The paper aimed to investigate the statistical relationship between Bitcoin prices and Ethereum trading volumes, as well as to create a simple predictive model for Ethereum trading volumes based on Bitcoin prices. To perform Spearman’s rank correlation analysis and to construct an artificial neural network (ANN) model, daily closing prices of Bitcoin in USD and daily trading volumes of Ethereum were utilized. The timeframe covered by the data starts May 1, 2020 and ends November 22, 2025. In this study, Ethereum volumes were treated as the dependent variable, while Bitcoin prices served as the independent variable. The findings indicate a significant, moderate, positive correlation between Bitcoin prices and Ethereum volumes, and the ANN model successfully predicted Ethereum volumes with a high level of accuracy. These results reinforce existing evidence regarding the relationships among cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, by confirming the efficacy of artificial neural networks (ANN) in predicting trends within the cryptocurrency market, the study also makes a methodological contribution. In addition, the study also offers a simpler modelling approach that highlights the significance of bilateral interactions among major cryptocurrencies through a single-input model. Based on the impressive performance of the ANN model, exchanges, fintech companies, and investment firms could incorporate lightweight machine-learning systems into their forecasting tools to provide real-time analytics with minimal processing requirements.
This paper presents a blockchain-based electronic voting system designed to address the persistent challenges of transparency, security, and integrity in democratic electoral processes. Traditional voting systems in countries like Nepal suffer from vote manipulation, ballot rigging, logistical inefficiencies, and limited public trust. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a decentralized e-voting application built on the Ethereum blockchain, leveraging smart contracts for tamper-proof vote recording and enforcement of voting rules. The system incorporates multi-factor authentication, combining facial recognition via OpenCV with Voter ID and Date of Birth verification to ensure only eligible voters participate. MetaMask wallet integration enables secure blockchain transactions, while Web3.js facilitates real-time interaction between the frontend and the deployed smart contracts on Ganache. The methodology encompasses data collection, voter authentication, smart contract deployment, and result retrieval. This paper offers a scalable and cost-effective alternative to conventional voting methods, with future scope for public Ethereum deployment and expanded biometric authentication.
Bhutan has deployed a blockchain-based national identity system on Ethereum and issued a gold-backed sovereign token, while simultaneously developing a National AI Strategy 2025 that requires AI governance to align with Gross National Happiness constitutional principles. Ethereum protocol governance is conducted by the Ethereum Foundation and developer community without Bhutanese constitutional participation. This paper documents the constitutional command gap between Bhutan's GNH governance philosophy and the technical infrastructure on which its digital sovereignty depends, and presents the Fijishi Sovereign Identity Framework, Sovereign Algorithmic Immunity Doctrine, and Institutional Failover Charter as the constitutional command layer that ensures GNH principles govern AI and digital systems regardless of the underlying protocol architecture.
This paper presents a comparative study between two leading blockchain platforms—Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum—with emphasis on their architectural design, performance characteristics, and security mechanisms in the context of enterprise applications. The study aims to identify key differences between permissioned and public blockchain models, focusing on scalability, consensus efficiency, and data confidentiality. A controlled experimental environment was developed using Docker-based deployments for both platforms, and performance was evaluated through Hyperledger Caliper using standardized workloads. Metrics such as transactions per second (TPS), latency, resource consumption, and failure rates were analyzed under varying network sizes. The results indicate that Hyperledger Fabric achieves significantly higher throughput (≈900 TPS) and lower latency (<200 ms) compared to Ethereum (≈25 TPS, ≈1 s latency), due to its deterministic Raft consensus and modular architecture. Ethereum, however, demonstrates superior decentralization and transparency suitable for public and decentralized applications. The findings highlight that both platforms are complementary: Hyperledger Fabric is optimized for controlled, high-performance enterprise use, while Ethereum excels in open, trustless environments.
