Workshop on Scalability & Interoperability of Blockchains (SIB)

SIB is a workshop on the scalability and interoperability of blockchains.

SIB aims to unite theoretical and practical approaches to the scalability and interoperability of blockchains, bringing together researchers and practitioners from the fields of security, cryptography, distributed systems, economics, and policy-making.

Scalability pertains to effectively maintaining a blockchain’s throughput and latency as the network grows. Interoperability expresses the composition of multiple blockchains to build protocols with richer functionality on top.

The goal of SIB is to discuss state-of-the-art scalability and interoperability solutions, the advantages of each, and their respective converses.

The conference is co-organized with AFT 2024.

Call for papers: submission deadline 10th of July.

Conference Date: 26 September 2024.

Venue: Austrian National Bank (OeNB), Vienna, Austria.

Registration: €100 for workshop only. €50 extra if you are already attending AFT. Plus €50 for late registration. Please visit the AFT website to register.

Register

Accommodations: Please see the AFT website for more information

Attending remotely: No remote attendance will be possible.

Affiliated conferences/workshops

• AFT
• Economics of Payments XIII (EoP)
• Workshop on Stability of Payments

Program

Speaker: David Tse

Chair: Giulia Scaffino

• Remote Staking with Economic Safety
  • Xinshu Dong (BabylonChain), Ertem Nusret Tas (Stanford University), Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos (Common Prefix), David Tse (BabylonChain), Robin Linus Woll (ZeroSync), Lei Yang (BabylonChain) and Mingchao Yu (BabylonChain)
• MUSEN: Aggregatable Key-Evolving Verifiable Random Functions and Applications
  • Bernardo David (IT University of Copenhagen and Common Prefix), Rafael Dowsley (Monash University), Anders Konring (Espresso Systems) and Mario Larangeira (Tokyo Institute of Technology and IOHK)

Chair: Jason Milionis

• On the Lifecycle of a Lightning Network Payment Channel
  • Florian Grötschla (ETH Zurich), Lioba Heimbach (ETH Zurich), Severin Richner (ETH Zurich) and Roger Wattenhofer (ETH Zurich)
• Boosting Liquidity in Payment Channel Networks with Online Admission Control
  • Mahsa Bastankhah (Princeton University), Krishnendu Chatterjee (IST Austria), Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali (University of Minnesota Twin Cities), Stefan Schmid (TU Berlin), Jakub Svoboda (IST Austria) and Michelle Yeo (IST Austria)
• Securing Lightning Channels against Rational Miners
  • Lukas Aumayr (TU Wien and Common Prefix), Zeta Avarikioti (TU Wien and Common Prefix), Matteo Maffei (TU Wien) and Subhra Mazumdar (Indian Institute of Technology Indore)

Chair: Lukas Aumayr

• Blink: An Optimal Proof of Proof-of-Work
  • Giulia Scaffino (TU Wien and Common Prefix), Lukas Aumayr (TU Wien and Common Prefix), Zeta Avarikioti (TU Wien and Common Prefix), Dionysis Zindros (Common Prefix) and Matteo Maffei (TU Wien)
• Unconditionally Safe Light Client
  • Niusha Moshrefi (Princeton University), Peiyao Sheng (University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign), Soubhik Deb (Eigen Labs), Sreeram Kannan (Eigen Labs) and Pramod Viswanath (Princeton University)
• On-Chain Timestamps Are Accurate
  • Apostolos Tzinas (National Technical University of Athens and Common Prefix), Dionysis Zindros (Common Prefix) and Srivatsan Sridhar (Stanford University)

Chair: Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos

• Pythia: Supercharging Parallel Smart Contract Execution to Guide Stragglers and Full Nodes to Safety
  • Ray Neiheiser (IST Austria), Arman Babaei (IST Austria), Giannis Alexopoulos (IST Austria), Marios Kogias (Imperial College London) and Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias (Mysten Labs)
• Aegis: A Decentralized Expansion Blockchain
  • Yogev Bar-On (Tel Aviv University and eOracle), Roi Bar-Zur (Technion and eOracle), Omer Ben-Porat (Technion), Nimrod Cohen (eOracle), Ittay Eyal (Technion) and Matan Sitbon (eOracle)
• DeCl: Deterministic and Metered Native Sandboxes
  • Zachary Yedidia (Stanford University), Geoffrey Ramseyer (Stanford University) and David Mazieres (Stanford University)

