Posts tagged ethereum

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.
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.
Suppose that N players share cryptocurrency using an M-of-N multisig scheme. If N-M+1 players disappear, the remaining ones have a problem: They've permanently lost their funds. In this blog, we propose a solution to this critical problem using the power of the trusted hardware.
Guest blogger Prof. Karen Levy describes how contracts often include terms that are unenforceable, purposefully vague, or never meant to be enforced, how this helps set expectations, and what this means for smart contracts.
We have been examining the state of the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks over time. In a recent study, we examine the level of decentralization in these two networks, with some interesting takeaways for the future.
This post argues that the recently proposed EIPs to rescue the frozen ethers are dangerous.
We discuss a novel scheme for preventing (miner) frontrunning in Ethereum.
We do a deep-dive into Parity's multisig bug.

Parity's Wallet Bug is not Alone

The bug in the Parity multisig wallet that caused the loss of $30M has the same root cause as a bug in the BitGo multisig wallet that I found a year ago.

Bancor Is Flawed

Bancor just raised $144M through the biggest ICO in history. We describe why their approach is flawed.
Town Crier is an oracle service for smart contracts.

How the Ethereum Hard Fork Can Fail

The Ethereum hard fork is in a few days. Having looked at the proposed hard fork code, I discuss what I believe is the weakest part of the HF code.

Cross-Chain Replay Attacks

Following a hard fork, there will be two chains. In cross-chain replay attacks, one can attack a smart contract by moving transactions from one chain to the other. Post describes a potential attack.

Reentrancy Woes in Smart Contracts

Reentrancy bugs are difficult to catch. This distilled, illustrative example shows how even a diligently-written contract with invariant checks can go wrong.

A Decentralized Escape Hatch for DAOs

We describe a general Decentralized Escape Hatch mechanism, suitable for DAOs and other smart contracts.
Our discovery of a DoS vulnerability in Ethereum turns out to be a point of strength and censorship resistence for the currency.
We identify a DoS vulnerability with Ethereum's proposed soft-fork for The DAO, and urge the community to be prepared for attacks, and to speed up the timetable for resolving the hard fork decision.
IC3's resident lawyer-techie discusses why smart contracts need escape hatches and how to implement them.
This post describes how the hacker who took $50+M from The DAO did it.

Thoughts on The DAO Hack

The DAO was just hacked and a few million ether is missing. Here are my quick thoughts on what this means and where we go from here.
In this post, we examine just how prevalent the recently discovered "unchecked-send" bug is in real, live, deployed Ethereum contracts, with the aid of an automated analysis tool we have developed.
The DAO is under pressure to turn itself into a Ponzi. I explain the "natural-born Ponzi" mechanisms, and call for the community to be on guard for such proposals.
We just published a draft article, urging a moratorium on The DAO until some security patches can be applied.

The ShapeShift Hack: Simply Incredible

There was a series of heists at ShapeShift, followed by an offered explanation. That offered explanation has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.