Blockchain Papers

Divesh Sarkar, Manish Sarkar

No abstract is available for this record.

Ashray Dubey, Thatikonda Supraja, Priyanka Chawla

No abstract is available for this record.

A. Galdeman, M. Zignani, C. Quadri, S. Gaito

No abstract is available for this record.

Michael J. Freedman

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has revolutionized how digital transactions are recorded and verified, enabling decentralized trust without intermediaries. Cryptography plays a foundational role in ensuring the integrity of data within these ledgers by providing mechanisms for secure data hashing, digital signatures, and consensus protocols. This paper explores the cryptographic techniques essential to maintaining integrity in DLT, including hash functions, public-key cryptography, and Merkle trees. We analyze how these tools mitigate tampering and fraud while supporting transparency and immutability in distributed environments. A comparative overview of cryptographic primitives in popular blockchain platforms is also provided. The study concludes by highlighting future challenges and potential advancements in cryptographic methods for enhancing DLT integrity.

Alsaadah Saif Mohammed ALabri, Shahd Ibrahim Ali AL Balushi

Blockchain is a distributed database used to store an unchangeable, permanent record of all transactions. It is operated by processors that are a member of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and functions as a decentralized database. Demand for decentralized applications (DApps), which provide accountability, safety, and independence beyond conventional centralized systems, is rising as a result of the quick development of blockchain technology. However, combining frontend, back end, and blockchain components into a unified and effective framework might be difficult for DApp designers. In order to simplify the creation of decentralized applications, this study suggests a full-stack blockchain framework that connects various levels. The framework creates an end-to-end development environment designed for compatibility and scalability by utilizing contemporary technologies, such as Solidity, with Web3.js for smart contract integration, React.js for the front-end, and Node.js/Express.js for the backend. Using cryptographic methods and decentralized storage (like IPFS), a layered architecture is intended to provide modularity, effective data flow, and increased security. The suggested framework streamlines DApp development processes, lowers latency in blockchain interactions, and boosts developer efficiency, according to implementation data. By offering a thorough architectural blueprint and execution method for full-stack DApp creation, this study advances the area of blockchain engineering and opens the door for safe, effective, and user-focused decentralized ecosystems.

Alexandros Antonov, Evangelos Kolyvas, Spyros Voulgaris

Reaching consensus in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) based consensus protocols, requires supermajority agreement among participating validator nodes. Such protocols need significant network resources due to the concurrent voting of a large number of consensus nodes. As a solution, these nodes are divided into committees, with each committee voting individually at a dedicated time slot. In this paper, we introduce CliqueSensus, a protocol that, given a distribution of consensus nodes into committees, lets them self-organize into small, ephemeral clusters structured in clique topologies, to accelerate the voting process, while using only a small fraction of the network resources required by conventional message dissemination methods. Our evaluation demonstrates that our protocol exhibits rapid convergence and operates with minimal network overhead. We focus on the PoS consensus algorithm adopted by Ethereum 2.0. In addition to our protocol, we also analyze and simulate the clustering approach that Ethereum has adopted, showcasing that our protocol can reduce validation message dissemination time by 23% to 70%, while requiring about 190 times fewer validation message forwards.

Matthieu Pigaglio, Onur Ascigil, Michał Król, Felix Lange · 9 authors

Layer-2 protocols such as rollups can help address Ethereum's throughput limits. An efficient data availability layer is key for layer-2 support in Ethereum, but broadcast methods do not scale. A promising approach is the selective distribution of layer-2 data and its verification by data availability sampling (DAS). Integrating DAS with Ethereum consensus is, however, a challenge, as data must be shared and sampled within 4 seconds of each consensus slot.

Yu Gao, Carlo Campajola, Nicolò Vallarano, Andreia Sofia Teixeira · 5 authors

IOTA is a distributed ledger technology that relies on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network for communications. Recently an auto-peering algorithm was proposed to build connections among IOTA peers according to their “Mana" endowment, which is an IOTA internal reputation system. This paper’s goal is to detect potential vulnerabilities and evaluate the resilience of the P2P network generated using IOTA auto-peering algorithm against eclipse attacks. In order to do so, we interpret IOTA’s auto-peering algorithm as a random network formation model and employ different network metrics to identify cost-efficient partitions of the network. As a result, we present a potential strategy that an attacker can use to eclipse a significant part of the network, providing estimates of costs and potential damage caused by the attack. On the side, we provide an analysis of the properties of IOTA auto-peering network ensemble, as an interesting class of homophile random networks in between 1D lattices and regular Poisson graphs.

