v1.0 by Kushal Babel, Nerla Jean-Louis, Mahimna Kelkar, Yunqi Li, Carolina Ortega Perez, Aditya Asgoankar, Sylvain Bellemare, Ari Juels, and Andrew Miller TLDR: The Sting Framework (SF) is a new idea for bolstering the security of systems at risk of information leakage. SF addresses the case where a corrupt service…

PROF: Fair Transaction-Ordering in a Profit-Seeking World by Kushal Babel, Yan Ji, Ari Juels, and Mahimna Kelkar 26 April 2023 v1.2 In today’s blockchain landscape, the life of a transaction is nasty, brutish, and short. Or, as some put it, a blockchain like Ethereum is a “dark forest” — a…

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…