Zachary Stucke, Theodoros Constantinides, John Cartlidge
Transactions sent to a public blockchain network, such as Ethereum, are initially held in the mempool before they are accepted in a block. While waiting in the mempool, these âin-flightâ transactions are publicly visible and vulnerable to front-running attacks, such that malicious parties use information in the transaction for their own gain and at a direct cost to the transaction owner. In this work, we introduce open-source simulation software for identifying and mitigating these attacks on Ethereum blockchains. Designed for education and research, the software introduces simple smart contracts that elaborate front-running vulnerabilities such as displacement attacks, sandwich attacks, and priority gas auctions. Users can run these attacks in a safe environment, monitor the detailed mechanics of attacks, and mitigate attacks using the MEV-geth protocol for in-flight transaction privacy.
Ratna Ekawati, Yandra Arkeman, Suprihatin Suprihatin, Titi Candra Sunarti
The complex supply chain system for the sugar agroindustry supply chain involves many actors, resulting in the asymmetry of information data. It still leads to a lack of data transparency. In the past, data traceability could not be made efficient at every stage, so the record data transaction was not real-time, less accurate, and inefficient coordination between actors. Blockchain is one of the technologies in the 4.0 era as a distributed ledger technology. It can be transparency, traceability, security, immutability, and decentralization. This study aims to design a white sugar agroindustry system based on blockchain technology using the SDLC waterfall stage public. Ethereum is a proof-of-work convention based on the Ropsten test-net on the Metamask wallet. The sugar supply chain system that has been successfully developed allows consumers to track the purchased sugar products based on the transaction hash code sent by the seller. The data listed is the location of the plantation, the quantity (quintal) and quality of sugarcane (percentage), and the purchase price. A web-based blockchain application could be used as a model by national sugar factories to help them make enough sugar food for themselves.
The Ethereum mainnet is designed as a public blockchain rather than an Enterprise platform; hence, it lacks privacy, performance, scaling, and permissioning capacities. In this chapter, we discuss new scalability technologies, including layer 2 and Ethereum 2.
In recent years, Ethereum, one of the leading applications to realize the service of blockchain technology, has received a great deal of attention with the usability and functionality to execute smart contracts, arbitrary programmable calculations in addition to cryptocurrency trading. However, misconfigured Ethereum clients with application programming interface (API) enabled, JSON-RPC in particular, are targeted by cyberattacks. In this research, we propose a new framework to detect malicious and suspicious Ethereum accounts using 3 different data sources (honeypot, Internet-wide scanner and blockchain explorer). The honeypot, named Etherpot, utilizes a proxy server placed between a real Ethereum client and the Internet. It modifies responses from the Ethereum client to attract attackers, identifies malicious accounts and analyzes their behaviors. With the Internet-wide scan results from Shodan, we also detect suspicious Ethereum accounts that are registered on multiple nodes. Finally, we utilize Etherscan, a well-known blockchain explorer for Ethereum, to track and analyze the activities related to the detected accounts. Through the observation of 6 weeks, we observed 538 hosts trying to call JSON- RPC of our honeypots with 41 different types of methods, including 2 types of unreported attacks in the wild. We detected 16 malicious accounts from the honeypots and 64 suspicious accounts from Shodan scan results, 5 out of which are overlapped. Finally, from Etherscan, we collected records of activities related to the detected accounts, including transactions of 21.50 ETH and mining of 22.61 ETH (equivalent to 167,560 USS at the rate of 2021/10/14). To an end, we provide a much brighter view of malicious activities on Ethereum.
