Common Prefix is taking the lead stewardship role of Axelar. We are excited to share our plans for 2026, with more details to be announced in Q1. Our team consists of scientists–professors, PhDs, and post-docs–from world-renowned universities like Stanford, Imperial, ETH Zürich, and University of Edinburgh. But also senior engineers with decades of experience in hedge funds, TradFi, and Web3. We bridge the gap between science and engineering. We are razor-sharp focused on institutional adoption. For this, we will double down on the ecosystems that matter like XRPL, Sui, Solana, Ethereum, Stellar, and Hyperliquid. We will make sure that supported connections bring value to the ecosystem, and the right incentives for validators. For institutional, we need increased economic security. We’ll enable co-staking of blue chip tokens beyond just AXL. Privacy, compliance, and robustness will also be a theme for the year. For bridging, we will remove friction of moving assets from chain to chain by introducing gasless bridging. Subsidies will come from investing capital locked in gateway contracts, creating novel asset classes. Users will always have the choice to act according to their risk appetite. Lastly, we’re building up-the-stack in select key verticals: stablecoins, tokenized deposits, yield, and lending. A fusion of new chains creates an opportunity for new emerging asset classes.

Decentralization is the fundamental concept underpinning all blockchain systems. But what does this mean and how do we measure it? Christina (@_LadyChristina_) explains in her talk at FC'24, presenting joint work with @sol3gga & CP's @dimitKarakostas: arxiv.org/pdf/2211.01291.pdf

We've been working with the @axelar team to integrate Bitcoin, @Ripple's XRPL, @hedera, and more with Axelar's new state-of-the-art bridging infrastructure. Excited to see these integrations on mainnet soon!

We're honored to have been a long term collaborator of @enosys_global, working closely with @0xbannik, @Thana_Enosys, and team for over 2 years now. Among other projects, we've interconnected @FlareNetworks with XDC and Ethereum. commonprefix.com/clients/eno…

In the past year, we've collaborated with @babylon_chain on their mission to bring Bitcoin Staking to the world: stake your bitcoins right from the Bitcoin chain and help secure the Cosmos ecosystem! 🧵 1/4

We're excited to announce our collaboration with Flashbots! 🤖 We're exploring low-latency, high-throughput systems with short-term censorship resilience. Stay tuned for more! @DistributedMarz @socrates1024 @0xQuintus

Congrats on the raise, @pisquared team! Excited about the future of our collaboration. Really glad to be able to participate as angels, too!

Our very own @dionyziz presenting "Light Clients for Lazy Blockchains," a paper describing how to construct a light client for "optimistic" chains like @CelestiaOrg. A collective effort alongside @ErtemTas, @dntse, and @yangl1996. 1/2

Fastcrypto's ECDSA secp256r1 implementation optimizes curve (multi)multiplication techniques using precomputation, enhancing processing speed. We audited this implementation and can attest to its performance, robustness, and security adherences: commonprefix.com/static/proj…

Proving an Ethereum PoS block's ancestry is hard. Verifying predecessor blocks without downloading all of Ethereum's ~200MB Beacon state is far from trivial. Inspired by @lodestar_eth's proving API, we built a Rust library that simplifies proving the lineage between two beacon blocks: github.com/commonprefix/ance…

One difficulty of grasping the utility of @eigencloud stems from the misunderstanding of when re-staking can be safely used. We at Common Prefix think that EigenLayer is an extremely promising technology but must be used with care. A 🧵. 1/9

Apostolos (@ap_tzinas) presenting "On-Chain Timestamps Are Accurate" at FC'24. This joint work with @dionyziz and @ssrivatsan97 proves that timestamps of blockchain blocks do not deviate from real-world time, even in adversarially-produced blocks. 1/2

Wait, why do we need consensus again? Look out for our first spinoff -- @poddotnetwork is brewing...

The `xz` backdoor affects a vast amount of the Internet's backbone, including Debian deployments with SSH. Many blockchain validators operate on Debian and are SSH accessible, whether they validate PoS L1s, sequence L2s, or are the key holders to multisig-based bridges. 1/4

We’re thrilled to be working with @RosuGrigore and the rest of the incredible team behind @pisquared, towards building the Universal Settlement Layer.

Shresth (@sagrawal) giving a talk at #zksummit11 about common pitfalls and optimizations for modern cryptographic protocol implementations.

PoW vs PoS: Can wealth truly replace work in securing blockchains? Let's dive into why Proof-of-Work may be the key to more robust and secure blockchain systems. 1/5

CP’s Dimitris (@dimitKarakostas), Lukas (@lukas_aumayr), and Nikolas (@nikolaskama) are attending @acm_ccs, starting today in Salt Lake City. Catch their paper presentations: 1/4

We're thrilled to be sponsoring this year's Financial Cryptography conference: fc24.ifca.ai/ Most of our team is out here in Curaçao - come say hi!

How I feel whenever I participate in a Diffie–Hellman key exchange.

