arXiv subjects

Ian C. Moore

Publications and source records attributed to Ian C. Moore.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Parent-Hash DAG: A Cost Analysis of Constant-Time Append for On-Chain Registries

Provenance trees are append-only directed acyclic graphs of artifact registrations anchored on a public blockchain, recently introduced as the data substrate of operator-gated provenance infrastructure. Their defining data-structural pattern is a parent-hash directed acyclic graph (PHDAG), in which each append performs a constant number of storage writes to previously-untouched slots. This pattern has not previously been isolated as a standalone primitive, formally bounded with explicit constants, or benchmarked against the standard alternative, the incremental Merkle tree (IMT). We formalize PHDAG append as O(1) in gas cost, independent of registry size and tree depth, and develop a stochastic cost model for IMT in which per-insert cost is a random variable over the leaf index, deriving closed-form expressions for its mean and variance. We validate both analyses empirically on Base Sepolia across tree depths 1 to 25. PHDAG is observed to be depth-invariant at 76,276 gas (standard deviation about 6 gas), while IMT cost grows linearly with depth. The crossover below which IMT is cheaper falls far beneath the depths of every production registry surveyed. We further establish trustless registry reconstruction from public event logs in linear time with no off-chain dependency.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

State Twins: An Off-Chain Substrate for Agentic Reasoning over Decentralized Finance Protocols

We introduce the State Twin: a typed, in-memory, replayable replica of an on-chain automated market maker (AMM) pool that serves as a substrate for agentic reasoning over decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Agentic DeFi stacks today couple reasoning to chain time, since every "what if?" query incurs a new RPC read or a real transaction, so the agent's effective action space is bounded by block confirmation latency and gas. We argue this coupling is a structural problem rather than a performance one, and that the missing layer is an off-chain substrate that preserves the protocol's exact mathematics while admitting the operations on-chain state cannot: forking, replay, branching, counterfactual rollout. We formalize each AMM family (Uniswap V2, V3, Balancer, Stableswap) as a discrete-time controlled dynamical system, prove a quantitative fidelity bound on the divergence between twin and chain, and give the open architecture used in DeFiPy v2, an open-source Python toolkit that ships the State Twin substrate and a reference Model Context Protocol server exposing typed analytical primitives as LLM tools. The same primitive (i.e., one Python class, one calling pattern) serves a notebook quant, a backtest, and an LLM agent without modification. We close with a fork-and-evaluate worked example: a single live RPC read seeds N independent in-memory twins under distinct price-shock scenarios, in sub-second wall-clock time. The contribution is the substrate, not a particular agent, which is what the specification of what an agentic DeFi substrate must look like

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Trustless Provenance Trees: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Operator-Gated Blockchain Registries

We present a formal treatment of provenance trees, directed acyclic graphs of artifact registrations anchored immutably on a public blockchain, and introduce the operator trust problem: when a single privileged operator submits all on-chain registrations on behalf of users, the on-chain record alone cannot distinguish user-initiated registrations from unilateral operator actions. We resolve this through a dual-layer cryptographic commitment scheme in which two commitments derived from a single client-side secret key, binding the key to the tree root and to each unique registration identifier, make false attribution claims strictly dominated strategies. We prove correctness under standard cryptographic assumptions and establish honest behavior as the unique Nash equilibrium without relying on operator trust. We further introduce and analyze the tree poisoning problem: adversarial attacks on users' provenance trees via fraudulent root registration, malicious child attachment, and tree identity spoofing. We characterize the closure properties of each attack variant and prove that a complete provenance tree integrity model requires three distinct mechanisms: cryptographic priority, governance cascade, and contract enforcement, each necessary and none individually sufficient. The construction is deployed on Base (Ethereum L2) as AnchorRegistry, an immutable on-chain provenance registry. We provide gas complexity analysis demonstrating O(1) cost invariant to registry scale, and a trustless reconstruction algorithm recovering the complete registry from public event logs alone.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2021

Stochastic Properties of EIP-1559 Basefees

EIP-1559 is a new proposed pricing mechanism for the Ethereum protocol developed to bring stability to fluctuating gas prices. To properly understand this as a stochastic process, it is necessary to develop the mathematical foundations to understand under what conditions the base fee gas price outcomes behave as a stationary process, and when it does not. Understanding these mathematical fundamentals is critical to properly engineering a stable system.

cs.GT↗