7 papers
Can Trustless Agents Be Trusted? An Empirical Study of the ERC-8004 Decentralized AI Agent Ecosystem
Xihan Xiong, Zelin Li, Wei Wei +3
As autonomous AI agents increasingly transact across organizational boundaries, a fundamental trust challenge emerges: how can an agent assess whether an unknown counterpart is tru…
Five Attacks on x402 Agentic Payment Protocol
Zelin Li, Qin Wang, Zhipeng Wang
The x402 protocol revives the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code to enable web-native micropayments across APIs, content, and agents. It combines synchronous HTTP authorization…
In the Margins: An Empirical Study of Ethereum Inscriptions
Xihan Xiong, Minfeng Qi, Shiping Chen +3
Ethereum Inscriptions (Ethscriptions) repurpose Ethereum calldata into a persistent inscription channel by embedding \texttt{data:}~URI payloads. These transactions typically targe…
Toxic Ink on Immutable Paper: Content Moderation for Ethereum Input Data Messages (IDMs)
Xihan Xiong, Zhipeng Wang, Qin Wang +1
Decentralized communication is becoming an important use case within Web3. On Ethereum, users can repurpose the transaction input data field to embed natural-language messages, com…
Talking Transactions: Decentralized Communication through Ethereum Input Data Messages (IDMs)
Xihan Xiong, Zhipeng Wang, Qin Wang +3
Can you imagine, blockchain transactions can talk! In this paper, we study how they talk and what they talk about. We focus on the input data field of Ethereum transactions, which…
Leverage Staking with Liquid Staking Derivatives (LSDs): Opportunities and Risks
Xihan Xiong, Zhipeng Wang, Xi Chen +2
In the Proof of Stake (PoS) Ethereum ecosystem, users can stake ETH on Lido to receive stETH, a Liquid Staking Derivative (LSD) that represents staked ETH and accrues staking rewar…