Blockchain Papers

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May 27, 2025·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
Repeated Auctions with Speculators: Arbitrage Incentives and Forks in DAOs

Nicolas Eschenbaum, Nicolas D. Greber

We analyze the vulnerability of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to speculative exploitation via their redemption mechanisms. Studying a game-theoretic model of repeated auctions for governance shares with speculators, we characterize the conditions under which -- in equilibrium -- an exploitative exit is guaranteed to occur, occurs in expectation, or never occurs. We evaluate four redemption mechanisms and extend our model to include atomic exits, time delays, and DAO spending strategies. Our results highlight an inherent tension in DAO design: mechanisms intended to protect members from majority attacks can inadvertently create opportunities for costly speculative exploitation. We highlight governance mechanisms that can be used to prevent speculation.

Open access
2 source records
Auction Theory and Applications
Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems
Housing Market and Economics
Original source
May 20, 2025·Blockchain Research and Applications
0 cites
Economic DAO governance: A contestable control approach

Jeff Strnad

In this article, we propose a new form of decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance that uses a sequential auction mechanism to overcome the entrenched control issues that have emerged for DAOs by creating a regime of temporary contestable control. The mechanism avoids potential public choice problems inherent in voting approaches but at the same time provides a vehicle that can enhance and secure value that inheres to DAO voting and other DAO non-market governance procedures. It is robust to empty voting and is code feasible. The mechanism not only facilitates the ability of DAOs to meet their normative and operational goals in the face of diverse regulatory approaches, but also strengthens the case for creating a less burdensome but at least equally effective regulatory regime for DAOs that employ the mechanism. Designed to shift control to the party with the most promising business plan, at the same time, it deters value destruction by control parties, maximizes social surplus, and distributes that surplus in a way that tends to promote investment by other parties both at start up and on an ongoing basis.

Open access
Auction Theory and Applications
Game Theory and Voting Systems
Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems
Original source
May 14, 2025·Information
1 cites
SCH-Hunter: A Taint-Based Hybrid Fuzzing Framework for Smart Contract Honeypots

Haoyu Zhang, Baotong Wang, Wenhao Fu, Leyi Shi

Existing smart contract honeypot detection approaches exhibit high false negatives and positives due to (i) their inability to generate transaction sequences triggering order-dependent traps and (ii) their limited code coverage from traditional fuzzing’s random mutations. In this paper, we propose a hybrid fuzzing framework for smart contract honeypot detection based on taint analysis, SCH-Hunter. SCH-Hunter conducts source-code-level feature analysis of smart contracts and extracts data dependency relationships between variables from the generated Control Flow Graph to construct specific transaction sequences for fuzzing. A symbolic execution module is also introduced to resolve complex conditional branches that fuzzing alone fails to penetrate, enabling constraint solving. Furthermore, real-time dynamic taint propagation monitoring is implemented using taint analysis techniques, leveraging taint flow information to optimize seed mutation processes, thereby directing mutation resources toward high-value code regions. Finally, by integrating EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) code instrumentation with taint information flow analysis, the framework effectively identifies and detects security-sensitive operations, ultimately generating a comprehensive detection report. Empirical results are as follows. (i) For code coverage, SCH-Hunter performs better than the state-of-art tool, HoneyBadger, achieving higher average code coverage rates on both datasets, surpassing it by 4.79% and 17.41%, respectively. (ii) For detection capabilities, SCH-Hunter is not only roughly on par with HoneyBadger in terms of precision and recall rate but also capable of detecting a wider variety of smart contract honeypot techniques. (iii) For the evaluation of components, we conducted three ablation studies to demonstrate that the proposed modules in SCH-Hunter significantly improve the framework’s detection capability, code coverage, and detection efficiency, respectively.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Auction Theory and Applications
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Original source
May 8, 2025·Blockchain Research and Applications
0 cites
FinanceFuzz: fuzzing smart contracts with financial properties

