Follow blockchain research across journals, conferences, and preprint repositories.
1,187 results · page 17 of 50
Kun Hao, Junchang Xin, Zhiqiong Wang, Zhongming Yao · 5 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Jitendra Saxena
In previous studies of bit coin it is notified with an objective and mission and vision that a new decentralized economic system termed as Bitcoin. The financial institutions are not included in the solely peer-to-peer electronic cash transactions and would allow online payments to be sent directly from one customer to another customer. The version was practically implemented by the concept of the bit coin, which is a practical real-time study of decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) automatically driven with full-proof transparency, integrity, and decentralization. Decentralization means it is executed in peer-to-peer transactions including nodes in the network for users, and it is fully transparent because the network is open in public domain. All these characteristics taken together are the milestones of trust-free transactions systems.
Huan Yu Wu, Xin Yang, Chentao Yue, Hye-Young Paik · 5 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Quinten Stokkink, Can Umut Ileri, Johan Pouwelse
Web3 networks are emerging to replace centrally-governed networking infrastructure. The integrity of the shared public infrastructure of Web3 networks is guaranteed through data sharing between nodes. However, due to the unstructured and highly partitioned nature of Web3 networks, data sharing between nodes in different partitions is a challenging task. In this paper we present the TSRP mechanism, which approaches the data sharing problem through nodes auditing each other to enforce carrying of data between partitions. Reputation is used as an analogue for the likelihood of nodes interacting with nodes from other partitions in the future. The number of copies of data shared with other nodes is inversely related to the nodes’ reputation. We use a real-world trace of Twitter to show how our implementation can converge to an equal number of copies as structured approaches.
Racin Nygaard
We have built a bare-metal testbed in order to perform large-scale, reproducible evaluations of erasure coding algorithms. Our testbed supports at least 1000 Ethereum Swarm peers running on 30 machines. Running experimental evaluation is time-consuming and challenging. Researchers must consider the experimental software's limitations and artifacts. If not controlled, the network behavior may cause inaccurate measurements. This paper shares the lessons learned from a bare-metal evaluation of erasure coding algorithms and how to create a controlled-environment in a cluster consisting of 1000 Ethereum Swarm peers.
Ruiguang Li, Jiawei Zhu, Dawei Xu, Fudong Wu · 6 authors
Bitcoin has made an increasing impact on the world's economy and financial order, which attracted extensive attention of researchers and regulators from all over the world. Most previous studies had focused more on the transaction layer, but less on the network layer. In this paper, we developed BNS(Bitcoin Network Sniffer), which could find and connect nodes in the Bitcoin network, and made a measurement in detail. We collected nearly 4.1 million nodes in 1.5 hours and identified 9,515 reachable nodes. We counted the reachable nodes' properties such as: service type, port number, client version and geographic distribution. In addition, we analyzed the stability of the reachable nodes in depth and found nearly 60% kept stable during 15 days. Finally, we proposed a new approach to infer the Bitcoin network topology by analyzing the Neighbor Addresses of Adjacent Nodes and their timestamps, which had an accuracy over 80%.
Kun Zhou, Chunping Wang, Xiaoqing Wang, Shenghang Chen · 5 authors
As of the end of September 2021, the size of the Bitcoin blockchain has reached 366.9GB and continues to increase at an average annual growth rate of 17.6%. The large-scale demand for storage space constrains new nodes from joining the network, which seriously hinders the development of blockchain technology. In this paper, to explore the data characteristics of the Bitcoin blockchain, we performed a comprehensive statistical experiment on the current 680,000 blocks. The analysis results indicated that in nearly 95% of blocks, the number of spent transaction output (STXO) accounts for more than 67% of the total transaction outputs. Inspired by this feature, we proposed a novel storage scheme to reduce the size of blocks by deleting the transaction data with the STXO ratio over 67% first and compressing fixed-length fields of those transactions. Then, the newly generated block files were deposited to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) private network to improve the scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain. The experiments and evalutions showed that the proposed scheme achieved a compression ratio of 96.9% and saved 330GB of storage space for the Bitcoin full nodes while guaranteeing the normal operation of the Bitcoin network.
