Smart contracts extended blockchain functionality beyond simple transactions, powering complex applications like decentralized finance (DeFi). However, this complexity introduces serious security challenges, including price manipulation and inflation attacks. Despite the development of various security tools, the rapid rise in financially motivated exploits continues to pose a significant threat to the blockchain ecosystem. These financially motivated exploits often stem from Monetarily Exploitable Vulnerabilities (MEVuls), which refer to vulnerabilities arising from exploitable implementations in monetary transactions or value-transfer logic. Due to their complexity, intricate chains of function calls, multifaceted logic, and diverse manifestations across different smart contracts, MEVuls are particularly challenging for current security tools to identify. Instead of providing actionable insights, existing tools frequently generate excessive warnings that overwhelm developers without effectively mitigating risks. To address the challenge of recognizing MEVuls, we first formalize MEVuls based on common real-world financial exploits. Then, we introduce FAUDITOR, a specialized fuzzer designed to detect MEVuls in smart contracts. The key insight is that leveraging smart contracts' finance-related interfaces directly exposes critical vulnerabilities, making detection more targeted. We further integrate auditors' reports using NLP to extract valuable insights on exploitation patterns, enabling a more informed search strategy. Additionally, FAUDITOR employs a self-learning mechanism that refines its detection strategies over time, allowing it to improve based on prior fuzzing results. In our evaluation, FAUDITOR impressively reveals 220 zero-day MEVuls. Meanwhile, compared to existing fuzzers, FAUDITOR detects vulnerabilities faster and achieves better instruction coverage.
The article explores cryptoeconomics as a new paradigm for the development of transaction theory and financial intermediation in the context of the digital transformation of the global economy. It is substantiated that the rapid introduction of blockchain technologies, smart contracts and asset tokenization mechanisms causes qualitative changes in the ways of organizing economic interaction, forming a transition from institutionally mediated to algorithmically managed trust systems. The evolution of theoretical approaches to transaction costs is revealed, in particular in the context of the ideas of R. Coase, O. Williamson and D. North, and their transformation in the digital environment is proven, where the key functions of coordination, control and verification are implemented through decentralized protocols. It is established that cryptoeconomics forms a new structure of transaction costs, in which the costs of coordination, monitoring and ensuring the execution of transactions are reduced, while the costs associated with the functioning of the network infrastructure appear. The main characteristics of the cryptoeconomic environment are highlighted: transparency, self-fulfillment of transactions, distributiveness of risks, autonomy of economic agents and the algorithmic nature of trust. Particular attention is paid to the role of decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) as new forms of organization of financial relations. A conceptual model of “new transactionality” is proposed, within which economic relations acquire a network character, and cryptocurrencies perform not only the function of a financial asset, but also an institutional mechanism of market self-regulation. It is proved that trust is transformed from a socio-legal category into a technologically guaranteed property of the protocol. It is concluded that cryptoeconomics forms the basis for the formation of a new financial architecture based on the principles of decentralization, digital trust and algorithmic management, determining the strategic directions of development of global economic systems in the 21st century
The overarching aim of this cumulative dissertation is to provide theoretical grounding and empirically informed design knowledge on (1) how blockchain can modernize intellectual property lifecycle management, (2) how decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) can unlock their full potential as an emerging governance form, and (3) how generative AI chatbots can provide reliable assistance in trust-sensitive and high-stakes contexts such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and academia. Motivated by growing frictions of digital markets—particularly in protecting and remunerating creative outputs and innovations—the dissertation consolidates research and develops transferable concepts for institutionally grounded, trustworthy digital systems. To attain the overarching research objective, this cumulative dissertation reports on six peer-reviewed research contributions embedded in a unifying socio-technical framework. The research contributions draw on systematic literature reviews, qualitative empirical studies (including case study and expert interviews), and design science research with mockup instantiations, addressing descriptive and prescriptive research questions in the field of information systems.