Zubaida Rehman, Mark A. Gregory, Iqbal Gondal, Hai Dong · 5 authors

Ethereum has emerged as one of the most widely used blockchain platforms, underpinning decentralized finance, smart contracts, and distributed applications. With its growing adoption, the Ethereum peer-to-peer network is susceptible to networklayer attacks including eclipse (node-isolation) attacks. To study the threats to Ethereum and to develop effective detection and mitigation strategies, researchers require controlled, reproducible, and labeled network datasets. However, datasets are scarce due to the complexity of capturing live blockchain traffic and the difficulty of confidently labeling malicious activity on public networks. In this paper, we present the design and deployment of a private Ethereum testbed for dataset collection. Our testbed consists of five virtual machines running Geth clients interconnected via a controlled gateway: four nodes act as benign Ethereum peers and one node acts as a malicious entity that performs eclipse attacks. The testbed emulates normal blockchain operations (block propagation, transaction exchanges, and peer discovery) and adversarial scenarios focused on node isolation. Wireshark is deployed on the gateway to capture the network traffic, enabling us to record raw packet traces for benign and attack scenarios. The resulting dataset provides a comprehensive view of Ethereum network-layer behavior, with traffic labeled according to ground truth (node role and attack phase). We describe the testbed, the attack procedure for generating eclipse conditions, the capture and labeling pipeline, and potential uses of the dataset for intrusion detection and resilience analysis.

Jitendra Gupta

This paper presents a decentralized, trustless architecture for IoT data trading, leveraging a subscription-based economic model, decentralized publish/subscribe communication, and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs). The system addresses scalability, integrity, confidentiality, and privacy challenges while ensuring financial incentives through end-to-end encrypted transmission and blockchain-based smart contracts. By integrating established standards and decentralized identity management, the framework secures digital rights, clarifies data ownership, and enables flexible trading mechanisms. The proposed architecture supports trustless information exchange, guarantees secrecy in IoT-based sensor data sharing, and fosters economic incentives for stakeholders. Evaluations focus on system performance, efficiency in encrypted data transmission, and trading cost optimizations. Future work includes optimizing Gas usage, enhancing broker operations, implementing a decentralized search engine for data products, and refining qualifications for data providers and brokers. This research contributes to the development of secure, scalable, and privacy-preserving IoT data trading solutions, ensuring efficient and transparent transactions.

François-Xavier Wicht, Zhengwei Tong, Shunfan Zhou, Hang Yin · 5 authors

Private BitTorrent trackers enforce upload-to-download ratios to prevent free-riding, but suffer from three critical weaknesses: reputation cannot move between trackers, centralized servers create single points of failure, and upload statistics are self-reported and unverifiable. When a tracker shuts down, users lose their contribution history and cannot prove their standing to new communities. We address these problems by storing reputation in smart contracts and replacing self-reports with cryptographic attestations. Peers sign receipts for received pieces; the tracker aggregates them via BLS signatures and updates reputation. If a tracker is unavailable, peers fall back to an authenticated distributed hash table (DHT): stored reputation acts as a public key infrastructure (PKI), preserving access control without the tracker. Reputation is portable across tracker failures through single-hop migration in factory-deployed contracts. We also address the privacy implications of publishing public keys and reputations tied to private trackers on a public ledger: we propose ephemeral session keys to prevent linking peer identities, zero-knowledge membership proofs for anonymous DHT participation, and confidential reputation using homomorphic commitments. We formalize the security requirements, prove four security properties under standard cryptographic assumptions, and evaluate a prototype. Measurements show that transfer receipts add less than 5\% end-to-end overhead with typical piece sizes. To minimize signing overhead, we adopt a hybrid signature scheme: ECDSA signs individual piece receipts at transfer time for low per-operation latency, while BLS serves as the overarching scheme, enabling compact aggregation of many receipts into a single proof at report time. This design reduces client-side signing cost by an order of magnitude compared to using BLS throughout.

