A curated list of blockchain-related academic papers. Papers with 🎓 have been peer-reviewed and presented in academic conferences.

1. General
2. Consensus
3. Cryptography
4. Block generation and mining
5. Stake
6. Attacks
7. Wallets
8. Crime
9. Economics
10. Marketplaces and Trust
11. Privacy
12. Sidechains, Higher layer and Scalability
13. Payment Networks
14. Fungibility
15. Network
16. Smart Contracts
17. Formal Methods
18. Proof of work
19. DAG-based consensus mechanisms
20. Survey, Sociological & Anthropological
21. Applications
22. License

• Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Nakamoto S. '08.
• 🎓 SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies. Bonneau J, Miller A, Clark J, Narayanan A, Kroll JA, Felten EW. S&P '15.
• Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree. Narayanan A, Clark J. ACM Queue '17.
• 🎓A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues. Casino F, Dasaklis T, Patsakis C. T&I '18.

• 🎓 The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol: Analysis and Applications. Garay J, Kiayias A, Leonardos N. EUROCRYPT '15.
• 🎓 The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol with Chains of Variable Difficulty. Garay J. Kiayias A, Leonardos N. '16. CRYPTO '17.
• 🎓 Analysis of the Blockchain Protocol in Asynchronous Networks. Pass R, Seeman L, shelat a. EUROCRYPT '17.
• On Trees, Chains and Fast Transactions in the Blockchain. Kiayias A, Panagiotakos G. '16.
• 🎓 "RSCoin": Centrally banked cryptocurrencies. Danezis G, Meiklejohn S. '15.
• Anonymous Byzantine Consensus from Moderately-Hard Puzzles: A Model for Bitcoin. Miller A, LaViola JJ Jr. '14.

• 🎓 The Byzantine Generals Problem. Lamport L, Shostak R., Pease M. '82. TOPLAS '82.
• 🎓 Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony. Dwork S., Lynch N. '88. JACM '88.
• 🎓 Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Castro M., Liskov B. '99. OSDI '99.
• 🎓 The part-time parliament. Lamport L. '00. TOCS '98.
• 🎓 Paxos Made Simple Lamport L. '00, ACM SIGACT News '01.

• On Bitcoin as a public randomness source. Bonneau J, Clark J, Goldfeder S. '15.
• Distributed Cryptography Based on the Proofs of Work. Andrychowicz M, and Dziembowski S. '14.
• Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity. Ben-Sasson E, Bentov I, Horesh Y, Riabzev M. '18.
• 🎓 Bitcoin as a Transaction Ledger: A Composable Treatment. Badertscher C., Maurer U., Tschudi D., Zikas V. '19. CRYPTO '17.

• 🎓 Bootstrapping the Blockchain - Directly. Garay JA, Kiayias A, Leonardos N, Panagiotakos G. '16.
• Speed-Security Tradeoffs in Blockchain Protocols. Kiayias A, Panagiotakos G. '15.
• 🎓 "GHOST": Secure High-Rate Transaction Processing in Bitcoin. Sompolinsky Y, Zohar A. FC '15.
• 🎓 Inclusive Block Chain Protocols. Lewenberg Y, Sompolinsky Y, Zohar A. FC '15.
• 🎓 On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains. Gervais A, Karame GO, Wüst K, Glykantzis V, Ritzdorf H, Capkun S. CCS '16.
• 🎓 Smartpool: Practical decentralized pooled mining. Luu L, Velner Y, Teutsch J, Saxena P. USENIX Security '17.