DilithiumBar Architecture DilithiumBar is a high-performance, post-quantum (PQ) blockchain protocol engineered to withstand the cryptographic threats posed by future quantum computing. By replacing standard ECDSA signatures with the CRYSTALS-Dilithium5 lattice-based scheme, the system ensures long-term security without compromising operational efficiency. The protocol integrates a sophisticated suite of modern blockchain innovations: Post-Quantum Security: Native implementation of NIST-standardized lattice cryptography to secure transactions and state transitions. High-Finality Consensus: A Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) mechanism that provides deterministic 10-second finality, significantly faster than traditional Proof-of-Work systems. Advanced State Management: Utilizes a Merkle-Patricia Trie for verifiable state tracking and atomic database operations to ensure data integrity. Dynamic Economics: An EIP-1559 inspired fee market that stabilizes transaction costs and optimizes network throughput. While the protocol acknowledges the increased bandwidth and storage requirements typical of post-quantum primitives, it balances these trade-offs through an optimized architecture designed for the next era of decentralized finance.
The adoption of Point-of-Care Testing (POCT) in Lagos private hospitals reflects a structural shift from centralized to decentralized diagnostics.Drawing on professional observation in the Lagos private healthcare ecosystem (2022-2024), this paper examines how economic instability, infrastructural fragility, and organizational behavior have shaped the trajectory of POCT deployment.The analysis highlights that while POCT devices can improve clinical decision-making and patient outcomes, their sustainable integration hinges on Health Technology Management (HTM), institutional leadership, and policy-driven financing models.The paper concludes with recommendations for stabilizing the diagnostic ecosystem through currencyanchored procurement, frugal device design, and strengthened public-private collaboration.
The rapid emergence of contemporary financial concepts—such as decentralized finance, cryptocurrency, and algorithmic trading—has necessitated an advanced level of digital literacy to maintain and achieve financial well-being. This paper presents a comprehensive mixed-methods study to explore the intersection of these domains. The qualitative phase utilizes a News-Reflection Analysis (NRA) of 150 mainstream financial news articles from 2021 to 2025, yielding a robust coding framework and foundational propositions. Building upon these qualitative insights, the quantitative phase employs Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) on a simulated dataset of 450 respondents. We test a conceptual model integrating Contemporary Financial Concepts (CFC), Digital Literacy (DL), Financial Behavior (FB), and Financial Well-Being (FWB). Findings reveal that while CFC positively influences financial behaviour, digital literacy serves as a critical moderator, significantly amplifying the translation of complex financial knowledge into tangible well-being. This paper provides a Q1-journal-ready framework, complete with qualitative coding schemes, an advanced SEM path diagram, simulate hypothesis testing, and a rigorously validated 22-item measurement instrument.
Cross-chain bridges are critical for decentralized finance (DeFi) to enable asset interoperability across heterogeneous blockchains. They are based on a complex hybrid architecture that involves on-chain contracts and off-chain relayers. In the recent past, several major attacks exploited vulnerabilities in cross-chain bridges. However, existing analysis tools have limited detection effectiveness as they focus on individual contracts and do not capture the complex interaction chain in cross-chain bridges. In this paper, we present BridgeFuzz, the first fuzzing framework for cross-chain bridge developers capable of detecting vulnerabilities such as balance mismatches, protocol errors, and off-chain denial-of-service bugs. BridgeFuzz is the first step towards bridging the gap between smart contract vulnerability research and the holistic vulnerability analysis of cross-chain bridges.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending protocols like Aave v3 rely on over-collateralization to secure loans, yet users frequently face liquidation due to volatile market conditions. Existing risk management tools utilize static health-factor thresholds, which are reactive and fail to distinguish between administrative "dust" cleanup and genuine insolvency. In this work, we propose an autonomous agent that leverages time-to-event (survival) analysis and moves beyond prediction to execution. Unlike passive risk signals, this agent perceives risk, simulates counterfactual futures, and executes protocol-faithful interventions to proactively prevent liquidations. We introduce a return period metric derived from a numerically stable XGBoost Cox proportional hazards model to normalize risk across transaction types, coupled with a volatility-adjusted trend score to filter transient market noise. To select optimal interventions, we implement a counterfactual optimization loop that simulates potential user actions to find the minimum capital required to mitigate risk. We validate our approach using a high-fidelity, protocol-faithful Aave v3 simulator on a cohort of 4,882 high-risk user profiles. The results demonstrate the agent's ability to prevent liquidations in imminent-risk scenarios where static rules fail, effectively "saving the unsavable" while maintaining a zero worsening rate, providing a critical safety guarantee often missing in autonomous financial agents. Furthermore, the system successfully differentiates between actionable financial risks and negligible dust events, optimizing capital efficiency where static rules fail.
