As transaction fees skyrocket today, blockchains become increasingly expensive, hurting their adoption in broader applications.
This work tackles the saving of transaction fees for economic blockchain applications. The key insight is that other than the existing "default" mode to execute application logic fully on-chain, i.e., in smart contracts, and in fine granularity, i.e., user request per transaction, there are alternative execution modes with advantages in cost-effectiveness.
On Ethereum, we propose a holistic middleware platform supporting flexible and secure transaction executions, including off-chain states and batching of user requests. Furthermore, we propose control-plane schemes to adapt the execution mode to the current workload for optimal runtime cost.
We present a case study on the institutional accounts (e.g., coinbase.com) intensively sending Ether on Ethereum blockchains. By collecting real-life transactions, we construct workload benchmarks and show that our work saves 18% ~ 47% per invocation than the default baseline while introducing 1.81 ~ 16.59 blocks delay.
Different versions of peer-to-peer electronic cash exist as data represented by separate blockchains. Payments between such systems cannot be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Bitcoin provided part of the solution but its utility is limited to intra-blockchain transactions. The benefits are lost if a trusted third party is required to execute inter-blockchain transactions. We propose a solution to the inter-blockchain transaction problem using the same fundamental principles of Bitcoin. The protocol is described by the Uberledger framework, …
Monero is a popular crypto-currency which focuses on privacy. The blockchain uses cryptographic techniques to obscure transaction values as well as a `ring confidential transaction' which seeks to hide a real transaction among a variable number of spoofed transactions. We have developed training sets of simulated blockchains of 10 and 50 agents, for which we have control over the ground truth and keys, in order to test these claims. We featurize Monero transactions by characterizing the local structure of the public-facing blockchains and use labels obtained from the simulations to perform mac…
As the core technology behind Bitcoin, Blockchain's decentralized, tamper-proof, and traceable features make it the preferred platform for organizational innovation. In current Bitcoin, block reward is halved every four years, and transaction fees are expected to become the majority of miner revenues around 2140. When transaction fee dominates mining rewards, strategic deviations such as Selfish Mining, Undercutting, and Mining Gap could threaten the integrity and security of the Blockchain. This paper proposes a set of Dynamic Transaction Storage (DTS) strategies for maintaining a sustainable…
In many typical application scenarios, it is necessary to revoke the incorrect account operations caused by user mis-operation, financial fraud, illegal hacking, etc. Unfortunately, users often blur the lines between the concept of "transaction state revocable" and "business status revocable", which result in revocable transaction not universally supported in blockchain systems at present. In this work, we propose GateChain , a blockchain that support revocable transaction model (RTM) on distributed ledger. Specifically, based on the state-of-the-art blockchain technologies, GateChain can safe…
Transactions represent a fundamental component in blockchains as they are the primary means for users to change the blockchain state. Current blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum require users to constantly observe the state changes of interest or the events taking place in a blockchain and requires the user to explicitly release the required transactions to respond to the observed events in the blockchain. This paper proposes EventWarden, a decentralized event-driven proxy service for users to outsource transactions in Ethereum-like blockchains. EventWarden employs a novel combinat…
This paper highlights the necessity to use modern blockchain technology in traditional banking sector to reduce frauds and enable high-security transactions on a permanent blockchain ledger. Reviewing different channels through which the traditional banking servers could integrate blockchain use, it is signified how a huge anti-fraud stand can be taken against bank servers allowing fraudulent transactions daily. Usage of a blockchain-based ledger is highly impactful in terms of security of a banking organization. Blockchain-based currency tokens, also referred to as Cryptocurrencies are not re…
The integration of multi-access edge computing (MEC) and RAFT consensus makes it feasible to deploy blockchain on trustful base stations and gateways to provide efficient and tamper-proof edge data services for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, reducing the latency of storing data on blockchain remains a challenge, especially when an anomalytriggered data flow in a certain area exceeds the block generation speed. This letter proposes an intelligent transaction migration scheme for RAFT-based private blockchain in IoT applications to migrate transactions in busy areas to idle regi…
