Crypto & Blockchain · Diting Lab

Measuring Where Intent Is Lost When AI Agents Write Smart Contracts

2026-10-28T00:00:00+09:00

Measuring Where Intent Gets Lost in Agentic Smart Contract Synthesis arXiv · Oct 28, 2026This paper examines whether AI agents that write smart contracts from plain-English descriptions actually produce code that behaves as requested. The authors compare an AI-written contract with the original on the same transactions and find that common AI judges and standard analysis tools miss obvious mistakes. They propose asking the client clarifying questions before code generation and checking the result against an independently written executable answer key, which they report works far better than reviewing or patching afterwards. ★★★★ Notable: The authors propose asking clarifying questions before generation and checking against an independent executable answer key, reporting results on 600 tasks across three models and releasing tools.

MEV: A multi-event video dataset for generating long, continuous video takes

2026-10-28T00:00:00+09:00

MEV: A Multi-Event Video Dataset for Long-Take Generation arXiv · Oct 28, 2026This paper introduces MEV, a dataset of real-world videos in which subjects perform a sequence of distinct, non-overlapping events, with precise temporal boundaries and fine-grained procedural annotations. The authors also present an annotation pipeline that segments videos into temporally grounded events and produces structured captions at both global and event levels. Under an event-centric evaluation protocol, fine-tuning on MEV with temporally grounded event conditioning is reported to improve event transitions and content coherence in long-take generation.

Undisclosed Fees in Hook-Based Decentralized Exchanges

2026-10-27T00:00:00+09:00

An Empirical Study of Undisclosed Charges in Hook-Based Decentralized Exchanges arXiv · Oct 27, 2026This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of Hook contracts on Uniswap v4 and PancakeSwap Infinity across Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain. The authors analyze 7,873 Hook deployments and 50,011 pools using bytecode analysis to identify settlement charges not itemized in standard fees. They find that 24.30% of Hooks can impose such deductions, which occur in 59.23% of relevant swaps and generate substantial revenue. The results suggest a gap between displayed fees and actual trading costs, motivating explicit disclosure.

UniPCH: A Unified Framework for Cross-Chain Payments via Payment Channel Hubs

2026-10-27T00:00:00+09:00

UniPCH: A Unified Framework for Cross-Chain Payments via Payment Channel Hubs arXiv · Oct 27, 2026This paper presents UniPCH, a two-layer framework for private cross-chain payments across heterogeneous blockchains. The lower UniPC layer defines common channel state transitions and security requirements, with realizations for UTXO and smart-contract account ledgers. The upper layer introduces selective re-signing blind conditional signatures (S-RBCS) to coordinate conditional authorization across hubs, enabling a four-phase payment protocol. The authors report security properties and a Go prototype evaluation of running time and bandwidth.

Tight limits on fair AMM mechanism design under weak efficiency

2026-10-27T00:00:00+09:00

Tight Characterizations of AMM Mechanism Design under Weak Efficiency arXiv · Oct 27, 2026This paper studies miner extractable value (MEV) in automated market makers (AMMs), where block builders can profit by controlling transaction order. It proves that no deterministic, anonymous batch AMM can be both incentive compatible and weakly locally efficient under plain consensus without fair sequencing, even with censorship resilience and unlimited block space. The impossibility relies on Sybil identities, over-reporting budgets, and misreporting values. Removing any one of these strategic capabilities makes both properties achievable under censorship resilience. ★★★★★ Notable: The authors prove deterministic anonymous batch AMMs cannot satisfy both IC and wLE under plain consensus; removing any one of three strategic capabilities restores feasibility.

Sybil-proof adaptive clinching auctions and their use in blockchain market design

2026-10-27T00:00:00+09:00

Sybil-Proofness of Generalized Adaptive Clinching and Implications for Blockchain Mechanism Design arXiv · Oct 27, 2026This paper examines whether the adaptive clinching auction for budget-constrained bidders stays robust when a bidder splits its budget across fake identities. The authors propose a generalized adaptive clinching framework and prove that bidders gain nothing by splitting into any number of identities, as long as their total reported budget does not exceed their enforceable true budget. They extend the mechanism to a two-sided automated market maker for decentralized finance and show, through impossibility results, that these guarantees are essentially the best possible. ★★★★ Notable: The authors show the generalized adaptive clinching framework is Sybil-robust incentive compatible when identity budgets sum within the true budget, and design a two-sided AMM with state-dependent sup

FIDES-Live: Checking Whether Trading AI Agents Behave Consistently

2026-10-27T00:00:00+09:00

FIDES-Live: Evaluating Behavioral Concordance in Sequential Trading Agents arXiv · Oct 27, 2026This paper presents FIDES-Live, an extension of the FIDES framework for auditing sequences of trading agent actions, orders, execution receipts, and reports. It assesses decision validity, adherence to numerical commitments, reconciliation with execution and ledger records, and report accuracy grounded in receipts. The authors retrospectively audited ten inference routes over 7,299 cryptocurrency account-rounds and a 310-round equity pilot. The paper states that its findings do not establish long-run trading skill, faithfulness of explanations, or causal benefits of audit feedback.

Merkle-tree-based public auditing of cloud object storage using Ethereum smart contracts

2026-10-26T00:00:00+09:00

Merkle-Tree-Based Verifiable Public Data Auditing for Cloud Object Storage Using Smart Contracts arXiv · Oct 26, 2026The paper proposes a public auditing system for cloud object storage in which the hash and name of each object form leaves of a Merkle tree. Only the tree's root is stored in an Ethereum smart contract, while the objects remain with the provider. An auditor downloads an object and checks it against the stored root using a short Merkle proof to mark it as intact, modified or missing. In experiments, the system detected all single and multiple modifications and deletions with no false alarms, and checking one object took about 10 ms regardless of dataset size.

One Leak, Lasting Gains: Binding Keys to Context to Deter Collusion

2026-09-29T00:00:00+09:00

When One Leak Pays Forever: Context Binding and the Price of Deterring Collusion arXiv · Sep 29, 2026The paper studies collusion in threshold-encrypted mempools, where a coalition of decryption committee members that sells its decryption capability to a front-runner can expose every later block the capability still decrypts. The authors show that deterrence holds if and only if each coalition's penalty covers the largest discounted value a single leak can reach. Binding each leak to its own round, such as with per-epoch keys, lowers the required stake substantially. ★★★★ Notable: The authors model collusive key leaks in threshold-encrypted mempools as a repeated game, prove penalties must cover the largest discounted single-leak value, and give horizon-dependent tight bounds.

Analyzing Solana's Blocks and Transactions: A Statistical Study of a Million Recent Blocks

2026-09-28T00:00:00+09:00

Analyzing Solana's Blocks and Transactions arXiv · Sep 28, 2026This paper studies how smart contracts (dApps) run on the Solana blockchain, analyzing about one million recent blocks. It reports statistics on transactions per block, execution time units and fees for individual transactions, and the Solana programs invoked. Using the declared read and write sets that Solana requires for each transaction, the authors analyze conflicts and conflict graphs within blocks to assess the network's potential for parallelism. The data and code are open source.

SmartMemory: Using a Memory-Based Agent to Detect On-Chain/Off-Chain Inconsistencies in Smart Contracts

2026-09-28T00:00:00+09:00

SmartMemory: Detecting On-chain-off-chain Communication Inconsistency for Smart Contract via Memory-based Agent arXiv · Sep 28, 2026This paper proposes SmartMemory, a framework that uses a memory-based agent to detect on-chain/off-chain communication inconsistency (OFCI), which the authors identify as a root cause of vulnerabilities in such applications. It maps diverse contract implementations into a unified business-semantic representation and transfers vulnerability knowledge to find unseen cases, then uses taint analysis to verify candidates. On a dataset of 48 DApps with 81 OFCIs, it reports 80.68% precision and 87.65% recall, and it found 36 previously unknown OFCIs across 325 real-world applications, all confirmed and fixed. ★★★★ Notable: Proposes OFC inconsistency as a unified view and first memory-based agent for its detection; the authors report 80.68% precision and 87.65% recall on 81 OFCIs, and 36 previously unknown OFCIs found ac

Can AI Earn Profits in Crypto? Measuring the Gap Between Backtests and Real Markets

2026-09-28T00:00:00+09:00

Can AI Make Money in Crypto? Measuring the Gap from Backtests to Real Markets arXiv · Sep 28, 2026This paper presents a unified benchmark for evaluating AI trading methods, including machine learning, reinforcement learning, LLM-based, and agent-based approaches, in cryptocurrency markets. The evaluation proceeds in three increasingly realistic stages: historical backtesting, exchange-based paper trading, and real-money live trading. This design lets the authors quantify the gap between backtested and realized performance and compare how that gap differs across method classes. The authors also release an open-source system supporting all three stages and a public platform that continuously updates benchmark results.[ ]

Market Efficiency in a Changing Asset Population: Mobility, Entry, and Survival Across Cryptocurrency History

2026-10-16T00:00:00+09:00

Market Efficiency in a Changing Asset Population: Mobility, Entry, and Survival over Cryptocurrency's Full History arXiv · Oct 16, 2026This paper tests symmetry restrictions implied by weak-form efficiency on the Markov chain of cryptocurrency capitalisation movements, using 8,970 listed assets across 690 weekly cross-sections from 2013 to 2026. Symmetry is rejected in every era, but asymmetry falls, and the convergence is attributed to entry-driven compositional churn rather than changes in coins' own valuations. The bottom decile shows 27.5% weekly returns on paper but none among tradable assets, with capacity of $293,000.

Not All LPs Are Equal: Active vs. Passive Liquidity Providers in Automated Market Makers

2026-09-30T00:00:00+09:00

Not All LPs Are Equal: The Active-Passive Gap in Automated Market Maker Liquidity Provision arXiv · Sep 30, 2026This 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.

Exchange Rate Setting for Cryptocurrency Mergers: A Formal Framework

2026-09-30T00:00:00+09:00

Exchange Rate Determination for Cryptocurrency Mergers: A Formal Framework arXiv · Sep 30, 2026Many 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.

Mixture-of-experts models for crypto order execution: stability, tail risk, and failure modes

2026-10-02T00:00:00+09:00

Mixture-of-Experts for Cryptocurrency Order Execution: Training Stability, Tail Risk, and Failure Modes arXiv · Oct 2, 2026This paper compares vanilla Double Deep Q-Learning, mixture-of-experts variants, and parameter-matched dense networks for cryptocurrency order execution, using 5-minute BTC/USDT limit order book data from Binance. No learned configuration significantly beats vanilla DDQL on mean implementation shortfall, and all underperform TWAP and immediate liquidation. The authors find that annealed exploration alone eliminates policy collapse, suggesting expert partitioning masks a training-specification problem rather than providing an intrinsic benefit.