Purpose - This study examines how Web3 technologies—including blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized finance (DeFi)—affect the business models of sports organizations and the engagement behavior of fans. The research evaluates both the revenue and loyalty opportunities created by digital assets and the financial risks and regulatory challenges they introduce. Design/methodology/approach - A mixed-methods approach is employed, combining blockchain analytics, big data and social media monitoring, expert interviews, ethnographic observation of online fan communities, and systematic case analysis of NBA Top Shot, Chiliz/Socios.com, Sorare, and related platforms. Theoretical grounding draws on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) paradigm, the Fan Attitude Network (FAN) model, and Social Identity Theory (SIT). Findings - Fan tokens and NFTs create new revenue streams and deepen supporter loyalty through exclusive access, participatory governance, and gamified interactions. However, empirical evidence reveals high price volatility, speculative investor behavior, misleading marketing, and an unclear regulatory environment that expose fans to financial risk. Emerging markets such as Azerbaijan face additional structural barriers—limited fan culture depth, nascent regulation, and underdeveloped digital infrastructure—that preclude near-term viability of NFT-based fan engagement. Originality/value - This article is among the first to systematically integrate governance, financial risk, and regulatory dimensions of Web3 in sports within a single framework, moving beyond prior work focused narrowly on marketing and financial performance. It offers actionable implications for sports organizations, regulators, and platform developers. Research limitations/implications - The study is constrained by the rapidly evolving nature of Web3 technologies, jurisdictional variation in regulatory frameworks, and limited blockchain data accessibility for some platforms.
The decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is a complex and ever-evolving system composed of various protocols. One of these protocols is lending, which has seen significant growth in recent times. However, the motivations behind investors’ interest in this area remain largely unknown. Lending protocols operate on predefined algorithms that automatically provide loans to users, allowing them to actively participate in DeFi lending platforms on public blockchain networks. The adaptation of these algorithms to a blockchain network within the framework of state legislation has not been explored in depth. This determines the importance of the study. The object of the study is to compare lending in a blockchain network with traditional forms; the subject is to identify the factors that influence decentralized lending and its relationship with traditional finance. The aim of this study is to develop a model architecture that can be used to create decentralized credit applications within a consortium blockchain network that uses a native currency, such as a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The main objectives of this study are:1) using data on transactions from the Aave lending protocol, one of the leading decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems in terms of market capitalization, to identify the motivations that drive participants to engage in DeFi lending activities; 2) based on research into the DeFi token ecosystem and its market, as well as analogues of traditional financial lending models, to develop a mathematical model and an architectural diagram for a decentralized lending system built on a consortium blockchain with a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as the native currency. The results of the study are presented in the form of a mathematical model and a diagram of the architecture for a decentralized lending system based on a consortium blockchain network using a consortium with a native cryptocurrency, known as CBDC.
As cross-chain interoperability advances, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols enable illicit funds to be reorganized into uniform liquid assets that flow throughout the cryptocurrency market. Such operations can bypass monitoring targeted at individual blockchains and thereby weaken current regulatory frameworks. Motivated by these, we introduce UniDetect, a multi-chain cryptocurrency fraud account detection method based on large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we use domain knowledge to guide the LLM to generate general transaction summary texts applicable to heterogeneous blockchain accounts, which serve as evidence for fraud account detection. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage alternating training strategy to continuously and dynamically enhance the multimodal joint reasoning for detecting fraudulent accounts based on both the textual evidence and the transaction graph patterns. Experiments on multiple blockchains show that UniDetect outperforms existing methods 5.57% to 7.58% in Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS). For cross-chain zero-shot detection, UniDetect identifies over 94.58% of fraudulent accounts. It also generalizes well to non-blockchain data, delivering a 6.06% improvement in F1 over existing methods. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/msy0513/UniDetect.