Lingxiao Yang, Xuewen Dong, Yushu Zhang, Qiang Qu · 6 authors
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) do hold the promise of providing Web3 with the opportunity for self-sovereignty of users' physical assets. However, existing NFT marketplaces lack a generic design that allows the value of assets to flow efficiently. In this paper, we propose a generic NFT architecture for Web3. The architecture supports the rapid development of the upper application environment and automated value mapping of the underlying physical asset environment. To connect these two environments, a generic connecter has been designed to provide flexible storage for mapping data management, and to support universal cross-chain transactions. With these features, the values of heterogeneous physical assets can coexist in a unified Web3 world, and rich value transfer services can be developed on demand. This paper discusses the background of the proposed architecture, the open problems and our initial solution, as well as our design principles and advantages, and finally validates this novel NFT architecture.
Dennis Trautwein, Aravindh Raman, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro · 8 authors
Recent years have witnessed growing consolidation of web operations. For example, the majority of web traffic now originates from a few organizations, and even micro-websites often choose to host on large pre-existing cloud infrastructures. In response to this, the "Decentralized Web" attempts to distribute ownership and operation of web services more evenly. This paper describes the design and implementation of the largest and most widely used Decentralized Web platform --- the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) --- an open-source, content-addressable peer-to-peer network that provides distributed data storage and delivery. IPFS has millions of daily content retrievals and already underpins dozens of third-party applications. This paper evaluates the performance of IPFS by introducing a set of measurement methodologies that allow us to uncover the characteristics of peers in the IPFS network. We reveal presence in more than 2700 Autonomous Systems and 152 countries, the majority of which operate outside large central cloud providers like Amazon or Azure. We further evaluate IPFS performance, showing that both publication and retrieval delays are acceptable for a wide range of use cases. Finally, we share our datasets, experiences and lessons learned.
Malcolm A. Smith, Alexander Castro, Mohamed Rahouti, Moussa Ayyash · 5 authors
One hundred thousand bulletins, eight thousand digital billboards, one million busses, forty thousand taxis, and thirty-five thousand movie theaters are examples of out-of-home (OOH) advertising. OOH is an advertising media located outside homes, generally found in highly-transited public locations. Digital out-of-home advertising is any OOH media displayed digitally, such as on a digital billboard. OOH advertising is a growing multi-billion-dollar industry that remains controlled by a small number of parties, stakeholders, or providers with high barriers to entry for advertisers. Large purchase minimums have made it impractical for low-budget advertiser to publish their content on OOH platforms. This paper introduces the ScreenCoin protocol, a solution to this issue that utilizes a decentralized ad network built on a blockchain and a token called Screencoin to advertise content. In this system, miners will earn tokens by storing and serving advertisers’ content, creating a decentralized OOH ad network with fewer entry barriers.
Sebastian Göndör, Hakan Yıldız, Martin Westerkamp, Axel Kuupper
Decentralized services and applications provide a multitude of advantages for their users, such as improved privacy, control, and independence from third parties. Anyhow, decentralization comes at the cost of certain disadvantages, such as increased application complexity or communication overhead. This aggravates the development and deployment of decentralized services and applications. In this paper we present Blade, a software platform that aims to ease the effort of development, deployment, and administration of decentralized services by implementing reusable solutions for recurring challenges developers are facing when designing decentralized service architectures. This includes functionality for e.g. identity management, access control, request handling, verification of authenticity and integrity, discovery, or routing. Blade implements all this functionality in a Blade server instance, which can be deployed on a lightweight device, such as a NAS, Raspberry Pi, or router at home. This allows users without expert knowledge to run a Blade instance with already existing hardware with little overhead. Blade supports polyglot Blade modules that implement extended functionality, such as interfaces, frontends, and business logic of decentralized applications, e.g. a decentralized instant messaging service or an online social network. Based on the Oracle GraalVM, Blade modules can be implemented in a variety of programming languages and utilize the functionality provided by the Blade server instance. Blade modules are published in a Ethereum-based decentralized marketplace from where they can be installed directly via the Blade instances...
Jean-Philippe Eisenbarth, Thibault Cholez, Olivier Perrin
No abstract is available for this record.