Call for papers

Submission site

PDF submissions can be submitted at EasyChair:

Submit

Important Dates

• Talk submission deadline: July 10th
• Final acceptance notification: August 27th
• Conference: September 26th

Proceedings and Submission at other Conferences

SIB is not archival and does not have proceedings. It is allowed to submit work which has been published at or submitted to another conference or a journal.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Scalability

• Rollups in the optimistic, ZK, and hybrid settings
• Any other scaling solution such as sidechains, payment/state channel networks (lightning etc.), sharding
• Modeling/proofs of security and/or attacks against existing scaling solutions
• Engineering considerations for the scaling of popular blockchains e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum
• Incentives of scaling, use of algorithmic game theory, and classical game theory techniques to prove security in rational/cryptographic models
• Blob / danksharding and other on-chain data storage techniques
• Off-chain data availability for scaling applications (e.g., EigenDA)
• Light clients
• Advances in consensus protocols that improve transaction latency and throughput
• All techniques to improve computation, communication, and storage complexity of validators and clients
• Scalability improvements in data structures such as execution-layer commitment data structures (Merkle trees, vector commitments, etc.)
• Programming language and compiler innovations (e.g. JIT) allowing for practical improvements in the execution of EVM, CosmWasm, and other popular platforms
• Applications of re-staking to scalability

Interoperability

• Connecting existing blockchains
• Authentication of messages between different blockchains
• Trustless blockchain communication
• Purpose-tailored interoperability constructions such as HTLCs, atomic swaps, etc.
• Generic message passing
• Hub-and-spoke architectures for interoperability
• Performance considerations of interoperability
• Practical engineering challenges in interoperability
• Empirical measurements for the performance and security of interoperable protocols
• Incentives, rationality and economic security of protocol for interoperability
• Use of optimistic and zero-knowledge techniques enhancing interoperability protocols
• Attacks on existing research and threat modeling of deployed protocols
• On-chain light clients / bridging

Do Not Submit

The conference is generally not intended for price analysis of cryptocurrency markets or other investor related topics. Nor is it a venue for legal considerations of owning or using cryptocurrency. We request proposals that are engineering or scientific in nature only.

Submission Instructions

Please submit a detailed technical paper that describes a novel contribution to the theory or practice of blockchain interoperability and scalability science and engineering.

• Please use Portable Document Format (.pdf).
• We suggest the LIPIcs format.
• Submissions size is unlimited, but the reviewers are only required to read the first twelve pages; they can read additional material at their discretion. Appendices and references are unlimited.
• Papers must be anonymized by omitting the author names in the pdf. Author names will be recorded in EasyChair but not displayed to the reviewers.
• If you have any conflict of interest with a member of the program committee, please note it in the designated section of the EasyChair submission form.
• Appendices will be read at the reviewers’ discretion.

Papers presented at the workshop require the registration of at least one author of the accepted paper at the workshop by the regular deadline of September 2nd, 2024.

Conflict of Interest

Authors must report in the submission site any conflicts with program committee members. A conflict exists if an author has the same affiliation as a committee member, has ever acted as their PhD supervisor or been supervised by them, has a close personal relationship with them, or if they have been co-authors on a paper within the past two years.

Organizing Committee

• Program Chairs
  • Chair: Zeta Avarikioti, TU Vienna & Common Prefix
  • Chair: Dionysis Zindros, Common Prefix
  • Co-chair: Jason Milionis, Columbia University
• Program Committee
  • Lukas Aumayr, TU Wien
  • Lioba Heimbach, ETH Zurich
  • Dimitris Karakostas, University of Edinburgh
  • Aggelos Kiayias, University of Edinburgh & IOG
  • Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Mysten Labs
  • Matteo Maffei, TU Wien
  • Gregory Neven, Chainlink
  • Christina Ovezik, University of Edinburgh
  • Yvonne-Anne Pignolet, DFINITY Foundation
  • Stefanie Roos, TU Delft
  • Tim Roughgarden, Columbia University & a16z crypto
  • Giulia Scaffino, TU Wien & Common Prefix
  • Srivatsan Sridhar, Stanford University
  • Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, Chainlink
  • Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos, Imperial College London
  • Yann Vonlanthen, ETH Zurich
  • Michelle Yeo, National University of Singapore