Atomic Crosschain Transaction technology allows composable programming across private Ethereum blockchains. It allows for inter-contract and inter-blockchain function calls that are both synchronous and atomic: if one part fails, the whole call graph of function calls is rolled back. Traditional Ethereum contract functions can limit which accounts can call them by specialised application program logic. This is important as it allows application developers to specify which callers can execute functions that update contract state. In this paper we introduce the strategy required to restrict whic…
Scalability has been a bottleneck for major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Despite the significantly improved scalability claimed by several high--profile blockchain projects, there has been little effort to understand how their transactional throughput is being used. In this paper, we examine recent network traffic of three major high-scalability blockchains--EOSIO, Tezos and XRP Ledger (XRPL)--over a period of seven months. Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of the transactions are used for value transfer purposes. In particular, 96% of the transactions on EOSIO were …
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in the blockchain. Over the years, informal conventions or "norms" for transaction ordering have, however, emerged via the use of shared software by miners, e.g., the GetBlockTemplate (GBT) mining protocol in Bitcoin Core. Today, a widely held view is that Bitcoin miners prioritize transactions based on their offered "transaction fee-per-byte." Bitcoin users are…
The use of blockchains is growing every day, and their utility has greatly expanded from sending and receiving crypto-coins to smart-contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations. Modern blockchains underpin a variety of applications: from designing a global identity to improving satellite connectivity. In our research we look at the ability of blockchains to store metadata in an increasing volume of transactions and with evolving focus of utilization. We further show that basic approaches to improving blockchain privacy also rely on embedding metadata. This paper identifies and classif…
Decentralized crypto-currencies based on the blockchain architecture under-utilize available network bandwidth, making them unable to scale to thousands of transactions per second. We define the Blockclique architecture, that addresses this limitation by sharding transactions in a block graph with a fixed number of threads. The architecture allows the creation of intrinsically compatible blocks in parallel, where each block references one previous block of each thread. The consistency of the Blockclique protocol is formally established in presence of attackers. An experimental evaluation of th…
Sharding is a promising blockchain scaling solution. But it currently suffers from high latency and low throughput when it comes to cross-shard transactions, i.e., transactions that require coordination from multiple shards. The root cause of these limitations arise from the use of the classic two-phase commit protocol, which involves locking assets for extended periods of time. This paper presents Rivet, a new paradigm for blockchain sharding that achieves lower latency and higher throughput for cross-shard transactions. Rivet has a single reference shard running consensus, and multiple worke…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing to the blockchain for each transaction, they only settle the final payment balances with the underlying blockchain. When executing off-chain transactions in current payment networks, parties must access the blockchain within bounded time to detect misbehaving parties that deviate from the protocol. This opens a window for attacks in which a malicious party c…
A Merkle tree is an information construction that is used in Blockchain to verify data or transactions in a large content pool in a safe manner. The role of the Merkle tree is crucial in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in a Blockchain network. In this paper, we propose a bright and enhanced verification method, Merkle Trim Tree-based Blockchain Authentication (MTTBA) for the hash node traversal to reach the Merkle Root in a minimum time. MTTBA is a unique mechanism for verifying the Merkle Tree's accumulated transactions specifically for an odd number of transactions. The future impact of c…
In this paper we address the issue of identity and access control within shared permissioned blockchains. We propose the ChainAchor system that provides anonymous but verifiable identities for entities on the blockchain. ChainAchor also provides access control to entities seeking to submit transactions to the blockchain to read/verify transactions on the the permissioned blockchain. Consensus nodes enforce access control to the shared permissioned blockchain by a simple look-up to a (read-only) list of anonymous members' public-keys. ChainAnchor also provides unlinkability of transactions belo…