Jiazhen Gan, Jianzhong Su, Kaixin Lin, Zibin Zheng

Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs that run on blockchain technology, capable of managing on-chain assets according to predefined logic, and become immutable once deployed on the blockchain. In recent years, the value of smart contracts on blockchains, notably Ethereum, has been on the rise. However, the hiding vulnerabilities made the substantial value of smart contracts a target of many hackers, leading to numerous attack incidents. Therefore, vulnerability detection in smart contracts before deployment is essential. Currently, many fuzzers for detecting smart contract vulnerabilities can only identify vulnerabilities based on the execution patterns of the underlying opcodes, overlooking the financial semantic properties of the contracts, which leads to many vulnerabilities being difficult to detect or resulting in a high rate of false positives. To this end, we focus on the financial characteristics of contracts, define contract vulnerability patterns starting from the high-level semantic properties of contracts, and combine fuzzers using evolutionary algorithms and symbolic constraint solving to detect vulnerabilities, culminating in the development of FinanceFuzz . Specifically, FinanceFuzz defines invariant and equivalence properties of finance that contracts should satisfy. Utilizing these properties, FinanceFuzz can generate transaction sequences for testing and identify vulnerable contracts that violate the properties. We conducted experiments on a dataset containing 437 smart contracts from the real world, the experimental results demonstrating that our tool outperforms other state-of-the-art tools in detecting vulnerabilities, achieving higher recall rate without false positive.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
May 2, 2025·Scientific Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain Technologies
0 cites
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) in Governance

Lalit Kumar

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have emerged as one of the most disruptive innovations in governance, offering new frameworks for collective decision-making, transparency, and accountability in both public and private spheres. Rooted in blockchain technology and powered by smart contracts, DAOs eliminate the need for traditional hierarchical management by enabling rules to be self-enforced and decisions to be executed automatically. This paper examines DAOs as governance mechanisms, tracing their historical development, theoretical underpinnings, and practical implementations across finance, civic engagement, digital cooperatives, and resource management. Through an extensive literature review, comparative case studies, and thematic content analysis, the study highlights DAOs’ potential to reduce agency problems, enhance participatory governance, and ensure auditability through immutable ledgers. However, the analysis also reveals significant challenges, including legal ambiguity, technological vulnerabilities, token-weighted plutocracy, voter apathy, and scalability concerns that hinder their broader application. Results suggest that DAOs function effectively as experimental laboratories of algorithmic governance but are not yet fully equipped to replace traditional governance structures. Instead, hybrid models integrating decentralized decision-making with institutional oversight present the most viable path forward. By critically analyzing DAO case studies such as MakerDAO, ConstitutionDAO, and CityDAO, the study underscores their dual role as governance innovations and socio-political experiments that push the boundaries of trust, coordination, and autonomy in the digital age. The findings position DAOs not only as technological entities but also as frameworks capable of reshaping democratic practices, resource governance, and institutional legitimacy in the 21st century.

Open access
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
May 1, 2025·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
Balancing Security and Liquidity: A Time-Weighted Snapshot Framework for DAO Governance Voting

Wang, Zayn, Frank Pu, Vinci Cheung, Ruibing Hao

As new project upgrading the blockchain industry, novel forms of attack challenges developers to rethink about the design of their innovations. In the growth stage of the development, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) introduces different approaches in managing fund through voting in governance tokens. However, relying on tokens as a weight for voting introduces opportunities for hackers to manipulate voting results through flash loan, allowing malicious proposals - fund withdrawal from DAO to hacker's wallet - to execute through the smart contract. In this research, we learned different defense mechanism against the flash loan attack, and their weakness in accessibility that compromise the security of different blockchain projects. Based on our observation, we propose a new defensing structure and apply it with cases.

Open access
2 source records
Auction Theory and Applications
cs.CR
Original source
Apr 6, 2025·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
Towards Source Mapping for Zero-Knowledge Smart Contracts: Design and Preliminary Evaluation

Pei Xu, Yulei Sui, Mark Staples

Debugging and auditing zero-knowledge-compatible smart contracts remains a significant challenge due to the lack of source mapping in compilers such as zkSolc. In this work, we present a preliminary source mapping framework that establishes traceability between Solidity source code, LLVM IR, and zkEVM bytecode within the zkSolc compilation pipeline. Our approach addresses the traceability challenges introduced by non-linear transformations and proof-friendly optimizations in zero-knowledge compilation. To improve the reliability of mappings, we incorporate lightweight consistency checks based on static analysis and structural validation. We evaluate the framework on a dataset of 50 benchmark contracts and 500 real-world zkSync contracts, observing a mapping accuracy of approximately 97.2% for standard Solidity constructs. Expected limitations arise in complex scenarios such as inline assembly and deep inheritance hierarchies. The measured compilation overhead remains modest, at approximately 8.6%. Our initial results suggest that source mapping support in zero-knowledge compilation pipelines is feasible and can benefit debugging, auditing, and development workflows. We hope that this work serves as a foundation for further research and tool development aimed at improving developer experience in zk-Rollup environments.

