Flash loans are a recent blockchain smart contract construct that enable the issuance of loans that are only valid within one transaction and must be repaid by the end of that transaction. This post examines recent flash loan attacks on DeFi, and outlines how they could have been far more effective, boosting attack profitability to 829K USD (instead of 350K USD) and 1.1M USD (instead of 600K USD), respectively.
Libra is a zero-knowledge proof protocol that achieves extremely fast prover time and succinct proof size and verification time. Not only does it have good complexity in terms of asymptotics, but also its actual running time is well within the bounds of enabling realistic applications. It can be applied in areas such as blockchain technology and privacy-preserving smart contracts. It is currently being implemented by Oasis Labs. This blog post is based on a paper authored by Tiancheng Xie, Jiaheng Zhang, Yupeng Zhang, Charalampos Papamanthou and Dawn Song.
An oracle is a service that provides data to smart contracts or other systems. Oracles obtain their data from trusted websites. But even those that relay data correctly cannot safely access users' web-session data, because they can't enforce privacy. DECO is a privacy-preserving oracle protocol. Using cryptographic techniques, it lets users prove facts about their web (TLS) sessions to oracles while hiding privacy-sensitive data. DECO can make private and public web data accessible to a rich spectrum of applications, for blockchains and traditional (non-blockchain) systems.
Ostraka is a node blockchain node architecture, with scale-out properties.
Some algorithmic stablecoins have proposed incorporating price feeds by asking their token holders. In this post, we point out that this mechanism is broken because of a fundamental incentive misalignment.
Achieving true decentralization requires decentralized cryptography. CHURP is a cryptographic protocol for secret sharing in decentralized settings. In such a setting where nodes may come and go, traditional secret sharing (e.g., Shamir's) is no longer secure. Featuring several fundamental innovations, CHURP accomplishes the mission while being 2300x more efficient than previous schemes!
We describe why the fee market is fundamentally broken and propose an alternative fee mechanism that fixes the issues with the current fee market.
Ever raise a quarter billion dollars and need to solve a really hard problem? Well, neither did we, but we've been talking to Filecoin about helping solve one of theirs.
We explore the space of trust-minimizing coordination mechanisms for on-chain vote buying and exploitation in the permissionless model.
In this Choose Your Own Adventure Game, you navigate the process of warning the world about an exploit you have uncovered in a large software project.