Public blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin do not give enterprises the privacy they need for many of their business processes. Consequently consortiums are exploring private blockchains to keep their membership and transactions private. Ethereum Private Sidechains is a private blockchain technology which allows many blockchains to be operated in parallel. Communication is needed between Ethereum Private Sidechains to allow a function in a contract on one sidechain to execute function calls which return values from, or update the state of, another sidechain. We propose a crosschain techniq…
Existing permissionless blockchain solutions rely on peer-to-peer propagation mechanisms, where nodes in a network transfer transaction they received to their neighbors. Unfortunately, there is no explicit incentive for such transaction propagation. Therefore, existing propagation mechanisms will not be sustainable in a fully decentralized blockchain with rational nodes. In this work, we formally define the problem of incentivizing nodes for transaction propagation. We propose an incentive mechanism where each node involved in the propagation of a transaction receives a share of the transactio…
As adoption of blockchain-based systems grows, more attention is being given to privacy of these systems. Early systems like BitCoin provided few privacy features. As a result, systems with strong privacy guarantees, including Monero, Zcash, and MimbleWimble have been developed. Compared to BitCoin, these cryptocurrencies are much less understood. In this paper, we focus on MimbleWimble, which uses the Dandelion++ protocol for private transaction relay and transaction aggregation to provide transaction content privacy. We find that in combination these two features make MimbleWimble susceptibl…
The General Purpose Atomic Crosschain Transaction protocol allows composable programming across multiple Ethereum blockchains. It allows for inter-contract and inter-blockchain function calls that are both synchronous and atomic: if one part fails, the whole call execution tree of function calls is rolled back. The protocol operates on existing Ethereum blockchains without modification. It works for both public permissioned and consortium blockchains. Additionally, the protocol is expected to work across heterogeneous blockchains other than Ethereum. This paper describes the protocol, analyses…
Bitcoin has emerged in 2008, and after decades of development, it has become the largest trading currency by far. The core of the blockchain is to ensure the anonymity of user transactions. As more and more analysis algorithms for blockchain transactions appear, the anonymity of the blockchain is increasingly threatened. We propose Tomen, an encryption application for the communication process in the bitcoin transaction process, combined with the encryption principle method of Tor. The goal is to achieve the application of the anonymization of bitcoin transaction communication.
Atomic Crosschain Transaction technology allows composable programming across private Ethereum blockchains. It allows for inter-contract and inter-blockchain function calls that are both synchronous and atomic: if one part fails, the whole call graph of function calls is rolled back. It is not based on existing techniques such as Hash Time Locked Contracts, relay chains, block header transfer, or trusted intermediaries. BLS Threshold Signatures are used to prove to validators on one blockchain that information came from another blockchain and that a majority of the validators of that blockchai…
The cross-blockchain transaction remains one of the most challenging problems in blockchains. The root cause of the challenge lies in the nondeterministic nature of blockchains: A $n$-party transaction across multiple blockchains might be partially rolled back due to the potential forks in any of the participating blockchains---eventually, only one fork will survive in the competition among miners. While some effort has recently been made to developing hierarchically distributed commit protocols to make multi-party transactions progress, there is no systematic method to reason about the transa…
Blockchain technology is an interlinked systematic chain of blocks that contains transaction history and other user data. It works under the principle of decentralized distributed digital ledger. This technology enables cryptographically secure and anonymous financial transactions among the user nodes of the network enabling the transactions to be validated and approved by all the users in a transparent environment. It is a revolutionary technology that earned its emerging popularity through the usage of digital cryptocurrencies. Even though Blockchain holds a promising scope of development in…
As user privacy gains popularity and attention, and starts to shape relations between users and service providers, blockchain based solutions thrive for ways to relax immutability without sacrificing consistency. This work answers that need and presents the first design for a redactable execute-order-validate blockchain, that grants users with the \emph{right to be forgotten}. The design is easy to adopt, as we exemplify by implementing it on top of Hyperledger Fabric. It modifies the block structure and extracts user data from the hash-chain without loosening any correctness or liveness crite…