Manjunath Mudda, Pavithra Shetty, Seema Aparaj, H Nikhil · 6 authors

A big and always-changing network of nodes that are connected to each other is what makes Bitcoin and other decentralized block chain networks safe, scalable, and reliable. It takes a lot of time and work to accurately map and analyses these large-scale topologies because of their communication overhead and inherent complexity. We introduce a novel topology discovery methodology that addresses this issue by integrating lightweight “probe” nodes for quick data collection, a clustering mechanism to aggregate stable nodes for enhanced accuracy, and a visualization system capable of displaying the network's layered structure in realtime. Our tests on the Bitcoin network demonstrate that the suggested solution gets 95 % of the mapping right and cuts down on communication cost by roughly 72 %. The framework's architecture is not particular to Bitcoin; instead, the methodology can be used to various blockchain networks with similar peer-to-peer topologies. It may be used by researchers, developers, and system administrators to evaluate, monitor, and improve distributed ledger systems because it is scalable and works well. Its generalizability ensures that it can affect several blockchain ecosystems.

Lucianna Kiffer, Lioba Heimbach, Dennis Trautwein, Yann Vonlanthen · 5 authors

Blockchain technologies underpin an expanding ecosystem of decentralized applications, financial systems, and infrastructure. However, the fundamental networking layer that sustains these systems, the peer-to-peer (P2P) layer, of all but the top few ecosystems remains largely opaque. In this paper, we present the first longitudinal, cross-network measurement study of 36 public blockchain networks. Over 9 months (since late 2024), we deployed 15 active crawlers, sourced data from two additional community crawlers, and conducted hourly connectivity probes (e.g., pings and protocol-level handshakes) to observe the evolving state of these networks. Furthermore, by leveraging Ethereum's discovery protocols, we inferred metadata for an additional 19 auxiliary networks that utilize the Ethereum peer discovery protocol. We also explored Internet-wide scans, which only require probing each protocol's default ports with a simple, network-specific payload. This approach allows us to rapidly identify responsive peers across the entire address space without having to implement custom discovery and handshake logic for every blockchain. We validated this method on Bitcoin and similar networks with known ground truth, then applied it to Cardano, which we could not crawl directly. Our study uncovers dramatic variation in network size from under 10 to more than 10,000 active nodes. We quantify trends in IPv4 versus IPv6 usage, analyze autonomous systems and geographic concentration, and characterize churn, diurnal behavior, and the coverage and redundancy of discovery protocols. These findings expose critical differences in network resilience, decentralization, and observability. Beyond characterizing each network, our methodology demonstrates a general framework for measuring decentralized networks at scale. This opens the door for continued monitoring, benchmarking, and more transparent assessments of blockchain infrastructure across diverse ecosystems.

Qiufan Wu, Han Wang, Hui Li, Kaili Shao · 7 authors

The classical CAP theorem reveals fundamental limitations in distributed system design, namely the impossibility of simultaneously achieving strong Consistency, high Availability, and Partition tolerance. As an important distributed ledger technology, blockchain systems also face these constraints. Recent research has attempted to alleviate this problem through consensus layer or physical layer optimization techniques. However, these methods fail to achieve optimal availability due to the mismatch problem between network layer and physical layer topologies. Therefore, this paper designs a P2P broadcasting protocol that matches physical topology structures at the network layer, namely Matching-Gossip, serving as an intelligent adapter between physical topology and consensus protocols to collectively address the CAP trilemma. Experimental results demonstrate that blockchain systems based on Matching-Gossip achieve trilemma efficiency coefficients exceeding 95%, simultaneously meeting engineering requirements for strong consistency, high availability, and partition tolerance, thereby breaking through traditional CAP limitations on blockchain system design.

