Rogue: Updatable Matrix Lookup Arguments and Applications to Verifiable Databases
ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security · 2026
To appear.
Applied cryptography, zero-knowledge, and decentralized systems
Zhuo Cai (蔡卓)
Research in proof systems, distributed randomness, and blockchain mechanism design.
I am a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST. My work focuses on proof systems, randomness protocols, and strategic questions in decentralized protocols.
Publications
Full publication record.
All 12 papers are listed here. The publications page adds search, tags, and abstracts.
Delay-Optimal Transaction Order Fairness
ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing · 2026
Under review at PODC 2026.
LockFee: Refundable Transaction Admission via Time-Locked Collateral
IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures · 2026
Under review at IEEE DAPPS 2026.
Smart Contracts for Trustless Sampling of Correlated Equilibria
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 2025
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
Strategic Mining in Proof-of-Stake with Practical Random Election
IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive · 2025
IACR ePrint 2025/1428.
SRNG: An Efficient Decentralized Approach for Secret Random Number Generation
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2024
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
Gas-Efficient Decentralized Random Beacons
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2024
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
Asparagus: Automated Synthesis of Parametric Gas Upper-Bounds for Smart Contracts
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
Trustless and Bias-Resistant Game-Theoretic Distributed Randomness
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
Game-Theoretic Randomness for Proof-of-Stake
Workshop on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
PureLottery: Fair Leader Election Without Decentralized Random Number Generation
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain · 2023
Alphabetical author order with Amir Goharshady.
Towards Visual Question Answering on Pathology Images
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · 2021
* Equal contribution.
Research Directions
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Blockchain Incentive Design for Next-Generation Infrastructure
Most transaction fee mechanism (TFM) theory—including the foundations of EIP-1559— assumes a linear chain with one proposer per block in isolation. Real blockchain infrastructure has moved well beyond this model: strategic builders can delay transactions across multiple blocks, DAG-based consensus (Bullshark, Shoal++) runs concurrent proposers across overlapping transaction sets, sharded systems must price cross-shard atomicity, and parallel execution engines (Solana, Monad, Sui) remove ordering constraints while introducing new strategic manipulation via conflict graphs. This direction asks which classical TFM desiderata survive these architectural changes and what new mechanisms are needed to restore incentive compatibility, user welfare, and revenue adequacy. It also studies incentive design for parallel execution: whether conflict injection can be detected and penalized, how MEV manifests under parallelism, and what validator compensation models are viable when transaction ordering is no longer the primary strategic lever.
transaction fee mechanismincentive designblockchain economicsDAG blockchainshardingparallel executionMEV
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