Atomic Crosschain Transaction technology allows composable programming across permissioned Ethereum blockchains. It allows for inter-contract and inter-blockchain function calls that are both synchronous and atomic: if one part fails, the whole call graph of function calls is rolled back. This paper analyses the processing overhead of using this technique compared to using multiple standard non-atomic single blockchain transactions. The additional processing is analysed for three scenarios involving multiple blockchains: the Hotel - Train problem, Supply Chain with Provenance, and an Oracle. T…
In this work, we propose a stateless blockchain called CompactChain, which compacts the entire state of the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) based blockchain systems into two RSA accumulators. The first accumulator is called Transaction Output (TXO) commitment which represents the TXO set. The second one is called Spent Transaction Output (STXO) commitment which represents the STXO set. In this work, we discuss three algorithms - (i) To update the TXO and STXO commitments by the miner. The miner also provides the proofs for the correctness of the updated commitments; (ii) To prove the transac…
A Chatbot is a popular platform to enable users to interact with a software or website to gather information or execute actions in an automated fashion. In recent years, chatbots are being used for executing financial transactions, however, there are a number of security issues, such as secure authentication, data integrity, system availability and transparency, that must be carefully handled for their wide-scale adoption. Recently, the blockchain technology, with a number of security advantages, has emerged as one of the foundational technologies with the potential to disrupt a number of appl…
It is observed that users have higher requirements for fairness, transparency, and privacy of transactions of energy exchanges that occur across platforms like Indian Energy Exchange (IEX) and Power Exchange India Limited (PXIL). As a decentralized distributed accounting system, blockchain is characterized by traceability, security, credibility, and non-tampering of transactions, which can meet the needs of integrated energy and multi-energy transactions. Based on the research on the application of blockchain technology in the field of integrated energy services, this solution proposes an inte…
Digital signature is a major component of transactions on Blockchain platforms, especially in enterprise Blockchain platforms, where multiple signatures from a set of peers need to be produced to endorse a transaction. However, such process is often complex and time-consuming. Multi-signature, which can improve transaction efficiency by having a set of signers cooperate to produce a joint signature, has attracted extensive attentions. In this work, we propose two multi-signature schemes, GMS and AGMS, which are proved to be more secure and efficient than state-of-the-art multi-signature scheme…
The state-of-the-art techniques for processing cross-blockchain transactions take a simple centralized approach: when the assets on blockchain $X$, say $X$-coins, are exchanged with the assets on blockchain $Y$---the $Y$-coins, those $X$-coins need to be exchanged to a "middle" medium (such as Bitcoin) that is then exchanged to $Y$-coins. If there are more than two parties involved in a single global transaction, the global transaction is split into multiple local two-party transactions, each of which follows the above central-exchange protocol. Unfortunately, the atomicity of the global trans…
Blockchain is becoming a new generation of information infrastructures. However, the current blockchain solutions rely on a continuous connectivity network to query and modify the state of the blockchain. The emerging satellite technology seems to be a good catalyst to forward offline transactions to the blockchain. However, this approach suffers expensive costs, difficult interoperability, and limited computation problems. Therefore, we propose BcMON, the first blockchain middleware for offline networks. BcMON incorporates three innovative designs: 1) it reduces the costs of offline transacti…
In this paper, we develop a more general framework of block-structured Markov processes in the queueing study of blockchain systems, which can provide analysis both for the stationary performance measures and for the sojourn times of any transaction and block. Note that an original aim of this paper is to generalize the two-stage batch-service queueing model studied in Li et al. \cite{Li:2018} both ``from exponential to phase-type" service times and ``from Poisson to MAP" transaction arrivals. In general, the MAP transaction arrivals and the two stages of PH service times make our blockchain q…
