Aaron Buchwald | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto: A Survey

The intersection of crypto x AI is spawning papers, products, online posts, and companies. All the surrounding buzz, though, obscures what exactly has been done, what the opportunities and challenges are, and what open questions deserve attention. This survey paper asks what AI can do for blockchain-based technologies (broadly construed as "crypto") (crypto x AI), and vice versa (AI x crypto). We systematize existing work, summarize key takeaways, highlight open research questions, and offer a perspective on pervasive industry misconceptions, concluding that AI and crypto are still in the very early stages of meaningful integration.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Snowman for partial synchrony

Snowman is the consensus protocol run by blockchains on Avalanche. Recent work established a rigorous proof of probabilistic consistency for Snowman in the \emph{synchronous} setting, under the simplifying assumption that correct processes execute sampling rounds in `lockstep'. In this paper, we describe a modification of the protocol that ensures consistency in the \emph{partially synchronous} setting, and when correct processes carry out successive sampling rounds at their own speed, with the time between sampling rounds determined by local message delays.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Frosty: Bringing strong liveness guarantees to the Snow family of consensus protocols

Snowman is the consensus protocol implemented by the Avalanche blockchain and is part of the Snow family of protocols, first introduced through the original Avalanche leaderless consensus protocol. A major advantage of Snowman is that each consensus decision only requires an expected constant communication overhead per processor in the `common' case that the protocol is not under substantial Byzantine attack, i.e. it provides a solution to the scalability problem which ensures that the expected communication overhead per processor is independent of the total number of processors $n$ during normal operation. This is the key property that would enable a consensus protocol to scale to 10,000 or more independent validators (i.e. processors). On the other hand, the two following concerns have remained: (1) Providing formal proofs of consistency for Snowman has presented a formidable challenge. (2) Liveness attacks exist in the case that a Byzantine adversary controls more than $O(\sqrt{n})$ processors, slowing termination to more than a logarithmic number of steps. In this paper, we address the two issues above. We consider a Byzantine adversary that controls at most $f<n/5$ processors. First, we provide a simple proof of consistency for Snowman. Then we supplement Snowman with a `liveness module' that can be triggered in the case that a substantial adversary launches a liveness attack, and which guarantees liveness in this event by temporarily forgoing the communication complexity advantages of Snowman, but without sacrificing these low communication complexity advantages during normal operation.

cs.DC↗