SRE-Llama, enhanced by Generative-AI, Federated Learning, Blockchain, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). This platform aims to automate and simplify the process of monitoring, SLI/SLO generation, and alert management, offering ease in accessibility and efficy for developers. The system operates by capturing metrics from cloud-native services and storing them in a time-series database, like Prometheus and Mimir. Utilizing this stored data, our platform employs Federated Learning models to identify the most relevant and impactful SLI metrics for different services and SLOs, addressing concerns around data privacy. Subsequently, fine-tuned Meta's Llama-3 LLM is adopted to intelligently generate SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and associated alerting mechanisms based on these identified SLI metrics. A unique aspect of our platform is the encoding of generated SLIs and SLOs as NFT objects, which are then stored on a Blockchain. This feature provides immutable record-keeping and facilitates easy verification and auditing of the SRE metrics and objectives. The automation of the proposed platform is governed by the blockchain smart contracts. The proposed SRE-Llama platform prototype has been implemented with a use case featuring a customized Open5GS 5G Core.
Azhar Hussain Mozumder, M. John Basha, Chayapathi A. R
With more and more existing networks being transformed to Software-Defined Networking (SDN), they need to be more secure and demand smarter ways of traffic control. This work, SmartSecChain-SDN, is a platform that combines machine learning based intrusion detection, blockchain-based storage of logs, and application-awareness-based priority in SDN networks. To detect network intrusions in a real-time, precision and low-false positives setup, the framework utilizes the application of advanced machine learning algorithms, namely Random Forest, XGBoost, CatBoost, and CNN-BiLSTM. SmartSecChain-SDN is based on the Hyperledger Fabric, which is a permissioned blockchain technology, to provide secure, scalable, and privacy-preserving storage and, thus, guarantee that the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) records cannot be altered and can be analyzed comprehensively. The system also has Quality of Service (QoS) rules and traffic shaping based on applications, which enables prioritization of critical services, such as VoIP, video conferencing, and business applications, as well as de-prioritization of non-essential traffic, such as downloads and updates. Mininet can simulate real-time SDN scenarios because it is used to prototype whole architectures. It is also compatible with controllers OpenDaylight and Ryu. It has tested the framework using the InSDN dataset and proved that it can identify different kinds of cyberattacks and handle bandwidth allocation efficiently under circumstances of resource constraints. SmartSecChain-SDN comprehensively addresses SDN system protection, securing and enhancing. The proposed study offers an innovative, extensible way to improve cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and the administration of next-generation programmable networks.
As the "agentic web" takes shape-billions of AI agents (often LLM-powered) autonomously transacting and collaborating-trust shifts from human oversight to protocol design. In 2025, several inter-agent protocols crystallized this shift, including Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A), Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), and Ethereum's ERC-8004 "Trustless Agents," yet their underlying trust assumptions remain under-examined. This paper presents a comparative study of trust models in inter-agent protocol design: Brief (self- or third-party verifiable claims), Claim (self-proclaimed capabilities and identity, e.g. AgentCard), Proof (cryptographic verification, including zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution environment attestations), Stake (bonded collateral with slashing and insurance), Reputation (crowd feedback and graph-based trust signals), and Constraint (sandboxing and capability bounding). For each, we analyze assumptions, attack surfaces, and design trade-offs, with particular emphasis on LLM-specific fragilities-prompt injection, sycophancy/nudge-susceptibility, hallucination, deception, and misalignment-that render purely reputational or claim-only approaches brittle. Our findings indicate no single mechanism suffices. We argue for trustless-by-default architectures anchored in Proof and Stake to gate high-impact actions, augmented by Brief for identity and discovery and Reputation overlays for flexibility and social signals. We comparatively evaluate A2A, AP2, ERC-8004 and related historical variations in academic research under metrics spanning security, privacy, latency/cost, and social robustness (Sybil/collusion/whitewashing resistance). We conclude with hybrid trust model recommendations that mitigate reputation gaming and misinformed LLM behavior, and we distill actionable design guidelines for safer, interoperable, and scalable agent economies.
