Zhi Guan

SE
4papers
75citations
Novelty44%
AI Score42

4 Papers

44.3DCMar 19
A402: Binding Cryptocurrency Payments to Service Execution for Agentic Commerce

Yue Li, Lei Wang, Kaixuan Wang et al.

The rapid proliferation of autonomous AI agents is driving a shift toward agentic commerce, where agents are expected to autonomously invoke and pay for services. While blockchain-based payments offer a programmable foundation for such interactions, the recently proposed x402 standard fails to enforce end-to-end atomicity across service execution, payment, and result delivery. In this paper, we present A402, a trust-minimized payment architecture that securely binds cryptocurrency payments to service execution. A402 introduces Atomic Service Channels (ASCs), a new channel protocol that integrates service execution into payment channels, enabling real-time, high-frequency micropayments for agentic commerce. Within each ASC, A402 employs an atomic exchange protocol based on TEE-assisted adaptor signatures, ensuring that payments are finalized if and only if the requested service is correctly executed and the corresponding result is delivered. To further ensure privacy, A402 incorporates a TEE-based Liquidity Vault that privately manages the lifecycle of ASCs and aggregates their settlements into a single on-chain transaction, revealing only aggregated balances. We implement A402 and evaluate it against x402 with integrations on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. Our results show that A402 delivers orders-of-magnitude performance and on-chain cost improvements over x402 while providing trust-minimized security guarantees.

45.6AIApr 30
Intent2Tx: Benchmarking LLMs for Translating Natural Language Intents into Ethereum Transactions

Zhuoran Pan, Yue Li, Zhi Guan et al.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a transformative interface for Web3, yet existing benchmarks fail to capture the complexity of translating high-level user intents into functionally correct, state-dependent on-chain transactions. We present \textsc{Intent2Tx}, a high-fidelity benchmark featuring 29,921 single-step and 1,575 multi-step instances meticulously derived from 300 days of real-world Ethereum mainnet traces. Unlike prior works that rely on synthetic instructions, \textsc{Intent2Tx} grounds natural language intents in real-world protocol interactions across 11 categories, including diverse long-tail Decentralized Finance (DeFi) primitives. To enable rigorous evaluation, we propose an execution-aware framework that transcends surface-level text matching by employing differential state analysis on forked mainnet environments. Our extensive evaluation of 16 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that while scaling and retrieval-augmentation enhance logical consistency and parameter precision, current models struggle with out-of-distribution generalization and multi-step planning. Crucially, our execution-based analysis demonstrates that syntactically valid outputs often fail to achieve intended state transitions, highlighting a significant gap in current "reasoning-to-execution" capabilities. \textsc{Intent2Tx} serves as a critical foundation for developing autonomous, reliable agents in intent-centric Web3 ecosystems. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Intent2Tx_Bench-97FF .

SEJun 2, 2020
Kaya: A Testing Framework for Blockchain-based Decentralized Applications

Zhenhao Wu, Jiashuo Zhang, Jianbo Gao et al.

In recent years, many decentralized applications based on blockchain (DApp) have been developed. However, due to inadequate testing, DApps are easily exposed to serious vulnerabilities. We find three main challenges for DApp testing, i.e., the inherent complexity of DApp, inconvenient pre-state setting, and not-so-readable logs. In this paper, we propose a testing framework named Kaya to bridge these gaps. Kaya has three main functions. Firstly, Kaya proposes DApp behavior description language (DBDL) to make writing test cases easier. Test cases written in DBDL can also be automatically executed by Kaya. Secondly, Kaya supports a flexible and convenient way for test engineers to set the blockchain pre-states easily. Thirdly, Kaya transforms incomprehensible addresses into readable variables for easy comprehension. With these functions, Kaya can help test engineers test DApps more easily. Besides, to fit the various application environments, we provide two ways for test engineers to use Kaya, i.e., UI and command-line. Our experimental case demonstrates the potential of Kaya in helping test engineers to test DApps more easily.

SENov 9, 2018
EASYFLOW: Keep Ethereum Away From Overflow

Jianbo Gao, Han Liu, Chao Liu et al.

While Ethereum smart contracts enabled a wide range of blockchain applications, they are extremely vulnerable to different forms of security attacks. Due to the fact that transactions to smart contracts commonly involve cryptocurrency transfer, any successful attacks can lead to money loss or even financial disorder. In this paper, we focus on the overflow attacks in Ethereum , mainly because they widely rooted in many smart contracts and comparatively easy to exploit. We have developed EASYFLOW , an overflow detector at Ethereum Virtual Machine level. The key insight behind EASYFLOW is a taint analysis based tracking technique to analyze the propagation of involved taints. Specifically, EASYFLOW can not only divide smart contracts into safe contracts, manifested overflows, well-protected overflows and potential overflows, but also automatically generate transactions to trigger potential overflows. In our preliminary evaluation, EASYFLOW managed to find potentially vulnerable Ethereum contracts with little runtime overhead.