Congratulations to the Blockchain Research team for yet another prestigious win!
The paper “Oceanic Games: Centralization Risks and Incentives in Blockchain Mining” won the Best Paper Award in the 1st International Conference on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy (MARBLE), held in Santorini, Greece, May 2019. This paper was co-authored by Stefanos Leonardos and Georgios Piliouras who were working on the NRF funded project Testing for Blockchain Security by Design , in collaboration with Nikos Leonardos from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
The paper utilizes the theory of Oceanic Games, originally developed by the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, Loyd S. Shapley, to unveil the instability of decentralized blockchain mining. The theory models the interaction between “big” mining pools and “oceanic” or individually insignificant miners and can be proven useful in the broader context of blockchain governance and long-term sustainability.