Posts tagged blockchain

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.

How Not To Run A Blockchain Lottery

Devising a lottery based off of a blockchain is a lot harder than it seems. Also, this is a parable for the Bitcoin blockchain debate.
Miniature world is an evaluation platform which provides a principled way of evaluating different blockchain proposals.