Published in Innovation Stories·Jan 30Optimistic State Prefetching (OSP)A recent paper suggests that the EVM performance can be increased 6x with speculative execution. The idea is to use the information gathered by executing transactions while they are in a node’s mempool to optimistically choose execution paths when the transaction is executed within a block. Vitalik Buterin has questioned…Ethereum17 min readEthereum17 min read
Published in Innovation Stories·Jan 26EVM blockchain Scalability & ACID Database PropertiesThe main data structure that holds accounts, balances, code and contract storage in an EVM-based blockchain is the world state trie. The efficient management of this data structure is one of the most important topics in scaling these blockchains. How and where the trie is stored, and how fast it…Evm14 min readEvm14 min read
Published in Innovation Stories·Apr 6, 2022Measuring RSK SecurityA complex system’s security cannot be measured by a single metric. Security is the result of the combined strength of a series of components and their interactions. Security is generally pictured as a chain, because it takes only a weak or faulty link to break it. To measure RSK security…Rsksmart12 min readRsksmart12 min read
Published in Innovation Stories·Jan 17, 2022Flaws in Ethereum’s EIP-1559EIP-1559 added a mechanism for the Ethereum network to establish a base transaction gas price that dynamically changes depending on the load of the network, measured by gas consumed by blocks. This base gas price is called base fee by the EIP. In this article we show that EIP-1559 is…Eip 155918 min readEip 155918 min read
Published in Innovation Stories·Jan 13, 2022RSK ScalabilityIn 2015 a group of Bitcoiners including myself started brainstorming on how to use Bitcoin to achieve true financial inclusion. True financial inclusion requires cheap and open access to essential but solid financial services such as savings, sending and receiving payments, receiving credit, and insurance. …Rsksmart14 min readRsksmart14 min read
Published in Innovation Stories·Jan 7, 2022Blockchain ScalabilityTo be successful in building a new open financial system, blockchains need to scale. Scalability is a property of a blockchain design, an inherent ability of a system to handle higher usage or adoption. Scaling is not simply increasing the transaction throughput, and this often misunderstood. …Blockchain12 min readBlockchain12 min read
Published in Innovation Stories·Oct 14, 2021Cheaper Payment Rollups with Ephemeral Calldata(or how RSK can become a Data Availability Layer for Rollups) Tl;dr; Ephemeral Calldata (ECD) is a new type of transaction calldata that is included in the blockchain but may be removed in the future. The hash digest of this data can be used by smart-contracts to verify Zero-Knowledge proofs…Blockchain11 min readBlockchain11 min read
Published in Innovation Stories·Aug 4, 2021More on the Security Against Fee Sniping in RSKIn a previous article we discussed different fee sniping attacks and we analyzed how they could impact RSK. In this article we dig deeper into the simplest form of fee sniping attack and we present the results of the simulation of different fee sniping strategies. We show how the two…Sidechains15 min readSidechains15 min read
Published in Innovation Stories·Jul 14, 2021The RSK Emergency MultisigFor many years, it was believed that the federated model was the best method to secure the two-way-peg of a Bitcoin sidechain without requiring a Bitcoin hard or soft fork. All other more decentralized potential solutions required either a Bitcoin soft-fork or the use of a new competing token to…Blockchain7 min readBlockchain7 min read
Published in Innovation Stories·Jul 2, 2021RSK Security Against Fee Sniping attacksThe security of Bitcoin relies on the economic incentives for miners to extend the “heaviest chain”, which is the chain with the most accumulated difficulty (usually the longest). Currently, those incentives are provided by the block reward, which consists of the block subsidy and the transaction fees. But the subsidy…Rsksmart12 min readRsksmart12 min read
