The authors present an empirical study of Forsage, a pyramid scheme implemented as a smart contract and at its peak one of the largest consumers of resources in Ethereum. They take advantage of the unprecedented transparency of a pyramid scheme run as a smart contract with public (byte)code and all of its transactions visible on the blockchain to gain insight into the mechanics, impact on participants, and evolution of Forsage.
Tyler Kell (Cornell Tech, IC3), Haaroon Yousaf (UCL, IC3), Sarah Allen (Cornell Tech, IC3), Sarah Meiklejohn (UCL), Ari Juels (Cornell Tech, IC3)
The authors describe Decentralized Oracle Networks (DONs) as the technical foundation of Chainlink 2.0 that enables hybrid smart contracts by providing universal connectivity to external resources and scalable off-chain computation. They focus on seven key areas: hybrid smart contracts, abstracting away complexity, scaling, confidentiality, order-fairness, trust-minimization, and incentive-based (cryptoeconomic) security.
Lorenz Breidenbach, Christian Cachin, Benedict Chan, Alex Coventry, Steve Ellis, Ari Juels, Farinaz Koushanfar, Andrew Miller, Brendan Magauran, Daniel Moroz, Sergey Nazarov, Alexandru Topliceanu, Florian Tramer, Fan Zhang (All Chainlink Labs)
The authors design and implement SnarkPack, a new argument that further reduces the size of SNARK proofs by means of aggregation. It is designed to work with Groth16 scheme and has logarithmic size proofs and a verifier that runs in logarithmic time in the number of proofs to be aggregated and does not require a separate trusted setup ceremony.
Nicolas Gailly (Protocol Labs), Mary Maller (Ethereum Foundation), Anca Nitulescu (Protocol Labs)