A growing number of products use layer 2 solutions to expand the capabilities of primary blockchains like Ethereum, where computation is off-loaded from the root chain, and the results are published to it in bulk. Those include optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups, information oracles, and app-specific chains. This work presents an analysis of layer 2 blockchain strategies determining the optimal times for publishing transactions on the root chain. There is a trade-off between waiting for a better layer 1 gas price and the urgency to finalize layer 2 transactions. We present a model for the problem that captures this trade-off, generalizing previous works, and we analyze the properties of optimal publishing strategies. We show that such optimal strategies hold a computable simple form for a large class of cost functions.
In recent years, mobile crowdsensing has emerged as a key technology for digital city construction, which acquires sensing data and mining data values with low cost and high flexibility. However, limited by the centrality of the sensing system, the complexity of the sensing process, and the uncertainty of sensing users, mobile crowdsensing has been severely suffering downgrading problems of security reliability and quality of service (QoS). In this study, a two-stage game involving blockchain technique is proposed to deal with security and QoS problems in mobile crowdsensing. First, a blockchain-based mobile crowdsensing system with a dual currency mechanism is established in a distributed manner to ensure the reliability of the sensing system. Second, a consensus protocol is designed to strengthen the security of sensing data based on a credit-based verifiers declaration game. Third, a quality rating mechanism based on the workers attitude game is established to improve the service quality of sensing tasks. Finally, some numerical results demonstrate the secure and efficient performances of mobile crowdsensing with the proposed framework.
This article describes a case study concerned with modelling the price of wholesale diamonds, as part of a project to develop an online diamond auction platform. The work was extended to exploring how to develop an index that could be used to track market trends of wholesale diamond prices. The approach we used is readily generalised to defining market indices for so-called Collectables, and can provide the basis for construction of derivatives. With the burgeoning interest in new markets of collectables such as those generated by the concept of a Non-Fungible Token, it is reasonable to suppose that there will be concomitant increasing interest in developing derivatives for these markets.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have revolutionized various industries and aspects of the digital world in several ways. Built on blockchain technology, NFTs provide a secure and transparent way to establish ownership and provenance of unique digital or physical items. This has wide-ranging implications, from art and collectibles to virtual real estate and digital goods. While NFTs offer many benefits, however, they also raise concerns, including environmental impacts due to energy-intensive blockchain networks, copyright and plagiarism issues, and speculative bubbles in the NFT market. In this work, we collected 200,000 tweets about NFTs and employed state-of-the-art neurosymbolic AI tools to better understand what are the online conversation drivers and sentiments around NFTs and, hence, gain insights about what makes them valuable.
Abstract We consider a situation in which two parties have concluded an efficient contract corresponding to one major bargaining solution. After the parties have agreed on one particular contract, an unanticipated shock may change the contract outcomes in a way that benefits one party but harms the other party. If this happens, they have the option to either stay with the original exchange contract or adjust some contract parameters such as the price. We propose a model to perform such adjustments automatically, to obtain the same bargaining solution as in the initial contract under the restriction that the new contract dominates the outcomes of the original contract. We study several bargaining solutions within this general framework. These bargaining solutions offer various sharing rules to distribute the benefit between the parties. To reflect practical considerations, we only consider adjustments made via one contract parameter (the price), while all other parameters result from the original contract and the random shock. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach, we also compare it to a full re-negotiation scenario, in which all parameters can be modified within the boundaries resulting after the random shock. However, waiting and re-negotiation might be costly compared to the situation when the smart contract executes the adjustment automatically. Therefore, the automatic adjustment might be more efficient compared to the other types of contracts. We present several numerical examples and run large random simulations, which we also check statistically.
The future distribution grid is a peer-to-peer (P2P) community formed by a large number of active energy agents (AEAs), and renewable energy certificate (REC) trading is an efficient way to realize a low-carbon AEA community. AEAs can trade not only electricity but also RECs among themselves to economically and efficiently meet the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) requirements. Aiming to lower the market barrier and increase the trading benefits for market participants, this paper proposes a blockchain-based renewable energy certificate (BCREC) that supports divisible and multiple transactions. The trade process includes four stages: setup, pre-transaction, transaction, and post-transaction. A scheme based on blockchain oracles and smart contracts is implemented to achieve decentralized BCREC issuance and transaction and to support a more flexible trading market. By exploring two typical market scenarios, we verify the advantages of BCREC trading and evaluate its impacts on AEA profits and market efficiency.