We estimate the causal price elasticity of gas demand on Ethereum mainnet (L1) and Arbitrum One (L2), a quantity necessary for calibrating fee mechanism simulations, evaluating resource pricing reforms, and explaining observed usage patterns. A two-way fixed effects panel regression instrumented by each wallet's own lagged base fee removes the congestion-driven endogeneity that causes naive regressions to substantially underestimate demand sensitivity. On Ethereum mainnet (full year 2025), the pooled IV elasticity is -0.006***, near-inelastic: a 10% fee increase reduces total gas demand by approximately 0.06%. On Arbitrum One (October 2025--April 2026), the pooled IV elasticity is -0.036**. Both chains are inelastic in the aggregate, with L2 measurably more responsive than L1. A per-resource decomposition of L2 demand reveals elasticities ranging from modestly elastic computation (-0.027*) to -0.27*** for refunds, with storage growth (-0.15***) and calldata (-0.06*) in between. Behavioral clustering identifies always-on protocol wallets as near-inelastic and high-volume operators as substantially more responsive, with cluster-level elasticities up to roughly 6x the pooled estimate. These results establish an empirical foundation for downstream simulations and for evaluating fee mechanism designs.
This paper examines whether blockchain-registered AI agents demonstrate operational readiness beyond identity registration. Using a dataset of ERC-8004 agents on Ethereum, we construct an agent-level feature table covering identity status, metadata, service declarations, reputation feedback, transfers, and cross-chain registration. We develop an operational readiness framework based on observable evidence layers and complement it with network analysis of owner-agent, feedback-client, wallet-transfer, and combined evidence relationships. The results show that early ERC-8004 adoption is registration-heavy but operationally shallow. While the identity layer is visible at scale, metadata availability, service exposure, reputation formation, and cross-chain evidence remain limited. Ownership and feedback activity are also highly concentrated, suggesting that early participation is shaped by a small number of high-activity wallets and clients. The network analysis further shows that richer operational evidence clusters around a small subset of agents rather than being broadly distributed across the ecosystem. The findings suggest that ERC-8004 provides an important identity layer for decentralized AI agents, but the transition from agent identity to agent economy remains incomplete.
State root computation dominates (78%) blockchain block processing time. Ethereum's canonical authenticated data structure, i.e., Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT), suffers from severe tree-height growth and is vulnerable to \textit{Nurgle attacks} (SP'24), where adversaries inflate path depth via hash collisions and degrade system performance at negligible cost. Existing defenses increase node fanout (span) to bound tree height, but higher span inflates proof size exponentially. Prior work mitigates this trade-off using vector commitments, at the cost of trusted setup or expensive verification. We present \textsc{Mhot}, a height-optimal authenticated data structure for blockchain state commitment that preserves standard hash-based verification without trusted setup. Unlike MPT's fixed-prefix indexing, which couples span and fanout exponentially, \textsc{Mhot} indexes by discriminative bits that actually distinguish keys, achieving adaptive span with linear fanout coupling and provably minimal height. To prevent high fanout from inflating proofs, we introduce hierarchical proofs, a two-layer Merkle construction that reduces per-node proof overhead from O(k) to O(log k). On Ethereum mainnet workloads, \textsc{Mhot} achieves up to 9X higher write throughput, 4X lower write amplification, and 2X smaller proofs than MPT. Under Nurgle attacks, even when the adversary consumes an entire block's gas budget, \textsc{Mhot} maintains a 0% attack success rate (v.s., 99.97% for MPT). Our results, somewhat surprisingly, show that height optimality (not new crypto primitives!) is the key abstraction for scalable and attack-resilient blockchain state commitment.
Kabilesh C M, Dr. B. Raja, Dr. S. Geetha, Dr. V. Cyrilraj
As decentralized finance (DeFi) continues to scale, traditional forensic methodologies often fail due to their retrospective, "post-mortem" nature, analyzing illicit activities only after they are permanently recorded on the ledger. This project proposes coinEth, a real-time institutional blockchain surveillance and autonomous defense system designed for the Ethereum Sepolia network. The framework operates across a four-layer architecture: a Data Acquisition Layer that intercepts pending transactions via Alchemy WebSockets (WSS); a Persistence and Forensic Engine that utilizes SQLite and Python-based heuristics to detect suspicious behavioral patterns such as "structuring" and "high velocity"; a Governance Layer that executes an autonomous enforcement loop via a Solidity-based "Gatekeeper" smart contract; and a Visualization Layer built with Streamlit and PyVis. By assigning dynamic risk scores—categorized as Safe (Level 0), Warning (Level 1), and Frozen (Level 2)—the system can automatically broadcast on-chain transactions to freeze illicit accounts before fund exfiltration occurs. Furthermore, coinEth reconstructs a chronological "money trail" through sequential path mapping (T0 → T1 → T2...), ensuring a verifiable digital chain of custody for investigative reporting. This proactive approach shifts blockchain security from passive observation to active, real-time intervention, significantly enhancing the defense mechanisms available to institutional stakeholders.
