The topic of on-chain arbitrage and miner extractable value (MEV), has been of interest to the Ethereum community as of late due to the meteoric rise in decentralized finance protocols. A central issue with the current Ethereum paradigm is that all transactions are broadcasted into the mempool. Among these publicly viewable pending transactions ... Read more

In the design of cryptographic encryption schemes, a core tenent is to ensure that the key space is large enough so that an exhaustive search over the keys is computationally infeasible. However, early on, cryptographers realized that perhaps there are instances when we do want a “bad” encryption scheme, one in which it is possible to decrypt, b... Read more

The Paillier cryptosystem was first presented in the 1999 paper “Public-Key Cryptosystems Based on Composite Degree Residuosity Classes” by Pascal Paillier. It is a public key encryption scheme that uses a novel cryptographic assumption, and furthermore has the property that the encryption is additively homomorphic–multiplying two ciphertexts re... Read more

In this post, I present a high level overview and context for “A Minimal Model for Secure Computation”, a paper on multiparty computation published by Uri Feige, Joe Kilian, and Moni Naor in 1994. The problem the paper is trying to tackle is secure two-party computation, in which two parties, Alice and Bob, try to compute some function \(f(x, y... Read more

In the world of public blockchains and cryptocurrencies, projects need to bootstrap network effects before becoming useful. As per Metcalfe’s Law, the value that a network provides scales non-linearly with the number of people; a network with \(n\) people participating has a total of \(\binom{n}{2}\) possible connections between people. The more... Read more

For the first half of this semester, up until Spring Break, I developed the material for and taught a weekly seminar formally titled “Topics in Blockchain” at Penn to a crowd of students interested in learning more about what is happening in this rapidly evolving space. The course met for a total of six sessions, with each session being about 90... Read more