Open access
3 source records
cs.SE
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
Apr 3, 2025·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
EvoChain: A Framework for Tracking and Visualizing Smart Contract Evolution

Ilham Qasse, Mohammad Hamdaqa, Björn Þór Jónsson

Tracking the evolution of smart contracts is challenging due to their immutable nature and complex upgrade mechanisms. We introduce EvoChain, a comprehensive framework and dataset designed to track and visualize smart contract evolution. Building upon data from our previous empirical study, EvoChain models contract relationships using a Neo4j graph database and provides an interactive web interface for exploration. The framework consists of a data layer, an API layer, and a user interface layer. EvoChain allows stakeholders to analyze contract histories, upgrade paths, and associated vulnerabilities by leveraging these components. Our dataset encompasses approximately 1.3 million upgradeable proxies and nearly 15,000 historical versions, enhancing transparency and trust in blockchain ecosystems by providing an accessible platform for understanding smart contract evolution.

Open access
3 source records
cs.SE
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Original source
Mar 26, 2025·Blockchain Research and Applications
0 cites
ACOFuzz: An ant colony algorithm-based fuzzer for smart contracts

Peixuan Feng, Wenrui Cao, Siqi Lu, Yongjuan Wang · 6 authors

In today's blockchain landscape, smart contracts are assuming a pivotal role, albeit accompanied by a heightened risk of exploitation by attackers. As smart contracts grow in complexity, vulnerabilities lurking within deeper layers of code become more prevalent. Existing analysis tools primarily focus on data flow and a priori knowledge based on symbolic execution as a test case generation strategy, often falling short in uncovering vulnerabilities nested within intricate conditional statements. To address this challenge, we present ACOFuzz, an advanced fuzzer for Ethereum smart contracts. ACOFuzz employs the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to traverse the control flow graph (CFG) of smart contracts, systematically exploring execution paths and generating test cases. Subsequently, it strategically directs the search towards paths that are more susceptible to vulnerabilities within the CFG, leveraging block coverage data obtained from executing the test cases. In a comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate that ACOFuzz excels in covering a wider array of paths within a contract while exhibiting enhanced accuracy in pinpointing specific vulnerabilities compared to contemporary fuzzers.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
Mar 24, 2025·Empirical Software Engineering
4 cites
Why and how developers maintain smart contracts

Giovanni Rosa, Simone Scalabrino, S. Mastrostefano, Rocco Oliveto

Abstract Smart contracts, i.e., self-executing contracts written in code, have gained popularity in recent years due to the introduction of blockchain technology. These contracts are executed automatically when certain conditions are met, and, once deployed, they can not be modified. This presents issues when errors are found or updates are needed. Previous research has mainly focused on introducing approaches and tools for detecting bugs or vulnerabilities in smart contracts. However, it is unclear if these are the only maintenance-related operations developers perform. In this paper, we aim to understand why and how developers maintain smart contracts. We run a qualitative analysis on 590 commits from 14 open-source smart contract repositories written in Solidity, the most popular programming language for smart contracts. We analyze the commit messages, related issues, and the changes made to understand what triggered changes. Then, we examine how developers changed the source code. As a result, we define two taxonomies: one reporting the reasons for the maintenance and one regarding the patterns of modifications. Our findings suggest that smart contract maintenance is often focused on improving the internal quality of the scripts (40% of the cases), and that many changes aim to fix bugs despite the several approaches available for detecting them beforehand.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
Mar 17, 2025·SN Business & Economics
0 cites
Buyer’s choice of a seller using smart contracts

Elmira Mohammadhosseini Fadafan, Rudolf Vetschera

Abstract Contractual relationships between buyers and sellers can be disrupted by unanticipated shocks to attributes of the exchanged good or service; in manufacturing, such relationships often involve one buyer of components or intermediate goods and many potential sellers. We study the buyer’s selection of a seller given the option to initially agree on a smart contract which, in the advent of such unanticipated shocks, automatically adjusts the exchange price. Our benchmark analysis focuses on the case where a positive potential shock raises attribute values for both contracting parties, implying that the seller benefits more than the buyer from executing the original contract at the agreed exchange price. Taking the perspective of the buyer, we vary the shock and utility parameters to arrive at conclusions regarding the determinants of smart contract dominance in random buyer-seller matches. One of the key issues analyzed in this paper is the possibility that after the potential shock, another seller might be better and a buyer who anticipates this might be led to select a different seller. For the case of the Nash bargaining-solution, we further investigate the impact of increasing the number of utility-generating attributes on these switch rates.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Supply Chain and Inventory Management
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
Mar 17, 2025·Journal of Operations Management
6 cites
Incentivizing Blockchain Participation Through Task Assignment Mechanisms: Evidence From a Natural Experiment of Consensus Protocols on Ethereum

