In briefBoron vacancies made in bulk hexagonal boron nitride by high-energy helium ion irradiation
SummaryThe paper reports creating negatively charged boron vacancy color centers in bulk hexagonal boron nitride by implanting helium ions at about 1 MeV. Photoluminescence and optically detected magnetic resonance confirm the centers, with a 180 MHz resonance width and the expected Zeeman shift. The depth along the c-axis was measured and compared with SRIM modeling; the values agree within reported uncertainties, though the experiment shows greater depth and a wider distribution.
P.G. Vilyuzhanina, S.V. Bolshedvorskii, R. Isayev et al.
In briefXIM: XDC Interledger Messaging Protocol for Cross-Network Messages
SummaryThis paper proposes XIM, a chain-agnostic protocol for sending canonical messages between heterogeneous networks, with each communication lane choosing an explicit verification policy. It separates message meaning from transport, verification, execution, routing, asset identity, and compliance metadata, and introduces a Universal Asset Identifier, pluggable adapters, and a route graph for multi-hop settlement. The paper specifies the protocol model, state machine, encoding, verification modes, security assumptions, and a phased deployment plan. It targets public and permissioned ledgers and institutional gateways, especially stablecoins, tokenized assets, and ISO 20022-compatible payments.
Atul Khekade, Ritesh Kakkad, Wanwiset Peerapatanapokin et al.
In briefExchange Rate Setting for Cryptocurrency Mergers: A Formal Framework
SummaryMany cryptocurrencies face declining adoption, low liquidity and weak security, so merging two of them is proposed as an alternative to abandonment. The paper introduces a formal framework for determining a fair exchange rate in such a merger, treating the merged value as endogenous because a cryptocurrency's value depends on network effects. The authors prove that at any exchange rate where the merger does not destroy value, the pre-merger price ratio preserves wealth, and under explicit conditions it satisfies five fairness conditions: wealth, adoption, security, governance and liquidity preservation.
In briefPreventing time-averaged selfish mining across epoch boundaries in Nakamoto consensus
SummaryThe paper addresses selfish mining in Nakamoto consensus, where difficulty adjustment misreads uncounted orphan blocks as falling hash rate, letting attackers profit. It proposes a pipelined buffer difficulty adjustment mechanism (PB-DAM) that splits each epoch into an accountable prefix and a settlement buffer of depth d. Simulations reported in the paper show that d = 16 neutralizes selfish mining at α = 0.40, and systems recover from a 50% hash-rate crash in about 2.2 epochs with under 1% capacity overhead.
In briefSlashable Secrecy for Witness Encryption on Ethereum Finality: Paper on Key Release Without Custodians
SummaryThis paper addresses a gap in witness encryption over blockchain state, where validators able to build a fork witness can obtain a secret even though the condition never holds on the canonical chain. It proposes slashable secrecy, which uses Ethereum's native slashing rules without an extra key-custody committee or separate collateral. The authors give a construction from a witness KEM and prove the property conditionally on its extraction interface. Experiments on a synthetic Ethereum network confirm native processing of evidence without WE decryption.
In briefNot All LPs Are Equal: Active vs. Passive Liquidity Providers in Automated Market Makers
SummaryThis paper examines how profits from liquidity provision on automated market makers (AMMs) differ across LP strategies. The authors use a markout-based framework to split Uniswap LP profitability into active and passive components, applied to v2, v3 and v4 pools on Ethereum, Arbitrum and Base. They find that in concentrated-liquidity pools passive LPs tend to underperform aggregate pool measures, with a wider gap on Ethereum than on L2s, and that passive LPs fare better in higher-fee pools.
Agathe Sadeghi, Dingyue Liu, Ciamac Moallemi et al.
In briefByzantine causal reliable broadcast with constant metadata overhead
SummaryThis paper proposes a Byzantine Causal Reliable Broadcast (BCRB) algorithm that guarantees agreement, validity and causal message ordering in asynchronous distributed systems with Byzantine faults. It modifies Bracha's Byzantine Reliable Broadcast with small but critical changes. The algorithm uses constant O(1) metadata per message, O(n²) messages, and O(n²) communication word complexity, compared with O(n³) for existing protocols. It tolerates f < n/3 Byzantine processes and uses four phases.
WhyReduces Byzantine causal broadcast metadata from linear to constant with a complete proof, though lacks experimental validation.
In briefMaking duplicate reimbursement impossible: a verified Ethereum e-invoice system for humans and AI agents
SummaryThis paper presents a blockchain-based electronic invoice system built on Ethereum, aimed at preventing repeated reimbursement, letting recipients verify invoice authenticity, and removing reliance on a central authority. The authors model the invoice lifecycle as a guarded transition system and prove reimbursement uniqueness, face integrity, and authorization soundness under standard cryptographic and consensus assumptions. Core invariants are machine-checked with Solidity SMTChecker, and the prototype's benchmarks on a private network are reported, including gas costs and throughput. The verified contract is also proposed as a safety envelope that rejects unsafe actions from LLM-based reimbursement agents.
In briefThe Illusion of Payload Blindness: Why MEV Mitigations Fail in Practice
SummaryThis paper evaluates three protocol-level MEV mitigation families built on payload blindness: encrypted mempools, verifiable permutations, and block delay. Using closed-form analysis and simulations calibrated to Ethereum, it compares outcomes against an idealized fully blind adversary and against real deployment conditions. It finds that encryption with permutation removes content-dependent attacks under the idealized model, but deployment problems such as sender metadata leakage, optional encryption causing adoption collapse, and key rotation creating congestion dominate in practice. The authors conclude that liveness and deployment incentives, not cryptography, are the binding obstacles to MEV-free blockchains.
