Tarik Roukny | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Swarm Oracle: Trustless Blockchain Agreements through Robot Swarms

Blockchain consensus, rooted in the principle ``don't trust, verify'', limits access to real-world data, which may be ambiguous or inaccessible to some participants. Oracles address this limitation by supplying data to blockchains, but existing solutions may reduce autonomy, transparency, or reintroduce the need for trust. We propose Swarm Oracle: a decentralized network of autonomous robots -- that is, a robot swarm -- that use onboard sensors and peer-to-peer communication to collectively verify real-world data and provide it to smart contracts on public blockchains. Swarm Oracle leverages the built-in decentralization, fault tolerance and mobility of robot swarms, which can flexibly adapt to meet information requests on-demand, even in remote locations. Unlike typical cooperative robot swarms, Swarm Oracle integrates robots from multiple stakeholders, protecting the system from single-party biases but also introducing potential adversarial behavior. To ensure the secure, trustless and global consensus required by blockchains, we employ a Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol that enables robots from different stakeholders to operate together, reaching social agreements of higher quality than the estimates of individual robots. Through extensive experiments using both real and simulated robots, we showcase how consensus on uncertain environmental information can be achieved, despite several types of attacks orchestrated by large proportions of the robots, and how a reputation system based on blockchain tokens lets Swarm Oracle autonomously recover from faults and attacks, a requirement for long-term operation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2019

Compressing Over-the-Counter Markets

Over-the-counter markets are at the center of the postcrisis global reform of the financial system. We show how the size and structure of such markets can undergo rapid and extensive changes when participants engage in portfolio compression, a post-trade netting technology. Tightly-knit and concentrated trading structures, as featured by many large over-the-counter markets, are especially susceptible to reductions of notional and reconfigurations of network structure resulting from compression activities. Using transaction-level data on credit-default-swaps markets, we estimate reduction levels consistent with the historical development observed in these markets since the Global Financial Crisis. Finally, we study the effect of a mandate to centrally clear over-the-counter markets. When participants engage in both central clearing and portfolio compression, we find large netting failures if clearinghouses proliferate. Allowing for compression across clearinghouses by-and-large offsets this adverse effect.

q-fin.GN↗