Initial coin offering (ICO) is a Web-3 based financing method for ventures, which allows them to use digital assets (e.g., tokens) to raise capital. During an ICO, the entrepreneur has control on ownership; they can choose to issue a very small number of tokens which would allow them to keep âtheir skin in the gameâ and retain ownership, or issue all the tokens they hold, which would distribute ownership to investors and have a community-decentralized orientation. While previous literature has identified several factors of ICO success, they have not delved into the role of ownership in ICO success. In this study, we explore whether retaining or distributing ownership during an ICO is more beneficial for raising capital. We find a two-pronged explanation. When looking at ICOs maintaining a higher level of ownership, entrepreneurs are catering to corporate-market logic investors, and we see a U relationship where the optimal percentage in which the entrepreneurs show they have skin in the game at the same time as giving enough to investors. But then, there are ICOs distributing most of its ownership in which entrepreneurs are attracting community-oriented investors, and as such, the higher the distribution the higher the investment. We propose that this is related to how there are different investors audiencesâ that will value different practices and ideals and choose differently on what types of projects to invest in. Our research elucidates this new funding source. Nonetheless, future research should investigate these exploratory findings.
We propose a new approach for a secure decentralized and censorless upgrade of existing cryptocurrencies to newly created tokens without interaction from any external information sources (oracles). The proposed scheme is based on burning of existing cryptocurrencies tokens and implemented via the multi-currency auction. The auction is carried out on the blockchain of the new token and implemented using a smart-contract that processes participants' bids of burnt tokens of other cryptocurrencies and supports a new token price discovery algorithm for each cryptocurrency with no oracles or any other trusted source of information. Contrary to traditional ways of getting the new asset, like centralized and decentralized exchanges, etc., our method requires no user registration (as well as no KYC â âknow your customerâ procedure that requires obligatory client identification) and provides a predicted supply level of the new asset for an adequate price within a model with economically rational participants. We provide the results of decentralized auction simulations implemented for several strategies of user behavior (based on bid prices with normal and log-normal distribution laws), both under the normal operation and in the presence of adversary who follows specific strategies.
Robot swarms are generally considered to be composed of cooperative agents that, despite their limited individual capabilities, can perform difficult tasks by working together. However, in open swarms, where different robots can be added to the swarm by different parties with potentially competing interests, cooperation is but one of many strategies. We envision an information market where robots can buy and sell information through transactions stored on a distributed blockchain, and where cooperation is encouraged by the economy itself. As a proof of concept, we study a classical foraging task, where exchanging information with other robots is paramount to accomplish the task efficiently. We illustrate that even a single robot that lies to others-a so-called Byzantine robot-can heavily disrupt the swarm. Hence, we devise two protection mechanisms. Through an individual-level protection mechanism, robots are more sceptical about others' information and can detect and discard Byzantine information, at the cost of lower efficiency. Through a systemic protection mechanism based on economic rules regulating robot interactions, robots that sell honest information acquire over time more wealth than Byzantines selling false information. Our simulations show that a well-designed robot economy penalises misinformation spreading and protects the swarm from Byzantine behaviour. We believe economics-inspired swarm robotics is a promising research direction that exploits the timely opportunity for decentralised economies offered by blockchain technology.
We study the following problem that is motivated by Blockchains where ``miners'' are serially given the monopoly for assembling transactions into the next block. Our model has a single good that is sold repeatedly every day where new demand for the good arrives every day. The novel element in our model is that all unsatisfied demand from one day remains in the system and is added to the new demand of the next day. Every day there is a new monopolist that gets to sell a fixed supply $s$ of the good and naturally chooses to do so at the monopolist's price for the combined demand. What will the dynamics of the prices chosen by the sequence of monopolists be? What level of efficiency will be obtained in the long term? We start with a non-strategic analysis of users' behavior and our main result shows that prices keep fluctuating wildly and this is an endogenous property of the model and happens even when demand is stable with nothing stochastic in the model. These price fluctuations underscore the necessity of an analysis under strategic behavior of the users, which we show results in the prices being stable at the market equilibrium price.