Smart contract security audits are essential for trust in decentralized finance (DeFi), yet audit reports from different firms vary widely in scope definition, severity labels, fix verification, and report structure. These differences make it hard for developers, users, and other stakeholders to assess risk. In this paper, we address these issues by empirically analyzing 160 audit reports from 26 leading auditing firms to uncover patterns and gaps in current practices. Using qualitative content analysis, we extract a taxonomy of 19 common properties that audit reports include (or omit). We then apply Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to identify five distinct “report style families” used by auditors, and perform a temporal trend analysis to see if the industry is converging on certain best practices. Finally, we synthesize a feature model that specifies a minimal defensible baseline for audit reports, distinguishing mandatory sections from optional extensions to support traceability and consistent interpretation across reports. This model enables reproducible comparisons across auditors, strengthens accountability for scope definition and fix verification, and provides an evidence base to improve the quality and uniformity of smart contract audit reporting.
Abstrak. Perkembangan decentralized finance (DeFi) mendorong perubahan signifikan dalam layanan keuangan berbasis blockchain, termasuk pada platform Jupiter Swap di jaringan Solana. Meskipun menawarkan efisiensi dan transparansi, sistem DeFi memiliki risiko keamanan yang tinggi akibat sifatnya yang terdesentralisasi dan kompleks. Oleh karena itu, penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis keamanan dan tata kelola sistem informasi pada Jupiter Swap menggunakan framework COBIT 2019. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah pendekatan kualitatif deskriptif melalui observasi sistem, studi literatur, serta analisis menggunakan COBIT 2019 Design Toolkit yang mencakup enterprise strategy, enterprise goals, dan IT risk profile. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa sistem memiliki orientasi kuat pada inovasi dan transformasi digital, dengan dominasi domain BAI dan APO dalam tata kelola. Namun, profil risiko menunjukkan tingkat eksposur yang tinggi terhadap serangan siber, kesalahan pengguna, dan ketergantungan pada pihak ketiga. Selain itu, terdapat kesenjangan antara kondisi saat ini dan target capability level, terutama pada aspek keamanan dan pengelolaan perubahan sistem. Penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa penerapan COBIT 2019 dapat membantu mengevaluasi dan meningkatkan tata kelola sistem DeFi secara lebih terstruktur dan adaptif. Abstract. The development of decentralized finance (DeFi) has significantly transformed blockchain-based financial services, including the Jupiter Swap platform on the Solana network. Despite offering efficiency and transparency, DeFi systems present high security risks due to their decentralized and complex nature. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the security and information system governance of Jupiter Swap using the COBIT 2019 framework. The research employs a descriptive qualitative approach through system observation, literature review, and analysis using the COBIT 2019 Design Toolkit, including enterprise strategy, enterprise goals, and IT risk profile. The results indicate that the system strongly emphasizes innovation and digital transformation, with governance dominated by the BAI and APO domains. However, the risk profile reveals high exposure to cyber attacks, user errors, and third-party dependencies. Additionally, a gap exists between the current condition and the target capability level, particularly in security and system change management. This study demonstrates that COBIT 2019 can be effectively applied to evaluate and improve governance in DeFi systems in a structured and adaptive manner.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has emerged as one of the most transformative applications of blockchain technology, constructing a financial ecosystem that operates without traditional intermediaries through smart contracts and distributed protocols. This paper systematically reviews the research progress of DeFi in terms of technical architecture, core protocols, governance models, and application scenarios, with particular focus on analyzing key domains including lending platforms, decentralized exchanges, stablecoin mechanisms, and asset tokenization. Research indicates that although DeFi demonstrates revolutionary potential in enhancing financial inclusion and transaction efficiency, it still faces significant challenges in smart contract security, regulatory compliance, and systemic risk prevention. This paper further explores future research directions including the integration of DeFi with traditional finance, technological innovation, and real-world asset integration, providing reference for scholars, policymakers, and industry participants to understand this rapidly evolving field.
