by James Austgen, Kushal Babel, Vitalik Buterin, Phil Daian, Ari Juels and Mahimna Kelkar ‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’ — Charles Dickens, Hard Times In a paper we’ve released today, we introduce a new cryptographic notion that we call proofs of complete knowledge…

by James Austgen, Kushal Babel, Phil Daian, Ari Juels, and Mahimna Kelkar In June of 2021, a group called PleasrDAO bought the Doge NFT for $4 million. The Doge NFT is a visual representation of a dog, a purebred Shiba Inu, shown below. …

by Ari Juels Museums exist not just to house original works of art, but as shrines to be visited by art lovers. Physical works of art — oil paintings, for instance — look very different in person than in posters or digital images. I’ve spent twenty minutes staring at this…

By Weizhao Tang, Lucianna Kiffer, Giulia Fanti, and Ari Juels TL;DR In traditional financial systems, time equals money and network latency — i.e., the time for messages to travel in a network — has an outsized impact. Recently, network latency has become critical in blockchain peer-to-peer (P2P) networks as well. …

By Sarah Allen, Ari Juels, Mukti Khaire, Tyler Kell, and Siddhant Shrivastava Fine artists exercising unprecedented control of their own markets, high tech art, cartoon images of rocks selling for millions of dollars, scams, cult-like followings: the NFT market has it all! In this post, we will briefly survey the…

by James Grimmelmann (Cornell and IC3), Yan Ji (Cornell and IC3), and Tyler Kell (IC3) Many NFT and DAOs are designed to provide new or more convenient ways to own and sell creative works. Beeple’s EVERYDAYS: The First 5000 Days sold at auction for $69 million. Some observers think that…

by Mahimna Kelkar TL;DR In current blockchain consensus protocols, a single miner or validator unilaterally controls the inclusion and ordering of transactions in a block. This form of temporary centralization is entirely at odds with the goals of decentralization. It also poses an acute problem for decentralized finance (DeFi). Arbitrageurs…

by Tyler Kell, Haaroon Yousaf, Sarah Allen, Sarah Meiklejohn, Ari Juels Have you been offered the chance to earn unlimited passive income in cryptocurrency for life with no risks using a new technology called a smart contract? Congratulations! You may have just encountered a smart contract pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are not a new phenomenon, but they have found a new form in the nascent technology of smart contracts and decentralized, trustless programmable money. In this blog post we identify common characteristics of smart-contract based pyramid schemes…

by Jun-You Liu (Cornell, IC3), Surya Bakshi (UIUC, IC3), Shreyas Gandlur (Princeton), Ankush Das (CMU), and Andrew Miller (UIUC, IC3) This research was done in collaboration with the UIUC Decentralized Systems Lab (DSL). This post serves as the appendix to our post, “Using Universal Composability to Implement Off-Chain Payment Channels,”…