The integration of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into low-altitude airspace has led authorities to adopt distributed Uncrewed Traffic Management (UTM) architectures that ensure interoperability and safety. Blockchain has been proposed as an enabler for trustworthy coordination among UTM stakeholders. Yet, its real-time performance under aeronautical constraints remains insufficiently characterized. This paper presentes a quantitative benchmark comparing two regulation compliant distributed architectures: the federated InterUSS platform maintained by the Linux Foundation and a permissioned blockchain based on Hyperledger Fabric. Both systems were evaluated through Operational Intent Reference (OIR) registration work loads generated via Hyperledger Caliper, measuring throughput, latency, and transaction loss under loads up to 50 transactions per second. Results show that InterUSS sustained sub-second latency and stable performance up to 30 TPS. At the same time, Fabric exhibited exponential degradation with median latency exceeding 3 s and tail latencies above 15 s beyond that point. These findings demonstrate that blockchain-based architectures must be redesigned to meet aeronautical timing and scalability requirements, suggesting that hybrid models combining distributed ledgers for auditability with federated frameworks for real-time coordination are more suitable for future UTM deployments.
Shashank Motepalli, N. Garg, Gengrui Zhang, Hans‐Arno Jacobsen
Geospatial decentralization is essential for blockchains, ensuring regulatory resilience, robustness, and fairness. We empirically analyze five major Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains: Aptos, Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, and Sui, revealing that a few geographic regions dominate consensus voting power, resulting in limited geospatial decentralization. To address this, we propose Geospatially aware Proof of Stake (GPoS), which integrates geospatial diversity with stake-based voting power. Experimental evaluation demonstrates an average 45% improvement in geospatial decentralization, as measured by the Gini coefficient of Eigenvector centrality, while incurring minimal performance overhead in BFT protocols, including HotStuff and CometBFT. These results demonstrate that GPoS can improve geospatial decentralization {while, in our experiments, incurring minimal overhead} to consensus performance.
Qi Xia, Hu Xia, Isaac Amankona Obiri, Adjei-Arthur Bonsu · 11 authors
Blockchain technology facilitates the development of decentralized systems that ensure trust and transparency without the need for expensive centralized intermediaries. However, existing blockchain architectures particularly consortium blockchains face critical challenges related to scalability and efficiency. State sharding has emerged as a promising approach to enhance blockchain scalability and performance. However, current shard-based solutions often struggle to guarantee fair participation and a balanced workload distribution among consortium members. To address these limitations, we propose Trusted Intelligent NetChain (TINC), a multi-plane sharding architecture specifically designed for consortium blockchains. TINC incorporates intelligent mechanisms for adaptive node assignment and dynamic workload balancing, enabling the system to respond effectively to changing network conditions while maintaining equitable shard utilization. By decoupling the control and data planes, TINC allows control nodes to focus on consensus operations, while data nodes handle large-scale storage, thus improving overall resource efficiency. Extensive experimental evaluation and formal analysis demonstrate that TINC significantly outperforms existing shard-based blockchain frameworks. It achieves higher throughput, lower latency, balanced node and transaction distributions, and reduced transaction failure rates. Furthermore, TINC maintains essential blockchain security guarantees, exhibiting resilience against Byzantine faults and dynamic network environments. The integration of Dynamic Decentralized Identifiers (DDIDs) further strengthens trust and security management within the consortium network.
Ethereum is currently the main blockchain ecosystem providing decentralised trust guarantees for applications ranging from finance to e-government. A common criticism of blockchain networks has been their energy consumption and operational costs. The switch from Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocol to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol has significantly reduced this issue, though concerns remain, especially with network expansions via additional layers. The ERC-4337 standard is a recent proposal that facilitates end-user access to Ethereum-backed applications. It introduces a middleware called a bundler, operated as a third-party service, where part of its operational cost is represented by its power consumption. While bundlers have served over 500 million requests in the past two years, fewer than 15 official bundler providers exist, compared to over 100 regular Ethereum access providers. In this paper, we provide a first look at the active power consumption overhead that a bundler would add to an Ethereum access service. Using SmartWatts, a monitoring system leveraging Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) hardware interfaces, we empirically determine correlations between the bundler workload and its active power consumption.
Distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) networking delivers the new blocks and transactions and is critical for the cryptocurrency blockchain system operations. Having poor P2P connectivity reduces the financial rewards from the mining consensus protocol. Previous research defines beneficalness of each Bitcoin peer connection and estimates the beneficialness based on the observations of the blocks and transactions delivery, which are after they are delivered. However, due to the infrequent block arrivals and the sporadic and unstable peer connections, the peers do not stay connected long enough to have the beneficialness score to converge to its expected beneficialness. We design and build Dynamic Peer Beneficialness Prediction (DyPBP) which predicts a peer's beneficialness by using networking behavior observations beyond just the block and transaction arrivals. DyPBP advances the previous research by estimating the beneficialness of a peer connection before it delivers new blocks and transactions. To achieve such goal, DyPBP introduces a new feature for remembrance to address the dynamic connectivity issue, as Bitcoin's peers using distributed networking often disconnect and re-connect. We implement DyPBP on an active Bitcoin node connected to the Mainnet and use machine learning for the beneficialness prediction. Our experimental results validate and evaluate the effectiveness of DyPBP; for example, the error performance improves by 2 to 13 orders of magnitude depending on the machine-learning model selection. DyPBP's use of the remembrance feature also informs our model selection. DyPBP enables the P2P connection's beneficialness estimation from the connection start before a new block arrives.
Fernando Castillo, Eduardo Brito, Sebastian Werner, Pille Pullonen · 5 authors
Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring in service-oriented environments suffers from inherent trust conflicts when providers self-report metrics, creating incentives to underreport violations. We introduce a framework for generating verifiable SLA violation claims through trusted hardware monitors and zero-knowledge proofs, establishing cryptographic foundations for genuine trustworthiness in service ecosystems. Our approach starts with machine-readable SLA clauses converted into verifiable predicates and monitored within Trusted Execution Environments. These monitors collect timestamped telemetry, organize measurements into Merkle trees, and produce signed attestations. Zero-knowledge proofs aggregate Service-Level Indicators to evaluate compliance, generating cryptographic proofs verifiable by stakeholders, arbitrators, or insurers in disputes, without accessing underlying data. This ensures three security properties: integrity, authenticity, and validity. Our prototype demonstrates linear scaling up to over 1 million events per hour for measurements with near constant-time proof generation and verification for single violation claims, enabling trustless SLA enforcement through cryptographic guarantees for automated compliance verification in service monitoring.
With the proliferation of decentralized applications (DApps), the conflict between the transparency of blockchain technology and user data privacy has become increasingly prominent. While Decentralized Identity (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) provide a standardized framework for user data sovereignty, achieving trusted identity verification and data sharing without compromising privacy remains a significant challenge. This paper proposes a novel, comprehensive framework that integrates DIDs and VCs with efficient Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) schemes to address this core issue. The key contributions of this framework are threefold: first, it constructs a set of strong privacy-preserving protocols based on zk-STARKs, allowing users to prove that their credentials satisfy specific conditions (e.g., "age is over 18") without revealing any underlying sensitive data. Second, it designs a scalable, privacy-preserving credential revocation mechanism based on cryptographic accumulators, effectively solving credential management challenges in large-scale scenarios. Finally, it integrates a practical social key recovery scheme, significantly enhancing system usability and security. Through a prototype implementation and performance evaluation, this paper quantitatively analyzes the framework's performance in terms of proof generation time, verification overhead, and on-chain costs. Compared to existing state-of-the-art systems based on zk-SNARKs, our framework, at the cost of a larger proof size, significantly improves prover efficiency for complex computations and provides stronger security guarantees, including no trusted setup and post-quantum security. Finally, a case study in the decentralized finance (DeFi) credit scoring scenario demonstrates the framework's immense potential for unlocking capital efficiency and fostering a trusted data economy.
The scalability of blockchain systems is constrained by inefficient P2P broadcasting, as most existing optimizations focus only on the logical layer without considering physical network conditions. To address this, we propose BlockSDN, the first SDN-based integrated architecture for blockchain. BlockSDN employs a distributed control plane for a global network view, a graph engine for hierarchical clustering, and a hybrid macro-micro neighbor selection with hierarchical broadcasting. A dedicated simulation platform shows that BlockSDN reduces global block synchronization time by 65% and 55% compared to Gossip and Mercury, respectively.These results highlight the potential of SDN-enabled cross-layer coordination to significantly enhance blockchain scalability and performance.