Kudos to @trailofbits for the great work, highlighting the gap between research and application. Checking the degree of the sharing polynomial might seem "obvious" to the cryptographer, but not to the engineer. This underscores the need for "translational cryptography". 1/4

A strong presence of @CommonPrefix and friends at AtheCrypt 2024, with talks about building an L2 that is more secure than any L1, optimal PoW light clients, measuring decentralization, accuracy of timestamps, and more. 1/5 🧵

Our very own @nikolaskama running a workshop on how to use the XRPL Testnet<>Ethereum Sepolia @axelarnetwork devnet bridge for @easya_app x @Ripple hackathon devs 🌁

We've curated our researchers' publications: commonprefix.com/research. Evidently, our scientists have been busy. Happy reading.

Zeta Avarikioti (@zetavar1) giving a talk on Blink: An Optimal Proof of Proof-of-Work, recent joint work w/ @lukas_aumayr, CP's @GScaffino, @matteo_maffei, & CP's @dionyziz: eprint.iacr.org/2024/692.pdf. 3/5

Hello, World! We are Common Prefix, the prerequisite for chain safety. We do blockchains, and stand between theory and practice. commonprefix.com 1/6

EigenLayer are well aware and actually tackle this issue in their original whitepaper in Appendix B, where they calculate the compositional security guarantees that EigenLayer can provide. docs.eigenlayer.xyz/assets/f… 8/9

We're looking to onboard Senior Software Engineers with blockchain experience: commonprefix.notion.site/Ope… If you think you're a good fit, please email your CV, GitHub handle, and transcript (if you graduated within the past 5 years) to ops@commonprefix.com.

The Common Prefix team is in Athens for ZK Summit, by @zeroknowledgefm. Looking forward to discussing all things Zero Knowledge with the thought leaders of ZK research and implementation!🪄

These constructions easily extend to optimistic L2s such as @arbitrum and @optimism. This work is exponentially better than existing literature, achieving O(lgL) communication complexity, and is provably secure: eprint.iacr.org/2022/384.pdf 2/2

The construction is made possible by turning a well-known footgun of Schnorr signatures into a feature: Two signatures made with the same randomness on distinct messages can be put into a simple mathematical formula and expose the signing key. 3/4

Babylon leverages a cryptographic primitive that allows anyone to extract the signing key of a party that signs two different messages. A construction for Schnorr keys was introduced for Bitcoin compatibility -- no new opcodes needed. 2/4

CJ taking the stage at @rippleswell, talking about @axelarnetwork and the upcoming integration with XRPL.

CP's Shresth Agrawal (@sagrawal) will be giving a talk on "Common Pitfalls and Optimization for Modern Cryptographic Protocol Implementations" on Wednesday at 17:30 on the Sidestage.

Babylon integrates this primitive into Tendermint, the consensus protocol that powers Babylon, as a finality gadget at the end of each block. This way, if a malicious validator tries to fork the PoS chain by signing two conflicting blocks, their staked bitcoins can be slashed. 4/4

We also caught Aggelos Kiayias (@sol3gga) giving a shoutout to AFT23's PoPoS (eprint.iacr.org/2022/1642.pd…), by @shresth et al., in his talk on Scaling Blockchain Protocols. 5/5

For those who couldn't make it in person, here's the recording of @sagrawal's talk: piped.video/5qy0AWTrjjI

The problem stems from the inherent nature of re-staking: When those 32 ETH get slashed, the adversary may be attacking (and stealing from) multiple protocols at once, without additional penalty. 4/9

Read more in our blog post by @zetavar1, The Battle of Blockchains: PoW vs PoS Unveiled: commonprefix.com/blog/battle…. 5/5

Our team will be flying over to Brussels to attend @EthCC and @modular_summit, coming up in a few days. DM us if you'll be there and would like to talk!

4/4 “Blind Multi-Signatures for Anonymous Tokens w/ Decentralized Issuance and Public Verifiability” by Ioanna Karantaidou, Omar Renawi, @FBaldimtsi, @julian_loss, @jon_katz, @nikolaskama, in Signatures, Proofs, Integrity Schemes. 🕰️ 3:45-4:00pm 📍 Grand Ballroom Salon I, J

This property was suspected but never proven before. Yet, billion-dollar DeFi protocols rely on it for their safety, e.g., in dispute period durations. The exact parameters are calculated in this paper: eprint.iacr.org/2023/1648.pd… 2/2

3/4 “Securing Lightning Channels against Rational Miners” by @lukas_aumayr, @zetavar1, @matteo_maffei, and @MazumdarSubhra, during the Blockchains, Authentication, and Distributed Systems session. 🕰️ 11:30-11:45am 📍 Deer Valley

This is an error in arguing security without composition of protocols in mind. Cryptographers have grappled with this problem since the 2000s with the introduction of Ran Canetti's Universal Composability framework and related works. eprint.iacr.org/2000/067.pdf 7/9

The take-home lesson is that protocols designed to be secured with re-staking should analyze how compositional attacks get slashed and whether they are profitable. Proofs of economic security must be made with compositionality in mind. 9/9

By a show of hands 🙋‍♀️, how many of you out there know what Common Prefix means?

