Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not only effects the throughput of the blockchain but also results in high gas fees for executing transactions on chain. The most successful solution for this problem is provided by optimistic rollups, Layer 2 (L2) blockchains that execute transactions outside L1 but post the transaction data on L1. The security for such L2 chains is argued, informally, under the assumption that a set of nodes will check the transaction data posted on L1 and raise an alarm (a fraud proof) if faulty transactions are detected. However, all current deployments lack a proper incentive mechanism for ensuring that these nodes will do their job "diligently", and simply rely on a cursory incentive alignment argument for security. We solve this problem by introducing an incentivized watchtower network designed to serve as the first line of defense for rollups. Our main contribution is a "Proof of Diligence" protocol that requires watchtowers to continuously provide a proof that they have verified L2 assertions and get rewarded for the same. Proof of Diligence protocol includes a carefully-designed incentive mechanism that is provably secure when watchtowers are rational actors, under a mild rational independence assumption. Our proposed system is now live on Ethereum testnet. We deployed a watchtower network and implemented Proof of Diligence for multiple optimistic rollups. We extract execution as well as inclusion proofs for transactions as a part of the bounty. Each watchtower has minimal additional computational overhead beyond access to standard L1 and L2 RPC nodes. Our watchtower network comprises of 10 different (rationally independent) EigenLayer operators, secured using restaked Ethereum and spread across three different continents, watching two different optimistic rollups for Ethereum, providing them a decentralized and trustfree first line of defense. The watchtower network can be configured to watch the batches committed by sequencer on L1, providing an approximately 3 minute (cryptoeconomically secure) finality since the additional overhead for watching is very low. This is much lower than the finality delay in the current setup where it takes about 45 minutes for state assertions on L1, and hence will not delay the finality process on L1.

Decentralized cellular networks have emerged to increase network accessibility by distributing infrastructure ownership over independent entities. Unlike the centralized setting, these architectures can allow users to connect to any untrusted base station without prior subscription. However, verification of the service is necessary in the absence of trust for commensurate payments by the user. Further, any method of verification must be non-intrusive and reliably agreed upon by the involved parties. To this end, we describe two-sided measurements where both the users and the providers independently assess the cellular service. We find that reconciling measurements from different layers of the cellular stack for a diverse set of matching observations is challenging but not impossible. Hence, new use cases such as a decentralized slicing marketplace, and contract-free roaming can be enabled by two-sided measurements. We envision applying two-sided measurements to real-time, on-demand network slicing and present an architecture that is capable of offering, as well as verifying, such slices in a scalable manner.

Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains are susceptible to adversarial majority mining attacks in the early stages due to incipient participation and corresponding low net hash power. Bootstrapping ensures safety and liveness during the transient stage by protecting against a majority mining attack, allowing a PoW chain to grow the participation base and corresponding mining hash power. Liveness is especially important since a loss of liveness will lead to loss of honest mining rewards, decreasing honest participation, hence creating an undesired spiral; indeed existing bootstrapping mechanisms offer especially weak liveness guarantees.

A blockchain is a database of sequential events that is maintained by a distributed group of nodes. A key consensus problem in blockchains is that of determining the next block (data element) in the sequence. Many blockchains address this by electing a new node to propose each new block. The new block is (typically) appended to the tip of the proposer's local blockchain, and subsequently broadcast to the rest of the network. Without network delay (or adversarial behavior), this procedure would give a perfect chain, since each proposer would have the same view of the blockchain. A major challenge in practice is forking. Due to network delays, a proposer may not yet have the most recent block, and may therefore create a side chain that branches from the middle of the main chain. Forking reduces throughput, since only one a single main chain can survive, and all other blocks are discarded. We propose a new P2P protocol for blockchains called Barracuda, in which each proposer, prior to proposing a block, polls ℓ other nodes for their local blocktree information. Under a stochastic network model, we prove that this lightweight primitive improves throughput as if the entire network were a factor of ℓ faster. We provide guidelines on how to implement Barracuda in practice, guaranteeing robustness against several real-world factors.