• 🎓 Ouroboros: A provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. Kiayias A, Russell A, David B, Oliynykov R. '16.
• 🎓 ALGORAND: The Efficient and Democratic Ledger. Micali S. '16.
• 🎓 "ByzCoin": Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing. Kogias EK, Jovanovic P, Gailly N, Khoffi I, Gasser L, Ford B. USENIX '16.
• 🎓 Cryptocurrencies without Proof of Work. Bentov I, Gabizon A, Mizrahi A. FC '16.
• 🎓 Ouroboros Praos: An adaptively-secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake protocol. Bernardo D, Gazi P, Kiayias A, Russell A. Crypto '17.
• 🎓 Ouroboros Genesis: Composable Proof-of-Stake Blockchains with Dynamic Availability. Badertscher C, Gazi P, Kiayias A, Russell A, Zikas V. '18.
• 🎓 A Proof-of-Stake protocol for consensus on Bitcoin subchains. Bartoletti M, Lande S, & Podda A S. FC '17.
• 🎓 Snow White: Provably Secure Proofs of Stake.. Bentov I, Pass R, Shi E. FC '19.

• 🎓 "Selfish Mining": Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable. Eyal I, Sirer EG. FC '14.
• Theoretical Bitcoin Attacks with less than Half of the Computational Power. Bahack L. '13.
• 🎓 Optimal Selfish Mining Strategies in Bitcoin. Sapirshtein A, Sompolinsky Y, Zohar A. FC '16.
• 🎓 Refund attacks on Bitcoin’s Payment Protocol. McCorry P, Shahandashti S, Hao F. FC '16.
• Low-Resource Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum’s Peer-to-Peer Network. Marcus Y, Heilman E, Goldberg S. '18.
• 🎓 Hostile blockchain takeovers. Bonneau J. FC '18.

• 🎓 Bitcoin Covenants. Möser M, Eyal I, Sirer EG. FC '16.
• 🎓 Enhancing Bitcoin Transactions with Covenants. O’Connor R, Piekarska M. FC '17.
• 🎓 Hierarchical deterministic Bitcoin wallets that tolerate key leakage. Gutoski G, Stebila D. FC '15.

• 🎓 ZombieCoin: Powering Next-Generation Botnets with Bitcoin. Ali ST, McCorry P, Lee PH, Hao F. FC '15.
• 🎓 The Bitcoin Brain Drain: A Short Paper on the Use and Abuse of Bitcoin Brain Wallets. Vasek M, Bonneau J, Castellucci R, Keith C, Moore T. FC '16.

• 🎓 On Bitcoin and Red Balloons. Babaioff M, Dobzinski S, Oren S, Zohar A. EC '12.
• 🎓 On the instability of Bitcoin without the block reward. Carlsten M, Kalodner H, Weinberg SM, Narayanan A. CCS '16.
• 🎓 The Economics of Bitcoin Mining or Bitcoin in the Presence of Adversaries. Kroll J, Davey I, Felten E. WEIS '13.
• 🎓 Trends, Tips, Tolls: A Longitudinal Study of Bitcoin Transaction Fees. Möser M, Böhme R. FC '15.
• 🎓 Why buy when you can rent? Bribery attacks on Bitcoin-style consensus. Bonneau J. FC '16.
• 🎓 Game-Theoretic Analysis of DDoS Attacks Against Bitcoin Mining Pools. Johnson B, Laszka A, Grossklags J, Vasek M, Moore T. FC '14.
• 🎓 When Bitcoin Mining Pools Run Dry A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Long-Term Impact of Attacks Between Mining Pools. Laszka A, Johnson B, Grossklags J. FC '15.
• 🎓 Incentive Compatibility of Bitcoin Mining Pool Reward Functions. Schrijvers O, Bonneau J, Boneh D, Roughgarden T. FC '16.
• 🎓 When cryptocurrencies mine their own business. Teutsch J, Jain S, Saxena P. FC '16.
• 🎓 Incentivizing Blockchain Forks via Whale Transactions. Liao K, Katz J. FC '17.
• 🎓 Smart Contracts Make Bitcoin Mining Pools Vulnerable. Velner Y, Teutsch J, Luu L. FC '17.
• 🎓 Mixing Coins of Different Quality: A Game-Theoretic Approach. Abramova S, Schöttle P, Böhme R. FC '17.
• 🎓 Decentralized Prediction Market without Arbiters. Bentov I, Mizrahi A, Rosenfeld M. FC '17.
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