Some more CP talks (that our intern forgot to snap pics of): - Rollerblade: Replicated Distributed Protocol Emulation on Top of Ledgers (eprint.iacr.org/2024/210.pdf) presented by @dionyziz, - FC24's On-Chain Timestamps Are Accurate (fc24.ifca.ai/preproceedings/…) by @ap_tzinas, & - EUROCRYPT24's Approximate Lower Bound Arguments (eprint.iacr.org/2023/1655.pd…) by Pyrros Chaidos. 4/5

Let's keep the conversation going on how we can systematize this. In the meantime, `apt update && apt upgrade`. 4/4

While developing an Ethereum light client, we had to prove, on a different chain, that a given Ethereum event occurred. Since the sync committee does not sign every block, we needed to prove that the block containing that event was a predecessor of the last block signed by the committee. This fundamental issue, surprisingly, lacked a modular solution in the light client space.

PoW, akin to manual labor in the physical world, requires computational power to validate transactions. Similar to building a structure brick by brick, PoW imposes an 'arrow of time' making past data tampering nearly impossible for a minority adversary. 2/5

We’ve been around for 2.5 years, and we thought it’s about time we pick up our Twitter DMs. 6/6

To be precise, in theory, the honest committee member signs every block. However, due to network delays and/or adversarial behavior, some blocks might not be signed by a supermajority.

In the crypto community, we have the means and the obligation to supply more funding to open source to support these projects so that maintenance does not fall into the hands of one unpaid person. 3/4

Dimitris Karakostas (@dimitKarakostas) presenting joint work w/ Christina Ovezik (@_LadyChristina_) & Aggelos Kiayias (@sol3gga), SoK: A Stratified Approach to Blockchain Decentralization, published at FC24: fc24.ifca.ai/preproceedings/…. 2/5

2/4 “Blockchain Bribing Attacks and the Efficacy of Counterincentives” by @dimitKarakostas, @sol3gga, and @Th_Zacharias, during the Blockchain Attacks session. 🕰️ 2:45-3:00pm 📍 Deer Valley

Shoutout to @lodestar_eth for their great work on their proving API. Our library builds on these foundations to provide an all-in-one solution for proving that an Ethereum Beacon block is a predecessor of another Beacon block.

Our cryptography background enables us to analyze all possible adversaries, not just the ones we can imagine. 5/6

Scientists commonly leave out such details about standard techniques, which are "obvious" to the cryptographers, falsely assuming that they are universally known and understood. 3/4

Ultimately, PoW's continuous work ensures "cumulative" security that PoS can't match, even with VDFs. Consider this: Given the key pair that will win the lottery for proposing the next block, what is the required computational overhead to actually produce the next block? 4/5

The idea is that an adversary who steals the holdings up to 32 ETH will be slashed 32 ETH, and so the attack will not be profitable. The slashing part may be true, but the security conclusion can be wrong. 3/9

Proof-of-Stake mechanisms tie security to stake, exposing blockchains operating in dynamic networks to long-range attacks: Adversaries can gain majority control compared to past activity and rewrite the transaction history. 3/5

We don't fully understand the motives of the xz hacker, but it's not unlikely that a large-scale attack on consensus systems was on their radar. This issue highlights the importance of employing security-in-depth measures such as firewalls, VPNs, and proper monitoring tools. 2/4

This is why we need "translational cryptography"—applying research results from the lab in clinical settings, treating protocols deployed in the wild. Code audits do not suffice. Involving cryptographers is crucial to ensure, for one, the code actually matches the theory. 4/4

Practice: We are cryptography engineers who implement cryptographic papers and take protocols from idea to reality. Our scientists are engineers, and our engineers are scientists, narrowing the chasm between whiteboards and mechanical keyboards. 3/6

Each of the two protocols believes that the adversary lost 32 ETH - 30 ETH = 2 ETH, and so the attack was irrational. In reality, the adversary made 30 ETH + 30 ETH - 32 ETH = 28 ETH, because the re-staking only caused her to be slashed once. 6/9

Typical arguments for the use of EigenLayer go like this: "My protocol holds less than 32 ETH. There's 32 ETH collateral on my protocol through EigenLayer. That collateral will be slashed in case of any misbehavior. Therefore my protocol is secure." 2/9

The situation can arise that protocol A observes that the adversary stole 30 ETH from them, but got slashed 32 ETH at EigenLayer for this misbehavior. And protocol B separately observes that the adversary stole 30 ETH from them, but got slashed 32 ETH at EigenLayer too. 5/9

The engineers are not to blame here. The DKG protocol introduced in the first version of Lindell22 (eprint.iacr.org/archive/2022…) actually clearly specifies this check. However, many newer DKG constructions do not. 2/4

We're actively collaborating with @Mysten_Labs to audit components of the Fastcrypto library. All of our completed audits have been published on our website: commonprefix.com/projects/my…

Theory: We are cryptographers, game theorists, and consensus experts who analyze and mathematically prove, from first principles, the security of protocols related to blockchains, distributed ledgers, and consensus. 2/6

Between Theory and Practice: We do protocol-level audits, and make sure that the implementation's code corresponds to the paper's pseudocode. If there’s no paper, we write it. If there’s no proof, we prove it. 4/6