Wei Yang

ABSTRACT This study examines how task assignment mechanisms affect the participation of workers on decentralized blockchains. In developing the theory, I highlight that blockchain represents a distinct organizational form for coordinating operations under a highly decentralized structure, in which the essential tasks of system infrastructure maintenance are assigned to third‐party crowd workers through the unique governance mechanism of consensus protocol. I specifically focus on two widely adopted consensus protocols in the context of cryptocurrency, namely, proof‐of‐work (PoW), which assigns tasks that sustain the blockchain system operation based on workers' investments in computing power, and proof‐of‐stake (PoS), which assigns these tasks based on workers' investments in the native cryptocurrency as stakes. I argue that compared with PoW, PoS increases worker participation and task decentralization because the investment requirement of task participation in the form of blockchain native assets reduces workers' transaction costs in task contracting and their tendencies for hyper‐competition. My empirical analysis leverages a natural experiment on Ethereum, namely, the “Merge” event on September 15, 2022, in which the blockchain changed the assignment rules by switching the consensus protocol from PoW to PoS. The results under a difference‐in‐differences research design confirm my arguments.

Open access
Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
Mar 13, 2025·Lecture notes in computer science
1 cites
Decentralized Fair Exchange with Advertising

Pierpaolo Della Monica, Ivan Visconti, Andrea Vitaletti, Marco Zecchini

Before a fair exchange takes place, there is typically an advertisement phase with the goal of increasing the appeal of possessing a digital asset while keeping it sufficiently hidden. Advertisement phases are implicit in mainstream definitions, and therefore are not explicitly integrated within fair-exchange protocols. In this work we give an explicit definition for such a fair exchange in a setting where parties communicate via broadcast messages only (i.e., no point-to-point connection between seller and buyer is needed). Next, we construct a fair-exchange protocol satisfying our new definition using zk-SNARKs and relying on mainstream decentralized platforms (i.e., a blockchain with smart contracts like Ethereum and a decentralized storage system like IPFS). Experimental results confirm the practical relevance of our decentralized approach, paving the road towards building decentralized marketplaces where users can, even anonymously, and without direct off-chain communications, effectively advertise and exchange their digital assets as part of a system of enhanced NFTs.

Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Original source
Mar 13, 2025·IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
8 cites
NumScout: Unveiling Numerical Defects in Smart Contracts Using LLM-Pruning Symbolic Execution

Jiachi Chen, Zhenzhe Shao, Shuo Yang, Yiming Shen · 8 authors

In recent years, the Ethereum platform has witnessed a proliferation of smart contracts, accompanied by exponential growth in total value locked (TVL). High-TVL smart contracts often require complex numerical computations, particularly in mathematical financial models used by many decentralized applications (DApps). Improper calculations can introduce numerical defects, posing potential security risks. Existing research primarily focuses on traditional numerical defects like integer overflow, and there is currently a lack of systematic research and effective detection methods targeting new types of numerical defects. In this paper, we identify five new types of numerical defects through the analysis of 1,199 audit reports by utilizing the open card method. Each defect is defined and illustrated with a code example to highlight its features and potential consequences. We also propose NumScout, a symbolic execution-based tool designed to detect these five defects. Specifically, the tool combines information from source code and bytecode, analyzing key operations such as comparisons and transfers, to effectively locate defects and report them based on predefined detection patterns. Furthermore, NumScout uses a large language model (LLM) to prune functions which are unrelated to numerical operations. This step allows symbolic execution to quickly enter the target function and improve runtime speed by 28.4%. We run NumScout on 6,617 real-world contracts and evaluated its performance based on manually labeled results. We find that 1,774 contracts contained at least one of the five defects, and the tool achieved an overall precision of 89.7%.