Bilateral attribute-based access control for data trading must hide policies, provide cryptographic fairness, and avoid trusted third parties. Existing solutions either leak policy information, incur super-linear costs, or rely on trusted dispute resolution. We present PriME-Deal, a non-interactive protocol that simultaneously achieves policy-hiding bilateral matching, efficient threshold access control, and auditable fair exchange on public blockchains. The seller embeds a secret token under the buyer policy into an oblivious key-value store with pseudorandom masking; the buyer reconstructs the token locally via tag-based probing, eliminating combinatorial enumeration, and proves correctness in zero-knowledge. Fair exchange is enforced through a collateralized on-chain reveal with a cryptographic audit that penalizes misbehaviour without trusted parties. We prove security in the Universal Composability framework under standard assumptions. Compared with the state-of-the-art threshold fuzzy IB-ME scheme, the seller's publishing time is reduced by two orders of magnitude (e.g., 8.76s vs. 690s for a policy of 500 attributes). For a typical configuration of (200,20,5), the buyer completes token reconstruction and proof generation in 8.9s, with the zero-knowledge proof taking under 0.6s and remaining constant across all parameter scales. The on-chain cost is approximately 28.6M gas, well within Ethereum's block limit. PriME-Deal thus delivers the first practical privacy-preserving data trading protocol that combines linear seller overhead, bilateral policy hiding, and auditable fairness.
Ensuring the authenticity, integrity, and reliability of digital image evidence is a persistent challenge in forensic and legal domains due to the vulnerabilities of centralized evidence management systems. This study compares three blockchain consensus mechanisms—Proof of Existence (PoE), Proof of Ownership (PoOW), and Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM)—to assess their effectiveness in securing and validating digital image evidence on the Layer 2 Polygon network. Forensic images were stored on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), with each consensus model registering tamper-evident Content Identifiers (CIDs) on-chain via dedicated smart contracts. The evaluation considered performance metrics including latency, gas usage, transaction fees, throughput, scalability, and privacy protection. The findings revealed that PoE demonstrated the best overall efficiency, achieving a latency of 3730ms, a transaction fee of 0.001321 ETH, and a throughput of 0.176 TPS, making it well-suited for real-time applications such as timestamping and immediate evidence submission. PoOW, although more computationally demanding, achieved the highest gas-refund rate at 89%, making it ideal for ownership verification and traceability, such as copyright and asset provenance. Meanwhile, zkEVM provided a well-rounded performance profile with moderate transaction costs and latency. It is powerful for privacy-preserving applications that require cryptographic guarantees, especially in enterprise and regulatory settings. This comparative evaluation highlights the unique advantages and limitations of each approach, providing critical insights into selecting the most suitable blockchain-based consensus mechanism for the transparent and tamper-resistant validation of digital forensic evidence.