Cross-chain access control for permissioned blockchain interoperation

2026-10-04T00:00:00+09:00

Cross-chain Access Control for Permissioned Blockchain Interoperation arXiv · Oct 4, 2026This paper proposes InterAcct, an end-to-end access-control framework for secure interactions between permissioned blockchain networks. Outgoing requests are converted into a consortium-level representation before being shared, so internal sensitive information is not exposed, and responses are securely mapped back to the original requester. Experiments show that InterAcct enforces end-to-end access control for cross-chain request-response interactions with low additional overhead and keeps working effectively as workload increases.

ContractLens: Using an LLM's Internal Security Knowledge to Detect Malicious Smart Contracts

2026-10-04T00:00:00+09:00

ContractLens: Latent Security Knowledge for Malicious Smart Contract Detection arXiv · Oct 4, 2026This paper presents ContractLens, a framework for detecting malicious smart contracts. Instead of relying on prompt engineering or attack-specific fine-tuning, it identifies key layers and neuron units inside a frozen pretrained language model that distinguish malicious from benign contracts, then trains a lightweight classifier on them. Masking these units causes larger performance drops than masking random neurons, and the method achieves higher average accuracy across three pretrained models. The authors also report generalization to unseen malicious intents.

Post-quantum authentication protocol for medical IoT devices

2026-10-04T00:00:00+09:00

Post-Quantum Authentication Protocol for Internet of Medical Things arXiv · Oct 4, 2026This paper addresses tampering, impersonation, and replay attacks on medical reports sent from patient devices to gateways in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), with attention to long-term security against quantum attacks. It proposes a protocol using an ISIS-like lattice-based signature construction combined with blockchain concepts, including a trusted ledger that tracks each patient's trust score. A prototype demonstrates registration, signing, verification, and auditing, and the authors argue that batch verification outperforms simple per-signature validation in large-scale systems.

Shorter Auction Windows and Arbitrage Competition: Base Flashblocks Evidence

2026-10-03T00:00:00+09:00

Priority Gas Auction Cadence and Searcher Competition: Evidence from Flashblocks on Base arXiv · Oct 3, 2026The paper studies how Base's July 2025 switch from one 2-second priority gas auction to ten 200 ms auctions changed bidding by automated arbitrageurs (searchers). Using on-chain data and a difference-in-differences design, it estimates a 0.187 gwei fall in the effective priority fee, which it identifies as the causal effect. The revert-rate response is reported only descriptively. ★★★★ Notable: Using Base's switch from one 2s auction to ten 200ms auctions, a difference-in-differences estimate reports searcher effective priority fees falling about 0.187 gwei, alongside an auction model explai

Estimating Ethereum's Energy Use by Mapping Its Network

2026-10-03T00:00:00+09:00

Quantifying Ethereum Energy Consumption via Network Mapping arXiv · Oct 3, 2026Ethereum's electricity use fell about 99.95% after switching from proof of work to proof of stake. The authors crawl consensus and execution layer nodes, assign each peer a wattage based on publicly advertised attributes such as client software, hardware architecture, hosting provider and validator role, and use a Random Forest to estimate incomplete peers. Across 6,934 peers from two June 2026 crawls, reachable nodes sum to about 415 kW, or 3.63 GWh per year if sustained.

Asymptotic Analysis of Trading Fees in CFMM: Studies how much trading fees liquidity providers earn from arbitrage when fee rates approach zero.

2026-10-02T00:00:00+09:00

Asymptotic Analysis of Trading Fees in CFMM arXiv · Oct 2, 2026This paper examines trading fees in automated market makers (AMMs), the dominant mechanism in decentralized finance. It derives a closed-form formula for the fees liquidity providers can receive from arbitrage trading as the fee rate approaches zero. The authors find that, when prices are continuous, arbitrage-generated fees can fully offset LVR loss. The analysis extends to price processes with jumps, concluding that jumps, along with market risk, are the only causes of LP losses.

Upgrading FROST2 Threshold Signatures from TS-SUF-2 to TS-SUF-4 Security

2026-10-02T00:00:00+09:00

From TS-SUF-2 to TS-SUF-4: Practical Security Enhancements for FROST2 Threshold Signatures arXiv · Oct 2, 2026This paper studies FROST2, a practical threshold Schnorr signature scheme used to secure digital assets. Prior analysis showed FROST2 reaches only TS-SUF-2 security under static corruption and centralized key generation, due to TS-UF-3 attacks. The authors propose FROST2+, which adds pre-processing token verification and achieves TS-SUF-4 security under the same assumptions, also when initialized with PedPoP. Benchmarks with ZCash's FROST library report performance comparable to FROST2 and about 64-79% faster than FROST with precomputation.

Rateless lattice codes for secure V2X broadcast under fading and erasures

2026-10-02T00:00:00+09:00

Rateless Nested Lattice Codes for Secure Cooperative V2X Broadcast over Fading and Erasure Channels arXiv · Oct 2, 2026The paper proposes a vehicular communication framework combining rateless Raptor lattice codes, nested-lattice physical-layer security with spread spectrum, and blockchain-based trust management for cooperative relaying. Under block-Rayleigh fading with random erasures, rateless Raptor reception achieves 0.3% outage with about 2.3 packets on average, outperforming LDLC and LDPC under identical channels. An eavesdropper with 8 dB combined SNR fails in 62% of sessions.

Stablecoins in the Quantum Era: A Systematization of Knowledge

2026-10-02T00:00:00+09:00

SoK: Stablecoins in the Quantum Era arXiv · Oct 2, 2026This paper is a systematization of knowledge on post-quantum stablecoins. It builds a stablecoin-specific threat model, maps cryptographic dependencies to monetary control points, and classifies migration choices by who can authorize change, where it must occur, and whether it is hybrid, post-quantum native, or a classical-component encapsulation. The authors highlight an authority-liability gap, where the party able to migrate often differs from those who bear losses. The paper also reviews interoperability proposals and identifies open problems.

Byzantine causal reliable broadcast with constant metadata overhead

2026-09-30T00:00:00+09:00

Byzantine Causal Reliable Broadcast with Constant Metadata Overhead arXiv · Sep 30, 2026This 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. ★★★★ Notable: The authors present a Byzantine causal reliable broadcast that keeps metadata at O(1) and uses O(n²) messages, adapting Bracha's BRB to tolerate f

RANDAO Manipulation When MEV Is Present: how Ethereum's randomness can be gamed for profit

2026-10-02T00:00:00+09:00

RANDAO Manipulation in the Presence of MEV arXiv · Oct 2, 2026Ethereum's RANDAO randomness beacon can be manipulated, and earlier work calculated the share of blocks a strategic proposer can propose. This paper introduces a generalized reward model covering forms such as consensus reward rollover, multi-block MEV, and CEX-DEX arbitrage, and gives a method for computing an ε-optimal strategy for any such reward scheme. The authors find that partial reward rollover or super-linear scaling with consecutive blocks amplifies the incentive to manipulate. They also study tail-slot slashing, modeled as a reward function, and show that honest equilibria can be recovered.

A hybrid malware detector pairing autoencoders with few-shot meta-learning

2026-10-02T00:00:00+09:00

A Hybrid Approach to Malware Detection: Integrating Few-Shot Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning with Autoencoders arXiv · Oct 2, 2026This paper proposes a hybrid deep learning framework for detecting malware, especially ransomware, when few labeled samples are available. An autoencoder compresses inputs into compact latent features, and a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) classifier adapts quickly to new threats from limited data. Experiments on the Ransomware Dataset 2024 across one- to fifty-shot settings report consistently high accuracy, F1 score, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient, including under extreme data scarcity.

From Network Intrusion Detection to Blockchain-Backed Endpoint Detection: A Survey of Decentralized Response Architectures

2026-10-02T00:00:00+09:00

From Network Intrusion Detection to Blockchain-Backed Endpoint Detection and Response: Mapping the Landscape of Decentralized Detection-and-Response Architectures arXiv · Oct 2, 2026This Systematization of Knowledge paper reviews research from 2019 to 2026 on blockchain-assisted intrusion detection and prevention for IoT and industrial IoT networks. It proposes a three-axis taxonomy covering detection-system class, blockchain's functional role, and response-automation maturity. The authors find that a true per-endpoint, blockchain-anchored response loop is nearly nonexistent. They also discuss cross-cutting challenges such as consensus latency, post-quantum vulnerability, and smart-contract attack surfaces, and propose a research agenda centered on hybrid on-chain and off-chain orchestration.

GridSMR: Causal Compression for Faster Sharded Blockchains

2026-10-01T00:00:00+09:00

GridSMR: Causal Compression for Sharded Blockchains arXiv · Oct 1, 2026This paper presents GridSMR, a sharded blockchain that scales execution across shards and lets dependent cross-shard operations proceed within one block. Atomicity is limited to individual accounts, and cross-account work runs asynchronously, with consensus validating and committing the resulting schedule afterward. The authors report throughput of 1.07M requests/s with one validator and 193K committed requests/s with four validators. Latency for a 16-hop causal chain is reduced 8.2x compared with deferred execution.

Blockchain Lifecycle Prediction: Predicting Dead Cryptocurrencies

2026-10-01T00:00:00+09:00

Blockchain Lifecycle Prediction - Dead Coins arXiv · Oct 1, 2026This paper examines whether cryptocurrency failure can be predicted from publicly available market data alone. An LSTM recurrent neural network was trained on 90-day sequences of daily price and estimated market capitalization for 82 assets (41 alive, 41 dead) from 2020 to 2026, using a strict chronological split. The best test-set ROC AUC reached 0.98, but dropped to between 0.59 and 0.65 on unseen data. The authors conclude that price and market-cap patterns carry useful signal, with failing assets showing gradual value erosion and rising volatility rather than sudden collapse.

A Systematic Review of DeFi Vault Designs, Curator Controls, and Strategy Risks

2026-10-01T00:00:00+09:00

A Systematization of Knowledge on DeFi Vaults: Architectures, Curation Mechanisms, and Strategy Design arXiv · Oct 1, 2026This paper systematizes decentralized finance (DeFi) vaults, smart-contract systems that pool deposits, run strategies, and issue share tokens. It presents a unified system model with formal definitions, then three taxonomies covering exposures and objectives, curator governance and accountability, and strategy execution patterns with their failure modes. The authors map representative production protocols onto these dimensions to support rigorous analysis and safer design of blockchain-based financial applications.

