2025/09/21 by Bence Soóki-Tóth, István András Seres, Soóki-Tóth, Bence +9 · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Corruption and Economic Development #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.17185
openalex publication_date 2025/09/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements, and evaluates three novel and efficient bribery contracts targeting Ethereum validators. The first bribery contract enables a briber to fork the blockchain by buying votes on their proposed blocks. The second contract incentivizes validators to voluntarily exit the consensus protocol, thus increasing the adversary's relative staking power. The third contract builds a trustless bribery market that enables the briber to auction off their manipulative power over the RANDAO, Ethereum's distributed randomness beacon. Finally, we provide an initial game-theoretical analysis of one of the described bribery markets.