The advent of blockchain technology has introduced new alternatives to traditional banking systems, providing a decentralized, secure, and transparent framework. However, its adoption is still complex and uneven for many reasons. This study provides a comprehensive mapping of the intellectual trajectory, thematic structure, and development of blockchain technology research in the banking sector. Using a hybrid literature review methodology that combines bibliometric analysis and systematic content review, the study analyzes 389 peer-reviewed publications retrieved from Scopus (2015–May 2025). VOSviewer was employed to conduct performance analysis and science mapping, including co-authorship, co-citation, keyword co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling analyses. In parallel, qualitative thematic analysis identified six clusters: (1) blockchain in banking and financial intermediation to enhance operational efficiency, (2) decentralized finance and cryptocurrencies, (3) integration of blockchain with other digital innovations, (4) trust-related dimensions, (5) institutional and regulatory aspects, and (6) strategies for modernizing banking business models. The findings reveal a steady rise in research output, regional disparities in collaboration, and thematic evolution from early conceptualization to recent signs of diversification of applied research. By integrating quantitative and qualitative insights, this study highlights key research gaps, offers directions for future work, and provides guidance for academics, practitioners, and policymakers on the transformative potential and challenges of blockchain in banking.
This paper focuses on the application of blockchain technology in the field of supply chain finance, with an emphasis on its supportive role in alleviating the financing difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises. Through theoretical analysis and case study methods, it systematically elaborates how blockchain technology, leveraging its characteristics such as decentralization, traceability, and immutability, enhances the transparency and credibility of supply chain finance, reduces the risks associated with information asymmetry, and thereby improves the availability and efficiency of financing for small and medium-sized enterprises. Taking "Ant Duo-Chain" as an example, the paper analyzes the application effects of blockchain technology in the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises, concluding that this model not only enhances the efficiency of capital circulation but also provides a sustainable path for the stable development and value enhancement of the overall supply chain ecosystem.
Cloud-based SaaS platforms now run essential services across finance, healthcare, and government sectors. Many of these systems include automated agents and decision engines that operate at high speed and scale. Identity and access governance therefore serves as a central control layer. Traditional IAM models depend on fixed roles, centralized authorization servers, and periodic reviews. Such structures struggle in distributed, multi-tenant environments that process millions of access requests each day. Prior studies address adaptive authentication, Zero Trust security, decentralized identity, anomaly detection, and cloud resilience. However, these solutions often function separately rather than within a unified framework. This paper introduces a Resilient Identity and Access Governance Architecture that integrates real time risk evaluation, distributed policy enforcement, lifecycle governance for human and machine identities, and fault tolerance in a single design. The framework defines measurable targets for availability, detection time, throughput, and policy propagation. Risk scoring occurs during live authorization decisions, and enforcement spans multiple nodes. The result is a scalable identity governance model suitable for complex SaaS ecosystems that require high availability and consistent control.
This paper discusses the economic principles and policy requirements of cryptocurrency regulation in a more complex and fast developing digital financial ecosystem. It examines how decentralized blockchain-based assets, though having immense advantages such as financial inclusion, efficiency, and innovation, can also create enormous regulatory issues such as market volatility, information asymmetry, illegal financial transactions, and systemic risk. Basing the analysis on the concepts of economic analysis, the authors assess regulation as a method that addresses market failures, distributes resources efficiently, and maximizes social welfare in general. The paper expounds the relevance of cost-benefit modeling in regulatory design, with the emphasis on the fact that policy-makers need to strike a balance between the cost of compliance, administrative burden, and possible limitations on innovation and the benefits of regulatory transparency, investor protection, and financial stability. It also examines incentive systems in international cryptocurrency markets, and especially the so-called regulatory arbitrage, where national regulatory differences affect the geographical location of digital asset practices. One of the priorities is the trade-off between financial privacy and regulatory enforcement. Even though privacy-related aspects of cryptocurrencies can secure the autonomy of users and the safety of their data, they also make it more challenging to trace and intercept illegal financial activities. This article proposes the combination of risk-based and technology-neutral regulatory frameworks that will be capable of adapting to a variety of blockchain applications, such as decentralized finance (DeFi), stablecoins, and tokenized assets. Also, the paper highlights the increasing significance of cross-border coordination and new regulatory technologies (RegTech) to handle cross-border problems and increase the efficiency of compliance. It concludes that to have good cryptocurrency governance, there must be an interdisciplinary approach that comprises of economic theory, legal analysis, and understanding of technology. This balancing and adaptive action is what is needed to encourage innovation and still maintain financial stability, investor protection, and overall interest of the digital economy by the general population.