Pricing Bandwidth for Certified Transaction Dissemination in Blockchains

2026-10-01T00:00:00+09:00

Bandwidth Fee Mechanisms for Certified Transaction Dissemination arXiv · Oct 1, 2026This paper studies bandwidth fee mechanisms that price threshold-certified transaction dissemination before consensus, analogous to transaction fee mechanisms for computation. The authors model them as two-sided procurement auctions between users and validators, and prove limits on incentive compatibility, including that no nontrivial mechanism prevents profitable two-validator collusion. They give a greedy-route posted-price mechanism that is incentive compatible for individual users and validators, and propose an EIP-1559-style cross-block price-update rule with a locally stable fixed point under honest execution. ★★★★ Notable: The paper studies bandwidth fee mechanisms for pre-consensus certified transaction dissemination, reporting impossibility results for several simultaneous incentive-compatibility notions, a greedy-rou

XIM: XDC Interledger Messaging Protocol for Cross-Network Messages

2026-09-30T00:00:00+09:00

XIM: The XDC Interledger Messaging Protocol arXiv · Sep 30, 2026This 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.

Making duplicate reimbursement impossible: a verified Ethereum e-invoice system for humans and AI agents

2026-09-30T00:00:00+09:00

Making Duplicate Reimbursement Unrepresentable: A Verified Ethereum E-Invoice System for Humans and AI Agents arXiv · Sep 30, 2026This 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.

PQMZ: A Formally Verified Falcon-PKR Scheme for Post-Quantum Migration in Zcash

2026-09-29T00:00:00+09:00

PQMZ: Formally Verified Falcon-PKR for Post-Quantum Cryptographic Migration in Zcash IACR ePrint · Sep 29, 2026This paper studies Falcon-PKR, a public-key-recovery variant of the Falcon signature scheme, for Zcash-like transparent transactions. It stores a compact digest instead of the full public key and reconstructs a candidate key from the signature during verification, reportedly reducing combined key and signature size by about 15%. The authors machine-check an EUF-CMA reduction in the Random Oracle Model using EasyCrypt and verify honest-signing correctness. A complementary case study covers an extended SECUER-based multi-party computation ceremony architecture.

The Illusion of Payload Blindness: Why MEV Mitigations Fail in Practice

2026-09-30T00:00:00+09:00

The Illusion of Payload Blindness: Why MEV Mitigations Fail in Practice IACR ePrint · Sep 30, 2026This 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.

Slashable Secrecy for Witness Encryption on Ethereum Finality: Paper on Key Release Without Custodians

2026-09-30T00:00:00+09:00

Slashable Secrecy for Witness Encryption over Ethereum Finality IACR ePrint · Sep 30, 2026This 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.

Preventing time-averaged selfish mining across epoch boundaries in Nakamoto consensus

2026-09-30T00:00:00+09:00

Defeating Time-Average Selfish Mining Across Epoch Boundaries in Nakamoto Consensus IACR ePrint · Sep 30, 2026The 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.

DAVINCI: A Decentralized Cryptographic Voting Protocol

2026-10-01T00:00:00+09:00

DAVINCI: A Decentralized Cryptographic Voting Protocol IACR ePrint · Oct 1, 2026The paper presents DAVINCI, a decentralized end-to-end verifiable voting protocol that needs no trusted coordinator. It is built as a zero-knowledge rollup in which every election state transition is encoded as a circuit constraint, with Ethereum serving as a public bulletin board and data-availability layer. Ballot secrecy relies on threshold ElGamal with distributed key generation. The authors report that their open-source implementation supports large-scale elections and generates ballot proofs on commodity devices.

Fee mechanisms for pricing bandwidth to disseminate certified transactions

2026-10-01T00:00:00+09:00

Bandwidth Fee Mechanisms for Certified Transaction Dissemination IACR ePrint · Oct 1, 2026This paper studies bandwidth fee mechanisms (BFMs) that price how transactions are shared among network nodes before consensus, when a threshold of nodes must certify them. It models this as a two-sided procurement auction between users and validators, and it is analogous to earlier transaction fee mechanisms but applies to communication instead of computation. The authors characterize limits on incentive compatibility and present a greedy-route posted-price mechanism that is incentive compatible for individual users and validators. They also propose an EIP-1559-style price-update rule and show its fluid approximation has a locally stable fixed point.

DuraShare: A BIP39-compatible secret sharing scheme with full manual recovery

2026-10-02T00:00:00+09:00

DuraShare: BIP39-native secret sharing with full manual fallback IACR ePrint · Oct 2, 2026DuraShare splits a BIP39 word sequence used by Bitcoin wallets among n Sharekeepers, so any k of them can reconstruct it, while k-1 colluding holders learn nothing. It combines Shamir secret sharing over F_2053, row and column checksums that detect transcription and physical errors, and an affine inner-product MAC that detects tampering. The design ensures recovery is possible using only paper, a calculator, and instructions.

Ziren: Succinct Proofs for MIPS32 Program Execution

2026-10-04T00:00:00+09:00

Ziren: Succinct Arguments for MIPS32 Execution IACR ePrint · Oct 4, 2026This paper presents Ziren, a production zero-knowledge virtual machine for MIPS32r2 that supports 77 user-mode integer instructions and has proved Ethereum mainnet blocks end to end. The authors verified 104 determinism theorems in Lean 4, covering 57 of 62 core chips, and report 12.0 MHz proving throughput on one RTX 5090 GPU. The interactive composite security estimate is 93.5 bits, but end-to-end knowledge soundness depends on five stated hypotheses and no numerical bound is given for the cross-shard digest. ★★★★ Notable: Presents a production MIPS32 zkVM; the authors report Lean 4 proofs of unique outputs for 57 of 62 core chips from 104 extracted determinism theorems.

STAKE: A blockchain protocol that deters colluding majorities from double spending

2026-10-01T00:00:00+09:00

STAKE: Preventing a colluding majority from double spending arXiv · Oct 1, 2026This paper proposes STAKE, a blockchain protocol that stays secure with only about one-third plus one honest participants, fewer than the usual two-thirds supermajority. Each participant must stake an amount large relative to their liquidity. The authors show that the probability of a coalition successfully executing a series of double-spending attacks drops exponentially with the number of attacks. They conclude that rational players do not collude with Byzantine ones even with a relatively low stake-to-liquidity ratio.

Beyond Wasserstein Proximity: Finding Better Transfer Sources

2026-10-26T00:00:00+09:00

Beyond Wasserstein Proximity: Finding Better Transfer Sources arXiv · Oct 26, 2026This paper examines how to choose pretraining data sources for transfer, arguing that the most similar data is not always the most useful. The authors test five-day volatility forecasting for ten Binance spot cryptocurrencies across six model families. Selecting farther Gaussian-Wasserstein sources improved persistence-relative skill for several models. The findings are presented as exploratory results on a fixed historical dataset.

Secure metaverse computation offloading with smart update admission and adaptive Byzantine redundancy

2026-10-21T00:00:00+09:00

Semantic-Aware Update Admission and Adaptive Byzantine Redundancy for Secure Computation Offloading in COIN-Enabled Metaverse Systems arXiv · Oct 21, 2026This paper studies secure computation offloading for latency-sensitive metaverse services in computing-in-the-network (COIN) systems. It jointly decides which shared-state updates to commit to a blockchain, how much PBFT Byzantine redundancy to provision, and where to run tasks. The authors propose a hierarchical R-PBFT approach combining an identical-interest game with a feasibility-filtered double deep Q-network. Numerical results report reward gains over the strongest baseline and ablations that assess feasibility filtering and adaptive deferral.

Testing Whether AI Trading Agents Follow Their Rules or Just Get Lucky

2026-10-19T00:00:00+09:00

The Control Layer Behind Rule-Following Agents Trading Across Market Conditions arXiv · Oct 19, 2026This paper tests whether four AI trading agents followed their declared strategies and risk rules. The authors analysed 2,627 closed positions, mostly simulated against live prices with a 0.09% round-trip fee, and 18% using real Hyperliquid orders. The fleet finished net positive after fees with high rule adherence, and the study provides a toolkit to separate rule-following from luck. The authors stress these are trade-level results, not proof of account returns or a lasting edge.

RealityBench: Simulated environments for testing whether vision-language models can document physical work

2026-10-10T00:00:00+09:00

RealityBench: Simulated Environments to Evaluate a Vision Language Model's Ability to Document Human Physical Work arXiv · Oct 10, 2026The paper builds simulated field-work scenes in Blender across eleven environments, such as rooftop solar installation and vehicle repair, to test 26 vision-language models. It evaluates whether an image is acceptable as proof of work and whether a model can understand the task-relevant state shown in the image. Top models handle text in frame well but struggle with measurements and small parts or spatial relations, and the best models match a single non-author rater on acceptability, which is itself hard to judge due to rater disagreement.

A study of verification flaws in cross-chain bridge smart contracts

2026-10-09T00:00:00+09:00

Understanding Verification Vulnerabilities in Cross-chain Bridges: An Empirical Study arXiv · Oct 9, 2026This paper presents the first systematic empirical study of vulnerabilities in the verification logic of cross-chain bridge contracts, which validate external-chain data such as state proofs and signatures. The authors analyzed 588 security audit reports from 36 real-world bridge projects and identified 11 vulnerability patterns grouped into 5 categories. They built a dataset of 830 vulnerability instances across 786 contract files. Evaluation shows existing tools cover these patterns only in limited ways, and the best of four LLMs reaches 51.2% Macro-F1, motivating detection methods tailored to cross-chain verification.

SwingGuard: Risk-Conditioned Multi-Agent Crypto Swing Trading with Two-Speed Oversight

2026-10-09T00:00:00+09:00

SwingGuard: Risk-Conditioned Multi-Agent Swing Trading with Dual-Timescale Governance arXiv · Oct 9, 2026This paper presents SwingGuard, a long-only multi-agent framework for crypto swing trading that operates on two timescales. A strategy layer has analysts weigh technical, sentiment, on-chain and macro evidence, then a portfolio architect sets a target position conditioned on current risk. A five-minute risk controller monitors risk and constrains execution until the next strategy revision. Tests on Bitcoin and Ether report positive returns after transaction costs and shallow drawdowns, with a joint portfolio Sharpe ratio of 2.98 versus 2.79 for a post-hoc risk variant.

