Cryptocurrencies

Exploring the Edges of Blockchain Technology: A Deep Dive into MEV and Oracles

In the dynamic world of blockchain technology, a Research Note from authors at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and University College London (UCL) delves into the complex territories of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and blockchain oracles, presenting a nuanced study that underscores both the potential and the pitfalls of these advanced concepts in cryptoasset services and Decentralised Finance (DeFi).

At the heart of this exploration lies MEV, a concept that thrives on the transparency and ordering of transactions within blockchain networks. While it heralds a new era of value extraction, it also opens the door to strategies that may skirt the ethical line, raising concerns over market fairness and the integrity of transactional processes. From the beneficial arbitrage opportunities to the controversial practices of front-running and sandwich attacks, MEV presents a multifaceted phenomenon that demands a keen understanding of its implications.

Equally significant are blockchain oracles, pivotal in bridging the on-chain and off-chain worlds. These conduits of information are indispensable for the seamless operation of smart contracts, yet they bear vulnerabilities that can be exploited, casting a shadow over their reliability. The study highlights the delicate balance that must be struck in the design and implementation of oracles, stressing the importance of robust data sources, decentralisation, and innovative solutions to mitigate risks.

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A Regulatory “Trial and Error” Phase Shaping the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem

In general, the broad aim of regulation is to organise the relationship between persons and to protect their rights and interests in society. However as we have discovered, this has not been the case within the cryptocurrency space.

It has been almost 15 years since Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper. Since then, this seminal document posted on a mailing list, catalysed the emergence of an entirely new-transnational field. Considering the substantial time that has passed and the widespread popularity of cryptocurrencies, one would expect regulators to have at least figured out ‘how’ and ‘what’ to regulate, right? But it appears not so. Regulators do not seem to want to provide long-term, serious solutions, but rather a collection of outdated bandages of reactions that mostly portray the illusion of a solution, with not-so-hidden intentions in mind.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem itself has often been compared to the Wild West. Nevertheless, this also applies to its journey to be regulated. A journey full of ill-suited regulatory approaches that resulted in a plethora of dilemmas. We explore this tension between the technology and regulation in our latest paper “Shaping Cryptocurrency Gatekeepers with a Regulatory ‘Trial and Error’”, with a primary focus on the Financial Action Task Force’s recommendations, and the EU’s 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive.

Historically speaking, it was only after the rising popularity of the Silk Road and the collapse of the most popular (at the time) exchange Mt. Gox, that regulators realised that they needed to take action. The advertised main objective here is the curbing of criminal activity and providing regulatory protection to consumers/users. However, until only recently, most of the regulatory steps taken by most regulators choosing to act, were approaches mainly targeting money laundering and terrorist financing, with other limited initiatives here and there. Whilst this approach might have had some potential benefits, it was not 1. comprehensive, 2. global, 3. stable/constant, or 4. tailored to address the specific risks and characteristics of cryptocurrencies. In other words, different regulators have been testing diverse approaches, simultaneously, without engaging with one another, and without properly acknowledging the true needs and risks of the ecosystem.

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Rugpull reports in the DeFi jungle

A rising category of cryptocurrency scams called ‘rugpulls’ accounted for 37% of all cryptocurrency scam revenue in 2021. A rugpull is an exit scam in the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) ecosystem where developers abandon a project without fully delivering and run away with investors’ funds. Thodex, a Turkish centralized exchange, ran away with $2 billion from victims. In March 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two defendants for a $1.1 million NFT rugpull scam called Frosties.

In our paper to be presented next week at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2023, we analyze an updated list of rugpulls from an online discussion forum – bitcointalk.org. This forum provides a platform for everyone to discuss anything on crypto that also attracts scammers to advertise their projects. We observe that since 2020, the number of rugpull threads has increased, while the ones containing exit scams have decreased; the total mention of either of these terms is relatively stable over time. This means that users have started using the term ‘rugpull’ instead of ‘exit scam’ since the DeFi space emerged.

Using keywords to search for threads discussing rugpulls, we found 101 rugpulls from six services, summarised in Table 1. Our dataset is available from the Harvard Dataverse as doi:10.7910/DVN/SMGMW8.

Table 1: DeFi service types by quantity of observed rugpulls (N=101)
Service Type	Definition	Observation
Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)	Raising money to create a new ERC20 token	73
Yield farms	Lending crypto assets to earn interest on the loan	16
Exchanges	Platforms for users to buy/sell cryptocurrency	5
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)	Unique, non-interchangeable digital asset that can be bought and sold	5
Initial Dex Offerings (IDOs)	Similar to ICO, but on a decentralized exchange	1
Cloud mining	Fractional shares of a mining operation	1

We find that Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) form the majority of rugpulls, and most of them pulled the rug in less than six months. For example, the SquidGame Token, named after a famous TV show, rugpulled within days in 2021.