Introduction Electronic health records (EHRs) are central to healthcare analytics, but their granularity increases re-identification risk when shared. Conventional privacy-preserving methods including k -anonymity, l -diversity, and differential privacy often protect confidentiality at the expense of analytical utility by weakening clinically meaningful correlations. Methods We propose SENTINEL-Chain, a blockchain-integrated privacy-preserving framework for secure EHR publishing. The privacy layer combines six mechanisms: Adaptive Correlation-Aware Perturbation (ACAP), Hierarchical Multi-Granularity Generalization (HMGG), Semantic-Aware Anatomization (SAA), Probabilistic Suppression with Utility Bounds (PSUB), Geo-Temporal Indistinguishability (GTI), and Ensemble Privacy Composition (EPC). The blockchain layer adds Merkle Hash Tree verification, PBFT-based validation, zero-knowledge proof compliance checking, and smart contract-based access control. Evaluation used a synthetic dataset (10,000 records) and two real clinical benchmarks (Wisconsin Breast Cancer, N = 569; Diabetes, N = 442). Results SENTINEL-Chain attains a privacy score of 79.9% and utility of 98.2%, producing a combined score of 178.1% that exceeds all 16 baselines by 4%-95%. Correlation fidelity reaches 99.9% for claim amounts, 99.6% for length of stay, 99.7% for age, and 99.1% for severity indices. The framework shows 100% resistance to record linkage attacks, with membership inference attacker advantage below the random guessing baseline. The blockchain layer processes 9,988 transactions in 101 blocks with complete integrity verification. Formal Renyi DP composition yields ε = 7.08 ( δ = 10 −5 ), and throughput reaches approximately 3,600 records/second up to one million records. Discussion SENTINEL-Chain addresses five identified gaps in healthcare data publishing: correlation destruction, the privacy-blockchain disconnect, single-technique brittleness, verification without disclosure, and limited attack resistance evaluation. Smart contract gas estimation on Ethereum indicates a per-record registration cost of 61,895 gas units; Layer-2 deployment would reduce costs by 10-100x.
Alireza Kavousi, István András Seres, Zhipeng Wang
Regulatory compliance is increasingly mandatory for decentralized finance and privacy-enhancing technologies. Current approaches rely on binary inclusion/exclusion lists or retroactive graph analysis by centralized blockchain intelligence firms. This approach strips honest users of their financial privacy, leads to false positives and negatives, and forces decentralized platforms to bear the burden of on-chain transaction monitoring. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift: moving from platform-side surveillance to user-side provenance. We introduce Proof of Source of Funds (PoSoF), a novel cryptographic framework that shifts the burden to the user. Rather than the platform tracing funds, the user locally generates a zero-knowledge proof demonstrating that their deposit originates exclusively from a set of compliant sources. The platform is thus relieved of chain-analysis duties, requiring a constant-time, O(1) verification to enforce admission control. We formulate a unified temporal Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) abstraction that formalizes both UTXO and account-based ledger histories within a generalized value-flow model. Users extract a compliant sub-DAG of their transaction history and utilize Incrementally Verifiable Computation (IVC) to prove rigorous state-transition predicates that protect against various attack vectors. Crucially, PoSoF provides verifiable cryptographic provenance; it guarantees the legitimacy of the funds without leaking the intermediate transaction topology, intermediary addresses, or the specific origins utilized. We formally define the security properties of PoSoF and evaluate an Ethereum-compatible prototype. Our benchmarks demonstrate that fully private, proactive compliance is highly practical, requiring only ~1.8 s to incrementally update a user's PoSoF per new transaction, and a constant-time ~1.5 ms (~800k gas) for final on-chain EVM verification.
The oracle problem, broadly understood as the difficulty of reliably incorporating external information into blockchain-based systems, has been widely examined by scholars and practitioners. Recent comparative research has shown that several challenges of modern blockchain oracles, including attributability, accountability, integrity, and query design, mirror procedural and epistemic constraints already present in ancient oracular institutions such as the Delphic Oracle. Yet the translation of these insights into applied oracle design remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces the Dodona Protocol, a modular, chain-agnostic oracle service inspired by procedural patterns identified in ancient and modern oracle systems. Named after the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona, one of the oldest oracular sanctuaries in ancient Greece, the protocol operationalizes principles such as structured consultation, access control, attributable resolution, constrained query formats, reputational accountability, and tiered service availability. Its first module implements a query and dispute resolution mechanism in which a named expert resolver provides binding answers to structured questions submitted by petitioners. The oracle does not claim to reveal objective truth; rather, it produces outcomes that parties have agreed in advance to accept. The paper presents the design rationale, architecture, and comparative positioning of the Dodona Protocol. It frames the protocol as a living research experiment within the Design Science Research tradition, where the deployed system functions as the research artifact and operational data support structured analysis, iterative refinement, and peer-reviewed dissemination. In doing so, the paper seeks to bridge the gap between oracle theory and oracle practice.