AgentValve: A payment authorization protocol resistant to Sybil attacks in open AI markets

2026-10-09T00:00:00+09:00

AgentValve: Sybil-Resilient Payment Authorization for Permissionless AI Markets arXiv · Oct 9, 2026This paper presents AgentValve, a protocol that authorizes AI agent payments in permissionless markets while resisting Sybil attacks, where adversaries fabricate identities and feedback to inflate provider reputation. It models reputation as finite capacity in a directed trust graph and uses a smart contract to reserve capacity for each admitted payment. Experiments using six months of Ethereum data and synthetic workloads report that payment exposure and capacity depletion stay bounded with up to 10,000 synthetic Sybil identities. The witness-commit mechanism reduces admission cost by up to 40.8%, with common payments costing about $0.04 to $0.21.

From Imbalance to Evidence: A Deep Classifier Test for Very Uneven Sample Sizes

2026-10-09T00:00:00+09:00

From Imbalance to Evidence: Deep Nonparametric Testing for Complex Data under Severe Sample Imbalance arXiv · Oct 9, 2026This paper studies how to compare two data distributions when one sample is far smaller than the other, a setting where classifier-based two-sample tests lose power. The authors propose EIAD-C2ST, a classifier-agnostic framework that turns the surplus majority-sample observations into useful testing evidence, with a scalable implementation for deep classifiers. The method comes with theoretical guarantees on size and power, and is evaluated through simulations and a blockchain forensics application.

DeFiRank: Federated Pairwise Ranking for Fair Governance in Decentralized Finance

2026-10-09T00:00:00+09:00

DeFiRank: Federated Pairwise Ranking for Governance in Decentralized Financial Networks arXiv · Oct 9, 2026This paper proposes DeFiRank, a federated learning framework in which multiple institutions jointly train a pairwise ranking model without sharing private transaction data. It ranks providers by the authenticity of their actions, promoting genuine contributors and demoting suspicious ones. On a real blockchain transaction dataset, the federated method's NDCG@15 is about 0.87 versus about 0.92 for the centralized baseline, with similar Kendall τ (about 0.70) for both.

A systematic review of privacy-preserving order matching across 22 protocol families

2026-10-08T00:00:00+09:00

SoK: Privacy-Preserving Order Matching arXiv · Oct 8, 2026This paper systematizes privacy-preserving order matching, covering 22 protocol families across financial markets and blockchain-based exchanges. It divides the order lifecycle into four phases (order representation and submission, discovery and collection, matching, and settlement) and characterizes each by protected and exposed information, access roles, privacy mechanisms, and trust assumptions. The authors find that privacy is not a single protocol-level property, since protecting some attributes or phases may still leak information elsewhere in the lifecycle. They also identify recurring trade-offs among privacy, functionality, trust, and verifiability.

One Node, Two Roles: Competing Rewards for Verification and Attention in Rollups

2026-10-09T00:00:00+09:00

One Node, Two Roles: Simultaneous Contests for Validation and Attention in Rollups arXiv · Oct 9, 2026This paper studies incentives in optimistic rollups, where safety requires at least one honest validator to re-execute the state transition and dispute incorrect assertions, yet correct verification goes unpaid. The authors formalize arguments with registered provers and model validation and attention rewards as two coupled Tullock-like contests. They compare the TRACE and Proof of Diligence attention mechanisms and apply the results to Arbitrum One.

On-chain archaeology of Bitcoin oracles: tracing their use despite incomplete data

2026-10-08T00:00:00+09:00

On-Chain Archaeology of Bitcoin Oracles: Evidence of Use under Limited Observability arXiv · Oct 8, 2026This study traces the use of oracles on Bitcoin, services that supply external data or act as arbiters for contracts, from early days through July 2026. It combines a full census of 1,149 Counterparty bets, analysis of the Bitcoin chain through block 958,628, and searches of a public-key index. Early contracts remain on-chain, but many event descriptions are gone, and public registries can misrepresent actual oracle use.

Economic Security of Exponential EIP-1559: Setting Blockchain Gas Fee Parameters with Revenue Guarantees

2026-10-08T00:00:00+09:00

The Economic Security of Exponential EIP-1559 arXiv · Oct 8, 2026This paper studies how to choose parameters for EIP-1559, a gas pricing mechanism used by blockchains. The goal is to guarantee a lower bound on total collected fees whenever usage over a time window exceeds a set threshold, economically discouraging usage above a desired level. The authors analyze the revenue-minimizing gas-usage distribution for the pure exponential version used by Ethereum and for a variant used by Robinhood Chain and Arbitrum, then show how to set economically secure parameters and discuss the tradeoffs. ★★★★ Notable: Proposes economic-security parameter selection for EIP-1559 that guarantees a fee revenue lower bound when usage exceeds a threshold, characterizing the revenue-minimizing distribution for the exponen

Pump-and-Dump Meets Honeypot Tokens: Detecting Telegram Bait-and-Trap Scams

2026-10-07T00:00:00+09:00

Pump-and-Dump meets Honeypot Tokens: Detection and Analysis of Telegram Bait-and-Trap Schemes arXiv · Oct 7, 2026The paper monitors 83 Telegram channels used to coordinate Pump-and-Dump campaigns, collecting 3,677 events across BNB Smart Chain and Ethereum. It finds these schemes use honeypot tokens whose smart contracts let buyers purchase but not sell, a mechanism the authors call Bait-and-Trap. The authors also present a transaction-simulation tool that detects honeypot tokens before purchase.

Matching signal, noise, and hardware timescales to filter or forecast correlated noise

2026-10-07T00:00:00+09:00

Matching of signal, noise and hardware timescales for filtering and forecasting of correlated noise signals arXiv · Oct 7, 2026This paper studies how physical reservoir computing handles time series containing correlated noise, using a nanoporous niobium oxide reservoir, synthetic noisy signals, and cryptocurrency price volatility. The authors find that the relationship among noise correlation time, reservoir memory, and forecast horizon determines whether noise is filtered out or predicted. They introduce a reservoir memory horizon and a forecasting regime index to distinguish these operating regimes.

Q-PhotoMarket: A design-space exploration framework for photonic quantum neural networks used in market forecasting

2026-10-07T00:00:00+09:00

Q-PhotoMarket: A Design Space Exploration Framework for Photonic Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks in Financial Market Prediction arXiv · Oct 7, 2026This paper presents Q-PhotoMarket, a framework that systematically explores design choices for photonic hybrid quantum neural networks applied to financial market prediction. The authors evaluate over 5,000 valid photonic configurations across input photon states, circuit architectures, entangling models, and measurement strategies, using U.S., Indian, and cryptocurrency market data. Bayesian optimization, threshold calibration, and prediction-collapse diagnostics are used to support the search and evaluation. The reported results indicate consistent architectural patterns across markets and some designs that perform competitively with classical machine learning baselines.

BVI: A lightweight, data-centric blockchain method for verifying caller identity claims

2026-10-06T00:00:00+09:00

BVI: Lightweight, Data-Centric Blockchain-Based Verification of Identity Claims arXiv · Oct 6, 2026This paper proposes BVI, a system that lets a call recipient check whether the caller holds a credential a registered organisation issued for that specific call. The organisation's records, authorised channels and revocation status are kept on a public ledger, while all decision logic runs on the recipient's handset. The authors define ten attack classes, compare coverage against alternatives, and report that 27 automated scenario tests on isolated contract fixtures all pass. They also give per-session anchoring gas costs and path simulation results.

When Does AI Supervision Help? Role-Aware Network Fraud Decisions with Blockchain Audits

2026-10-06T00:00:00+09:00

When Does AI Supervision Help? A Role-Aware Study of Network Fraud Decision Management with Blockchain Auditability arXiv · Oct 6, 2026This paper asks whether adding a second AI component to supervise a primary network-fraud decision actually improves outcomes or only adds operational burden. The authors propose a Decider-Supervisor framework with blockchain auditability and compare four configurations across varied traffic mixes and review capacities. They conclude that the value of AI supervision depends on role assignment, calibration, escalation policy, traffic composition, and lifecycle controls, not merely on having a second model.

Token transfers do not always mean liquidity in tokenized real-world assets

2026-10-05T00:00:00+09:00

When Token Transfers Do Not Mean Liquidity in Tokenized Real-World Assets arXiv · Oct 5, 2026This paper argues that on-chain transfer volume in tokenized real-world assets can mix different functions, such as minting, burning and issuer operations, so it cannot be read directly as liquidity. The authors separate transfer categories before calculating turnover, and compare ownership concentration with and without identified intermediaries. Using Ethereum-based tokenized funds from December 2025 to August 2026, they show that classification changes measured turnover and that concentration can move in different directions. The measures offer evidence about liquidity-related activity but do not directly measure market liquidity.

StOMR: Stateful Oblivious Message Retrieval (a privacy-preserving way to fetch messages)

2026-10-06T00:00:00+09:00

StOMR: Stateful Oblivious Message Retrieval IACR ePrint · Oct 6, 2026The paper introduces stateful oblivious message retrieval (OMR), a model in which senders and receivers keep lightweight private state to communicate anonymously. It presents StOMR, a protocol that greatly reduces the size of sender signals compared with prior approaches. The authors also propose an OMR Key Encapsulation Mechanism (OMR-KEM) that lets users privately establish shared state without out-of-band channels. Implemented in C++, StOMR is reported to keep detector performance while producing signals about 550×, 650×, and 178× smaller than PerfOMR, SophOMR, and InstantOMR.

Costs of Garbled-Circuit Bitcoin Bridges in a Post-Quantum Setting

2026-10-06T00:00:00+09:00

The Post-Quantum Cost of Garbled-Circuit Bitcoin Bridges IACR ePrint · Oct 6, 2026This paper examines recent Bitcoin bridge designs that verify succinct proofs to process withdrawals, and assesses the post-quantum vulnerability of their cryptographic components. It compares the costs of secure alternatives, finding that post-quantum proving systems can yield smaller circuits than the current pairing-based baseline but require significantly larger proofs that need multiple Bitcoin blocks to encode. The authors suggest future research directions to improve proof efficiency, circuit representations, and input encodings.

Individual cryptography based on iterated squaring

2026-10-09T00:00:00+09:00

Individual Cryptography from Iterated Squaring IACR ePrint · Oct 9, 2026This paper studies individual cryptography and complete knowledge protocols, which ensure that some individual party must know a secret in the clear so the computation cannot be outsourced to MPC. Using ideas from time-lock puzzles, the authors construct secret sharing with snitching and encryption with self-incriminating proofs where reconstruction or decryption must be sequential. Security relies on a new knowledge assumption.

