Blockchain is predicted to disrupt industries, economies, and societies. The properties of distributed ledgers allow the creation of immutable data structures that facilitate shared access in real time and enable a plethora of innovative applications. However, blockchain is not a uniform technology but rather a bundle of evolving components whose implications are notoriously hard to predict. At present, it is not clear how current trends will evolve, with technical evolution, legislation, and public policy being three contingency factors that make ongoing disruptive transformations particularly hard to predict. In light of blockchain’s potential disruptive impact, it is surprising that scenario analysis has hitherto been largely ignored in academic research. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the technique, clarify several misconceptions, and provide examples illustrating how this method can help to overcome the limitations of existing technology impact research. We conclude that if applied correctly, scenario analysis represents the ideal tool to rigorously explore uncertain future developments and to create a comprehensive foundation for future research.
Tuti Nurhaeni, Leli Nirmalasari, Adam Faturahman, Sella Avionita
This research is based on the national need to build an effective HKI protection system. Results in the form of human intellectual work that have very high values should receive adequate regulatory protection supported by a sense of justice & be rewarded according to their intellectual output. Copyright protection for creators and copyright holders according to Law Number 28 of 2014 concerning Copyright. Article 1 number 1 & Article 24 paragraph (1) & (2). So according to the parallel growth of science and the number of outputs of work found and technology which is very rapid, has a great effect on human life. With this background, this research adopts a research framework capable of compiling insights from current research bodies on blockchain technology. The application of the blockchain framework aims to make it easier for creators to prove what and when their work was made in front of a court or when registering a work copyright. Blockchain can provide solutions in copyright protection and digital copyright management.
In the current cross-border electronic commerce (e-commerce) system, various document recording and authorization processes are cumbersome, record sharing efficiency is low, and identity verification is difficult. A method of asymmetric encryption technology combining Blockchain technology and cryptography is proposed. The advantages of asymmetric encrypted communications include high security and ease of multiparties communication collaboration, being applied to a peer-to-peer network formed by Blockchain technology, and making cross-border e-commerce record cross-domain sharing traceable, data immutable, and identity verification simplified. First of all, based on the immutable modification of Blockchain technology and asymmetric encryption technology, file synchronization contracts and authorization contracts are designed. Its distributed storage advantages ensure the privacy of users’ cross-border e-commerce information. Second, the design of the cross-domain acquisition contract can effectively verify the identity and transmission efficiency of both parties to the data sharing, so that illegal users can be safely filtered without a third-party notary institution. The simulation experiment results show that the solution proposed in this paper has obvious advantages in data antitheft, multiparty authentication, and saving system overhead compared with traditional cloud computing methods to solve the problem of sharing medical records. It provides a reference for solving the security problems in the process of data sharing by using the advantages of Blockchain’s decentralization and auditability and provides reference ideas for solving the problems of data sharing and cross-domain authentication.
Imminent changes to the international monetary system alongside a shift toward more egalitarian principles of justice in commercial contracts for trade are now taking place. Such changes however do not sufficiently account for circumstances of hardship, or black-swan events such as COVID-19, whereby the relative losers of trading arrangements should continue to receive outcomes which are not only efficient, but also fair and resilient. We argue that the ‘Society-in-the-Loop’ (SITL) social contract paradigm, in conjunction with the use of Strategic Responsible Innovation Management (StRIM), can together provide a solution for improving distributive justice in trade. Through collaboration with a locally based trade facilitation company, we describe the innovation-planning phase of a blockchain smart contract solution based on Derek Leben's idea of a ‘Rawlsian Algorithm’ (2017). It is demonstrated how this can be used to strengthen the algorithmic fairness of commercial contract implementation in accordance with existing ISO 20022 standards. Since currently no formal design framework exists for modeling blockchain oriented software (BOS), an agile development approach is adopted which takes account of the substantial difference between traditional software development and smart contracts. This method involves the construction of UML Use Case, Sequence, and Class diagrams, with a view to blockchain specificities. Evaluation and feedback from the company is also considered.