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Winkle – Decentralised Checkpointing for Proof-of-Stake

Several blockchain projects are considering proof-of-stake mechanisms in place of proof-of-work, attracted by the lower energy costs. Some proof-of-stake protocols based on BFT systems such as HotStuff or Tendermint appear to provide faster and deterministic finality. In these protocols, a set of nodes known as validators, that are identified by their public key, operates the consensus protocol such that any user can verify it using only publicly available information by verifying the validators’ signatures. The set of validators changes periodically, with respect to a specific governance mechanism.

However, as any consensus protocol that is not based on resource consumption (such as proof-of-work, proof-of-space and so on) they are vulnerable to an attack known in the literature as Long-Range Attack. In a Long-Range Attack, an adversary obtains the secret keys of past validators (e.g., by bribing them at no cost since they do not use these keys any more) and is thus able to re-write the entire history of the blockchain with those. A user that has been offline for a long period of time could then be fooled by the adversarial chain.

The number of keys holding a given fraction of stake (logarithmic scale).

To solve this problem, we propose Winkle, a decentralised checkpointing mechanism operated by coin holders, whose keys are harder to compromise than validators’ as they are more numerous. By analogy, in Bitcoin, taking control of one-third of the total supply of money would require at least 889 keys, whereas only 4 mining pools control more than half of the hash power (see figure above).

Our Protocol

The idea of Winkle is that coin holders will checkpoint the honest chain, such that if an adversary creates an alternative chain, its chain will not be checkpointed (since the adversary does not control the keys of coin holders) and is thus easily differentiable from the honest chain.

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A Marlin is One of the Fastest SNARKs in the Ocean

In this post, we discuss our new zero-knowledge proving system, Marlin, by Chiesa, Hu, Maller, Mishra, Vesely, and Ward. This year has been the year of the universal SNARK, with Sonic, Libra, and Plonk all bidding for attention. Marlin is yet another competitor, one which we recommend using when you require fast verification time without the use of batching.

Why Universal SNARKs?

A universal SNARK is a proving system in which a single trusted setup suffices to prove anything that we know how to prove. That means that the same setup could be used across all applications and that parameters could be stored in a general-purpose library. Additionally, these universal SNARKs typically have relatively easy to coordinate setup procedures, which makes it easier to convince users that the procedure has been carried out correctly and securely.

Some SNARKs avoid setup procedures altogether. Such works include Spartan, Halo, and Hyrax. However, the cost of avoiding a trusted setup can generally be seen in the proof sizes and verification time.

Marlin or Sonic?

In this authors’ humble opinion, Sonic is fabulous. The proofs are small, the provers are fast, and the verification is fast provided one is verifying many proofs at the same time. For applications that use batched verifications, Sonic currently remains the state-of-the-art. Cryptocurrency transactions are a classic example of this – nodes can verify all the transactions in a new block simultaneously (provided the miner aggregates the transactions). However, this setting in which Sonic excels, i.e. the setting in which the verifier is not just given a single proof but many, many proofs of the same thing, is not always a given. For an example where Sonic’s batched proofs would not suffice, consider a randomness beacon. Here verification of the beacons outputs is only done once in a while. Therefore it would be a setting where batching is totally inappropriate.

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Beyond Regulators’ Concerns, Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Faces another Big Challenge: The Risk of Fraud

Facebook has attracted attention through the announcement of their blockchain-based payment network, Libra. This won’t be the first payment system Facebook has launched, but what makes Facebook’s Libra distinctive is that rather than transferring Euros or dollars, the network is designed for a new cryptocurrency, also called Libra. This currency is backed by a reserve of nationally-issued currencies, and so Facebook hopes it will avoid the high volatility of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. As a result, Libra won’t be attractive to currency speculators, but Facebook hopes that it will, therefore, be useful for its stated goal – to be a “simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people.”

Reducing currency volatility is only one step towards meeting this goal of scaling cryptocurrencies to billions of users. The Libra blockchain design addresses how the network can maintain the high throughput and low transaction fees needed to compete with existing payment networks like Visa or MasterCard. However, a question that is equally important but as yet unanswered is how Facebook will develop a secure authentication and fraud prevention system that can scale to billions of users while maintaining good usability and low cost.

Facebook designed the Libra network, but in contrast to traditional payment networks, the Libra network is open. Anyone can send transactions through the network, and anyone can write programs (known as “smart contracts”) that control how, and under what conditions, funds can move between Libra accounts. To comply with anti-money-laundering regulations, Know Your Customer (KYC) checks will be performed, but only when Libra enters or leaves the network through exchanges. Transactions moving funds within the network should be accepted if they meet the criteria set out in the applicable smart contract, regardless of who sent them.