Trust management systems often use registries to authenticate data, or form trust decisions. Examples are revocation registries and trust status lists. By introducing distributed ledgers (DLs), it is also possible to create decentralized registries. A verifier then queries a node of the respective ledger, e.g., to retrieve trust status information during the verification of a credential. While this ensures trustworthy information, the process requires the verifier to be online and the ledger node available. Additionally, the connection from the verifier to the registry poses a privacy issue, as it leaks information about the user's behavior. In this paper, we resolve these issues by extending existing ledger APIs to support results that are trustworthy even in an offline setting. We do this by introducing attestations of the ledger's state, issued by ledger nodes, aggregatable into a collective attestation by all nodes. This attestation enables a user to prove the provenance of DL-based data to an offline verifier. Our approach is generic. So once deployed it serves as a basis for any use case with an offline verifier. We also provide an implementation for the Ethereum stack and evaluate it, demonstrating the practicability of our approach.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is an emerging financial service model based on blockchain technology. DeFi composability denotes the ability for different DeFi services to interact with one another resulting in new forms of financial services. The DeFi ecosystem is largely based on ERC-20 tokens that can represent the value of an asset. Collateralized assets in DeFi composability are locked and additional profit cannot be generated. In this paper, we propose a method to generate profit from locked assets by using ERC-721 Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and perpetual contracts. NFT represents the rights to a certain asset. A perpetual contract is a futures contract that does not have an expiration date. We propose perpetual contract NFT, a new form of NFT that can be used as collateral, which exploits perpetual futures contracts in the cryptocurrency derivatives market. Collateral needs to be provided to back the value of a perpetual contract. If the perpetual contract is minted as NFT, the resulting NFT represents the rights to the perpetual contract and its collateral. Therefore, the perpetual contact NFT itself can be used as collateral for DeFi composability. A proof-of-concept smart contract and a web application for perpetual contract NFT are provided to demonstrate its functionality. To validate the profitability of the perpetual contract NFT using a real-world scenario, we experiment with the position NFT of Uniswap v3 decentralized exchange. The position NFT is a form of perpetual contract NFT. Specifically, we present validation with three types of pools: stablecoins, stablecoin/wrapped tokens pair, and wrapped tokens.
Mr.Vimu Ram Kale Kale, Chandrani Singh, Dr.Sunil Khilari
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s) indicate the creation of a blockchain-based digital certificate of authenticity that is comparable to other virtual crypto assets and currencies. The use of blockchain technology and the exchange of digital currency have become increasingly widespread in recent years. Having said that, as has been shown in recent years, the NFT market is also booming. The very idea of NFT is derived from an Ethereum token standard that aims to separate and recognise each token with its distinct signature being tied with digital attributes. India has also seen increased interest in this digital sector, particularly from the future new-age investors and digital innovators, as a result of the spectacular return on its quickly expanding global market. However, due to the early stage of the NFT ecosystem's growth, India lacks a regulatory legislative framework to oversee such immature digital crypto assets. There are several legal complexities surrounding them, which has made it difficult to determine their legal legitimacy and sanctity. New artists could have a tendency to become lost in this chaotic growth in the absence of comprehensive descriptions. This paper aims to examine the idea of NFT in comparison to bitcoin and copyright, as well as its operational and technological elements. It attempts to examine the legal hazards that affect its operation as well as the potential and difficulties the Indian legal system has with regard to crypto-assets.
For the development of blockchain smart contracts, a structured approach based on the principles of the Model Driven Architecture can be beneficial and facilitate the implementation of smart contracts. This paper presents such an approach, which, in combination with Unified Modeling Language (UML) Class and State machine diagrams, allows the smart contract structure and behavior logic to be modeled in several abstraction layers. This paper delves into details on how the model-to-model transformations from the specified Blockchain Platform Independent Model (PIM) with specified state-like behavior can be used to produce a Solidity Platform Specific Model (PSM). Subsequently, we elaborate on how the Solidity PSM is used for Solidity smart contract code generation by employing model-to-text transformations. The paper also demonstrates the process of our proposed transformations and code generation using smart contract code examples from Solidity documentation. Based on the examples, a Blockchain PIM is specified and transformed to Solidity PSM, which is then used for Solidity smart contract code generation. The generated smart contract code is then compiled, deployed on the Ethereum blockchain JavaScript virtual machine, and compared to the original smart contract code in terms of Solidity code metrics, similarity scores, and execution costs. The evaluation results indicate that our approach could be successfully used to model and later generate smart contract code.
