A big challenge posed in blockchain centric platforms is achieving scalability while also preserving user privacy. This report details the design, implementation and evaluation of a Layer-2 scaling solution for Hyperledger Fabric using Zero Knowledge Rollups (ZK Rollups). The proposed architecture introduces an off chain sequencer that accepts transactions immediately and sends them for batching into a Merkle tree based rollup, using ZK proofs to attest to the correctness and verifiability of the entire batch. The design aims to decouple transaction ingestion from actual on chain settlements to address Fabric scalability limitations and increase throughput under high load conditions. The baseline architecture in Hyperledger Fabric constrains transaction requests due to endorsement, ordering and validation phases, leading to a throughput of 5 to 7 TPS with an average latency of 4 seconds. Our Layer-2 solution achieves an ingestion throughput of 70 to 100 TPS, leading to an increase of nearly ten times due to the sequencer immediate acceptance of each transaction and reducing client perceived latency by nearly eighty percent to 700 to 1000 milliseconds. This work demonstrates that integrating ZK Rollups in Hyperledger Fabric enhances scalability while not compromising the security guarantees of a permissioned blockchain network.
Distributed ledgers are increasingly relied upon by industry to provide trustworthy accountability, strong integrity protection, and high availability for critical data without centralizing trust. Recently, distributed append-only logs are opting for a layered approach, combining crash-fault-tolerant (CFT) consensus with hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for greater resiliency. Unfortunately, hardware TEEs can be subject to (rare) attacks, undermining the very guarantees that distributed ledgers are carefully designed to achieve. In response, we present Proteus, a new distributed consensus protocol that cautiously trusts the guarantees of TEEs. Proteus carefully embeds a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocol inside of a CFT protocol with no additional messages. This is made possible through careful refactoring of both the CFT and BFT protocols such that their structure aligns. Proteus achieves performance in line with regular TEE-enabled consensus protocols, while guaranteeing integrity in the face of TEE platform compromises.
Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger system providing secure, transparent, decentralized cryptocurrency transactions. Its underlying structure includes wallets and the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO), which facilitates transactions and maintains transaction integrity. A blockchain wallet is a software program that stores and manages cryptocurrencies, allowing users to send and receive digital currency and monitor their balance. The UTXO set tracks unspent outputs, particularly in the Bitcoin network, ensuring accurate and secure accounting of available balances. This paper examines how well a hybrid data structure performs when processing wallet values in a UTXO set. The hybrid data structure stores the walletâs addresses in a hash table and the UTXO in a minimum heap tree rather than a list. At first, we assume that the values in the list should always be sorted and appear in ascending order. Then, we employ a list with unsorted values. The wallet addresses are invariably assigned to a hash table. The âinstruction countâ approach counts the number of statements that can be executed or what we refer to as a âsingle operationâ to measure performance.
Kunpeng Ren, Nhut-Minh Ho, Tien Tuan Anh Dinh, Dumitrel Loghin ¡ 5 authors
Distributed ledgers are enabling novel applications in traditional domains, such as finance, healthcare and supply chains, and in emerging domains such as metaverse. We observe that the current ecosystem is fragmented, with different blockchains operating in silos. Interledger applications that can access resources in different ledgers can tap into the billions of dollars worth of locked resources, but they require support for interledger communication. Existing interledger communications, however, are either insecure, inefficient, or application specific. Our goal is to design a system for interledger applications. To this end, we design and implement that achieves strong security guarantees and high performance while providing the general message passing abstraction to the applications. Our system leverages trusted hardware for performance and threshold signature schemes for strong security. It consists of multiple lightweight clients that verify transactions within their trusted execution environments before generating threshold signatures. We conduct extensive performance evaluations of and compare it against three state-of-the-art systems, namely WeCross, Cosmos IBC and LayerZero-V2. The results show that is efficient, achieving up to$42\times$higher throughput than the baselines.
ELTA is a project funded by the Valencian Institute for Business Competitiveness (IVACE) and the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER). DELTA project is aimed at bringing companies closer to the use of different disruptive technologies such as Blockchain / Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT). To achieve its goal, DELTA will provide: A software tool for automating the deployment of DLT networks, regardless of the number of required nodes, or the process of joining an existing network. A modular mechanism that allows the synchronization of DLTs with databases. The goal of this mechanism is to ease and improve the way data is retrieved from a DLT ledger. An accountability tool for shared environments for the exchange of services that brings in some of the most important characteristics of blockchain/DLTs: facilitating auditing and accountability by each participant, use of tokens, etc.