Version 2.4.0 supersedes v2.3.0 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20355497) and is the sixth paper in the immo.quick Core technical series (10.5281/zenodo.19634279 → 19799660 → 19969948 → 20078326 → 20355497 → this paper). Overview This paper presents the complete institutional specification of immo.quick Core — a nine-layer deterministic compliance enforcement infrastructure operating across 47 jurisdictions. It is not a paper about technology. It is a paper about institutional legitimacy — about what it means, in a world of deterministic machines, for an institution to prove that it acted correctly. Every previous compliance document in history has answered the question: "Did we follow the process?" This paper answers a different question: "Can we prove, with mathematical certainty, that no impermissible movement produced a consequence — and that no unknown party could have caused one?" The answer is yes. The architecture enforces it. The enforcement is not optional. What v2.4.0 Adds to v2.3.0 v2.3.0 established the complete epistemological foundation, the nine-layer architecture, 15 jurisdictions, complete sector analysis, geopolitical dimensions, and the economic case. v2.4.0 adds four structural elements not present in v2.3.0: Element 1 — The Nine Gamechangers: The first systematic documentation of the capability advances that place immo.quick Core in a categorically different strategic position. These are not product features. They are architectural consequences of the nine-layer system — capabilities that emerge from the architecture and could not exist without it: EPA Offline-First Verification (SSL for compliance decisions), Bi-Temporal Legal State Replay (compliance time machine), Cross-Institution Proof Network (SWIFT for compliance verdicts), Regulatory DNA Sequencing (live law tracking to zero-downtime deploy), Intraday Settlement Finality (T+0 in under 2 seconds), Legal Pathway Optimizer (optimal jurisdiction in 9ms), Machine Law Constitution (immutable rule foundation on Ethereum and IPFS), Compliance Credit Score (compliance as a balance sheet asset), and Post-CMOS Governance Readiness (investor track — strategic roadmap signal). Element 2 — Law as Code / German Federal Government Initiative: The Bundesregierung's Digitalcheck program and the formal Law-as-Code initiative (2023–2026) represent the first sovereign government mandate for machine-readable law. immo.quick Core's Machine Law Engine is the only production implementation of this paradigm at institutional scale. This is not coincidence. It is architectural convergence. Element 3 — White House National Cybersecurity Strategy (2023) and EO 14028: The US Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity and the National Cybersecurity Strategy mandate zero-trust architecture, post-quantum cryptography migration, and SBOM requirements for critical infrastructure. immo.quick Core satisfies all three mandates simultaneously — by architectural construction, not by configuration. Element 4 — The Legacy Integration Protocol: Precisely how immo.quick Core connects to, validates, wraps, and structurally elevates existing compliance infrastructure without requiring system replacement. The anti-rip-and-replace architecture. Architecture Summary The nine-layer enforcement system comprises: Layer 0 (DEPE — Deterministic Execution Proof Engine, 49ms total from proposal to permanent proof), Layer 1 (PAS — Prior Admissibility Space, closed-world assumption with five mandatory conjunctive conditions), Layer 2 (BTL — Bi-Temporal Ledger, BFT quorum n=9 f=3 q=7, WORM architecture), Layer 3 (EAP — Exogenous Anchor Protocol, hardware-attested dual-channel measurement, 28ms maximum heartbeat gap), Layer 4 (SOTB — Sensor/Oracle Trust Bridge), Layer 5 (MLE — Machine Law Engine, 7-stage compilation pipeline), Layer 6 (ZKP — Zero-Knowledge Proof subsystem, Groth16/PLONK/Bulletproofs), Layer 7 (PQC — Post-Quantum Cryptography, CRYSTALS-Kyber-1024/Dilithium-3/SPHINCS+, NIST FIPS 203/204/205), Layer 8 (GLD — Governance Logic Divergence engine, maker-checker independence quantification). Document Structure Part I — The Complete Problem Statement. Part II — The Nine-Layer Architecture. Part III — The Nine Gamechangers (v2.4.0 new). Part IV — Law as Code: The German Federal Government Initiative (v2.4.0 new). Part V — The White House Cybersecurity Strategy and EO 14028 (v2.4.0 new). Part VI — Complete Legal and Jurisdictional Grounding (47 jurisdictions). Part VII — What immo.quick Core Does to Existing Systems: The Legacy Integration Protocol (v2.4.0 new). Part VIII — The Complete Platform: Every