Deepal Tennakoon, Vincent Gramoli
Decentralized Applications (DApps) have seen widespread use in the recent past driving the world towards a new decentralized version of the web known as Web3.0. DApp-supported blockchains like Ethereum have largely been responsible for this drive supporting the largest eco-system of DApps. Although the low performance provided by Ethereum has been a major impediment to realizing a decentralized web, several high-performance blockchains have been introduced recently to bridge this gap. Most of these blockchains rely on consensus optimizations. Only a few enhance other parts of the blockchain protocol that involves transaction management: the validation of transactions, broadcast of transactions, encapsulation and dissemination of blocks with transactions, re-validation and execution of transactions in blocks, storage of blocks, and confirmation of transaction commits to senders upon request. In this paper, we enhance transaction management by introducing a novel transaction validation reduction and a per sub-block processing to optimize the block storage. We empirically show the performance improvements gained by our enhanced transaction management in the Smart Red Belly Blockchain (SRBB) VM we develop. Finally, we integrate our SRBB VM to an already optimized consensus from a known blockchain to develop the Smart Red Belly Blockchain. Our results show that SRBB achieves a peak throughput of 4000 TPS and an average throughput of 2000 TPS on 200 nodes spread across 5 continents. SRBB outperforms 6 other blockchains when running the exchange DApp featuring a real workload trace taken from Nasdaq.
Jignasha R. Shah, Deepak Sharma
Permissionless or public Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) provide full decentralization and transparency. The performance evaluation of permissionless Distributed Ledger Technologies is difficult due to their dynamic nature. This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of permissionless Ethereum DLT. Public test networks highly resemble the main network and capture the dynamic nature of permissionless DLTs. The paper proposes the BloodTrace application to trace the donated blood from the donor to the patient. The performance is evaluated by deploying the BloodTrace smart contract on the public test network Ropsten. The data collection for the calculation of the performance parameters can be performed in two ways: i) RPC based method ii) Log-based method. RPC based method involves polling the blockchain for each transaction data. The log-based method involves the collection of logs and fewer RPC calls to the Blockchain. The probabilistic nature of transaction confirmation is also taken into consideration while calculating the Latency (Finality) by analysing the effect of block confirmations on the latency. The evaluation results are then compared with the results obtained by the Hyperledger Caliper Benchmarking tool as it is using RPC based approach for calculation of performance parameters.
Hanyue Dou, Lingyuan Yin, Yuan Lu, Jing Xu
No abstract is available for this record.
Rajat Verma, Namrata Dhanda, Vishal Nagar
No abstract is available for this record.
Mirko Zichichi, Luca Serena, Stefano Ferretti, Gabriele D’Angelo
Many services that are taken for granted in smart cities are not even remotely available in dislocated areas yet, due to the lack of or too costly wide area network connectivity. With the aim to offer a practical and secure way to transport data and allow for communications in such constrained scenarios, we focus on the problem of incentivizing to data mules, i.e. devices dedicated to enable the data transfer even in the absence of the Internet. Our solution combines the use of several distributed technologies for verifying the correct behavior of all the partici-pants and incentivize them. We focus on the use of state channels to support the flow of smart-contract-based tokens as a form of payment, in a condition where participants communicate only with others in physical proximity. Furthermore, we validate the viability of the application through the simulation of peer-to-peer interactions between the participants. In this work we achieve positive results in terms of communication latency and percentage of client nodes which are able to benefit from the system.
Zening Zhao, Jinsong Wang, Kai Shi, Hongwei Zhang
The Bitcoin system uses anonymous transactions to protect users’ privacy, but attackers can use this defect of bitcoin transactions to discover the association between bitcoin addresses. At present, address clustering methods can make use of these vulnerabilities to associate the address as an entity to a certain extent. However, these address clustering methods have problems such as an insufficient inference rate of change addresses, inability to identify mixing transactions, and low efficiency of algorithm implementation. We propose some solutions to these problems. 1) We improve the method of change address identification to identify and mark more of them. 2) We propose a heuristic address clustering method related to mixing transactions, which can identify their privacy vulnerabilities. 3) We propose an incremental address clustering method that can store the historical state and more quickly discover the anonymity defect of Bitcoin. We use real Bitcoin transaction data to demonstrate our method’s feasibility and reliability.