Blockchain has received tremendous attention as a secure, distributed, and anonymous framework for the Internet of Things (IoT). As a distributed system, blockchain trades off scalability for distribution, which limits the technologys adaptation for large scale networks such as IoT. All transactions and blocks must be broadcast and verified by all participants which limits scalability and incurs computational and communication overheads. The existing solutions to scale blockchains have so far led to partial recentralization, limiting the technologys original appeal. In this paper, we introduce…
Stealth address prevents public association of a blockchain transaction's output with a recipient's wallet address and hides the actual destination address of a transaction. While stealth address provides an effective privacy-enhancing technology for a cryptocurrency network, it requires blockchain nodes to actively monitor all the transactions and compute the purported destination addresses, which restricts its application for resource-constrained environments like Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we propose DKSAP-IoT, a faster dual-key stealth address protocol for blockchain-based Io…
Many blockchain-based cryptocurrencies provide users with online blockchain explorers for viewing online transaction data. However, traditional blockchain explorers mostly present transaction information in textual and tabular forms. Such forms make understanding cryptocurrency transaction mechanisms difficult for novice users (NUsers). They are also insufficiently informative for experienced users (EUsers) to recognize advanced transaction information. This study introduces a new online cryptocurrency transaction data viewing tool called SilkViser. Guided by detailed scenario and requirement …
Permissionless blockchain consensus protocols have been designed primarily for defining decentralized economies for the commercial trade of assets, both virtual and physical, using cryptocurrencies. In most instances, the assets being traded are regulated, which mandates that the legal right to their trade and their trade value are determined by the governmental regulator of the jurisdiction in which the trade occurs. Unfortunately, existing blockchains do not formally recognise proposal of legal cryptocurrency transactions, as part of the execution of their respective consensus protocols, res…
Traditionally, blockchain systems involve sharing transaction information across all blockchain network participants. Clearly, this introduces barriers to the adoption of the technology by the enterprise world, where preserving the privacy of the business data is a necessity. Previous efforts to bring privacy and blockchains together either still leak partial information, are restricted in their functionality or use costly mechanisms like zk-SNARKs. In this paper, we propose the Multi-Shard Private Transaction (MSPT) protocol, a novel privacy-preserving protocol for permissioned blockchains, w…
Blockchains have shown great promise as peer-to-peer digital currency systems over the past 10 years. However, with increased popularity, the demand for processing transactions has also grown leading to increased costs, confirmation times, and limited blockchain utility. There have been a number of proposals on how to scale blockchains, such as Plasma, Polkadot, Elastico, RapidChain, Bitcoin-NG, and OmniLedger. These solutions all propose the segmentation of every function of a blockchain, namely consensus, permanent data storage, transaction processing, and consistency, which significantly in…
We propose Shard Scheduler, a system for object placement and migration in account-based sharded blockchains. Our system calculates optimal placement and decides of object migrations across shards and supports complex multi-account transactions caused by smart contracts. Placement and migration decisions made by Shard Scheduler are fully deterministic, verifiable, and can be made part of the consensus protocol. Shard Scheduler reduces the number of costly cross-shard transactions, ensures balanced load distribution and maximizes the number of processed transactions for the blockchain as a whol…
Since its inception as a solution for secure cryptocurrencies sharing in 2008, the blockchain technology has now become one of the core technologies for secure data sharing and storage over trustless and decentralised peer-to-peer systems. E-government is amongst the systems that stores sensitive information about citizens, businesses and other affiliates, and therefore becomes the target of cyber attackers. The existing e-government systems are centralised and thus subject to single point of failure. This paper proposes a secure and decentralised e-government system based on the consortium bl…
A blockchain is an append-only linked-list of blocks, which is maintained at each participating node. Each block records a set of transactions and their associated metadata. Blockchain transactions act on the identical ledger data stored at each node. Blockchain was first perceived by Satoshi Nakamoto as a peer-to-peer digital-commodity (also known as crypto-currency) exchange system. Blockchains received traction due to their inherent property of immutability-once a block is accepted, it cannot be reverted.
