Adding Redundancy To Splitting Protocols for a Better Performance

Payment Channel Networks have been developed to deal with the scalability issue in blockchain technologies. Using them, two parties can make multiple payments between themselves relatively fast. However, usually the channels have too small capacities, unable to handle a big payment. Allowing to split a payment into smaller payments and...

Mitigating game theoretic vulnerabilities in Chainlink

Oracles are mechanisms that provide blockchain networks with data that only exists outside of the network, such as asset prices. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols use this data, and therefore their usability depends on the reliability of oracles. One such oracle system, widely used by DeFi protocols for pricing feeds, is Chainlink. The...

Mitigating sandwich attacks in Kyber DMM

Kyber is a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) system which runs on the Ethereum blockchain. DeFi aims to remove centralized intermediaries such as Market Makers. An Automated Market Maker (AMM), implemented in a smart contract, is a decentralized version of these. Kyber's Dynamic Market Maker (DMM) is a next-generation AMM which solves two issues:...

Increase of long-term success ratio using novel splitting methods in Interdimensional SpeedyMurmurs

Popular cryptocurrencies lack scalability. Payment Channel Networks (PCN's) allow a large increase in transaction throughput. However, transaction failures are frequent when transactions are routed through multiple intermediaries. A previously introduced protocol, Interdimensional SpeedyMurmurs, increased the success ratio of transactions in PCN...

LRFP : Extending local routing protocols in layer 2 networks with a secure fee model

Blockchains like Bitcoin are known to be victim of scalability issues. The lack in high throughput and low latency form a great bottleneck to its network. A promis- ing solution are layer 2 protocols, more precisely payment channel networks (PCN). Payment success rates are a common metric in these networks. These rates can be in- creased by...

Splitting Payments to Increase Blockchain Effectiveness

Blockchain technology is the underlying mechanism that many cryptocurrencies operate on. It relies on cryptographic techniques that enforce integrity on transaction records. The records (blocks) stored are limited in size and frequency. One well-known issue regarding blockchain technology is the lack of scalability. In order to mitigate this...

Comparing Lightning Routing Protocols to Routing Protocols with Splitting

The largest payment channel network, Bitcoin Lightning, shows a potential alternative to cur- rent financial systems, overcoming the scalability limitations of blockchain. Source onion routing is used to route payments, but novel routing protocols claim improved effectiveness by employ- ing strategies not compatible with the current state of...

Mitigation of Transaction Manipulation Attacks in UniSwap

Front-running is the illegal practice of obtaining information unavailable to the general public with regards to upcoming transactions and performing actions based on this knowledge as to gain profit. This type of attack has been an issue since the introduction of the first stock market and it is not a surprise it has spread into blockchain...

Protecting smart contracts of Decentralized Finance systems against Reentrancy attacks

Reentrancy attacks target smart contracts of Decentralized Finance systems that contain coding errors caused by developers. This type of attacks caused, in the past 5 years, the loss of over 400 million USD. Several countermeasures were developed that use patterns to detect reentrancy attacks on smart contracts before deployment on the Ethereum...

Bubblechain: An IoT authentication system

Authentication of domains has been a crucial part of the growth of web browsing, especially for e-commerce and secure browsing. However, the digital space has expanded from web domains to include devices such as smart cars, smart houses, and other IoT devices. The future for these devices is to communicate autonomously with one another, also...

Liquidity risks in the decentralized finance protocol Aave

Protocols for Loanable Funds (PLFs) are lending protocols that exist in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. They provide users the opportunity of lending and borrowing of cryptocurrencies. The economic model used to ensure liquidity in these protocols are variable parameters and incentives to reach an optimal equilibrium and...

D4: Distributed Direct Digital Democracy: a Remote Electronic Voting Protocol

Recently we have been witnesses to a string of controversial elections: the 2016 US Presidential election, the 2016 Brexit referendum, the 2018 Russian presidential election, the 2018 Zimbabwe elections. The controversies surrounding elections are seemingly endless.<br/><br/>Why are these examples relevant? In the 21st century, we are still...

Publicly verifiable authenticity of data from multiple external sources for smart contracts using aggregate signatures

Smart contracts are applications that are deployed and executed on a blockchain's decentralised infrastructure. Many smart contract applications rely on data that resides outside the blockchain. However, while traditional web applications can communicate with trustworthy data sources directly through the Internet, this is not possible for smart...