Efficient Unbiasable Verifiable Random Functions via Reductions

2026-10-09T00:00:00+09:00

Efficient Unbiasable Verifiable Random Functions via (Non-)Black-Box Reductions IACR ePrint · Oct 9, 2026This paper presents simple, practical constructions of verifiable random functions (VRFs) that meet strong unbiasability notions introduced by Giunta and Stewart at Eurocrypt 2024. A compiler turns any VRF into an unbiasable VRF in the standard model, without setup, using only symmetric-key primitives and negligible extra computation. The authors also give a non-black-box reduction with polynomial loss under a mild condition, enabling a provably secure "Hash-then-VRF" construction in place of the heuristic "VUF-then-Hash" approach at almost no cost. ★★★★ Notable: The authors present a symmetric-key compiler that makes any VRF unbiasable in the standard model, plus a non-black-box reduction with polynomial loss, improving on the subexponential loss of their bla

Magnetar: a fast post-quantum RV64 zkVM built on standard hash functions

2026-10-09T00:00:00+09:00

Magnetar: High-speed post-quantum RV64 zkVM from standard hashes IACR ePrint · Oct 9, 2026This paper presents Magnetar, a transparent proof system that proves executions of RV64I programs (a zkVM). Its security rests on standard hash functions such as SHA-256 or SHA-3, without relying on algebraic hashes like Poseidon, elliptic-curve or lattice assumptions. The authors report experiments at 120 bits of provable security showing higher proving throughput than several compared zkVMs. ★★★★ Notable: Proposes the first zkVM combining general RV64I proving, standard-hash post-quantum security, and efficient recursion; reports geometric-mean throughput speedups of about 39×, 18×, and 9.6× over SP1 H

More Meters or More Prices? Comparing Single and Multi-Dimensional Ethereum Fee Designs

2026-10-24T00:00:00+09:00

More Meters or More Prices? One- vs. Multi-dimensional Fee Mechanisms on Ethereum arXiv · Oct 24, 2026This paper examines Ethereum's shift from a one-dimensional transaction fee mechanism to a multi-dimensional one that prices execution, data, and state creation separately. The authors build a demand model calibrated from 2025 block-capacity increases and find that state creation is the most price-responsive resource. Combining this model with transaction-level metering reconstruction and block-level simulation, they report that the multi-dimensional design removes fee coupling and yields more execution throughput at similarly low congestion.

Beyond Copying: Lifelong Smart Contract Security Task Construction via Protocol Mutation

2026-10-23T00:00:00+09:00

Beyond Copying: Lifelong Smart Contract Security Task Construction via Protocol Mutation arXiv · Oct 23, 2026This paper proposes CONSTRAINTDIAL, a framework that automatically builds smart contract security tasks by mutating protocols, to test AI agents on detecting, exploiting, and patching vulnerabilities. It changes the calls or inputs needed for an attack so the original fails while exploitability and normal functionality are preserved, and new incidents are added over time. Using 203 public cases, the authors built 3,045 task inputs. Protocol mutation lowered success with supplied public answers by 10.9 percentage points on average compared with reconstruction alone.

Interpretable quantum generators for financial returns via problem-informed circuit design

2026-10-13T00:00:00+09:00

Toward Interpretable Quantum Generators for Financial Returns through Problem-Informed Circuit Design arXiv · Oct 13, 2026The paper proposes a framework that uses relational structure and symmetry-inspired parameter sharing to build quantum circuits with few trainable parameters. Three quantum generator architectures are tested within a hybrid Wasserstein quantum GAN to generate 16-step Bitcoin return windows. Single-layer circuits remain competitive with deeper ones, and ZZ-CRX shows a downward shift in median leverage relative to ZZ at matched depths.

Shared Hidden Signals and Misleading Cross-Excitation in Multivariate Hawkes Models

2026-10-14T00:00:00+09:00

Common Signals, Spurious Cross-Excitation, and Identification in Multivariate Hawkes Processes arXiv · Oct 14, 2026Multivariate Hawkes models are used to measure how events excite one another, but hidden common signals can create apparent excitation with no real interaction. The paper builds stable Hawkes processes with different mechanisms that match common-signal models in mean intensity and spectrum, showing a form of second-order non-identification. It uses third-order cumulants, simulations, Whittle estimation, and a cryptocurrency application to show what can and cannot be identified. ★★★★ Notable: The paper shows latent common signals can produce apparent excitation without structural interaction, constructs stable nonnegative Hawkes processes matching common-signal models' mean intensity and B

Asymmetric q-Gaussian distributions derived from Tsallis maximum entropy

2026-10-12T00:00:00+09:00

Asymmetric q-Gaussian Distributions from Tsallis Maximum Entropy arXiv · Oct 12, 2026This paper proposes an asymmetric q-Gaussian distribution within non-extensive statistical mechanics. Standard q-Gaussians are symmetric and cannot capture the asymmetric fluctuations seen in empirical data. The authors keep Tsallis entropy and impose a global escort mean together with separate downside and upside escort semi-variances, reformulating the problem as maximizing a strictly concave functional. Monte Carlo experiments and in-sample fits to equity index, commodity, and cryptocurrency returns indicate that the asymmetric model fits better than the symmetric q-Gaussian, most clearly in the tails.

Demand under a mechanical price: how inelastic Ethereum data-availability demand is

2026-10-12T00:00:00+09:00

Demand Under a Mechanical Price: Elasticity and Welfare in Ethereum's Data-Availability Market arXiv · Oct 12, 2026Ethereum sells data-availability capacity to rollups as "blobs" priced by a controller that adjusts fees with cumulative usage rather than through an auction. Using the Pectra upgrade of May 7, 2025, which doubled blob capacity, the paper estimates demand elasticity and finds it is inelastic, so the controller mainly acts as a transfer. It also estimates the deadweight loss from the reserve price introduced in December 2025 at most 2.6 ETH when capacity was slack. ★★★★★ Notable: Using Pectra's pre-scheduled doubling of blob capacity as a quasi-experiment, the authors estimate inelastic blob demand and welfare effects, reporting the controller mainly acts as a transfer and at

Does Client Diversity Protect the Lightning Network? Evidence from the 2026 Core Lightning Shutdown

2026-10-15T00:00:00+09:00

Does Client Diversity Protect the Lightning Network? Evidence from the 2026 Core Lightning Shutdown arXiv · Oct 15, 2026This 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.

Blockchain participation games with upfront contribution commitment

2026-10-17T00:00:00+09:00

Blockchain Participation Games with Upfront Contribution Commitment arXiv · Oct 17, 2026This paper studies blockchain participation games where entry is costly, contributors are randomly selected, and success requires reaching a threshold. It characterizes all pure Nash equilibria under homogeneous selection and analyzes how heterogeneous selection affects who commits. The authors show a minimum-outlay reward scheme that supports full contribution as a Nash equilibrium, and note that requiring zero registration reward can raise the minimum outlay under heterogeneous selection.

Empirical Study of TEE-Based Rollup Sequencer Designs

2026-10-17T00:00:00+09:00

Empirical Analysis of TEE-Enabled Rollup Designs arXiv · Oct 17, 2026This paper experimentally evaluates designs that use trusted execution environments (TEEs) to strengthen Ethereum Layer 2 rollup sequencers against censorship and manipulation. It compares separating proposer and builder logic (PBS) into independent services with a monolithic sequencer design. The experiments find that TEEs have a small impact on rollup performance, and PBS does not significantly amplify that impact. The authors also report that PBS can yield significant performance gains through more specialized, efficient builder implementations.

A decision engine for choosing where to deploy smart contracts

2026-10-17T00:00:00+09:00

Towards an Intelligent Decision Engine for Smart Contract Deployment arXiv · Oct 17, 2026This paper proposes a systematic method to help choose among Ethereum layer 2 (L2) blockchains for deploying smart contracts. It uses a set of metrics and user-defined profiles that reflect different priorities among them. The authors collect major smart contract categories from a community-maintained source and six months of transactions from Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, then compute metrics and scores per category and chain.

ABF-Bench: A Verifiable Benchmark for Agentic Blockchain Forensics

2026-10-17T00:00:00+09:00

ABF-Bench: A Verifiable Benchmark for Agentic Blockchain Forensics arXiv · Oct 17, 2026This paper introduces ABF-Bench, an interactive benchmark that tests whether AI agents can trace cryptocurrency funds using public ledger records, requiring each claimed transfer to cite records the agent actually retrieved. The authors also propose the ABF agent harness, built around a working memory, and compare it with general-purpose agents and fixed-order tracers. The harness reaches 75% edge recall, versus 47% for Codex and 10% for Claude Code. The paper also notes that agents often stop early and lose recall on larger tasks.

Classifying DeFi transaction methods using network graphlet patterns

2026-10-16T00:00:00+09:00

Graphlet-based Decentralized Finance Transaction Method Classification arXiv · Oct 16, 2026This paper examines whether network topology can identify the transaction methods that describe Decentralized Finance (DeFi) operations. The authors extract directed graphlet features to classify the 30 most frequent methods. They report that graphlet features complement event log counts and improve classification performance. Using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), they derive model explanations that reveal method-specific graphlet structural patterns.

Paper on whether adaptive transaction fees stay stable across multiple blockchains

2026-10-16T00:00:00+09:00

On the (In)stability of Adaptive Fee Mechanisms in Multi-Chain Systems arXiv · Oct 16, 2026This paper studies whether adaptive base fee mechanisms like Ethereum's EIP-1559 remain stable when several blockchains are linked by cross-chain transfers. The authors model multi-chain fee markets as a nonlinear dynamical system with delayed feedback and identify delay-amplified over-correction as the root cause of instability. Experiments show that cross-chain coupling shrinks the safe range of update rates and that instability spreads to peer chains. The authors also propose a lightweight protocol-level mitigation that removes the over-correction.

QuarkShard: Splitting Cross-Shard Requests into Single-Shard Transactions

2026-10-16T00:00:00+09:00

QuarkShard: Decomposing Cross-Shard Requests into Single-Input Transactions arXiv · Oct 16, 2026This paper proposes QuarkShard, a sharding protocol for blockchains that splits cross-shard user requests into transactions that each need consensus within only one shard. A request decomposition algorithm is said to preserve fund or location atomicity, and the design is said to improve resistance to MEV and flooding attacks. In tests across four AWS regions, the authors report a peak throughput of 1024k requests per second with latency under 4 seconds, and up to 210.7% and 314.8% of the maximum throughput of Kronos and 2PC.