Blockchain clients are fundamental software for running blockchain nodes. They provide users with various RPC (Remote Procedure Call) interfaces to interact with the blockchain. These RPC methods are expected to follow the same specification across different blockchain nodes, providing users with seamless interaction. However, there have been continuous reports on various RPC bugs that can cause unexpected responses or even Denial of Service weakness. Existing studies on blockchain RPC bug detection mainly focus on generating the RPC method calls for testing blockchain clients. However, a wide range of the reported RPC bugs are triggered in various blockchain contexts. To the best of our knowledge, little attention is paid to generating proper contexts that can trigger these context-dependent RPC bugs. In this work, we propose EthCRAFT, a Context-aware RPC Analysis and Fuzzing Tool for client RPC bug detection. EthCRAFT first proposes to explore the state transition program space of blockchain clients and generate various transactions to construct the context. EthCRAFT then designs a context-aware RPC method call generation method to send RPC calls to the blockchain clients. The responses of 5 different client implementations are used as cross-referring oracles to detect the RPC bugs. We evaluate EthCRAFT on real-world RPC bugs collected from the GitHub issues of Ethereum client implementations. Experiment results show that EthCRAFT outperforms existing client RPC detectors by detecting more RPC bugs. Moreover, EthCRAFT has found six new bugs in major Ethereum clients and reported them to the developers. One of the bug fixes has been written into breaking changes in the client's updates. Three of our bug reports have been offered a vulnerability bounty by the Ethereum Foundation.
In primary-backup replication, consensus latency is bounded by the time for backup nodes to replay (re-execute) transactions proposed by the primary. In this work, we present Ira, a framework to accelerate backup replay by transmitting compact \emph{hints} alongside transaction batches. Our key insight is that the primary, having already executed transactions, possesses knowledge of future access patterns which is exactly the information needed for optimal replay. We use Ethereum for our case study and present a concrete protocol, Ira-L, within our framework to improve cache management of Ethereum block execution. The primaries implementing Ira-L provide hints that consist of the working set of keys used in an Ethereum block and one byte of metadata per key indicating the table to read from, and backups use these hints for efficient block replay. We evaluated Ira-L against the state-of-the-art Ethereum client reth over two weeks of Ethereum mainnet activity ($100,800$ blocks containing over $24$ million transactions). Our hints are compact, adding a median of $47$ KB compressed per block ($\sim5\%$ of block payload). We observe that the sequential hint generation and block execution imposes a $28.6\%$ wall-time overhead on the primary, though the direct cost from hints is $10.9\%$ of execution time; all of which can be pipelined and parallelized in production deployments. On the backup side, we observe that Ira-L achieves a median per-block speedup of $25\times$ over baseline reth. With $16$ prefetch threads, aggregate replay time drops from $6.5$ hours to $16$ minutes ($23.6\times$ wall-time speedup).
The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has necessitated a shift to distributed Edge environments, rendering traditional perimeter security obsolete and exposing scalability bottlenecks in centralized Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA). This paper proposes a novel, decentralized ZTA framework that integrates Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) distributed ledgers with Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) to eliminate single points of failure. By leveraging asynchronous DAG protocols (e.g., IOTA Tangle, Obyte) instead of linear blockchains and using lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for resource-constrained devices, the system enables fee-less, parallel transaction processing. Quantitative analysis demonstrates the framework's superior performance, achieving over 1,000 transactions per second (TPS), sub-second finality, and 15ms encryption times on commodity hardware, thereby establishing a robust, partition-tolerant security model for the future Internet of Everything.
Current agent payment standards enable transactions across varied infrastructure, including card systems, banking channels, and blockchain platforms, through cryptographic mandates binding user intentions to agent actions. These mandates create authorization structures while revealing critical vulnerabilities in transaction privacy protection, fine-grained delegation management, and cohesive governance implementation across multiple payment infrastructures. Zero-Knowledge Mandates introduce cryptographic techniques allowing agents to demonstrate compliance with spending restrictions while concealing constraint details from verifiers. Agents demonstrate compliance with spending caps, approved vendors, and time restrictions while keeping financial details and payment channel choices hidden. The system uses compact cryptographic proofs that allow verification without exposing mandate terms, user account information, or transaction routing. Core security guarantees include execution unlinkability, preventing transaction correlation, and verifiable compliance, ensuring constraint adherence. Technical implementation utilizes efficient proof systems, maintaining real-time transaction processing requirements. Evaluation addresses computational performance, information leakage boundaries, and practical deployment considerations across heterogeneous payment networks. The resulting architecture provides the first comprehensive privacy-preserving authorization primitive for autonomous commercial agents operating across multiple financial infrastructures simultaneously.
