Over the last couple of months, several research results have been accepted for publication or were already published at leading venues:

  • The research paper Asymmetric Grid Quorum Systems for Heterogeneous Processes, co-authored by Michael Senn, shows how one can utilize differences of real-world processes, such as their operating system, physical location, or the entity controlling them, to construct a specific family of failure assumptions and trust models. Processes may select among this family without coordination between tehm. This then allows distributed applications to tolerate more faults than with commonly used alternatives and does not impact their performance adversely, as confirmed by an evaluation with CometBFT adapted to this model.

    The paper will appear in the proceedings of ACM CCS 2026.

  • François-Xavier Wicht and co-authors show how to realize Persistent BitTorrent Trackers. This work introduces a novel cryptographic and smart-contract-based reputation system that keeps private BitTorrent communities operational and users’ reputations portable even when trackers fail.

    This work has been presented at EuroS&P 2026 and appears in the proceedings, and another presentation was given at SBC ‘26.

  • Erasure codes are a critcial component in many reliable storage systems and communication protocols today; they tolerate the loss of a certain number of pieces of a large information value. Monotone Erasure Codes extend erasure codes to any general and monotone failure structure, such as found in some blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Co-authors Vivien Bammert and Annalisa Cimatti introduce this concept, and an extended abstract of this paper will be presented at IEEE ITW2026.

  • The Consensus Number of Untraceable Cryptocurrencies shows how two different approaches to transaction privacy trade off ledger storage against synchronization and fairness. Co-authors David Lehnherr, who graduated earlier this year, Juan Villacis, and François-Xavier Wicht present with this work the first formal evidence on the necessity to balance privacy with storage growth in privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies.

    This work will be presented at AFT ‘26.

  • Asymmetric trust has been introduced to generalize classical, symmetric quorum systems so that each process can express its own failure assumptions. While this flexibility lets processes tolerate strictly more failure scenarios, Juan Villacis and co-authors show in Symmetry All the Way Down that for many distributed-computing problems, asymmetric trust is actually not more powerful than symmetric trust because the asymmetric protocols reduce to symmetric ones.

    This paper will be published in the proceedings of DISC 2026.

Congratulations to all authors!