Wilson S. Melo, Lucas S. Dos Santos, Lucila M. S. Bento, Paulo R. Nascimento · 6 authors
The monitoring and protection of critical infrastructures, especially the ones involving physical assets (e.g., dams, nuclear energy facilities, governmental buildings), constitute a challenging problem. The failure and collapse of these infrastructures can cause untold consequences. Recent works have proposed blockchains as a tool to improve monitoring systems in different critical infrastructures. However, most previous works lack on presenting a more in-depth discussion about how to implement these solutions. In this paper, we develop a practical approach. We propose a comprehensive framework that describes how to implement a blockchain-based system to monitor and protect critical infrastructures. We implement our framework in two distinct blockchain platforms: Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. We compare both implementations and discuss their differences in terms of performance, easiness of development, security, privacy, complexity, and costs. We believe that our results can be valuable for professionals interested in applying blockchain-based solutions to protect critical infrastructures.
This paper studies the impact of fear, uncertainty and market volatility caused by the Ukraine-Russia war on crypto-assets returns (Bitcoin and Ethereum) and Gold returns. We use the searches on Wikipedia trends as proxies of uncertainty and fear and two volatility indices: S&P500 VIX and the Russian VIX (RVIX). \nThe results show that Bitcoin, Ethereum and Gold failed as safe havens during this war.
The Ethereum blockchain is a decentralized computing platform providing peer-to-peer financial services. Decentralized exchanges, which run on the blockchain, enable matching of buyers and sellers without any central third party, and are distinct from the centralized “off-chain” cryptocurrency markets often studied in the literature. The decentralized markets facilitate trade in cryptocurrencies and other digital assets and have daily turnovers of several billion dollars. In this paper, I study how arbitrageurs on the blockchain contribute to price discovery and price efficiency in decentralized “on-chain” markets. I collect a transaction-level dataset of primary data from the Ethereum blockchain and cleanly identify a set of completed cross-exchange and triangular arbitrages. To investigate the speed at which arbitrage opportunities are eliminated, I study how sensitive arbitrage profits are to when the trades execute. I show that most arbitrage profits are made immediately after the occurrence of price anomalies, indicating that decentralized markets adjust fast after a shock to the no-arbitrage price.
Blockchain technology supports the generation and record of transactions, and maintains the fairness and openness of the cryptocurrency system. However, many fraudsters utilize smart contracts to create fraudulent Ponzi schemes for profiting on Ethereum, which seriously affects financial security. Most existing Ponzi scheme detection techniques suffer from two major restricted problems: the lack of motivation for temporal early warning and failure to fuse multi-source information finally cause the lagging and unsatisfactory performance of Ethereum Ponzi scheme detection. In this paper, we propose a dual-channel early warning framework for Ethereum Ponzi schemes, named Ponzi-Warning, which performs feature extraction and fusion on both code and transaction levels. Moreover, we represent a temporal evolution augmentation strategy for generating transaction graph sequences, which can effectively increase the data scale and introduce temporal information. Comprehensive experiments on our Ponzi scheme datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and timeliness of our framework for detecting the Ponzi contract accounts.
This chapter covers blockchain age protocols. Some novel and some variants of classical blockchain consensus protocols were discussed in Chapter 7 . We start with Ethereum and finish this chapter at Solana. Along the way, we will cover in detail the characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, properties, and inner workings of major consensus protocols used in platforms such as Cosmos, Ethereum 2.0, and Polkadot.
Abstract Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been used as a way of rewarding content creators. Artists publish their works on the blockchain as NFTs, which they can then sell. The buyer of an NFT then holds ownership of a unique digital asset, which can be resold in much the same way that real-world art collectors might trade paintings. However, while a deal of effort has been spent on selling works of art on the blockchain, very little attention has been paid to using the blockchain as a means of fundraising to help finance the artist’s work in the first place. Additionally, while blockchains like Ethereum are ideal for smaller works of art, additional support is needed when the artwork is larger than is feasible to store on the blockchain. In this paper, we propose a fundraising mechanism that will help artists to gain financial support for their initiatives, and where the backers can receive a share of the profits in exchange for their support. We discuss our prototype implementation using the SpartanGold framework. We then discuss how this system could be expanded to support large NFTs with the 0Chain blockchain, and describe how we could provide support for ongoing storage of these NFTs.