December 6, 2024

Will Web3 Follow in the Footsteps of the AI Hype Cycle?

For many, the global financial crisis of 2008 marked a turning point for trust in established institutions. It is unsurprising that during this same historical time period, Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency that aspired to operate independent from state manipulation, began gaining traction. Since the birth of Bitcoin, other decentralized technologies have been introduced that enable […]

Attackers exploit fundamental flaw in the web’s security to steal $2 million in cryptocurrency

By Henry Birge-Lee, Liang Wang, Grace Cimaszewski, Jennifer Rexford and Prateek Mittal On Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022, attackers stole approximately $2 million worth of cryptocurrency from users of the Korean crypto exchange KLAYswap. This theft, which was detailed in a Korean-language blog post by the security firm S2W, exploited systemic vulnerabilities in the Internet’s routing […]

What’s new with BlockSci, Princeton’s blockchain analysis tool

Six months ago we released the initial version of BlockSci, a fast and expressive tool to analyze public blockchains. In the accompanying paper we explained how we used it to answer scientific questions about security, privacy, miner behavior, and economics using blockchain data. BlockSci has a number of other applications including forensics and as an […]

Bitcoin is unstable without the block reward

With Miles Carlsten, Harry Kalodner, and Matt Weinberg, I have a new paper titled On the instability of Bitcoin without the block reward, which Harry will present at ACM CCS next week. The paper predicts that miner incentives will start to go haywire as Bitcoin rewards shift from block rewards to transaction fees, based on […]