Provable Authority: A Verifiable Protocol for Checking Organizational Authority Before Transactions

2026-10-16T00:00:00+09:00

Provable Authority: A Protocol for Verifiable Authority Resolution and Control Across Human, Organizational, and Agentic Transactions arXiv · Oct 16, 2026The paper proposes the ChainIT Authority Protocol, which lets a counterparty or payment rail independently verify, before execution, that the party presenting a transaction holds current organizational authority to execute it. It separates identity, a versioned authority record, sourced evidence, policy predicates, and execution credentials, binding decisions and human approvals to a canonical transaction digest. The paper also covers an extension for AI agent subjects, enforcement profiles for fiat and stablecoin rails, and stated residual risks and non-goals.

Agentic AI in Automated Markets: How Different Trading Behaviors Affect Market Stress and Volatility

2026-10-16T00:00:00+09:00

Agentic AI in Automated Markets arXiv · Oct 16, 2026This paper studies automated markets run by formulaic market makers, where three reinforcement-learning trading agents are modeled: a rational arbitrageur, a manipulator, and a retail herd-follower. A pilot on hourly cryptocurrency data (AAVE, ETC, SUI) compares how each behavior affects stress episodes, risk-adjusted performance, and volatility. The authors conclude that regulation should target specific behaviors rather than apply uniform limits on volatility or turnover.

TCDA: Tunable Coded Distributed Arrays for Blockchain Data Availability Sampling

2026-10-16T00:00:00+09:00

TCDA: Tunable Coded Distributed Arrays for Data Availability Sampling arXiv · Oct 16, 2026This paper proposes TCDA, a coded network layer for data availability sampling in blockchains that remains robust against an unbounded number of Byzantine nodes. A tunable parameter sets how much of its assigned data each node keeps, trading off dissemination and storage costs against retrieval cost. At Ethereum's parameters for a 32 MiB block, the authors report that the fully replicated RDA misses the attestation deadline, while TCDA meets it from 868 to 40,000 good nodes, using 1.7 to 32 times less storage per node and 2.5 to 7.7 round-trips per sample.

Capital Costs Protect the Network: Idle Mining Periods in Proof-of-Work Blockchains

2026-10-16T00:00:00+09:00

Capital Costs Protect the Network: Mining Gap Dynamics in Proof-of-Work Blockchains Under a Stochastic Mempool arXiv · Oct 16, 2026As block subsidies decline, Proof-of-Work blockchains increasingly depend on transaction fees to keep miners active. The paper models the backlog of high-fee transactions as a Lindley-type recursion and uses its stationary distribution to characterize the mining gap, the idle time miners face before enough profitable transactions accumulate. Under Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment, the expected gap grows with network hashpower and can fill an entire round as hashpower grows without bound. A free-entry condition yields a unique long-run equilibrium hashpower, and capital cost caps that equilibrium so the gap never occupies the whole round.

Study on whether blockchain gossip protocols keep consensus messages reliable under attack

2026-10-15T00:00:00+09:00

On the Robustness of Gossip Protocols in Modern Blockchains arXiv · Oct 15, 2026This 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. ★★★★ Notable: Compares gossip protocols in Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana and Bitcoin under network adversaries, showing via analysis and measurements that common random-graph parameters may not ensure quorum formation

NEST: A Stale-Robust Method for Measuring Tokenized Stocks in Crypto-Treasury LETF Chains

2026-10-15T00:00:00+09:00

NEST: Stale-Robust Tokenized-Stock Measurement for a Crypto-Treasury LETF Stack arXiv · Oct 15, 2026The 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.

Hybrid DeepXAI Fusion Network: A Deep Learning Model for Explainable and Secure Cloud Decision-Making

2026-10-14T00:00:00+09:00

Hybrid DeepXAI Fusion Network for Interpretable Big Data Analytics and Secure Cloud Decision-Making Systems arXiv · Oct 14, 2026This paper proposes the Hybrid DeepXAI Fusion Network, a deep learning framework that combines temporal, relational, and contextual features with explainable AI mechanisms. It integrates 1D-CNNs, Transformer encoders, and graph neural networks through attention-based fusion, using CAM and an explanation loss. The authors report 98.42% accuracy across healthcare, finance, and energy datasets and above 91.5% accuracy under PGD adversarial perturbations.

Tulva: A Practical Asynchronous Threshold FHE Scheme

2026-10-15T00:00:00+09:00

Tulva: Practical Asynchronous Threshold FHE arXiv · Oct 15, 2026This 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.

Effective-balance design rules for Ethereum staking rewards

2026-10-14T00:00:00+09:00

Effective-Balance Design in Ethereum Proof-of-Stake arXiv · Oct 14, 2026This paper treats Ethereum's effective-balance rules as a mechanism-design problem, where the protocol sets a reward coefficient, activation threshold, and maximum effective balance. For a fixed set of validators and identities, it proves a unique Nash equilibrium in validator stakes and analyzes incentives for splitting or merging identities. An illustrative simulation uses synthetic agents calibrated to Beacon Chain, Lido, and Etherscan data, and reports that lowering the reserve price from 32 ETH to 30 ETH raises active identities by 5.922% and total effective stake by 0.098%.

A quantum-resistant security protocol for decentralized edge-IoT peer-to-peer energy trading

2026-10-14T00:00:00+09:00

Quantum-Resilient Secure Protocol for Decentralized Edge-IoT Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Systems arXiv · Oct 14, 2026The paper proposes a mutual authentication session key agreement protocol to protect peer-to-peer energy trading between edge IoT smart meters against quantum attacks. It uses CRYSTALS-Kyber to secure the authenticity and confidentiality of session keys and the Hedera Hashgraph public blockchain to provide transparency and efficient revocation. The authors report comparative analyses showing better performance and security than classical and early post-quantum alternatives.

EvoQuantLab: Training-free dual-loop evolution for auditable quant research

2026-10-13T00:00:00+09:00

EvoQuantLab: Training-Free Dual-Loop Evolution for Auditable Quantitative Research arXiv · Oct 13, 2026This paper presents EvoQuantLab, a training-free framework that uses a dual-loop design to automatically discover quantitative alpha factors. An inner genetic-programming loop evolves typed factor expressions, while an outer loop audits evidence across cycles to refine the protocol, and multi-metric validation filters out spurious factors. Out-of-sample tests on daily CSI 500 and S&P 500 data and hourly cryptocurrency data report annualized returns of 18.34%, 21.30%, and 37.91%, respectively.

The Geography of Concurrent Block Proposing: An Economic Incentives Analysis

2026-10-14T00:00:00+09:00

The Geography of (Concurrent) Block Proposing arXiv · Oct 14, 2026This paper studies the economic incentives that determine where blockchain validators and proposers choose to operate, both with a single proposer and with multiple concurrent proposers. The authors model it as a game in which proposers first pick locations and then compete in a first-price auction for an opportunity whose common value depends on geographically dispersed information sources. They show that multiple concurrent proposers reward exclusive rather than shared information, creating an economic force toward geographic decentralization.

SolBehave: Testing Whether AI-Written Smart Contracts Actually Behave Correctly

2026-10-14T00:00:00+09:00

SolBehave: Evaluating the Behavioural Correctness of LLM-Generated Smart Contracts arXiv · Oct 14, 2026This paper introduces SolBehave, a benchmark that checks whether large language model-generated Solidity smart contracts behave correctly, not just whether they compile. It uses 250 real Ethereum contracts and three tests: differential fuzzing, historical transaction replay, and DCR-graph-guided synthetic transaction replay. Across seven open-weight models, compilation success ranged from 26.4% to 92.7%, but only 31.4% of compiled function bodies matched the original behavior under differential fuzzing.

Verifiable agent insurance: making AI agents financially accountable after misbehavior

2026-10-13T00:00:00+09:00

Holding Agents Accountable with Verifiable Agent Insurance arXiv · Oct 13, 2026The paper proposes verifiable agent insurance (VAI), in which agent providers financially commit to programmatic policies through a smart contract with escrowed funds on an immutable ledger. Users who detect violations can have a verifier review execution traces, and confirmed violations trigger payment from escrow to the reporting user. Implemented on an Ethereum layer-2 network and tested on three benchmarks, VAI detected violations in 42.2% of violating runs, rising to 83.0% when agents emit explicit structured authorization and security records.

FLAI Protocol: Blockchain-Rewarded Decentralized Federated Learning with Contribution Scoring

2026-10-13T00:00:00+09:00

FLAI Protocol: Decentralized Federated Learning with On-Chain Rewards and sPEG-Based Contribution Scoring arXiv · Oct 13, 2026This paper presents the FLAI Protocol, a decentralized federated learning framework that lets parties train models collaboratively without centralizing their data. It combines aggregation verified inside a trusted execution environment, a sparse Peer Evaluation Graph (sPEG) scoring method for participant contributions, and on-chain settlement of token rewards. Evaluations on image, text, and healthcare datasets show utility comparable to FedAvg, with improved fairness and accountability.

Feature-Context Consistency: label-free, drift-stable adversarial detection on attributed graphs

2026-10-12T00:00:00+09:00

Feature-Context Consistency: Unsupervised Adversarial Detection with Drift Stability on Attributed Graphs arXiv · Oct 12, 2026This paper addresses detecting adversarial nodes on evolving attributed graphs, where labels are scarce and data distributions drift over time. It proposes measuring feature-context consistency, the alignment between a node's attributes and its neighborhood's aggregated attributes, via a Context Boost score within a Restricted Boltzmann Machine framework (CB-RBM). The authors prove separation guarantees between legitimate and adversarial nodes and a Wasserstein-Lipschitz bound under drift. On Ethereum phishing and Reddit banned-user datasets, CB-RBM reports AUROC of at least 0.96 with zero labels and keeps the false positive rate near its 5% target under drift.

CryptoFlowBench: A Benchmark for Multi-Hop Crypto Fund Tracing on Blockchains

2026-10-12T00:00:00+09:00

CryptoFlowBench: Benchmarking Multi-Hop Reasoning on Blockchains for Cryptocurrency Fund Tracing arXiv · Oct 12, 2026This paper introduces CryptoFlowBench, a benchmark built from authoritative reports on cryptocurrency-related illicit incidents, with four tasks ranging from local to multi-hop fund tracing. It also proposes ChainSleuth, an agent that uses graph tools to iteratively reason and update its tracing path. Experiments show no baseline consistently leads on all four tasks, and ChainSleuth achieves notable gains on multi-hop tasks.

Do Rollups Self-Organize? Multi-Agent RL in the EIP-4844 Blob Fee Market

2026-10-11T00:00:00+09:00

Do Rollups Self-Organize? Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in the EIP-4844 Blob Fee Market arXiv · Oct 11, 2026This paper studies the blob data fee market introduced by Ethereum's EIP-4844, using a multi-agent reinforcement learning environment calibrated to post-Dencun Ethereum data. The blob base fee is determined endogenously by the EIP-4844 rule applied to the aggregated choices of heterogeneous rollups. The authors report that independent learners settle near the target of three blobs per block without coordination, while supply exceeds the target at high demand.