Module. Part IX — Complete Sector Analysis (Banking, Insurance, Real Estate, Government, Cloud). Part X — The Geopolitical Dimension. Part XI — The Economic Case: Monopoly, Moat, FOMO, EBITDA. Part XII — The Falsifiability Standard. Conclusion — For the Permanent Record. Key Claims Established The Boundary-Behavior Gap — the space between process documentation and governance proof — is closed by mathematical construction for the first time. The Past Irreversibility Principle: every transaction processed without immo.quick Core produces a compliance history that is permanently unrecoverable. The Falsifiability Standard: all claims in this document are falsifiable by counter-proof. No counter-proof has been produced. None is expected. Historical Compliance Failures Addressed Wirecard AG (2020, €1.9B), Libor manipulation (2012, $9B+ fines), UBS rogue trader (2011, $2.3B), Cum-Ex dividend stripping (ongoing, €55B+ EU-wide), 1MDB (2015, $4.5B), Danske Bank AML (2018, €200B flow), Credit Suisse/Archegos (2021, $5.5B). immo.quick Core produces a PAS BLOCK with DPA on every one of these at T=0 — not after the fact, not during audit, at the moment of formation. Version Series 10.5281/zenodo.19634279 → 19799660 → 19969948 → 20078326 → 20355497 → 20562464 (this paper) Related Work Economics of Deterministic Compliance Infrastructure: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20229204. immo.quick Serverless Edition v1.1.0: DOI pending.
We analyze competing auctions in intermediated markets, where a seller selects among parallel mechanisms for the sale of a single good, most prominently the relay-and-protocol architecture of proposer-builder separation in Ethereum. When the intermediary can enforce single-homing on its bidders, sealed-bid second-price intermediary auctions fully unravel into the sealed first-price principal auction; open bidding-format intermediaries unravel only partially, collapsing into first-price in equilibrium under symmetric latency and sorting fast bidders to the intermediary under asymmetric latency. Any last-look advantage is removed through the availability of a credible sealed bidding channel. These results extend to multi-plexing environments (no enforcement by the intermediary). While the unraveling result indicates that the availability of a sealed first-price bidding channel pushes the overall market to the same auction structure, the very assumption of the credibility of such channel is problematic, as the seller may have an incentive to leak information: a first-price auction is leakage-resistant in the presence of a single ``fast'' bidder but not against two or more. However, if the seller can credibly commit to not leak bids, it is optimal for them to do so. A main motivation is the forthcoming Glamsterdam update of Ethereum: our analysis suggests that the availability of an in-protocol (first-price) bidding channel severely limits the design space for out-of-protocol auctions by relays and other intermediaries.
C. Rupa, K. Vijaya Bhaskar Reddy, Srinivas Jagirdar, Srinivas Rao Pulluri · 6 authors
Land registration and record management systems worldwide continue to face significant challenges, including document fraud, long processing times, and inefficient maintenance procedures. Traditional methods involve several technical limitations that reduce reliability and transparency. To address these issues, the proposed system leverages blockchain technology to improve process efficiency, data integrity, and security in land registration workflows. In the proposed framework, users upload property details and supporting land documents while initiating a sale. However, fraudulent document uploads remain a common issue, enabling sellers to receive payments using forged records without the buyer’s knowledge. To mitigate such risks, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is integrated to authenticate and validate uploaded land documents before further processing. Only documents verified as authentic are stored on the blockchain. The government authority converts these validated documents into Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and mints them on the Ethereum blockchain. A unique hash is generated for each document, enabling secure verification and traceability through platforms such as Etherscan. Once the documents are confirmed to be valid, the property is approved for sale, and the ownership transfer between the seller and buyer is securely executed through the blockchain enabled system. We evaluated the performance of proposed framework by considering both blockchain performance metrics and CNN evaluation metrics.
