Blockchains revolutionized centralized sectors like banking and finance by promoting decentralization and transparency. In a blockchain, information is transmitted through transactions issued by participants or applications. Miners crucially select, order, and validate pending transactions for block inclusion, prioritizing those with higher incentives or fees. The order in which transactions are included can impact the blockchain final state. Moreover, applications running on top of a blockchain often rely on governance protocols to decentralize the decision-making power to make changes to their core functionality. These changes can affect how participants interact with these applications. Since one token equals one vote, participants holding multiple tokens have a higher voting power to support or reject the proposed changes. The extent to which this voting power is distributed is questionable and if highly concentrated among a few holders can lead to governance attacks. In this thesis, we audit the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains to investigate the norms followed by miners in determining the transaction prioritization. We also audit decentralized governance protocols such as Compound to evaluate whether the voting power is fairly distributed among the participants. Our findings have significant implications for future developments of blockchains and decentralized applications.

翻译：区块链通过推动去中心化与透明度，彻底变革了银行与金融等集中化领域。在区块链中，信息通过参与者或应用程序发布的交易进行传输。矿工在决定待处理交易是否被纳入区块时，起着至关重要的作用——他们选择、排序并验证这些交易，并优先处理激励或费用更高的交易。交易被纳入区块的顺序可能影响区块链的最终状态。此外，运行于区块链之上的应用程序通常依赖治理协议，将其核心功能的修改决策权去中心化。这些变更可能影响参与者与应用程序的交互方式。由于“一币一票”的机制，持有多个代币的参与者拥有更高的投票权来支持或否决提案变更。这种投票权的分配程度值得商榷，若高度集中在少数持有者手中，则可能导致治理攻击。本论文通过审计比特币和以太坊区块链，探究矿工在确定交易优先级时所遵循的规范。同时，我们审计了Compound等去中心化治理协议，以评估投票权是否在参与者间公平分配。我们的研究发现对区块链及去中心化应用的未来发展具有重要启示。