Tree-BTE: Batched Threshold Encryption Using Additive Homomorphism

2026-10-14T00:00:00+09:00

Tree-BTE: Batched Threshold Encryption using Additive Homomorphism IACR ePrint · Oct 14, 2026This paper proposes a tree-based batched threshold encryption (BTE) scheme that lets a committee of servers jointly decrypt any chosen subset of ciphertexts from a large pool while keeping the rest private. It is built from two additively homomorphic components and can be instantiated under assumptions including DDH, DCR, LWR and LWE. The authors implement the DDH-based version and partially implement a post-quantum RLWE-based version, reporting computation and ciphertext-size measurements.

Trustless Bitcoin Vaults: Withdrawing Collateral Without Trusting Third Parties

2026-10-14T00:00:00+09:00

Trustless Bitcoin Vaults IACR ePrint · Oct 14, 2026Existing Bitcoin bridges require trust in a centralized party or committee to release deposited BTC. This paper proposes Trustless Bitcoin Vaults, a primitive that lets depositors or known counterparties withdraw BTC by following only the application smart contract's logic. The authors implement it for a lending application using BTC as collateral on Aave v4 on Ethereum. Mainnet experiments report deposit fees of about $0.7 and withdrawal fees of at most $7.7 at current prices and fee rates. ★★★★ Notable: Proposes trustless Bitcoin vaults letting depositors withdraw collateral solely via application contract logic; the authors report an Aave v4 lending instantiation with mainnet costs of about $0.7 per

FlatMerkle: Logarithmic-size proofs over a plain hash stream

2026-10-14T00:00:00+09:00

FlatMerkle: Logarithmic-Space Inclusion Proofs over a Single Linear Hash Stream IACR ePrint · Oct 14, 2026This paper presents FlatMerkle, a construction that gives Merkle-tree-style inclusion proofs with logarithmic size and verification time over an ordinary linear hash stream. It works by periodically writing the hash function's past internal states back into the data as ordinary content, so the final digest is a single unmodified hash call. The construction supports compact proofs for any element and proofs that a published file is malformed.

Measuring On-Chain Cost of Output-Private Distributed VRFs on Ethereum

2026-10-15T00:00:00+09:00

Unveiling the Cost: Gas-Efficient Output-Private Distributed VRFs on Ethereum IACR ePrint · Oct 15, 2026This 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.

Tulva: A Practical Asynchronous Threshold FHE Scheme

2026-10-15T00:00:00+09:00

Tulva: Practical Asynchronous Threshold FHE IACR ePrint · Oct 15, 2026Fully 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.

A scalable, robust threshold ECDSA signing protocol for many signers

2026-10-15T00:00:00+09:00

Robust ECDSA Threshold Signing at Scale IACR ePrint · Oct 15, 2026This 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.

Issuer-independent decentralized exchange for e-cash, letting users swap between two separately issued digital cash currencies without each issuer taking part.

2026-10-15T00:00:00+09:00

Issuer-Independent Decentralized Exchange for E-Cash IACR ePrint · Oct 15, 2026The 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.

Aerie: A proof system that aggregates post-quantum Falcon signatures into one short proof

2026-10-16T00:00:00+09:00

Aerie: Efficient Aggregation of Falcon Signatures IACR ePrint · Oct 16, 2026This paper presents Aerie, a proof system that aggregates Falcon-512 and Falcon-1024 signatures, the post-quantum signatures selected by NIST, into a single short proof. Aerie keeps each signature's short random salt in the aggregate, so the verifier computes hashes directly and the proof covers only algebraic and norm checks. On an Apple M4 Max laptop without GPU acceleration, it aggregates 32,768 Falcon-512 signatures in 0.65 seconds, and verification takes 54 milliseconds on one core. The authors prove knowledge soundness in the random-oracle model. ★★★★ Notable: Aggregates Falcon signatures with a lattice SNARK, keeping salts so verifiers hash directly and proving byte-format rules; the authors report 0.65 s proving and 54 ms verification for 32,768 signature

Weekend Crypto Volatility and Monday Risk: Whether weekend crypto price swings predict Monday variance in traditional markets.

2026-10-27T00:00:00+09:00

Weekend Crypto Volatility and Monday Market Risk arXiv · Oct 27, 2026This paper studies whether volatility in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ether and XRP, which trade through the weekend, predicts Monday variance in the S&P 500, gold and a US Treasury ETF. The authors add a common weekend crypto factor to heterogeneous autoregressive models using daily data from 2017 to 2026. Predictive content is significant after 2024 and reduces out-of-sample losses, though statistical evidence varies across markets.

Regime-aware multi-asset portfolio allocation using hidden Markov models and nested clustered optimization, tested on Indonesian assets.

2026-10-20T00:00:00+09:00

Market Regime-Based Multi-Asset Portfolio Optimization Using Nested Clustered Optimization for Tactical Asset Allocation arXiv · Oct 20, 2026The paper proposes a tactical asset allocation framework that combines Gaussian Hidden Markov Model regime detection with Nested Clustered Optimization, with regimes identified out of sample. It is tested on an Indonesian multi-asset universe including government bonds, LQ45 equities, gold, CNY/IDR exchange rates, and Bitcoin over 56 out-of-sample months from 2021 to 2025. The regime-aware version limits maximum drawdown to 4.44%, but the regime-agnostic NCO shows a lower drawdown of 2.19% and higher cumulative return. The authors find that a rolling 24-month HMM switches regimes in 55 of 56 months, causing regime drift that erodes the expected gains.

Fuji: How Demand Bursts Take Shape, What They Consist Of, and How They Spread on Robinhood Chain

2026-10-27T00:00:00+09:00

Fuji: The Shape, Composition, and Spread of Demand Bursts on Robinhood Chain arXiv · Oct 27, 2026This paper measures sudden surges in demand on a blockchain marketplace, using Robinhood Chain, a layer-2 network, over its first three active months and more than 50 million Uniswap swaps. During bursts, traders touch about as many pools as in quiet periods, mostly different ones, and trade more intensively, with median peaks 2.5 times normal load. The rise and fall of demand are described by two exponential functions, and the authors compare two explanations for bursts, finding externally triggered cascades fit the data better than self-excitation.

Performance guarantees for a permissionless lending protocol

2026-10-26T00:00:00+09:00

Performance Guarantees for Permissionless Lending arXiv · Oct 26, 2026This paper proposes a lending protocol that the authors say carries far fewer risks than pool-based protocols such as Aave and Compound. Lenders and borrowers make competing interest-rate offers, and loans carry a fixed rate for their full term. The authors model collateral value as a random walk and use characteristic functions and Fourier inversion to derive exact expressions for liquidation and repayment-shortfall probabilities, illustrated with Bitcoin collateral.

Decentralized medical data sharing system using off-chain storage and view-based access control

2026-10-25T00:00:00+09:00

Decentralized Medical Data Sharing with Off-chain Storage and View-based Access Control arXiv · Oct 25, 2026This paper proposes VASCO, a decentralized medical data sharing system that does not rely on a central server, a specific cloud storage such as IPFS, or a secure channel. It encrypts both data and metadata end-to-end, using eight chaincodes built on view-based access control. The authors report scalability tests on a 21-peer blockchain and interoperability checks across 30 combinations of standards, formats, and protocols.

BE-CTDE: Blockchain-based multi-agent learning with anomaly detection and token incentives

2026-10-25T00:00:00+09:00

BE-CTDE: Blockchain-Enabled Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Anomaly Detection and Token Economics arXiv · Oct 25, 2026This paper proposes BE-CTDE, a framework that uses blockchain as a training-management layer for multi-agent reinforcement learning. A behavioral verifier compares executed trajectories with shared-policy recommendations, and token mechanisms (slashing, burning, rewards, compensation) adjust each agent's influence on the global policy update. In multi-agent path finding experiments, it achieves higher success rates under attack, even when adversaries are a majority, with collision rates up to 35% lower than detection without economic consequences and up to 43% lower than conventional stake slashing.

Temporal liquidity matching for blockchains: an EIP-1559 extension admitting transactions below the base fee

2026-10-22T00:00:00+09:00

Temporal Liquidity Crossing for Blockchains: An EIP-1559 Extension for Admission Below the Base Fee arXiv · Oct 22, 2026The paper proposes temporal liquidity markets (TLM), in which transactions seeking early block execution (consumers) fund transactions that accept later execution (providers). In a block-local EIP-1559 extension, providers can be admitted below the base-fee floor, and their gas is excluded from the ordinary demand controller input. The authors state an adversary model with strategic senders and builders and prove eight properties, including validator-checked rule validity, full burning of the base fee, and no subsidy.

Cambium: Shared Commitment Roots Built by Participants

2026-10-22T00:00:00+09:00

Cambium: Participant-Built Commitment Roots for Shared Digital Infrastructure arXiv · Oct 22, 2026This paper presents Cambium, a permissioned peer-to-peer service in which participants jointly build each cycle's commitment root, so no single party decides which inputs it includes. Fixed-size committees certify inputs, and a recursive-doubling merge spreads root construction across all nodes. A Go prototype on AWS completed cycles in 12 to 148 ms, verified proofs in under 1.5 ms, and showed logarithmic growth.

Who Patches the Lightning Network? Release-line analysis of Lightning gossip, 2023–2026

2026-10-22T00:00:00+09:00

Who Patches the Lightning Network? Evidence from Release Lines in Gossip, 2023-2026 arXiv · Oct 22, 2026The paper infers which software release line each Lightning node runs by matching the feature bits it announces in public gossip against implementation sources. Analyzing 814 daily graph snapshots from 2023 to 2026, it finds nodes upgrade on release and platform schedules rather than after security disclosures. The authors suggest that platforms packaging releases are the main lever for nodes that lag behind. ★★★★★ Notable: The authors infer node release lines from Lightning gossip feature bits and, across 814 daily snapshots, report that platform packaging drives patching more than vulnerability disclosures.

Why Ethereum-style SDK defaults fail on UTXO-style chains: three reusable design patterns

2026-10-20T00:00:00+09:00

When EVM Defaults Break: Three SDK Patterns for UTXO-Family Wallets arXiv · Oct 20, 2026This paper argues that mainstream Web3 SDKs such as ethers.js and viem assume an account-based ledger, a single secp256k1 signer, and transactions built without input selection. These assumptions break on UTXO-family chains like Nervos CKB's Cell model and when wallets use different cryptographic primitives. Using the TypeScript SDK CCC, the authors extract three recurring patterns from its release history and exported APIs: a declarative transaction composer, a unified signer abstraction, and a drop-in connector UI component. The paper presents these as transferable design lessons for SDKs serving UTXO-family ledgers and heterogeneous wallets.