Open access
3 source records
Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems
Auction Theory and Applications
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Original source
Mar 13, 2025·Technische Universität Berlin – Universitätsbibliothek
1 cites
DAOMod: A Modeling Method for Decentralized Autonomous Organization Development

Avanzo, Sowelu, Pautasso, Daniele, Domenicale, Irene, Norta, Alex · 8 authors

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a type of Decentralized Applications (DApps) that utilize smart contracts to support governance processes. To achieve a high degree of utility of the system, stakeholders need to identify a suitable organizational structure in the early stages of design. While Model-Driven Development (MDD) methods are established for DApp and smart contract design, they lack specialization for modeling the organizational structures of DAOs. To address this gap, we propose a modeling language and a method which support crucial DAO design and development phases. The method is evaluated through an in vivo case study. Unlike existing solutions, comprehensive stepwise guidance is provided by our method for both technical and non-technical stakeholders involved in DAO development from the initial stages of the project.

Open access
2 source records
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
Auction Theory and Applications
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Original source
Mar 1, 2025·TUHH Open Research
1 cites
Towards Solidity Smart Contract Efficiency Optimization through Code Mining

Avik Banerjee, Michael Sober, Stefan Schulte

Deploying smart contracts and invoking their functions on block-chains incur gas costs, which depend on the operations executed by those functions. This makes optimizing the gas cost of smart contract functions a rewarding goal. However, existing approaches to gas cost optimization of smart contracts mainly involve rule-based optimization or automatic optimization for specific types of patterns. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to automatically retrieving optimized versions of Solidity functions from a repository of smart contracts. The system identifies and suggests gas-efficient alternatives that maintain functional equivalence by comparing the opcode sequences of individual functions. We evaluate this approach on a dataset of 16,529 functions from real-world contracts, demonstrating substantial gas savings, as high as 34% on average when considering the most similar functions.

Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
Feb 28, 2025·Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
4 cites
Crystality: A Programming Model for Smart Contracts on Parallel EVMs

Hao Wang, Minghao Pan, Jiaping Wang

Scaling blockchain performance through parallel smart contract execution has gained significant attention, as traditional methods remain constrained by the performance of a single virtual machine (VM), even in multi-chain or Layer-2 systems. Parallel VMs offer a compelling solution by enabling concurrent transaction execution within a single smart contract, using multiple CPU cores. However, Ethereum's sequential, shared-everything model limits the efficiency of existing parallel mechanisms, resulting in frequent rollbacks with optimistic methods and high overhead with pessimistic methods due to state dependency analysis and locking.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Auction Theory and Applications
Supply Chain and Inventory Management
Original source
Feb 27, 2025·arXiv
2 cites
Economic Censorship Games in Fraud Proofs

Ben Berger, Edward W. Felten, Akaki Mamageishvili, Benny Sudakov

Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs -- interactive protocols executed on Ethereum to resolve conflicting claims about the rollup's state -- to scale Ethereum securely. To mitigate against potential censorship of protocol moves, fraud proofs grant participants a significant time window, known as the challenge period, to ensure their moves are processed on chain. Major optimistic rollups today set this period at roughly one week, mainly to guard against strong censorship that undermines Ethereum's own crypto-economic security. However, other forms of censorship are possible, and their implication on optimistic rollup security is not well understood. This paper considers economic censorship attacks, where an attacker censors the defender's transactions by bribing block proposers. At each step, the attacker can either censor the defender -- depleting the defender's time allowance at the cost of the bribe -- or allow the current transaction through while conserving funds for future censorship. We analyze three game theoretic models of these dynamics and determine the challenge period length required to ensure the defender's success, as a function of the number of required protocol moves and the players' available budgets.

Open access
2 source records
cs.GT
Auction Theory and Applications
Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance
Original source
Feb 27, 2025·ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
2 cites
Characterizing Smart Contract Evolution

Xiangping Chen, Z. Qian, Peiyong Liao, Yuan Huang · 6 authors

Smart contracts are programs that permanently store and automatically execute on the blockchain system such as Ethereum. Due to the non-tamperable nature of the underlying blockchain, smart contracts are difficult to update once deployed, which requires redeploying the contracts and migrating the data. It means that the observation of smart contract evolution in the real world makes more sense. Hence, in this paper, we conducted the first large-scale empirical study to characterize the evolution of smart contracts in Ethereum. For evolution identification, we presented a contract similarity-based search algorithm, digEvolution, and evaluated its effectiveness with five different search strategies. Then we applied this algorithm to 80,152 on-chain contracts we collected from Ethereum, to dig out the evolution among these contracts. We then explored three research questions. We first studied whether the evolution of smart contracts is common (RQ1), then we studied how do the Gas consumption (RQ2) and the vulnerability (RQ3) of smart contracts vary during the evolution. Our research results show that the evolution of smart contracts is not very common. There are some contract components that have vulnerability but still be called by users. The Gas consumption of most smart contracts doesn’t vary during the evolution, contract is Gas-efficient before and after the evolution. The vulnerability of most smart contracts doesn’t vary during the evolution, both are secure before and after the evolution.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Auction Theory and Applications
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Original source
Feb 24, 2025·Cantonal and University Library Fribourg
0 cites
Domain-specific conceptual modeling for designing distributed ledger applications