We introduce the first practical protocols for fully decentralized sealed-bid auctions using timed commitments. Timed commitments ensure that the auction is finalized fairly even if all participants drop out after posting bids or if n bidders collude to try to learn the nth bidder's bid value. Our protocols rely on a novel non-malleable timed commitment scheme which efficiently supports range proofs to establish that bidders have sufficient funds to cover a hidden bid value. This allows us to penalize users who abandon bids for exactly the bid value, while supporting simultaneous bidding in multiple auctions with a shared collateral pool. Our protocols are concretely efficient and we have implemented them in an Ethereum-compatible smart contract which automatically enforces payment and delivery of an auctioned digital asset.
Currently, over 90% of Ethereum blocks are built using MEV-Boost, an auction that allows validators to sell their block-building power to builders who compete in an open English auction in each slot. Shortly after the merge, when MEV-Boost was in its infancy, most block builders were neutral, meaning they did not trade themselves but rather aggregated transactions from other traders. Over time, integrated builders, operated by trading firms, began to overtake many of the neutral builders. Outside of the integrated builder teams, little is known about which advantages integration confers beyond latency and how latency advantages distort on-chain trading. This paper explores these poorly understood advantages. We make two contributions. First, we point out that integrated builders are able to bid truthfully in their own bundle merge and then decide how much profit to take later in the final stages of the PBS auction when more information is available, making the auction for them look closer to a second-price auction while independent searchers are stuck in a first-price auction. Second, we find that latency disadvantages convey a winner's curse on slow bidders when underlying values depend on a stochastic price process that change as bids are submitted.
Adithya Bhaskara, Rafael Frongillo, Lindgren, Elias, Maneesha Papireddygari
Liquidity provisioning in automated market makers is the practice of recruiting third-party liquidity providers (LPs) to contribute assets to the market in exchange for fees skimmed off of trades. This paper introduces a general framework for liquidity provisioning in cost function prediction markets. Our most general protocol allows LPs to submit or update an arbitrary cost function that specifies their liquidity over the entire price space. We show that our protocol encapsulates several notions of running market makers in parallel, which we prove to be equivalent. We also recover existing protocols from decentralized finance as special cases. In our protocol, liquidity can be expressed as a matrix-valued function, which we argue is necessary with three or more securities. Due to this inherent multidimensionality, the design of trading fees with three or more securities is nontrivial: we show that natural axioms on the design of these fees are incompatible.
We present and analyze an attack on Ethereum 1's consensus mechanism, which allows miners to obtain higher mining rewards compared to their honest peers. This attack is novel in that it relies on manipulating block timestamps and the difficulty-adjustment algorithm (DAA) to give the miner an advantage whenever block races ensue. We call our attack Uncle Maker, as it induces a higher rate of uncle blocks. We describe several variants of the attack. Among these, one that is risk-free for miners.
In Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain network, stakeholders spend tokens for consumption while competing for network transaction fee with unspent tokens. Stakeholders are incentivized to form staking pools to compete with each other, but continued staking pool merge does not occur given fixed pool operating cost. Unlike other blockchain networks and traditional payment systems, token price in PoS blockchain network is a direct result of competition among service providers (staking pools) and is strongly positively correlated with network decentralization level. As an extension, we show that uneven wealth distribution or biased validator selection function enhances stake centralization and sabotage token price.
Blockchain has become a revolutionary technology that has had a great impact on the business environment. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are distinct from fungible tokens traded on multiple centralized or decentralized exchanges. Automated Market-MMs (AMMs) are decentralized markets for crypto-tokens that offer users three core operations: deposition of crypto tokens to get AMM shares in return; the dual operation of getting shares for the base tokens; and swapping of two different tokens with each other. This research aims to put forth a comprehensive view of Blockchain and its applications in the real world, including cryptocurrencies, NFTs trading, voting, and much more. It also focuses on how NFTs are traded on different platforms and aims at better marketplaces for trading NFTs,namely Automated Market Makers on different blockchains like Ethereum and Tezos.