This paper proposes the Physical Law-Based Security System (PLBSS), a novel distributed ledger paradigm that anchors digital records to irreversible astrophysical events rather than computational assumptions. By deriving absolute timestamps from the past light cones of phenomena such as supernovae or gravitational waves, PLBSS achieves physically irreversible, non-consensus-based data integrity. The system combines probabilistic event anchoring and quantum-based node verification, rendering retroactive tampering physically impossible under known laws of nature.
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are cryptographic protocols that allow verification of statements without disclosing the underlying information. Among them, PLONK-based ZKPs are particularly notable for offering succinct, non-interactive proofs of knowledge with a universal trusted setup, leading to widespread adoption in blockchain and cryptocurrency applications. Nonetheless, their broader deployment is hindered by long proof-generation times and substantial memory demands. While GPUs can accelerate these computations, their limited memory capacity introduces significant challenges for efficient end-to-end proof generation.
This paper extends the classical Avellaneda-Stoikov framework for optimal market making to blockchain networks with directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. In DAG-based consensus protocols such as GHOSTDAG, multiple blocks are produced in parallel, creating a branching time structure that fundamentally alters the market maker's optimization problem. We derive a DAG-extended Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation that incorporates the probability distribution over transaction acceptance, showing that optimal spreads depend on the anticipated ordering of parallel blocks. Our main theoretical result demonstrates that market makers achieve O(1/n) variance reduction in inventory risk by distributing quotes across n parallel execution paths, exploiting the transaction-level mutual exclusivity inherent to GHOSTDAG ordering. We extend the framework to K correlated assets (proving portfolio-level variance reduction of O(K/n)) and provide adversarial robustness analysis under bounded hash power attacks. Implementation analysis for the Kaspa network (10 BPS, k=124 post-Crescendo) addresses practical constraints including direct-to-miner submission requirements, fee incentive compatibility, and latency bounds. Monte Carlo simulations validate theoretical predictions, showing Sharpe ratio improvements of 40-82% over single-path strategies under realistic network conditions. This work establishes foundational theory for high-frequency decentralized finance applications on DAG-based blockchains.
본 ë źëŹ¸ě ěĽě , 곾겊, ę˛ě´, ë¤í¸ěíŹ ëśí ęłź ę°ě "ě¤ë¨ ěŹęą´" ě´í ëśě° ěěĽ ë° íŠě ěě¤í ě´ ě´ëťę˛ ěŹěë ´íëě§ ëśěí기 ěí ę°ë ě íë ěěíŹëĄ íëŚ ëłľěë Ľ(Flow-Resilience )ě ě ěíŠëë¤ . "ěšźëĄ ëŹźě ë˛ ě´ë 돟ě ęłě í뼸ë¤"ë ęł ě ěë´ě 기ë°íěŹ, 본 ë źëŹ¸ě ěë´ęłź íëĄí ě˝ ę°ě 매í í í댿곟 íëŚâěśěâëśí âěŹíëŚ ë¨ęł 모ë¸ě ě ěíęł , ë운모í ě íŠě, íěě¤ ęłě´ íŠě, BFT ëłľě ë°Šě ę°ě ěŹěë ´ 경ëĄëĽź ëšęľíŠëë¤. ë¨, 꾏íěě 믟ę°í ě¸ëś ě ëł´ë ęłľę°íě§ ěěľëë¤. License and Usage Notice Proprietary â All Rights Reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Key Constraints: Attribution: You must give appropriate credit to the author (Jeongchoon Lee). Non-Commercial: You may not use this material for commercial purposes (including corporate-funded research or patent filings by third parties). NoDerivatives (No-Derivs): If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. The production of derivative worksâincluding academic papers that hybridize this theory with other frameworksâis strictly prohibited without the express written consent of the author.
Cross-chain bridges constitute the single largest vector of systemic risk in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), accounting for over \$2.8 billion in losses since 2021. The fundamental vulnerability lies in the binary nature of existing bridge security models: a bridge is either fully operational or catastrophically compromised, with no intermediate state to contain partial failures. We present ASAS-BridgeAMM, a bridge-coupled automated market maker that introduces Contained Degradation: a formally specified operational state where the system gracefully degrades functionality in response to adversarial signals. By treating cross-chain message latency as a quantifiable execution risk, the protocol dynamically adjusts collateral haircuts, slippage bounds, and withdrawal limits. Across 18 months of historical replay on Ethereum and two auxiliary chains, ASAS-BridgeAMM reduces worst-case bridge-induced insolvency by 73% relative to baseline mint-and-burn architectures, while preserving 104.5% of transaction volume during stress periods. In rigorous adversarial simulations involving delayed finality, oracle manipulation, and liquidity griefing, the protocol maintains solvency with probability $>0.9999$ and bounds per-epoch bad debt to $<0.2%$ of total collateral. We provide a reference implementation in Solidity and formally prove safety (bounded debt), liveness (settlement completion), and manipulation resistance under a Byzantine relayer model.