Simon Curty

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) enable the immutable, transparent, and tamper-proof storage of transaction records in a shared electronic register. Due to these intrinsic properties, DLT has the potential to be highly disruptive to businesses. However, the heterogeneity and intricacy of the underlying technologies impede their more widespread adoption. A primary challenge lies in comprehending the interrelationships between the organizational, economical, and technical dimensions of DLT systems. An integrated perspective on the fundamental concepts of DLT within each dimension can be accomplished through the implementation of domain-specific conceptual modeling languages that explicitly account for intrinsic properties. Conceptual models adhere to well-defined elements and rules for the utilization of these elements. This enables the algorithmic processing of models to generate derivations and new insights.The focus of prior research on modeling support for DLT has been on the technical dimension. However, research on conceptual modeling approaches enabling the joint consideration of organizational, economical, and technical factors is lacking. This situation is undesirable both from a scientific standpoint and from a practical one. To address this gap, this thesis advances the current state-of-the-art in the design of DLT applications by introducing several domain-specific approaches addressing concerns across dimensions. This includes support for the decision-making in organizations, for the design of their business model, its alignment with the underlying DLT systems, and for the development of smart contracts and subsequent generation of functional code. The artifacts are consolidated into a domain-specific conceptual modeling method, facilitating the design of DLT applications and business cases.

Open access
Distributed systems and fault tolerance
Business Process Modeling and Analysis
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
Feb 23, 2025·Journal of Operations Management
8 cites
Beyond Money: Incentive Effects of Tokenized Ownership on User Contribution in DAOs

Kun Chen, Yifan Fan, Yulin Fang, Xin Luo

ABSTRACT Blockchain technologies have catalyzed the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which operate in an incentive network fueled by crypto tokens. In essence, these tokens are imbued with either payment rights (i.e., transactional tokens) or ownership rights (i.e., governance tokens). The decentralized organizational paradigm dismantles the traditional management structure and bring new research opportunities to Operations Management (OM). While the performance of DAOs has been largely examined in current OM literature, the effectiveness of their internal incentive mechanisms—specifically the one that uses ownership as rewards to promote user contributions—remains unclear. Focusing on DAO‐enabled virtual communities, we seek to examine whether decentralized ownership provides stronger incentives for user behaviors, such as creation and curation, in comparison to traditional monetary rewards through the lens of psychological ownership theory. We obtained data from Steemit that captures the reward, creation, curation and transaction behaviors of 98,000 users from May 2017 to April 2019. By leveraging the “power‐up” action as a shock that increases user ownership shares, we established a quasi‐experimental setting. Employing the PSM‐DID model, we found that the use of governance tokens is associated with enhanced creation and curation efforts but declined creation novelty, compared to the use of transactional tokens. Our additional analyses further reveal that the incentive effects of governance tokens diminish over time. However, upon the recurrence of the intended choice, these effects become reinforced. Notably, we find that governance token ownership is more strongly associated with curation efforts for users with weaker social ties. Conversely, for users with high reputation scores, their content creation behaviors are less strongly associated with governance token ownership. This study contributes to the burgeoning discourse on blockchain and cryptocurrency from an operational perspective, providing valuable insights for the design of incentive mechanisms in DAOs and advancing our understanding of operational efficiencies and stakeholder engagement in decentralized structures within Operations Management.

