In briefStudy on whether blockchain gossip protocols keep consensus messages reliable under attack
SummaryThis paper examines how well gossip protocols used in large blockchains such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Bitcoin, and Solana withstand realistic network adversaries. The authors show analytically and empirically that commonly chosen random-graph parameters may not ensure enough honest nodes receive consensus messages to form quorums. They compare protocols and report tradeoffs, including Solana's bandwidth-efficient but adaptive-attack-fragile trees, Polkadot's robust but bandwidth-heavy grid, and GossipSub's efficiency and resilience with parameter sensitivity. Bitcoin-style Erdős-Rényi graphs offer a strong robustness-efficiency tradeoff when average fanout exceeds 15 for networks up to 5000 nodes.
WhyCompares several blockchain gossip protocols via analysis and large-scale measurements, revealing robustness and efficiency tradeoffs under adaptive attacks.
Wenting Li, Jannik Albrecht, Frederik Armknecht et al.
In briefNEST: A Stale-Robust Method for Measuring Tokenized Stocks in Crypto-Treasury LETF Chains
SummaryThe paper proposes NEST, a protocol for testing whether tokenized equity prices, which trade while markets are closed, improve off-hours measurement of exposures linking Bitcoin, crypto-treasury stocks, and leveraged ETFs. It separates the mechanical fit shared by a token return and the next opening gap from genuine conditional information, measured by a partial determination index. For MSTRx, after controlling for Bitcoin, mark age, and a premarket MSTR proxy, the token explains 15.7% of the remaining gap variation.
In briefIssuer-independent decentralized exchange for e-cash, letting users swap between two separately issued digital cash currencies without each issuer taking part.
SummaryThe paper presents an e-cash exchange where a liquidity provider holds inventories of two independently issued currencies and users trade between them without either issuer joining individual swaps. It combines a blockchain settlement layer that automates and publicly verifies execution with an exchange-compatible e-cash protocol. The authors formalize new privacy requirements and build a compact realization with publicly verifiable payments and aggregate anonymous reissue, and prove its security and privacy properties under stated assumptions.
In briefA scalable, robust threshold ECDSA signing protocol for many signers
SummaryThis paper presents an efficient, scalable, and robust threshold ECDSA signing protocol for the case t≤(n-1)/3, for example for bridging consensus between blockchains. It allows pre-processing material to be computed in batches to speed up online signing. The authors combine established secret-sharing techniques with recent efficient zero-knowledge proofs. Experiments show the protocol is practical even with a large number of parties.
In briefDoes Client Diversity Protect the Lightning Network? Evidence from the 2026 Core Lightning Shutdown
SummaryThis paper uses the August 26, 2026 instruction by Core Lightning (CLN) maintainers for operators unable to upgrade to disconnect their nodes as a natural experiment on whether client diversity protects the Lightning Network. Analyzing 805 daily gossip snapshots and 132,360 on-chain channel closes, the authors find 22% of CLN nodes went dark overnight, while network-wide reachability fell 7.8 percentage points. They conclude that the impact depends on whether a failure reaches the hubs, not on how many nodes run the failing software.
In briefTulva: A Practical Asynchronous Threshold FHE Scheme
SummaryThis paper presents Tulva, a practical threshold fully homomorphic encryption scheme that adds an asynchronous threshold decryption mechanism to a base FHE scheme in a modular way. Ciphertexts are left unchanged except for an appended random tag, and security holds under the standard LWE assumption even when partial decryption queries are made on challenge ciphertexts. The authors provide an open-source implementation and benchmark decryption performance, including a 16-out-of-512 threshold, and compare it with a synchronous state-of-the-art scheme.
Valerio Cini, Antonio Guimar\~aes, Russell W. F. Lai et al.
In briefTulva: A Practical Asynchronous Threshold FHE Scheme
SummaryFully homomorphic encryption allows computation on encrypted data, but its single secret key is a single point of failure. This paper presents Tulva, which splits the key among K parties so that any t of them can decrypt, without needing to coordinate or be online at the same time. The scheme adds asynchronous threshold decryption to a base FHE scheme in a modular way, and the authors report 3.7 ms and 0.5 ms for partial decryption and share combination in a 16-out-of-512 setting.
Valerio Cini, Antonio Guimarães, Russell W. F. Lai et al.
In briefMeasuring On-Chain Cost of Output-Private Distributed VRFs on Ethereum
SummaryThis paper compares two output-private distributed verifiable random functions, FlexiRand (pairing-based) and IcyVeil (pairing-free), by implementing both on the Ethereum Virtual Machine behind a shared coordinator contract. The pairing-free IcyVeil verifier uses about 57% less execution gas in isolation, and roughly 11% less across the full request lifecycle. However, its distributed evaluation requires about 2.5 to 8.2 times more aggregate committee compute, depending on the committee configuration.