A new form of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), termed speculative MEV, has emerged across Layer-2 blockchains. Unlike Ethereum mainnet, many Layer-2 systems lack a public mempool, forcing extraction strategies to become probabilistic: searchers emit multiple identical transactions hoping to capture an opportunity first. This generates substantial transaction spam, increasing fees and wasting block space. We investigate speculative Oracle Extractable Value (OEV), a form of MEV associated with liquidating undercollateralized loans via speculative backrunning of oracle price updates. We propose a methodology for detecting speculative liquidations in the wild and apply it across Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism. On October 10, 2025, we identify 64 speculative liquidators on Aave (57% of all detected liquidators) and 831 successful speculative liquidations (39% of all successful liquidations across the three chains). We further examine whether latency differences in oracle price feed updates across blockchains can be exploited for cross-chain OEV. Specifically, we ask whether a searcher can observe oracle updates on one chain and frontrun liquidation opportunities on another. We systematically analyze Chainlink Decentralized Oracle Network (DON) configurations (deviation thresholds, heartbeat intervals, and submitted price observations) across Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, and Optimism. Our dataset comprises 63 Chainlink feeds, 12,009 price updates, and over 100,000 oracle observations linked to 2,986 Aave liquidations. We show that independent DONs consume largely identical off-chain price data nearly simultaneously yet publish updates at different times, creating statistically predictable cross-chain exploitation windows. We demonstrate that Chainlink updates on Optimism can predict subsequent updates on Arbitrum and Base, enabling speculative cross-chain OEV extraction.
Alternative data availability (AltDA) systems provide Ethereum L2s with an external data publication layer for high throughput rollup designs. By moving bulk data publication outside of Ethereum, AltDA allows L2s to process more data than native DA. However, this replacement introduces a new consensus critical integration layer. Existing ecosystem frameworks identify high level risks, such as external DA trust assumptions and the presence or absence of a DA verifier, but do not provide a complete specification for how an L2 should integrate with AltDA. This gap can lead to L2 halts, inconsistent derivation across honest L2 nodes, invalid state assertions, or bridge attacks. This paper presents a canonical validation framework for secure AltDA integration. We model the boundary as a typed, deterministic, and total translation from L1 inbox bytes to an AltDA commitment, then to externally available data, and finally to the rollup payload consumed by the rest of core L2s logic. The central principle is that every adversarial input must lead to a defined unique outcome. We show how missing obligations lead to concrete failure modes, including underconstrained settlement, derivation halts, inconsistent honest node behavior, invalid state assertions, and bridge safety failures. We then apply the framework to representative AltDA integration architectures, including Celestia-Blobstream, EigenDA based designs, and Avail-ZKsync. Our evaluation shows that secure AltDA integration is not determined solely by the DA provider or bridge. The surrounding L2 integration must also enforce the full validation relation connecting L1 inbox inputs to accepted L2 state.
CiteChain is a decentralized, blockchain-based platform designed to register, track, and verify scientific citations while rewarding contributors with a native utility token (CITE). This working paper presents the problem statement, proposed system architecture, tokenomics model, and development roadmap for the CiteChain protocol. Current academic citation systems (Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar) suffer from centralized control, manipulation, lack of incentives for researchers, and slow updates. CiteChain addresses these issues through a combination of smart contracts on an EVM-compatible blockchain (Ethereum/Polygon), decentralized storage via IPFS/Filecoin, ORCID-based researcher identity verification, and a community-driven citation validation mechanism with economic incentives and anti-abuse slashing penalties. The CITE token (ERC-20, fixed supply of 1 billion) rewards researchers for submitting papers, validating citations, and reporting fraud. Governance is managed through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The protocol is designed to be open-access, permissionless, and censorship-resistant. Keywords: decentralized science, DeSci, blockchain, citation network, smart contracts, tokenomics, ORCID, IPFS, academic integrity, open science, Polygon, ERC-20.