The Libra network isn’t even restricted to transactions transferring the Libra currency. Facebook has explicitly designed the Libra blockchain to make it easy for anyone to implement their own currency and benefit from the same technical facilities that Facebook designed for its currency. Other blockchains have tried this. For example, Ethereum has spawned hundreds of special-purpose currencies. But programming a smart contract to implement a new currency is difficult, and errors can be costly. The programming language for smart contracts within the Libra network is designed to help developers avoid some of the most common mistakes.

Facebook’s Libra and Securing the Calibra Wallet

There’s more to setting up an effective currency than just the technology: regulatory compliance, a network of exchanges, and monetary policy are essential. Facebook, through setting up the Libra Association, is focusing its efforts here solely on the Libra currency. The widespread expectation is, therefore, at least initially, the Libra cryptocurrency will be the dominant usage of the network, and most users will send and receive funds through the Calibra wallet smartphone app, developed by a Facebook subsidiary. From the perspective of the vast majority of the world, the Calibra wallet will be synonymous with Facebook’s Libra, and so damage to trust in Calibra will damage the reputation of Libra as a whole.

Continue reading Beyond Regulators’ Concerns, Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Faces another Big Challenge: The Risk of Fraud

Tracing transactions across cryptocurrency ledgers

The Bitcoin whitepaper specifies the risks of revealing owners of addresses. It states that “if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner.” Five years later, we have seen many projects which look at de-anonymising entities in Bitcoin. Such projects use techniques such as address tagging and clustering to tie many addresses to one entity, making it easier to analyse the movement of funds. However, this is not only limited to Bitcoin but also occurs on alternative cryptocurrencies such as Zcash and Monero. Thus tracing transactions on-chain is a known and studied problem.

But we have recently seen a shift into entities performing cross-currency trades. For example, the WannaCry hackers laundered over $142,000 Bitcoin from ransoms across cryptocurrencies. The issue here is that cross-chain transactions appear to be indistinguishable from native transactions on-chain. For example, to trade Bitcoin for Monero, one would have to send the exchange bitcoin, and in return, the exchange sends the user some coins in Monero. Both these transactions occur on separate chains and do not appear to be connected, so the actual swap can appear to be obscured. This level of obscurity can be used to hide the original flow of coins, giving users an additional form of anonymity.

Thus it is important to ask whether or not we can analyse such transactions and the extent of the analysis possible, and if so, how? In our paper being presented today at the USENIX Security Symposium, we (Haaroon Yousaf, George Kappos and Sarah Meiklejohn) answer these questions.

Our Research

In summary, we scraped and linked over 1.3 million transactions across different blockchains from the service ShapeShift. In doing so, we found over 100,000 cases where users would convert coins to another currency then move right back to the original one, identified that a Bitcoin address associated with CoinPayments.net address is a very popular service for users to shift to, and saw that scammers preferred shifting their Ethereum to Bitcoin and Monero.

We collected and analysed 13 months of transaction data across eight different blockchains to identify how users interacted with this service. In doing so, we developed new heuristics and identified various patterns of cross-currency trades.

What is ShapeShift?

ShapeShift is a lightweight cross-currency non-custodial service that facilitates trades which allows users to directly trade coins from one currency to another (a cross-currency shift). This service acts as the entity which facilitates the entire trade, allowing users to essentially swap their coins with its own supply. ShapeShift and Changelly are examples of such services.

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Will dispute resolution be Libra’s Achilles’ heel?

Facebook’s new cryptocurrency, Libra, has the ambitious goal of being the “financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people”. This aspiration will only be achievable if the user-experience (UX) of Libra and associated technologies is competitive with existing payment channels. Now, Facebook has an excellent track record of building high-quality websites and mobile applications, but good UX goes further than just having an aesthetically pleasing and fast user interface. We can already see aspects of Libra’s design that will have consequences on the experience of its users making payments.

For example, the basket of assets that underly the Libra currency should ensure that its value should not be too volatile in terms of the currencies represented within the reserve, so easing international payments. However, Libra’s value will fluctuate against every other currency, creating a challenge for domestic payments. People won’t be paid their salary in Libra any time soon, nor will rents be denominated in Libra. If the public is expected to hold significant value in Libra, fluctuations in the currency markets could make the difference between someone being able to pay their rent or not – a certainly unwelcome user experience.

Whether the public will consider the advantages of Libra are worth the exposure to the foibles of market fluctuations is an open question, but in this post, I’m mostly going to discuss the consequences another design decision baked into the design of Libra: that transactions are irrevocable. Once a transaction is accepted by the validator network, the user may proceed “knowing that the transaction can never be changed or reversed“. This is a common design decision within cryptocurrencies because it ensures that companies, governments and regulators should be unable to revoke payments they dislike. When coupled with anonymity or decentralisation, to prevent blacklisted transactions being blocked beforehand, irrevocability creates a censorship-resistant payment system.