The quick proliferation of cryptocurrency markets has essentially transformed the financial frameworks of the globe in that it has made it possible to initiate the means of value transfer across borders that are decentralized, borderless, and technologically advanced. Cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain and cryptographic protocols and enable peer-to-peer transactions without use of traditional financial intermediaries, which improves efficiency, lowers the costs of transactions, and increases financial inclusion, especially in underserved areas. In addition to payments, the technologies have stimulated innovation in fields like decentralised finance, smart contracts, and systems of digital identity. But the very same characteristics which render cryptocurrencies appealing also pose serious threats to regulation and law enforcement. The anonymity of transactions combined with the decentralized and cross-border structure of blockchain networks make it difficult to determine who the users are and apply jurisdiction-specific legislation. As a result, cryptocurrencies have become more and more related to different types of financial crime such as money laundering, terrorist financing, tax evasion, ransomware attacks, and illegal trading in darknet markets. The paper discusses the principal types of crime in the context of cryptocurrency and evaluates the challenges encountered by regulatory bodies and law enforcement agencies that might need to overcome these challenges. It also discusses the international regulation reaction, including the involvement of the international standard-setting organizations and the development of compliance systems, including anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) systems. Furthermore, the paper also mentions that technological solutions, such as blockchain analytics, are increasingly gaining significance in enhancing investigative potential. The paper concludes that, regardless of the revolutionary potential of cryptocurrencies in terms of financial innovation, their productive regulation involves a moderate and coordinated strategy, incorporating legal and regulatory models, technological progress, and global collaboration.
Legal certainty is a fundamental prerequisite for implementing decentralized governance, particularly to ensure protection for the apparatus in developing public service innovations. However, regulatory fragmentation often leads to overlapping authority and administrative uncertainty at the local level. This research aims to examine the legal certainty construction of innovation through a vertical synchronization test of Regulation Number 20 of 2021, and to evaluate its sociological implications on the fluctuation of regional innovation performance. This research employs a normative legal method calibrated with policy evaluation through statutory and conceptual approaches, and analyzes Regional Innovation Index data for the 2020 to 2025 period. The analysis results indicate that the Regent Regulation suffered multilayered substantive defects over time. In the initial formulation phase, the budget deprivation threat sanction for innovations deemed unsuccessful contradicted the apparatus protection principle under Law Number 23 of 2014. Furthermore, the local government has been found to have committed legislative omission by failing to amend the Regent Regulation to accommodate the updates to the institutionalization obligation and affirmative financing guarantees mandated following the promulgation of Ministerial Regulation Number 91 of 2021 and Governor Regulation Number 3 of 2022. Factual evidence confirms that this static and defective legal formulation triggered a climate of bureaucratic fear, resulting in a drastic decline in the regional innovation score in the first year of the regulation’s implementation and subsequent stagnation. In conclusion, punitive innovation regulations that are unresponsive to hierarchical updates have degraded the essence of regional autonomy and created a governance paradox. Therefore, the revocation of the administrative sanction clause and the execution of the institutionalization amendment must be executed to restore a safe authorizing environment for experimental legislation.
