1. “Leveraging the Verifier’s Dilemma to Double Spend in Bitcoin” by Tong Cao, Jérémie Decouchant, and Jiangshan Yu

TLDR:

• A primary design goal for any blockchain system is to make it prohibitively expensive to reorganize the blocks that users consider to be “final”, or irreversible. Otherwise, blockchains would be considerably more susceptible to fraud via attacks such as double spends.

• In PoW systems, the susceptibility for a network to be captured has been measured in the context of “51% attacks” which are made possible by the centralization of mining resources.

• This paper discusses a variant of Bitcoin double spend attack called perishing mining. Like traditional double-spend attacks, this strategy involves mining a private chain to confuse network nodes unaware of the attack.

2. “Simplified State Storage Rent for EVM Blockchains” by Sergio Demian Lerner, Federico Jinich, Diego Masini, and Shreemoy Mishra

TLDR:

• Blockchain nodes are becoming increasingly expensive to run. The historical transactions, or state, of some blockchains exceed 20TB which prevents nodes to be run on commodity hardware, a problem often called state bloat.

• This issue has decreased the number of nodes validating blockchain transactions, which is problematic for many reasons, especially network security.

• This paper discusses a schema where the entities encoding information on the blockchain have to pay for state rent, which effectively socializes the impact that leveraging blockchains for storage has on network nodes.

3. “Accountable Safety for Rollups” by Ertem Nusret Tas, John Adler, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Ismail Khoffi, David Tse, and Nima Vaziri

TLDR:

• Optimistic Rollup designs have become the most popular scalability strategies not only for Ethereum but also for the smart contract ecosystem as a whole.

• At their core, optimistic designs trust a set of bonded operators that facilitate user transactions. If these intermediaries misbehave, users can provide fraud proofs and receive a reward. The system is optimistic in nature because it assumes intermediaries won’t misbehave since doing so will make them lose their stake.

• This paper discusses an important tool that can make these designs even safer: an accountability gadget for rollups. In this paradigm, network participants have stronger assurances around a node’s accountability which is intrinsically linked to the rollup’s security.

4. “An Efficient Verifiable State for zk-EVM and Beyond from the Anemoi Hash Function” by Jianwei Liu, Harshad Patil, Akhil Sai Peddireddy, Kevin Singh, Haifeng Sun, Huachuang Sun, and Weikeng Chen

TLDR:

• Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) have been used in privacy and scalability prototypes that have the potential to drastically improve the performance and usefulness of blockchains.

• Given the industry’s convergence on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the intersection of the EVM and ZKPs has been a vibrant area of research.

• This paper discusses the verifiability of zero knowledge circuits within the EVM and proposes a new schema for a ZKP-compatible execution environment.

Research collected and curated by @cipherix.

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal, business, investment, or tax advice.

The Smart Contract Research Forum’s (SCRF) bold mission is to advance web3 through actionable research and knowledge-sharing. To this end, SCRF connects researchers and builders, sponsors projects, and constructs collaborative forums. SCRF’s community is an active, international network of academics, industry architects, and blockchain advocates.

1. “Leveraging the Verifier’s Dilemma to Double Spend in Bitcoin” by Tong Cao, Jérémie Decouchant, and Jiangshan Yu

TLDR:

• A primary design goal for any blockchain system is to make it prohibitively expensive to reorganize the blocks that users consider to be “final”, or irreversible. Otherwise, blockchains would be considerably more susceptible to fraud via attacks such as double spends.

• In PoW systems, the susceptibility for a network to be captured has been measured in the context of “51% attacks” which are made possible by the centralization of mining resources.

• This paper discusses a variant of Bitcoin double spend attack called perishing mining. Like traditional double-spend attacks, this strategy involves mining a private chain to confuse network nodes unaware of the attack.

2. “Simplified State Storage Rent for EVM Blockchains” by Sergio Demian Lerner, Federico Jinich, Diego Masini, and Shreemoy Mishra

TLDR:

• Blockchain nodes are becoming increasingly expensive to run. The historical transactions, or state, of some blockchains exceed 20TB which prevents nodes to be run on commodity hardware, a problem often called state bloat.

• This issue has decreased the number of nodes validating blockchain transactions, which is problematic for many reasons, especially network security.

• This paper discusses a schema where the entities encoding information on the blockchain have to pay for state rent, which effectively socializes the impact that leveraging blockchains for storage has on network nodes.

3. “Accountable Safety for Rollups” by Ertem Nusret Tas, John Adler, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Ismail Khoffi, David Tse, and Nima Vaziri

TLDR:

• Optimistic Rollup designs have become the most popular scalability strategies not only for Ethereum but also for the smart contract ecosystem as a whole.

• At their core, optimistic designs trust a set of bonded operators that facilitate user transactions. If these intermediaries misbehave, users can provide fraud proofs and receive a reward. The system is optimistic in nature because it assumes intermediaries won’t misbehave since doing so will make them lose their stake.

• This paper discusses an important tool that can make these designs even safer: an accountability gadget for rollups. In this paradigm, network participants have stronger assurances around a node’s accountability which is intrinsically linked to the rollup’s security.

4. “An Efficient Verifiable State for zk-EVM and Beyond from the Anemoi Hash Function” by Jianwei Liu, Harshad Patil, Akhil Sai Peddireddy, Kevin Singh, Haifeng Sun, Huachuang Sun, and Weikeng Chen

TLDR:

• Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) have been used in privacy and scalability prototypes that have the potential to drastically improve the performance and usefulness of blockchains.

• Given the industry’s convergence on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the intersection of the EVM and ZKPs has been a vibrant area of research.

• This paper discusses the verifiability of zero knowledge circuits within the EVM and proposes a new schema for a ZKP-compatible execution environment.

Research collected and curated by @cipherix.

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal, business, investment, or tax advice.

The Smart Contract Research Forum’s (SCRF) bold mission is to advance web3 through actionable research and knowledge-sharing. To this end, SCRF connects researchers and builders, sponsors projects, and constructs collaborative forums. SCRF’s community is an active, international network of academics, industry architects, and blockchain advocates.