This February, the IC3 Newsletter brings you to the forefront of blockchain innovation with the announcement of The Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC'24) — now accepting registrations, sponsorship applications, and talk proposals. You can also dive into our latest research findings on consensus protocols, auctions, and Automated Market Makers. Plus, don't miss the intrigue of our faculty's new crypto thriller, The Oracle, blending the excitement of narrative with the complexities of blockchain. Enjoy reading! | |
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Mysticeti: Low-Latency DAG Consensus with Fast Commit Path by Kushal Babel (Cornell Tech, IC3), Andrey Chursin (Mysten Labs), George Danezis (Mysten Labs), Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias (Mysten Labs, IST Austria), Alberto Sonnino (Mysten Labs)
- The authors introduce Mysticeti-C, a Byzantine consensus protocol that stands out for its low-latency and high resource efficiency. By leveraging a DAG with Threshold Clocks and employing novel pipelining and multi-leader strategies, it aims to minimize latency in both steady states and crash scenarios. Mysticeti-FPC further enhances this with a fast commit path for reduced latency. The protocols' safety and liveness in a Byzantine context are validated. Evaluations show Mysticeti's superiority in latency and efficiency, and its innovative approach allows for a consensus commit WAN latency of 0.5 seconds with over 50k TPS, setting a new benchmark for Byzantine protocols.
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ZeroAuction: Zero-Deposit Sealed-bid Auction via Delayed Execution
by Haoqian Zhang (EPFL, IC3), Michelle Yeo (National University of Singapore), Vero Estrada-Galinanes (EPFL, IC3), Bryan Ford (EPFL, IC3)
- The authors discuss how auctions, vital for decentralized finance, face challenges with blockchain's transparency, requiring bidders to submit bids in a two-step process that includes a deposit, adding financial burden. To address this, they introduce a solution that implements delayed execution in the blockchain, allowing for encrypted transactions that are later decrypted and executed. This approach births ZeroAuction, a sealed-bid auction smart contract eliminating the need for deposits. ZeroAuction leverages this delayed execution to streamline the process, enabling bidders to participate with just one transaction, thereby reducing latency and financial barriers.
Mechanism Design for Automated Market Makers by T-H. Hubert Chan (The University of Hong Kong), Ke Wu (CMU, IC3), Elaine Shi (CMU, IC3)
- The authors address how automated market makers (AMMs) on blockchains, while innovative, introduce a challenge known as Miner Extractable Value (MEV), where miners manipulate transaction order for profit. They propose a new AMM mechanism that batches transactions within a block to counter MEV. This approach ensures arbitrage resilience in traditional blockchains, preventing miners from profiting unfairly, and promotes fair treatment of transactions. Furthermore, in decentralized systems, it guarantees incentive compatibility, encouraging users to act honestly. This mechanism aims to eliminate MEV, enhancing fairness and integrity in AMM operations.
Collusion-Resilience in Transaction Fee Mechanism Design by Hao Chung (CMU, IC3), Tim Roughgarden (Columbia University, a16z), Elaine Shi (CMU, IC3)
- The authors explore how users bid to get their transactions processed on blockchains through transaction fee mechanisms (TFM). Building on Roughgarden's work (EC'21), which set out criteria like user and miner incentive compatibility (UIC and MIC) and collusion-resilience (OCA-proofness), they note Ethereum's EIP-1559 meets these under no contention but fails UIC when blocks are full. Chung and Shi (SODA'23) introduced a stricter collusion-resilience criterion, c-side-contract-proofness (c-SCP), showing no TFM can meet UIC, MIC, and c-SCP with transaction contention. The authors prove that no TFM can achieve UIC, MIC, and OCA-proofness together when transactions compete for space, addressing a key question from Roughgarden (EC'21) and suggesting ways to overcome this limitation.
Pilotfish: Distributed Transaction Execution for Lazy Blockchains by
Quentin Kniep (ETH Zurich, IC3), Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias (IST Austria, Mysten Labs, IC3 Alum), Alberto Sonnino (Mysten Labs, UCL), Igor Zablotchi (Mysten Labs), Nuda Zhang (University of Michigan)
- The authors present Pilotfish, a groundbreaking blockchain execution engine that leverages parallelism in workloads, allowing validators to scale execution by using multiple machines, or ExecutionWorkers. This setup enables linear scalability in transaction processing with the number of ExecutionWorkers, given a parallelizable workload. Pilotfish also ensures state consistency across machine failures through a crash-recovery protocol integrated with blockchain consensus mechanisms. It introduces a novel approach by supporting dynamic reads without precise read and write sets, using a versioned-queues scheduling algorithm to maintain consistency and recover optimistically after crashes. Tested against the MoveVM and Sui's parallel execution MoveVM, Pilotfish shows promising scalability and linear performance gains up to 8 ExecutionWorkers, especially in compute-intensive tasks.
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SBC 2024 Registration is Open! | |
We are thrilled to announce that The Science of Blockchains (SBC) 2024 conference, cp-organized by IC3, Stanford CBR and Berkeley RDI, will take place from 7-9 August in NYC. Registration is now open here! Registration as always is free with limited capacity.
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Talk proposals are due by April 16, please submit here.
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🏆Proud to share that IC3 has been awarded 49,689.64 OP tokens in Optimism RetroPGF Round 3. Our sincere gratitude goes out to the Optimism Foundation and volunteer badgeholders for their support. IC3's dedicated commitment to multidisciplinary academic blockchain research will continue to play a crucial role in the advancement of blockchain systems like Optimism. | |
🔥New Book Alert: IC3 faculty Prof. Ari Juel's (Cornell Tech) new crypto thriller, The Oracle, is officially out! Find out more details, attend a book event and get a copy of it here! | |
💡"What can blockchain do for AI? Not what you've heard", check out this new op-ed in Blockworks by IC3 faculty Prof. Ari Juels (Cornell Tech) ⬇️: | 🌟 IC3 student Kushal Babel (Cornell Tech) recently presented new research work on Mysticeti at the Ava Labs System Seminar. Watch below to learn how Mysticeti reduce the number of round trip times required by DSMR/DAG consensus style protocols. | |
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The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3)
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