Mitigating the cost of irrevocable transactions

Libra isn’t decentralised, nor is it anonymous, so it is unlikely to be particularly resistant to censorship over matters when there is an international consensus. Irrevocability does, however, make fraud easier because once stolen funds are gone, they cannot be reinstated, even if the fraud is identified. Other cryptocurrencies share Libra’s irrevocability (at least in theory), but they are designed for technically sophisticated users, and their risk of theft can be balanced against the potentially substantial gains (and losses) that can be made from volatile cryptocurrencies. While irrevocability is common within cryptocurrencies, it is not within the broader payments industry. Exposing billions of people to the risk of their Libra holdings being stolen, without the potential for recourse, isn’t good UX. I’ve argued that irrevocable transactions protect the interests of financial institutions over those of the public, and are the wrong default for payments. Eventually, public pressure and regulatory intervention forced UK banks to revoke fraudulent transactions, and they take on the risk that they are unable to do so, rather than pass it onto the victims. The same argument applies to Libra, and if fraud becomes common, they will see the same pressures as UK banks.

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Thoughts on the Libra blockchain: too centralised, not private, and won’t help the unbanked

Facebook recently announced a new project, Libra, whose mission is to be “a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people”. The announcement has predictably been met with scepticism by organisations like Privacy International, regulators in the U.S. and Europe, and the media at large. This is wholly justified given the look of the project’s website, which features claims of poverty reduction, job creation, and more generally empowering billions of people, wrapped in a dubious marketing package.

To start off, there is the (at least for now) permissioned aspect of the system. One appealing aspect of cryptocurrencies is their potential for decentralisation and censorship resistance. It wasn’t uncommon to see the story of PayPal freezing Wikileak’s account in the first few slides of a cryptocurrency talk motivating its purpose. Now, PayPal and other well-known providers of payment services are the ones operating nodes in Libra.

There is some valid criticism to be made about the permissioned aspect of a system that describes itself as a public good when other cryptocurrencies are permissionless. These are essentially centralised, however, with inefficient energy wasting mechanisms like Proof-of-Work requiring large investments for any party wishing to contribute.

There is a roadmap towards decentralisation, but it is vague. Achieving decentralisation, whether at the network or governance level, hasn’t been done even in a priori decentralised cryptocurrencies. In this sense, Libra hasn’t really done worse so far. It already involves more members than there are important Bitcoin or Ethereum miners, for example, and they are also more diverse. However, this is more of a fault in existing cryptocurrencies rather than a quality of Libra.

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Efficient Cryptographic Arguments and Proofs – Or How I Became a Fractional Monetary Unit

In 2008, unfortunate investors found their life savings in Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund swindled away in a $65 billion Ponzi scheme. Imagine yourself back in time with an opportunity to invest in his fund that had for years delivered stable returns and pondering Madoff’s assurance that the fund was solvent and doing well. Unfortunately, neither Madoff nor any other hedge fund manager would take kindly to your suggestion of opening their books to demonstrate the veracity of the claim. And even if you somehow got access to all the internal data, it might take an inordinate effort to go through the documents.

Modern day computers share your predicament. When a computer receives the result of a computation from another machine, it can be critical whether the data is correct or not. If the computer had feelings, it would wish for the data to come with evidence of correctness attached. But the sender may not wish to reveal confidential or private information used in the computation. And even if the sender is willing to share everything, the cost of recomputation can be prohibitive.

In 1985, Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff proposed zero-knowledge proofs as a means to give privacy-preserving evidence. Zero-knowledge proofs are convincing only if the statement they prove is true, e.g. a computation is correct; yet reveal no information except for the veracity of the statement. Their seminal work shows verification is possible without having to sacrifice privacy.

In the following three decades, cryptographers have worked tirelessly at reducing the cost of zero-knowledge proofs. Six years ago, we began the ERC funded project Efficient Cryptographic Argument and Proofs aimed at improving the efficiency of zero-knowledge proofs. In September 2018 the project came to its conclusion and throwing usual academic modesty aside, we have made remarkable progress, and several of our proof systems are provably optimal (up to a constant multiplicative factor).

As described in an earlier post, we improved the efficiency of generalised Sigma-protocols, reducing both the number of rounds in which the prover and verifier interact and the communication, with a proof size around 7 kB even for large and complex statements. Our proof techniques have been optimised and implemented in the Bulletproof system, which is now seeing widespread adoption.

We also developed highly efficient pairing-based non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (aka zk-SNARKs). Here the communication cost is even lower in practice, enabling proofs to be just a few hundred bytes regardless of the size of the statement being proved. Their compactness and ease of verification make them useful in privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies and blockchain compression.

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