AbstractContemporary blockchain architectures face a critical impasse defined herein as the "Tetra-Lemma"âa four-dimensional optimization problem comprising decentralization, security, scalability, and thermodynamic sustainability. Proof-of-Work networks confront diminishing security budgets, while Proof-of-Stake systems risk validator centralization. This paper presents a Unified Monetary-Supply Framework designed to resolve these structural conflicts. By deriving a closed-form solution for supply dynamics that integrates a deterministic "Customized Halving Mechanism" with probabilistic asset attrition models, we demonstrate a mathematical convergence that maintains thermodynamic security over a secular horizon. Key Quantitative Findings: Asymptotic Convergence: While effective circulating supply may experience a temporary peak (approx. 27 million RIN), all evaluated models are engineered to stabilize below the 21 million threshold (specifically converging to 20.88 million RIN). Secular Stability: The framework secures a deflationary emission schedule mirroring Bitcoinâs scarcity model over a multi-century horizon of 443â703 years. Publication Status & RoadmapThis manuscript (v1.5.0) is maintained as a Living Research Document. It serves as the foundational theoretical framework for the Rincoin protocol. Future iterations will formalize the consensus mechanisms required to govern these algorithmic parameters. Integrity & Provenance ArchitectureThe scientific integrity and existence of this document are secured by a Triple-Verification Layer: 1. Academic Provenance: Indexed via Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17141922). 2. Thermodynamic Timestamping: Anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps. 3. Identity Assurance: Digitally signed by the author via a third-party certification authority (GMO Sign). Note: Verification data and the "Certificate of Authenticity" are available in the supplementary files. CorrespondencePrimary Author: Michiru Tokino (also known as Aevust in the decentralized infrastructure community). Academic Inquiries: edu@aevust.org Community Governance: @aevustus (Discord) / @aevust (X/Telegram)
Christopher Blake, Chen Feng, Xuachao Wang, Qianyu Yu
Proof of work blockchain protocols using multiple hash types are considered. It is proven that the security region of such a protocol cannot be the AND of a 51\% attack on all the hash types. Nevertheless, a protocol called Merged Bitcoin is introduced, which is the Bitcoin protocol where links between blocks can be formed using multiple different hash types. Closed form bounds on its security region in the $Î$-bounded delay network model are proven, and these bounds are compared to simulation results. This protocol is proven to maximize cost of attack in the linear cost-per-hash model. A difficulty adjustment method is introduced, and it is argued that this can partly remedy asymmetric advantages an adversary may gain in hashing power for some hash types, including from algorithmic advances, quantum attacks like Grover's algorithm, or hardware backdoor attacks.
We present a lightweight, probabilistic mechanism for certifying aligned storage between participants in decentralized systems. Participants respond to randomized suffix queries by performing forward scans over their locally stored data and returning short response sequences. A verifier observes only overlap statistics between responses. We prove that the overlap probability is bounded above by the minimum storage density among participants, ensuring that high observed overlap implies all parties store a large fraction of the underlying dataset. This bound holds regardless of adversarial strategy: a single well-provisioned participant cannot "carry" an under-provisioned partner. The protocol's "+1" advancement rule introduces pointer desynchronization that causes naĂŻve Binomial models to overestimate tail probabilities by 2â3Ă. We establish rigorous security bounds through systematic simulation of Poisson-walk dynamics. For example, observing 10 or more matches out of 12 recorded elements rules out minimum density below 0.6 at the 2.4% significance level. Independent repetition amplifies confidence exponentially. The mechanism requires no cryptographic commitments per element, no global verifier, and reveals only O(m) randomly-selected elements per interaction. We analyze several natural adversarial strategiesâfabrication, selective answering, collusion, Sybil attacksâand show that none can increase overlap probability beyond what storage density allows. From a mechanism-design perspective, repeated suffix-walk interactions induce a game where aligned storage is the dominant strategy, enabling emergent consensus without central coordination. The protocol serves as a foundation for proof-of-aligned-storage in distributed systems and provides consensus weight based on demonstrated storage rather than computational power or stake. Throughout this paper, "proof" refers to statistical evidence under a well-validated probabilistic model, not a cryptographic zero-knowledge proof.
