{"ID":2833784,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02354","arxiv_id":"2512.02354","title":"Characterizing Off-Chain Influence Proof Transaction Fee Mechanisms","abstract":"Roughgarden (2020) initiates the study of Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs), and posits that the on-chain game of a ``good'' TFM should be on-chain simple (OnCS), i.e., incentive compatible for users and the miner. Recent work of Ganesh, Thomas and Weinberg (2024) posits that they should additionally be Off-Chain Influence Proof (OffCIP), which means that the miner cannot achieve any additional revenue by separately conducting an off-chain auction to determine on-chain inclusion. They observe that a cryptographic second-price auction satisfies both properties, but leave open the question of whether other mechanisms (e.g, non-cryptographic) satisfy these properties. In this paper, we characterize OffCIP TFMs: They are those satisfying a burn identity relating the burn rule to the allocation rule. In particular, we show that auction is OffCIP if and only if its (induced direct-revelation) allocation rule $\\bar{X}(\\cdot)$ and burn rule $\\bar{B}(\\cdot)$ (both of which take as input users' values $v_1, \\dots, v_n$) are truthful when viewing $\\big(\\bar{X}(\\cdot), \\bar{B}(\\cdot)\\big)$ as the allocation and pricing rule of a multi-item auction for a single additive buyer with values $\\big(\\varphi(v_1),\\ldots, \\varphi(v_n)\\big)$ equal to the users' virtual values. Building on this burn identity, we characterize deterministic OffCIP and OnCS TFMs that do not use cryptography: They are posted-price mechanisms with specially-tuned burns. As a corollary, we show that such TFMs can only exist with infinite supply and prior-dependence. However, we show that for randomized TFMs, there are additional OnCS and OffCIP auctions that do not use cryptography (even when there is finite supply, under prior-dependence with a bounded prior distribution). Holistically, our results show that while OffCIP is a fairly stringent requirement, families of OffCIP mechanisms can be found for a variety of settings.","short_abstract":"Roughgarden (2020) initiates the study of Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs), and posits that the on-chain game of a ``good'' TFM should be on-chain simple (OnCS), i.e., incentive compatible for users and the miner. Recent work of Ganesh, Thomas and Weinberg (2024) posits that they should additionally be Off-Chain Influ...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02354","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02354v1","authors":"[\"Aadityan Ganesh\",\"Clayton Thomas\",\"S. Matthew Weinberg\"]","published":"2025-12-02T02:50:15Z","proceeding":"cs.GT","tasks":"[\"cs.GT\"]","methods":"[\"Generative Adversarial Network\"]","has_code":false}