Student Publications [Scholarly]

Timing is the New Attack: Blockchain Cannot Prevent Market Manipulation at the Boundary

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Abstract

Blockchains are often regarded as a trustworthy enabler for decentralized coordination, but they cannot provide a shared notion of real time due to the nature of failure-prone distributed systems. This paper shows that timing is an independent attack surface that undermines fairness and efficiency in Blockchain-based market mechanisms, even when consensus, immutability, and auditability are all guaranteed. We analyze two widely used classes of mechanisms - periodic sealed-bid call markets (e.g., McAfee's double auction) and continuous double auctions (CDA) - and demonstrate how small timing asymmetries can systematically violate fairness and efficiency in the market. These failures arise from boundary effects: who is included at the instant of closure, which bids define the marginal pair, and how timestamped orders are prioritized. Because Blockchains record what happened but cannot enforce when events should be observed or finalized, they cannot prevent these forms of manipulation. We identify the system-level limitations that make trustworthy timing fundamentally hard and outline design principles for building decentralized mechanisms that remain robust under real-world network and clock conditions. © 2026 IEEE.

Publication Title

Digest of Technical Papers - IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics

Publication Date

2-2026

ISSN

0747-668X

DOI

10.1109/ICCE67443.2026.11449682

Keywords

blockchain, market mechanism, timing attack

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