Open access
Sharing Economy and Platforms
Auction Theory and Applications
Taxation and Compliance Studies
Original source
Feb 17, 2025·arXiv (Cornell University)
4 cites
Detecting Various DeFi Price Manipulations with LLM Reasoning

Juantao Zhong, Daoyuan Wu, Ye Liu, Maoyi Xie · 7 authors

DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is one of the most important applications of today's cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. It manages hundreds of billions in Total Value Locked (TVL) on-chain, yet it remains susceptible to common DeFi price manipulation attacks. Despite state-of-the-art (SOTA) systems like DeFiRanger and DeFort, we found that they are less effective to non-standard price models in custom DeFi protocols, which account for 44.2% of the 95 DeFi price manipulation attacks reported over the past three years. In this paper, we introduce the first LLM-based approach, DeFiScope, for detecting DeFi price manipulation attacks in both standard and custom price models. Our insight is that large language models (LLMs) have certain intelligence to abstract price calculation from smart contract source code and infer the trend of token price changes based on the extracted price models. To further strengthen LLMs in this aspect, we leverage Foundry to synthesize on-chain data and use it to fine-tune a DeFi price-specific LLM. Together with the high-level DeFi operations recovered from low-level transaction data, DeFiScope detects various DeFi price manipulations according to systematically mined patterns. Experimental results show that DeFiScope achieves a high recall of 80% on real-world attacks, a precision of 96% on suspicious transactions, and zero false alarms on benign transactions, significantly outperforming SOTA approaches. Moreover, we evaluate DeFiScope's cost-effectiveness and demonstrate its practicality by helping our industry partner confirm 147 real-world price manipulation attacks, including discovering 81 previously unknown historical incidents.

Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
cs.AI
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Original source
Feb 16, 2025·International Journal of Network Management
2 cites
Option Contracts in the DeFi Ecosystem: Opportunities, Solutions, and Technical Challenges

Srisht Fateh Singh, Vladyslav Nekriach, Panagiotis Michalopoulos, Andreas Veneris · 5 authors

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the current landscape of option trading platforms for cryptocurrencies, encompassing both centralized and decentralized exchanges. Option contracts in cryptocurrency markets offer functionalities akin to traditional markets, providing investors with tools to mitigate risks, particularly those arising from price volatility, while also allowing them to capitalize on future volatility trends. The paper discusses these applications of option contracts in the context of decentralized finance (DeFi), emphasizing their utility in managing market uncertainties. Despite a recent surge in the trading volume of options contracts on cryptocurrencies, decentralized platforms account for less than 1 % of this total volume. Hence, this paper takes a closer look by examining the design choices of these platforms to understand the challenges hindering their growth and adoption. It identifies technical, financial, and adoption‐related challenges that decentralized exchanges face and provides commentary on existing platform responses. Subsequently, the paper analyzes the impact of absent options markets on the inefficiencies of automated market maker liquidity. It examines historical on‐chain data for 14 ERC20 token pairs on Ethereum. The analysis shows 1143 instances in which deeper liquidity levels, as high as more, could have been achieved by establishing an options market.

Open access
Economic theories and models
Stochastic processes and financial applications
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
Feb 6, 2025·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
Following Devils' Footprint: Towards Real-time Detection of Price Manipulation Attacks

Boao Zhang, Ningyu He, Xiaohui Hu, Kai Ma · 5 authors

Price manipulation attack is one of the notorious threats in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, which allows attackers to exchange tokens at an extensively deviated price from the market. Existing efforts usually rely on reactive methods to identify such kind of attacks after they have happened, e.g., detecting attack transactions in the post-attack stage, which cannot mitigate or prevent price manipulation attacks timely. From the perspective of attackers, they usually need to deploy attack contracts in the pre-attack stage. Thus, if we can identify these attack contracts in a proactive manner, we can raise alarms and mitigate the threats. With the core idea in mind, in this work, we shift our attention from the victims to the attackers. Specifically, we propose SMARTCAT, a novel approach for identifying price manipulation attacks in the pre-attack stage proactively. For generality, it conducts analysis on bytecode and does not require any source code and transaction data. For accuracy, it depicts the control- and data-flow dependency relationships among function calls into a token flow graph. For scalability, it filters out those suspicious paths, in which it conducts inter-contract analysis as necessary. To this end, SMARTCAT can pinpoint attacks in real time once they have been deployed on a chain. The evaluation results illustrate that SMARTCAT significantly outperforms existing baselines with 91.6% recall and ~100% precision. Moreover, SMARTCAT also uncovers 616 attack contracts in-the-wild, accounting for \$9.25M financial losses, with only 19 cases publicly reported. By applying SMARTCAT as a real-time detector in Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, it has raised 14 alarms 99 seconds after the corresponding deployment on average. These attacks have already led to $641K financial losses, and seven of them are still waiting for their ripe time.

Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source