Taking Singapore as an example, this article lays out a series of tests for determining whether gains arising from the disposal of cryptocurrencies are trade or business income, “all other income” or capital gains. It also considers the possibility of a presumption that individuals engaging in such transactions are gambling.
Recently, cross-border transfers using blockchain-based virtual assets (cryptocurrency) have been increasing. However, due to the anonymity of blockchain, there is a problem related to money laundering because the virtual asset service providers cannot identify the originators and the beneficiaries. In addition, the international anti-money-laundering organization (the Financial Action Task Force, FATF) has placed anti-money-laundering obligations on virtual asset service providers through anti-money-laundering guidance for virtual assets issued in June 2019. This paper proposes a customer identification service model based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) that enables virtual asset service providers to verify the identity of the originators and beneficiaries.
Caleb Johnson, Tao Lű, Pedro Rivera, Devon R. McDonald · 6 authors
iChain is an application which was created to help meet the growing demand of machine learning. It allows users to pay those with powerful machines to run machine learning tasks for them, bypassing the need for a significant investment in a powerful computer to run it themselves. This is similar to services like a render farm. Our application functions using the Ethereum blockchain which ensures security and decentralization, as well as providing a platform for payment transactions. This article will discuss the background on machine learning and blockchain, the application, how it works, how the data moves through it, and how to use it. We hope our application will enable many without the funds to build or buy a powerful computer to experiment with and utilize complex machine learning tasks.
The purpose of this study is to find out the solutions that can be done if there is a loss in bitcoin investment.Along with technological developments, virtual currencies were created to facilitate the process of electronic transactions. Bitcoin is a virtual currency using a peer to peer network that is fully controlled by the user. Its value continues to increase every year, many use bitcoin as an asset in investment. In this study, a normative juridical method was used by collecting data from various sources and laws and regulations related to the discussion in research. Referring to Law Number 7 of 2011 concerning Currencywhich states that the rupiah is the only legal currency, so there is no regulation regarding the legality of using bitcoin in Indonesia so it cannot be said that it is safe to use bitcoin as an investment asset. If there is a loss caused by investing in bitcoin, the settlement can use litigation or non-litigation channels. Tujuan Penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui legalitas investasi bitcoin dan untuk mengetahui penyelesaian sengketa dalam investasi bitcoin yang terus mengalami peningkatan. Seiring perkembangan teknologi, diciptakannya mata uang virtual untuk mempermudah dalam proses transaksi elektronik. Bitcoin merupakan mata uang virtual dengan menggunakan jaringan peer to peer yang sepenuhnya dikontrol oleh pengguna. Nilainya yang terus meningkat tiap tahunnya, banyak yang menggunakan bitcoin sebagai aset dalam investasi.Dalam penelitian ini digunakan metode yuridis normatif dengan mengumpulkan data dari berbagai sumber dan peraturan perundang-undangan yang terkait dengan pembahasan dalam penelitian. Mengacu pada Undang-Undang Nomor 7 Tahun 2011 tentang Mata Uang yang menyatakan rupiah adalah satu-satunya mata uang yang sah, dengan begitu belum ada regulasi mengenai legalitas penggunaan bitcoin di Indonesia sehingga belum bisa dikatakan aman menggunakan bitcoin sebagai aset investasi. Jika terjadinya kerugian yang ditimbulkan akibat investasi bitcoin, maka penyelesaiannya bisa menggunakan jalur litigasi maupun non litigasi.
We argue that there is a hierarchy of levels describing to that particular level relevant features of reality behind the content and behavior of blockchain and smart contracts in their realistic deployment. Choice, design, audit and legal control of these systems could be more informed, easier and raised to a higher level, if research on foundations of these descriptions develops and sets the formalisms, tools and standards for such descriptions.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) takes the promise of blockchain a step further and aims to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent protocols that run without involving intermediaries. Similar to how 2017 was the year of ICOs, 2020 was the year of DeFi, with more than fifteen billion dollars of total investments. The decentralized platforms utilize oracles to retrieve asset data from the external world, but their choice and management criteria are often unknown to the end-users. If oracles are poorly selected or managed, the funds of a rising number of investors are inevitably in danger. The issue, known as “the oracle problem”, which makes real-world applications controversial and debated due to the loss of decentralization, had recently drawn attention to DeFi, given the crescent number of related hacks that caused the loss of millions of dollars held in DeFi projects. Through a multivocal approach that considers academic papers, whitepapers, preprints, and opinion posts, this study aims to shed light on the pattern that identifies the oracle problem in DeFi and outline the most promising ways to overcome the related weaknesses. This research supports the view that the oracle problem in decentralized finance bears specific characteristics which require standardization and appropriate economic incentives to be addressed.