Using time-series foundation models to detect financial crime

2026-10-21T00:00:00+09:00

Leveraging Time-Series Foundation Models for Financial Crime Detection arXiv · Oct 21, 2026This paper proposes TCEE, a framework that summarizes each account's transaction history with a frozen time-series foundation model and adds the relevant temporal context to each transaction's representation. These representations can be used for edge classification or as edge features in a graph neural network. Across six AMLWorld datasets, TCEE improves PR-AUC by 10.8% on average over the strongest baseline on five datasets and trains 6.0 times faster end-to-end.

How Not to Be Censored: Guaranteeing Client Transaction Inclusion in Blockchain Consensus

2026-10-21T00:00:00+09:00

How Not to Be Censored: Inclusion Safety in Client-Led Consensus arXiv · Oct 21, 2026This paper observes that blockchain consensus is typically client-server, with clients only submitting transactions and relying on validators to include them. The authors propose a leaderless consensus protocol in which clients actively participate and define inclusion safety, a guarantee that a client's transaction enters some block produced in an epoch. The analysis covers synchrony and asynchrony, showing that client or replica connectivity can substitute for one another, though relying on replica connectivity requires a longer epoch.

PQ-Vault: A provably quantum-safe way to hold Ethereum assets without changing Ethereum

2026-10-21T00:00:00+09:00

PQ-Vault: Provably Quantum-Safe Asset Custody for Unmodified Ethereum arXiv · Oct 21, 2026The paper warns that a quantum computer could recover the private key of any Ethereum account whose public key is already on chain. The authors prove that sidechains or bridges cannot protect such accounts without changing Ethereum's rules, so funds must move into a vault contract released only through quantum-safe primitives. They present PQ-Vault, combining this vault, a quantum-safe proof-of-stake sidechain, and an optimistic dispute protocol. ★★★★ Notable: The authors prove that unmodified Ethereum requires moving vulnerable funds into a vault released only by quantum-safe primitives, and show a quantum attack dropping compact certificates from 128 to a

A blockchain consensus method where miners run AI inference instead of hash puzzles

2026-10-20T00:00:00+09:00

Proof-of-Machine-Learning-Inference: Mining Knowledge, Not Hashes arXiv · Oct 20, 2026This paper proposes Proof-of-ML-Inference (PoML), a consensus protocol in which miners perform user-requested machine-learning inference instead of computing hash puzzles. The authors formalize the computational assumptions needed for ML inference to replace hash work and argue that LLMs and diffusion models satisfy them. They analyse security by reducing it to the Bitcoin Backbone model and evaluate block-time stability in a simulated environment.

Fortress: A Fork-Resistant Transparency Log Using Social Graph Structure

2026-10-19T00:00:00+09:00

Fortress: Fork Resistant Transparency logs Relying on Social graph Structure arXiv · Oct 19, 2026Transparency systems such as Key Transparency rely on external anchors like bulletin boards, blockchains, or out-of-band gossip among auditors to ensure everyone sees the same directory. This paper proposes using the social graph formed by users themselves as a replacement, formalizing a primitive called sg-FORT and constructing the Fortress protocol. In honest runs, out-of-band interactions occur only when users reset their secrets, and security is proven under standard cryptographic assumptions. The authors present this as a feasibility result under simplifying assumptions such as synchronous epochs and always-online users.

On Pearl Blockchain's Proof of Useful Work: Systematization and Flexibility

2026-10-19T00:00:00+09:00

On Pearl Blockchain's Proof of Useful Work: Systematization and Flexibility arXiv · Oct 19, 2026This paper revisits the proof-of-useful-work (PoUW) scheme from the Pearl blockchain white paper. It offers a systematic sensitivity characterization as an alternative to the Jackpot policy, along with an efficient algorithm for verifying the sensitivity condition. Building on this, it proposes a more flexible PoUW scheme in which each miner independently chooses its noise magnitude to balance computational accuracy and mining efficiency.

Post-quantum IoT blockchain for securing edge and physical AI agents in critical systems

2026-10-25T00:00:00+09:00

Securing Edge & Physical AI: Post-Quantum IoT Blockchain for Mission-Critical Cyber-Physical Agents arXiv · Oct 25, 2026This paper addresses the risk that quantum computers could break public-key authentication used in distributed cyber-physical systems and edge AI. It introduces rotational secrecy, an architectural goal that limits key exposure through authenticated transitions between cryptographic epochs, and presents PARS, a mechanism for coordinating key establishment, rotation, and reconciliation among agents. It also describes PARS-ESL, an optional permissioned ledger that records only security state such as key epochs, membership, and revocation, not high-volume operational data. The authors conclude that ledger-assisted post-quantum key-epoch management is feasible for selected edge AI and CPS security-control workloads under stated assumptions.

Peer-relative trust screening to resist label-flipping attacks in semi-decentralized federated learning

2026-10-19T00:00:00+09:00

Peer-Relative Trust-Guided Update Screening for Robust Semi-Decentralized Federated Learning under Label-Flipping Attacks arXiv · Oct 19, 2026This paper proposes a peer-relative trust-based update screening method to make semi-decentralized federated learning more robust against label-flipping attacks. It combines a robust validation-utility score with direction- and norm-based update quality measures. In experiments with 50 MNIST clients and 20% persistent attackers, the method reached 98.37% accuracy under moderate heterogeneity, rejecting 95.82% of malicious updates, and 95.25% accuracy under severe heterogeneity, rejecting 88.55% of malicious updates.

Isotaxis: Optimal Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus with Ordering Linearizability

2026-10-26T00:00:00+09:00

Isotaxis: Optimal Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus with Ordering Linearizability IACR ePrint · Oct 26, 2026This paper presents Isotaxis, a state machine replication protocol with ordering linearizability, designed to resist adversaries who manipulate transaction order, such as in MEV attacks. Its communication complexity is O(nℓ+λn²), which is optimal when ℓ≥λn, and it is described as the first asynchronous protocol to achieve ordering linearizability. Experiments on up to 100 EC2 instances show it outperforms Pompē at all tested scales from 4 to 100 nodes. ★★★★ Notable: The authors present an asynchronous SMR with ordering linearizability, reporting optimal communication and Byzantine resilience, and outperforming Pompē in 4-to-100-node experiments.

Quantum Cadence: a post-quantum consensus protocol for multiple concurrent proposers that avoids certificates

2026-10-24T00:00:00+09:00

Quantum Cadence: Post-Quantum Consensus with Multiple Concurrent Proposers arXiv · Oct 24, 2026Most high-performance blockchains rely on quorum certificates built from aggregated signatures, which large-scale quantum computers could break, and no post-quantum scheme matches their size and aggregation speed. This paper presents Quantum Cadence, in which each validator counts quorums from the messages it has received, so no certificates are needed. Its fast path keeps the optimal latency of Chorus, and when that fails it falls back to Coda, a signature-free Byzantine agreement. In simulations with 200 validators, its latency is comparable to Chorus and it scales better as the number of proposers grows.

Tracing Money Laundering Across DeFi, Bridges and Mixers on Ethereum

2026-10-23T00:00:00+09:00

Tracing Money Laundering Across DeFi, Bridges, and Mixers on Ethereum arXiv · Oct 23, 2026This paper presents FPTracer, a framework for tracing illicit assets through Ethereum services such as DeFi protocols, cross-chain bridges and mixers. It recovers intra-transaction asset-flow paths using a Context-Aware Transfer Tree, classifies transactions with cross-chain intent, and analyzes post-mixer activity using upstream laundering evidence. Evaluated on 20 real-world cases, it achieves the highest recall for known laundering addresses and destinations and finds 30 previously unreported bridge uses.

SILMARILS-MV: An Information-Theoretically Secure Multi-Verifier Signature Scheme for Permissioned Blockchains

2026-10-23T00:00:00+09:00

SILMARILS-MV: Information-Theoretically Secure Multi-Verifier Signatures with Dealer-Free Key Issuance and Linear Aggregation for Permissioned Blockchains arXiv · Oct 23, 2026The paper proposes SILMARILS-MV, a multi-verifier signature scheme that remains secure against unbounded adversaries and needs no trusted dealer for key issuance. Signatures can be linearly aggregated, and the committee can sign threshold certificates of constant size. According to the authors' analysis and HotStuff prototype, it reduces authentication traffic and cryptographic CPU cost compared with ML-DSA-44.

DLT Terms 100: A Blockchain Glossary Based on ISO 22739:2024

2026-10-22T00:00:00+09:00

DLT Terms 100: a learner's glossary based on ISO 22739:2024 arXiv · Oct 22, 2026This paper proposes "DLT Terms 100," a glossary intended to improve understanding of blockchain, or distributed ledger technology (DLT). The authors note that gaps between business and technical terminology, and confusion from existing financial terms being reused, hinder comprehension. The glossary is based on ISO 22739:2024 and categorizes terms by how often they appear in representative domestic and international literature and by difficulty level.

A systematic survey of optimization tools for Hydra multi-party channels

2026-10-23T00:00:00+09:00

SoK: Optimization Tools for the Hydra Multiplayer Channel IACR ePrint · Oct 23, 2026This paper is a systematization of knowledge (SoK) survey on blockchain Layer-2 scaling. It reviews existing two-party payment channel protocols and the tools built on them, explaining their core ideas. It then identifies use cases that call for new protocols for Hydra's multi-party channels, lists open problems, and suggests existing tools that could address them or serve as starting points.

Tritone: Pairwise Garbled Disputes for Bitcoin Groth16 Proof Checks

2026-10-23T00:00:00+09:00

Tritone: Pairwise Garbled Disputes for Multi-Party Proof Verification on Bitcoin IACR ePrint · Oct 23, 2026This paper presents Tritone, a protocol that lets Bitcoin enforce the outcome of verifying a Groth16 proof without changing consensus rules. It extends the two-party BABE protocol to a fixed committee of N operators, and the locked funds stay secure while at least one operator is honest. The authors formally prove security against up to N-1 corrupted operators and implement the protocol in Rust. They report transaction sizes on Bitcoin mainnet and local storage measurements. ★★★★ Notable: Generalizes two-party BABE to N operators with a Lamport-adaptor binding gadget, enforcing Groth16 proof verification on Bitcoin without consensus changes and reporting on-chain transaction costs.