The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) plays a critical role in the data link layer by mapping network addresses to physical hardware addresses. However, its lack of authentication mechanisms exposes it to spoofing attacks, enabling adversaries to intercept, modify, or disrupt communication within a local network. This paper proposes B-ARP (Blockchain-Secured ARP), a secure and decentralized approach to ARP leveraging blockchain technology. By treating MAC-IP bindings as verifiable transactions stored on a distributed ledger, the system ensures immutability, transparency, and resistance to tampering. A consensus-based validation mechanism prevents the propagation of forged ARP responses and enhances trust among network nodes. The proposed method not only mitigates common spoofing attacks but also introduces a scalable framework for integrating decentralized trust into foundational network protocols. Analytical evaluation demonstrates that this approach maintains strong security guarantees with minimal performance degradation, offering a viable path toward resilient and tamperproof address resolution in modern network architectures.
Aliza Reif, Felix Hanke, O. H. RamĂrez-Agudelo, Michael Karl
Data provenance, the ability to trace the complete history, transformations, and responsible actors behind mission data, is fundamental to ensuring data integrity, auditability, and trust in aerospace systems. As AI-driven autonomy accelerates across spacecraft, ground systems, and multi-partner mission operations, provenance becomes essential for validating data quality and supporting responsible AI practices. However, space missions operate in delay-tolerant, resource-constrained, and intermittently connected environments where traditional blockchain approaches, which rely on global consensus and continuous connectivity, are infeasible. This paper presents a lightweight, sequentially decentralized provenance chain designed specifically for distributed space mission architectures. The approach preserves key security guarantees including integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation while remaining functional under intermittent communication and heterogeneous international collaboration. The system enables verifiable, append-only data lineage without imposing the computational or networking overhead typical of blockchain systems. Furthermore, the design aligns with emerging decentralized data ecosystems such as Gaia-X and IDSA, supporting cross-organizational trust frameworks and policy-compliant data exchanges. The proposed solution provides a scalable and interoperable foundation for secure, transparent, and reproducible mission data handling, enabling more resilient and autonomous operations in future space exploration and Earth-observation missions.
Permissionless consensus protocols require a scarce resource to regulate leader election and provide Sybil resistance. Existing paradigms such as Proof of Work and Proof of Stake instantiate this scarcity through parallelizable resources like computation or capital. Once acquired, these resources can be subdivided across many identities at negligible marginal cost, making linear Sybil cost fundamentally unattainable. We introduce Proof of Commitment (PoCmt), a consensus primitive grounded in a non-parallelizable resource: real-time human engagement. Validators maintain a commitment state capturing cumulative human effort, protocol participation, and online availability. Engagement is enforced through a Human Challenge Oracle that issues identity-bound, time-sensitive challenges, limiting the number of challenges solvable within each human window. Under this model, sustaining multiple active identities requires proportional human-time effort. We establish a cost-theoretic separation showing that protocols based on parallelizable resources admit zero marginal Sybil cost, whereas PoCmt enforces a strictly linear cost profile. Using a weighted-backbone analysis, we show that PoCmt achieves safety, liveness, and commitment-proportional fairness under partial synchrony. Simulations complement the analysis by isolating human-time capacity as the sole adversarial bottleneck and validating the predicted commitment drift and fairness properties. These results position PoCmt as a new point in the consensus design space, grounding permissionless security in sustained human effort rather than computation or capital.
Address verification and spend limit checks in card and instant payment systems expose cardholder ZIP codes and velocity histories to gateways and intermediaries, which increases the privacy impact of breaches. At the same time, issuers rely on these checks to control fraud within strict two to three hundred millisecond authorization budgets. This paper presents ZK-AVS, a design that replaces plaintext AVS and spend limit evaluation with zero knowledge proofs produced on the customer device and verified at the payment gateway. The issuer stores commitments to the cardholder ZIP and per window spend counters, and the device proves that its ZIP matches the committed value and that the proposed transaction keeps cumulative spend within the configured limit, without revealing the underlying values. We instantiate a synthetic workload of fifty thousand transactions and show that AVS mismatch and limit pressure carry useful fraud signal that can be exposed as proof outcomes. The design is structured to fit within sub three hundred millisecond budgets on commodity devices, while removing direct exposure of address and spend history data at the gateway and keeping changes largely at endpoints.