Jiajie Shi, Yuyang Qin, Hengming Dai, Xiaoyi Fan · 5 authors

Airdrops are a widely used mechanism in Web3 ecosystems to incentivize early users by distributing governance tokens. However, these mechanisms are increasingly targeted by airdrop hunters—malicious actors who exploit token distribution systems through address farming, automated scripts, and behavioral camouflage. While prior work such as ARTEMIS leverages multimodal features and local transaction patterns to detect such behavior, it lacks a global understanding of wallet influence in the transaction graph. In this paper, we propose an enhanced detection framework that augments the ARTEMIS by incorporating PageRank-based global centrality as an additional structural feature. This allows the model to better distinguish superficially active wallets from those with broader influence in the network. We evaluate our method on real-world Non-Fungible Token (NFT) data from the Blur marketplace and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, a feature substitution experiment reveals that simple degree-based features alone can achieve near-perfect performance, even outperforming PageRank, suggesting that the labels are strongly coupled with topological properties. These findings highlight both the effectiveness of structural augmentation and the potential risks of shortcut learning in graph-based detection systems.

Akihiro Fujihara

No abstract is available for this record.

Ammar Arief Ainol Ahmam, Nor Adora Endut

This paper presents a peer to peer (P2P) file sharing system designed on top of Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and blockchain. Decentralized storage solutions that enable programmatic file accessibility, security and reliability as well as eliminating bottlenecks, scaling problems, and user experience limitations in web based P2P application are explored. It integrates IPFS to store and retrieve the files using content-based addressing and. Pinata is also used for file pinning and keeping the file in the network free availability, and Helia is a JavaScript based interface for web application to communicate with IPFS. To increase security and transparency, decentralized verification is conducted via smart contracts on Ethereum by permanently logging a file hash record. With Meta Mask and Web3 technologies for secure payment, users can handle storage and access payment to services effectively. Despite these advancements, web based P2P programs have considerable challenges. Since they can run on limited processing power, storage, and fragile net stability, the processing is carried out in the client side, and that means slow file transfers and high latency. Moreover, the acceptance of decentralized applications is also hindered by the fact that users must understand the cryptographically based transactions and other complex concepts such as IPFS hashes. In this paper, we attempt to find approaches to improve performance on cryptographic computations using WASM, cache adaptive for faster download, and Ethereum Layer 2 solutions like rollups reducing transaction costs and improving scalability. Aside from that, associating with the File coin to facilitate growth of the distribution storage is considered to support the system growth

Abhay Pratap Yadav, Seema Verma, Madhumita Mahapatra, Pridhi Arora

This paper presents the development of a decentralized blockchain-based gaming platform designed to redefine the user experience in competitive gaming through Web3 technologies. Traditional online games suffer from centralized control, limited asset ownership, and trust issues in competitive environments. In contrast, the proposed solution leverages smart contracts, NFTs, and decentralized architecture to create a transparent, trustless, and rewarding gaming ecosystem. The platform enables users to register, link their crypto wallets, and participate in admin-hosted tournaments of a rock paper-scissors game. Here winners are selected by a dynamic leaderboard system. It automatically rewards NFTs depending on final rankings at the end of each tournament. Admin controls the tournament creation and NFT minting. Players can sell/buy the earned NFTs at an integrated exchange. All major activities of the game like tournament flow, result tracking, NFT ownership are controlled by smart contracts control. Due to the smart contracts control safe transactions takes place without the need for intermediaries, which ensures fairness. The study primarily dedicated to smart contract logic, User interface functionalities and NFT marketplace structure. It also deals all issues related to optimization. Other features of the work are real-time leader board management& secure execution of the game logic. The results of this research demonstrates that blockchain can improve transparency in gaming and its reward systems. It has the capacity to create a new model for competitive decentralized gameplay.

Lijun Ma

To address the limitations of blockchain data storage capacity and uneven dis-tribution, this paper proposes a Chord dual-ring distributed storage method based on virtual nodes. Building upon the original Chord protocol, this approach introduces virtual rings to construct a “storage ring-virtual ring” dual-ring structure. Target virtual nodes are located through routing table lookups, and data is distributed across the storage ring via a name mapping mechanism. Sim-ulation experiments validate the proposed scheme's effectiveness by evalu-ating load balancing and query success rate across varying sharding granulari-ties. Results demonstrate that this approach not only efficiently achieves shard-ed storage for blockchain data but also ensures balanced distribution of block data.