Anthony Devine, Abdul Jabbar, Jonathan Kimmitt, Chrysostomos Apostolidis
In this paper we explore how blockchain and smart contracts can build trust and act as catalysts for sustainable social businesses by supporting the coexistence of social and economic logics of social ventures. To achieve this we draw upon Yunus’ seven principles of social business to present six emergent questions challenging how blockchain can improve the sustainability of social ventures and support the fulfilment of the principles. Our contribution is a social business blockchain model, codifying Yunus’ principles as smart contract functions, offering novel insights into how blockchain could be utilised to promote the coexistence of social and economic logics (i.e. the defining characteristics of a social business). In addition, it demonstrates that implementation of this technology elicits new types of trust relationships between stakeholders, social businesses and the blockchain, which can be facilitated through the use of smart contracts.
IntroductionWhat are now called “social machines” have been around for decades as part of a computer-driven wave of digitalization that has taken over developed societies around the world, including but not limited to the invention of the Internet. People and machines are becoming increasingly integrated through computing power, data processing and storage, information
Victoria L. Lemieux, Atefeh Mashatan, Reihaneh Safavi–Naini, Jeremy Clark
IntroductionIn his 2004 book, The Medici Effect, Francis Johansson describes how creativity and innovation emerge when new ideas are begotten of existing ideas (Johansson, 2004). As ideas bounce off one another, they sometimes stick and form new combinations, and these recombinant ideas generate better ideas. When a person steps into the intersection of disciplines or
Mohd Anuar Mat Isa, Muzaffar Hamzah, Daimler Benz Alebaba
A variety of mobile devices and applications have spread the usability of blockchain solutions to over 5.27 billion unique mobile phone users. The rising of Bitcoin price up to USD 50,000 in March 2021 has made many blockchain mobile wallets and smart contracts DApps popular for current and future investment of cryptocurrency and digital-asset managements. To understand the trend, this chapter will present the design and implementation of mobile blockchain DApps using Android Studio together with Ethereum smart contract as the digital-asset management tool. Java Android and Ethereum Web3-Java APIs will be demonstrated as a practical deployment of the mobile DApps. The logic and decision-making of the mobile DApps will be demonstrated and coded as a smart contract. The source codes of the mobile DApps and smart-contract were published in Github as open-source codes for those who are interested to build and run the project.
The blockchain and cryptoasset sector, since coming to the attention of the mainstream business and financial markets during the bitcoin bull run of 2017, continues to accelerate and evolve rapidly. Decentralized finance (DeFi), a new iteration of what was previously referred to as open finance, has emerged as an innovative use case and service enabled by blockchain technology. As with any innovation or new tool, however, there remains a range of questions and considerations that will have to be addressed prior to wider adoption and utilization. This research attempts to contextualize the development of DeFi, frame it within the blockchain and cryptoasset sector, and explain potential obstacles and challenges to further development. Subsequent to this examination of DeFi trends, challenges, and opportunities, a potential framework for further development and implementation will be presented. Outlined and written in a manner approachable to both practitioners and academic users, this research should be used a springboard for further discussion, analysis, and progress.
Guych Nuryyev, Anastasia Spyridou, Simon Yeh, Chen-Chang Lo
Hospitality businesses might achieve a competitive advantage by adopting cryptocurrency payments. This study provides insight into the factors that influence hospitality businesses’ intention to use new digital payments based on a conceptual approach. One of the contributions to the literature is in integrating an external variable – perceived security – into the Technology Acceptance Model. Perceived security is considered a strong predictor for a new payment technology adoption. This study also contributes to the academic research by illuminating potential directions for future empirical research.