In our study, we propose a novel validator selection mechanism for Proof-of-Stake blockchains that utilizes game theory through a Vickrey auction mechanism to encourage honest staking. The main element of our contribution is to include an auction mechanism that prevents domination by high-stake validators and a weighted random selection process to ensure fairness, and we aim to address a gap in selection methods that advantage nodes with more resources. The rationale for our approach is based on other game-theoretic approaches used in production-grade blockchains like Algorand, Avalanche, and Prism. We introduce a payment mechanism similar to a classic âstag huntâ scenario for mutual benefit through honest bidding. We propose a consensus mechanism that combines a weighted lottery pool and a second-price auction system for candidate selection and cost calculation. Our model incentivizes nodes to bid truthfully, reflecting their true value estimation of validating a block. We set up a PoS blockchain, the initialization of nodes and violators, and proceeded to simulate the addition of new blocks. We record the conditions of the bids and rewards to demonstrate that our mechanism promotes a fairer stake distribution while minimizing disparity among validators. Although a perfectly equitable system is challenging to design, our method offers a significant step towards a more equitable, secure, and efficient blockchain system.
We propose a new way to share licensed spectrum bandwidth capacity in mobile networks between operators, service providers, and end users using blockchain-based smart contracts. We discuss the foundational building blocks in the contract as well as various extensions to support more advanced features such as bulk purchases and future reservations. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the system can be implemented with an open source, permissioned enterprise blockchain, Hyperledger Sawtooth. We show that our smart contract implementation can improve blockchain transaction performance, by approximately four orders of magnitude compared to serial transactions and one order of magnitude compared to parallel transactions, by using public key infrastructure driven bulk purchases of mobile access grants, paving the way for fully automated, efficient, and fine-grained roaming agreements. We conclude with a discussion of lessons learned from two end-to-end use cases we implemented to validate our distributed ledger design.
Companies that are investing in blockchain technology to enhance supply chain transparency face challenges in fostering collaborations with others and deciding what information to share. Transparency over the actions of supply chain partners can improve operational decisions, but sharing own data on the blockchain can put firms at a competitive disadvantage. In this paper, we investigate the resulting questions of when blockchain should be adopted in a supply chain and how it should be designed by analyzing two ways that it can enhance supply chain transparency: making the manufacturerâs sourcing cost transparent to the buyers (i.e., vertical cost transparency) and making the ordering status of buyers transparent to each other (i.e., horizontal order transparency). Given such transparency, firms can design a smart contract that automates transactions contingent on the revealed information and enables them to realize better equilibrium outcomes. We find that blockchain increases supply chain profit only when the manufacturerâs capacity is large and decreases supply chain profit otherwise. If the capacity is sufficiently large to eliminate the buyersâ competition, blockchain leads to a winâwinâwin and the incentives of all participants are naturally aligned. If the capacity is only moderately large, the manufacturer needs to compensate the buyers to facilitate a blockchain implementation. However, if the capacity is small, horizontal order transparency enabled by the blockchain mitigates the buyersâ overorder incentive to compete for the manufacturerâs capacity and increases double marginalization. For such cases, we show that a blockchain that only enables vertical cost transparency should (and can) still be adopted in a range of small capacity cases, and we propose an access control layer for the logistics data to implement such a blockchain. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, operations management. Funding: J. Liu was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72101110] and The MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [Grant 20YJC630084]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4851 .
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) use smart contracts to foster communities working toward common goals. Existing definitions of decentralization, however-the 'D' in DAO-fall short of capturing key properties characteristic of diverse and equitable participation. We propose a new metric called Voting-Bloc Entropy (VBE, pronounced ''vibe'') that formalizes a broad notion of decentralization in voting on DAO proposals. VBE measures the similarity of participants' utility functions across a set of proposals. We use VBE to prove a number of results about the decentralizing effects of vote delegation, proposal bundling, bribery, and quadratic voting. Our results lead to practical suggestions for enhancing DAO decentralization. One of our results highlights the risk of systemic bribery with increasing DAO decentralization. To show that this threat is realistic, we present the first practical realization of a Dark DAO, a proposed mechanism for privacy-preserving corruption of identity systems, including those used in DAO voting. Our Dark-DAO prototype uses trusted execution environments (TEEs) in the Oasis Sapphire blockchain for attacks on Ethereum DAOs. It demonstrates that Dark DAOs constitute a realistic future concern for DAO governance.