Hongbo Liu, Jiannong Cao, Yinfeng Cao, Dongbin Bai · 6 authors

Abstract Blockchain wallet manages decentralized identities in Web3, which allows users to identify themselves in a verifiable yet anonymous manner by digital signatures. However, native wallet scheme has been proven vulnerable to Sybil attacks in practice, where adversaries can easily create large numbers of controlled wallets at a low cost to undermine Web3 applications. To this end, many solutions are proposed for mitigating Sybil attacks. Nevertheless, they typically rely on either costly specialized biometric hardware or behavior-based heuristics that can be easily bypassed. In this paper, we introduce EdenDID, the first trinity-bound identity management system that uniquely binds human user, wallet address, and physical device into a unified framework. EdenDID combines edge-based video recognition, on-chain transactional activity analysis, and device computational power verification to establish a decentralized Proof-of-Trustworthiness consensus. The system provides compliant users with a trusted, verifiable credential to prove their unique identity. We prototype low-cost Eden Devices and deploy them on a Layer-2 blockchain network. Our experiments demonstrate the low end-to-end latency and robust resistance performance to Sybil attacks. Moreover, we present a case study to show how EdenDID can mitigate virtual-hardware fraud in DePIN, in which EdenDID successfully binds the user, wallet, and device uniquely, thus preventing users from binding multiple wallets or devices.

Michael Crystal, Guy Goren, Scott Duke Kominers

Decentralized storage is one of the most natural applications built on blockchains and a central component of the Web3 ecosystem. Yet despite a decade of active development -- from IPFS and Filecoin to more recent entrants -- most of these storage protocols have received limited formal analysis of their incentive properties. Claims of incentive compatibility are sometimes made, but rarely proven. This gap matters: without well-designed incentives, a system may distribute storage but fail to truly decentralize it. We analyze Shelby -- a storage network protocol recently proposed by Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto -- and provide the first formal proof of its incentive properties. Our game-theoretic model shows that while off-chain audits alone collapse to universal shirking, Shelby's combination of peer audits with occasional on-chain verification yields incentive compatibility under natural parameter settings. We also examine coalition behavior and outline a simple modification that strengthens the protocol's collusion-resilience.

Aida Maria Manzano Kharman

This work focuses on the study of distributed ledger applications, presenting proposals of fair and decentralised applications to counter scenarios in which centralisation of wealth and power are the norm. The first contribution is a novel architecture for a decentralised data market, in which participants crowd-source data and receive a fair share of the reward. The market is shown to be resilient against a number of adversarial behaviours. Subsequently, an algorithm to prove one's location is presented. This algorithm is a key component necessary to the functioning of the data market. In contrast to prior approaches, the design does not require assumptions of honest participation, nor dependence on an external ground truth to identify malicious actors. It is fully peer-to-peer, robust in highly adversarial settings, and compatible with privacy-preserving techniques. The security and reliability of the algorithm are evaluated empirically and characterised mathematically. The protocol is then generalised into a consensus mechanism applicable beyond location verification. An extended mathematical model is developed for this case, and its performance under varying operational conditions is systematically characterised. Finally, a study of governance vulnerabilities in Distributed Ledger Technologies is presented. This work provides a taxonomy of formalised properties necessary for good governance, solutions to implement them and an evaluation of how the absence of these cause severe vulnerabilities. The analysis is then extended to realm of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs), which are a class of applications implemented on Distributed Ledger Technologies. The findings anticipated several governance exploits that later materialised, incurring losses in the scale of millions for multiple DAOs. Overall, this thesis aims to contribute to the technological development of distributed ledger applications with the goal of furthering social good, presenting architectures, algorithms, and governance properties that prioritise fairness, decentralisation, and resilience.