Abstract Ethereum's transaction validity model is currently anchored in ECDSA over secp256k1, whose security assumptions weaken in the presence of large-scale quantum adversaries. While NIST-standardized post-quantum signature schemes such as ML-DSA, SLH-DSA, and FALCON provide resistance against quantum attacks, integrating these schemes into Ethereum introduces significant systems-level challenges involving bounded execution, gas determinism, and adversarial verification complexity. This paper introduces PQSigAbstract, a modular post-quantum signature verification architecture for Ethereum that separates validation into a stateless pre-validation phase and a deferred cryptographic verification phase linked through commitment binding. The design defines typed Verification Modules with explicit gas estimation, a versioned Scheme Registry with quarantine-based deployment safety, and a probabilistic aggregation mechanism for non-aggregatable post-quantum schemes. The proposed architecture preserves EU-CMA security while maintaining compatibility with ERC-4337 and RIP-7560 account abstraction models. Formal gas cost models are derived for ML-DSA-44, FALCON-512, and SLH-DSA-128f, and empirical evaluation demonstrates practical deployment feasibility for high-value Ethereum accounts despite substantially higher verification costs relative to ECDSA. Status: Technical Report / Working Paper Author: Ankita Virani Affiliation: University of Colorado Boulder
While full ledger access is theoretically possible on public blockchains, in reality it is often not possible. Things that can be seen are limited by storage limitations, client design, indexing services, and off-chain execution pathways. This means that entire ledger objects are rarely used for empirical blockchain analysis; instead, observable projections are typically used. In this research, the observability of blockchain is recast as an inferential problem with incomplete observation. Studying identifiability, information loss, and irreducible uncertainty under coarsened access, the framework defines a full ledger, an observable ledger, and an observability mechanism. Three distinct visibility regimes, independent Bernoulli, clustered, and activity-dependent, are assessed in the simulation study. Reduced visibility raises uncertainty inflation, root mean squared error, variance, and mean squared error across all three regimes. The most severe deterioration happens when the condition of the underlying ledger determines visibility. This empirical study employs Google BigQuery's publicly indexed Ethereum block data spanning blocks 18,000,000 to 18,001,000. Over the chosen Ethereum period, descriptive summaries reveal a large amount of fluctuation in gas utilised, transaction count, and basic charge per gas at the block level. Experiments with controlled missingness on the observed slice reveal that RMSE and trend estimate bias grow with increasing missingness, and that the degree of distortion is significantly affected by whether the incompleteness is MCAR-like, MAR-like, or MNAR-like. This research proves that partial observability isn't just a secondary data issue; it can significantly affect inference on Ethereum block-level summaries.
We present the first machine-checked correctness proof of the OpenZeppelin reentrancy-guard pattern against a Lean 4 state-machine model of production-deployed Solidity source. All thirteen theorems are machine-checked with zero sorry, zero user-introduced axioms, and an axiom footprint bounded by [propext] (a standard mathlib4 axiom), gated under continuous integration. Smart contract reentrancy has caused over US$500M in documented losses since 2016, with the DAO 2016 attack draining ~3.6M ETH and forcing the hard fork that split Ethereum. The OpenZeppelin ReentrancyGuard pattern is the de facto defense across production DeFi, yet no prior work has established its discriminating power: that the guard blocks attacks on vulnerable instances, preserves correct execution for non-attacking transactions, and distinguishes adjacent safe and vulnerable variants. Prior efforts formalized either guard correctness on toy contracts or attack feasibility on isolated instances - not both directions plus boundary cases against production source. We verify three production instantiations - DAO 2016, Compound v2, and Aave V3 flashLoan - plus a minimal-diff mutant of Aave V3's flashLoan (flashLoanVulnerable) isolating one security-critical difference, via mutation testing. The tridirectional structure pairs (a) attack reproduction of the DAO 2016 pattern, (b) a correctness proof for Compound v2, and (c) a boundary-case proof distinguishing Aave V3's CEI-correct flashLoan from the mutant. A capstone meta-theorem composes the three under a no-retrofit discipline, demonstrated at the first cross-protocol stress test (Compound v2 to Aave V3); broader-family portability is future work. Full Lean 4 source, CI config and reproduction commands are at https://github.com/rayiskander2406/qanary-contracts, reproducible at v1.6-phase7-closure (substrate: v1.3-layer6-closure).