Elio Jordan Lopes, Shaolin Kataria, Shashank Keshav, I. Sumaiya Thaseen · 7 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Lucian Trestioreanu, Cyril Cassagnes, Radu State
At the technical level, the goal of Interledger is to provide an architecture and a minimal set of protocols to enable interoperability between any value transfer systems. The Interledger protocol is a protocol for inter-blockchain payments which can also accommodate FIAT currencies. To understand how it is possible to achieve this goal, several aspects of the technology require a deeper analysis. For this reason, in our journey to become knowledgeable and active contributors we decided to create our own test-bed on our premises. By doing so, we noticed that some aspects are well documented but we found that others might need more attention and clarification. Despite a large community effort, the task to keep information on a fast evolving software ecosystem up-to-date is tedious and not always the main priority for such a project. The purpose of this tutorial is to guide, through several examples and hands-on activities, community members who want to engage at different levels. The tutorial consolidates all the relevant information from generating a simple payment to ultimately creating a test-bed with the Interledger protocol suite between Ripple and other distributed ledger technologies.
Jacques Bou Abdo, Shuvalaxmi Dass, Basheer Qolomany, Liaquat Hossain
Abstract The world economy is experiencing the novel adoption of distributed currencies that are free from the control of central banks. Distributed currencies suffer from extreme volatility, and this can lead to catastrophic implications during future economic crisis. Understanding the dynamics of this new type of currencies is vital for empowering supervisory bodies from current reactive and manual incident responders to more proactive and well-informed planners. Bitcoin, the first and dominant distributed cryptocurrency, is still notoriously vague, especially for a financial instrument with market value exceeding $1 trillion. Modeling of bitcoin overlay network poses a number of important theoretical and methodological challenges. Current measuring approaches, for example, fail to identify the real network size of bitcoin miners. This drastically undermines the ability to predict forks, the suitable mining difficulty and most importantly the resilience of the network supporting bitcoin. In this work, we developed Evolutionary Random Graph, a theoretical model that describes the network of bitcoin miners. The correctness of this model has been validated using simulated and measure bitcoin data. We then predicted forking, optimal mining difficulty, network size and consequently the network’s inability to stand a drastic drop in bitcoin price using the current mining configuration.
Qin Wang, Rujia Li, Qi Wang, Shiping Chen · 6 authors
Web3 is the most hyped concept from 2020 to date, greatly motivating the prosperity of the Internet of Value and Metaverse. However, no solid evidence stipulates the exact definition, criterion, or standard in the sense of such a buzzword. To fill the gap, we aim to clarify the term in this work. We narrow down the connotation of Web3 by separating it from high-level controversy argues and, instead, focusing on its protocol, architecture, and evaluation from the perspective of blockchain fields. Specifically, we have identified all potential architectural design types and evaluated each of them by employing the scenario-based architecture evaluation method. The evaluation shows that existing applications are neither secure nor adoptable as claimed. Meanwhile, we also discuss opportunities and challenges surrounding the Web3 space and answer several prevailing questions from communities. A primary result is that Web3 still relies on traditional internet infrastructure, not as independent as advocated. This report, as of June 2022, provides the first strict research on Web3 in the view of blockchain. We hope that this work would provide a guide for the development of future Web3 services.
Khaled Tarmissi, Atef Shalan, Abdullah Al Shahrani, Rayan Alsulamy · 6 authors
Abstract The authors have requested that this preprint be removed from Research Square.
Mohammad Nassar, Ori Rottenstreich, Ariel Orda
Blockchain leader-based protocols elect leaders for proposing the next block of transactions. Proposed blocks need to pass a validation routine in order to be added to the blockchain. Proposers may prioritize certain transactions based on their fees or accounts. A fair block selection follows a random selection of transactions among pending transactions that a proposer is aware of. The validators may only have partial knowledge of the network transactions making it challenging to validate the random selection. We propose a protocol to encourage fair block selection in a leader-based blockchain network. Our protocol offers two main contributions. First, suggesting an algorithm that evaluates the proposed blocks based on both their transactions’ issuance times and zone structure. Second, providing incentives for acting honestly and diminishing malicious and dishonest nodes. To accomplish this, we use a reputation system, whereby each node is given a reputation score based on its actions (i.e. latest proposals and evaluations). We demonstrate the improved accuracy of our protocol by implementing experiments based on Ethereum topology, comparing it with Helix [1], an existing consensus algorithm for a fair block selection.