Deen Ma, Chonghe Zhao, Shengli Zhang, Taotao Wang · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Behrooz Golshan

This dissertation investigates how tokenised claims and algorithmic governance reshape interactions in Web3, with a particular focus on business-to-business (B2B) settings. Building on the insight that digital platforms and infrastructures are mutually entangled—platforms acquiring infrastructural roles and infrastructures accumulating platform logics—the study examines how this entanglement reappears in blockchain-based systems and what it means for value creation, value distribution, and institutional control. Rather than assuming decentralization as an outcome, the dissertation asks how governance is actually assembled across code, organizations, and markets, and how these assemblies channel rights, risks, and rents over time. In this sense, the thesis extends platform/infrastructure scholarship into the Web3 domain, showing how infrastructuring and platformization remain co-constitutive under new technical conditions (e.g., programmable settlement, public ledgers, composability). The research is guided by the following question: How does algorithmic governance of tokenised claims affect dynamics of value creation and distribution in Web3? The thesis addresses a gap in extant work by analysing the combined economic and governance consequences of tokenisation in commercial contexts, rather than treating governance as either purely technical (smart contracts) or purely institutional (foundations, standards, regulators). Methodologically, this research adopts a qualitative, interpretive design centred on semi-structured interviews with founders and leads of Web3 projects oriented toward commercialization and enterprise use. Interview evidence is triangulated with document analysis (white papers, governance docs, upgrade logs) to trace how decision rights are allocated, which boundary resources act as chokepoints, and how incentives and accountability are engineered. The sample focuses on projects that tokenise rights and obligations to orchestrate inter-firm exchanges (e.g., guarantees, attribution, royalties), enabling a consistent comparison of governance choices and their distributional signatures. Theoretically, the thesis contributes a layered view of Web3 governance that differentiates transaction governance (smart-contract rules that execute exchanges) from platform governance (meta-rules that structure participation, evolution, and control)—layers that are interdependent yet analytically distinct. Across cases, transaction governance supplies deterministic settlement (escrows, splits, auctions), while platform governance defines constitutional levers (eligibility schemas, listings, parameter updates, treasury policy, emergency powers). This distinction clarifies why “more on-chain” does not automatically imply “more decentralised”: instruments can be automated while decision rights remain concentrated. The framing resonates with and extends platform governance scholarship that locates governance in the ongoing division of decision rights, control mechanisms, and incentives among interdependent actors. Empirically, the thesis identifies three governance models—monocentric, moderately polycentric (P2), and highly polycentric (P1)—and analyses how each allocates rights and rents. Monocentric configurations recentre constitutional authority in a focal hub (firm, foundation, tightly bonded coalition), delivering speed, legal legibility, and coherent risk management, while concentrating surplus upstream via control of boundary resources (standards, registries, upgrade cadence, listings). Moderately polycentric arrangements disperse constitutional authority across overlapping venues (token voters, stewards, committees, standards groups), pairing automated execution at the edge with contestable meta-rules and auditable, replaceable discretion. Highly polycentric designs thin the platform layer and push coordination into markets and minimal, auditable rules (fee markets, open listings, plural oracles), improving neutrality and exit but requiring continuous work to diffuse emergent chokepoints (indices, bridges, relays). The patterns observed align with infrastructure/platform research on how control points shape innovation and value capture and with blockchain governance work emphasizing the allocation of decision and control rights. For B2B contexts, the analysis suggests a pragmatic equilibrium. Applications that demand auditability, finality, and accountable remediation (e.g., elections, trade guarantees) gravitate toward monocentric settlements; applications with heterogeneous actors and rapid iteration (e.g., creator and talent markets) benefit from moderately polycentric designs that preserve micro-level determinism with macro-level contestability. Across models, tokenisation expands what can be coordinated, but distributional outcomes hinge on who controls admission, measurement, and upgrade pathways. Accordingly, the thesis proposes design heuristics: separate transaction and platform governance, publish change logs and revocation paths, pluralise attestors at measurement junctions, time-box mandates, and keep credible exit technically and institutionally real. In sum, the dissertation advances an integrated account of Web3 as a political economy of programmable claims and layered governance. It shows how infrastructuring and platformization fold into one another under blockchain conditions, how distinct governance models redistribute rights and rents, and how B2B value propositions depend as much on constitutional design as on code. The framework equips scholars and practitioners to evaluate Web3 systems not by decentralisation rhetoric, but by the concrete allocation of decision rights, boundary resources, and incentives across layers and venues.