Decentralized applications (DApps) represent a paradigm shift in software architecture, leveraging blockchain technology and distributed consensus mechanisms to eliminate single points of failure and centralized control. As the adoption of DApps accelerates across sectors such as finance, supply chain, healthcare, and governance, ensuring their functional correctness and behavioral reliability has become a critical engineering challenge. Unlike traditional software, DApps operate in adversarial, permissionless environments where smart contracts execute autonomously and immutably on distributed nodes, making post-deployment correction extremely costly or impossible. This review systematically examines the landscape of functional testing methodologies tailored for decentralized applications, analyzing their suitability, limitations, and practical applicability in modern DApp development workflows. We survey research spanning smart contract verification, consensus protocol testing, oracle interaction validation, cross-chain interoperability testing, and user-layer functional testing of Web3 interfaces. The review identifies four dominant testing paradigms: (1) unit testing of smart contract functions, (2) integration testing of DApp components, (3) property-based testing using formal specifications, and (4) end-to-end simulation on testnets. Through comparative analysis across 13 seminal studies, we evaluate each approach along dimensions of automation feasibility, coverage depth, gas efficiency awareness, and scalability to complex DApp ecosystems. Our findings indicate that while static analysis and symbolic execution tools such as Mythril, Slither, and Manticore offer strong vulnerability detection, they address security properties more than functional correctness. Conversely, framework-based testing tools like Hardhat, Truffle, and Foundry provide adequate unit-level coverage but struggle with cross-contract orchestration and event-driven logic verification. A critical gap exists in testing oracle-dependent and DAO governance workflows. This review concludes with a synthesis of best practices, open research challenges, and a directional roadmap for developing holistic functional testing frameworks suited to the evolving complexity of decentralized systems.
Fraudulent activities on blockchain networks threaten the integrity and reliability of decentralized finance ecosystems. Accurately identifying malicious nodes such as phishing or ransomware addresses, within large-scale blockchain transaction graphs remains a critical challenge due to their dynamic, sparse, and continuously evolving topologies. Transfer learning offers a powerful paradigm for fraud detection because many fraudulent schemes, including ransomware and phishing, are often orchestrated by overlapping actor groups that share behavioral and structural patterns across networks. Leveraging these shared representations enables knowledge transfer from previously observed fraud types to emerging ones. However, the complex and multi-modal nature of digital financial systems introduces substantial challenges for graph-based transfer learning. Fraudulent activities are shaped by diverse modalities including graph structure, transaction sequences, temporal price dynamics, and textual metadata, while distributional shifts frequently occur across time and platforms. Existing graph transfer learning methods struggle to model such multi-modal dependencies and to align divergent feature distributions. To tackle these challenges, we develop a Multi-mOdal Enhanced Graph Transfer Learning (MOE-GTL) framework which incorporates graph, temporal, and textual modalities for fraudulent node detection. We further introduce Temporal-aware Maximum Mean Discrepancy (TMMD), a regularization mechanism that explicitly aligns multi-modal feature distributions between source and target graphs over time. Extensive experiments reveal that our MOE-GTL model notably improves the accuracy of fraudulent node classifications on Ethereum and Solana transaction graphs.
Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm in modern software engineering, combining the reach of the web with the capabilities of native applications. Simulta- neously, decentralized systems—anchored by blockchain technology, distributed ledger frameworks, and peer-to-peer networking protocols—are reshaping trust architectures across industries ranging from finance and healthcare to supply chain and digital identity. Despite the clear synergies between these two technological pillars, the intersection of PWAs and decentralized systems remains relatively underexplored in the academic literature. This survey addresses that gap by systematically reviewing and analyzing the convergence of PWA design principles with decentralized infrastructure paradigms. We examine how service workers, Web App Manifests, push notifications, and IndexedDB offline storage can be effectively integrated with blockchain nodes, smart contracts, IPFS-based content stor- age, and decentralized identity (DID) frameworks to produce resilient, censorship-resistant, and user- centric applications. We survey thirteen seminal works spanning cross-platform application devel- opment, blockchain architecture, decentralized identity management, IoT integration, and distributed application (DApp) design. Our analysis reveals recurring challenges including transaction latency, key management complexity, offline consistency under Byzantine fault conditions, and the tension between decentralization purity and user experience expectations. We further synthesize findings through a structured comparative analysis across six dimensions: focus area, PWA feature utilization, blockchain integration depth, reported performance metrics, and identified limitations. Based on this synthesis, we identify open research directions and propose guidelines for practitioners seeking to build production-grade PWA-based DApp frontends. This survey contributes a consolidated reference for researchers and engineers working at the intersection of web engineering and decentralized computing.