The global financial market is influenced by relatively new technologies such as cryptocurrencies; namely Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and others. Cryptocurrencies are a challenging area in finance that requires additional attention from the academic community as they can have a potentially large impact on society and the economy.
Blockchain technology is rapidly gaining the attention of financial institutions around the world, especially among decision makers in Islamic financial institutions who are planning to apply this innovative technology into their institutions activities which could be an upright solution for their issues and challenges. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on financial technology by discussing some of the innovative applications of blockchain in Islamic financial institutions. In addition, this paper sheds light on the main opportunities and challenges facing application of Blockchain Technology in the Islamic financial industry and highlight the way forward to address these issues. Relying on the previous literature and analysis; this paper confirms the enormous opportunities for utilizing blockchain technology in various Islamic financial applications such as Waqf, Zakat and Sukuk. On the other hand, the main challenges towards implementing blockchain in this industry are the complexity of Islamic finance products added to the opacity of its application which end up with unclear regulations and lack of standards.
Mehdi Montakhabi, Shenja van der Graaf, Akash Madhusudan, Roozbeh Sarenche · 5 authors
This paper explores the applications of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) electricity trading. It highlights the challenges and trade-offs of applying three different DLTs: Blockchain, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), and Holochain. First, the study introduces the energy transition concept in the smart city context. Second, P2P electricity trading and its supporting trading mechanisms are introduced. Third, DLTs are defined and three different types of DLTs are introduced. Forth, possibilities, challenges, and consequences of applying DLTs in electricity trading are explained. Last, applying DLTs for P2P electricity trading from different aspects are discussed. This paper provides a benchmark for applying DLTs to foster energy transition in smart cities. It highlights how this type of technology can serve smart circular economy.
Abstract The increasing daily use of virtual currency (cryptocurrency) is being adopted worldwide for many legal and illegal transactions. Cryptocurrency technology operates on a network that allows people to make payments around the world without any middleman. Since the technology was first developed, it became popular, and the price of cryptocurrencies started to rise and became unstable. In terms of the returns gained from investing in cryptocurrencies, they have been huge in recent times, but there has always been a question about their existence and reliability. A cryptocurrency is a digital process that relies on the use of an encryption system for security primarily. Despite the challenges and problems facing cryptocurrencies, the success of Bitcoin has led several companies to search for alternative digital currencies. This paper tries to compare two cryptocurrencies - Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) with respect to their stability and understanding its trends in the recent period.
Public blockchains have spurred the growing popularity of decentralized transactions and smart contracts, especially on the financial market. However, public blockchains exhibit their limitations on the transaction throughput, storage availability, and compute capacity. To avoid transaction gridlock, public blockchains impose large fees and per-block resource limits, making it difficult to accommodate the ever-growing high transaction demand. Previous research endeavors to improve the scalability and performance of blockchain through various technologies, such as side-chaining, sharding, secured off-chain computation, communication network optimizations, and efficient consensus protocols. However, these approaches have not attained a widespread adoption due to their inability in delivering a cloud-like performance, in terms of the scalability in transaction throughput, storage, and compute capacity. In this work, we determine that the major obstacle to public blockchain scalability is their underlying unstructured P2P networks. We further show that a centralized network can support the deployment of decentralized smart contracts. We propose a novel approach for achieving scalable decentralization: instead of trying to make blockchain scalable, we deliver decentralization to already scalable cloud by using an Ethereum smart contract. We introduce Blockumulus, a framework that can deploy decentralized cloud smart contract environments using a novel technique called overlay consensus. Through experiments, we demonstrate that Blockumulus is scalable in all three dimensions: computation, data storage, and transaction throughput. Besides eliminating the current code execution and storage restrictions, Blockumulus delivers a transaction latency between 2 and 5 seconds under normal load. Moreover, the stress test of our prototype reveals the ability to execute 20,000 simultaneous transactions under 26 seconds, which is on par with the average throughput of worldwide credit card transactions.
Alfred Taudes, Jakob Hackel, Wolfgang Haunold, Hannes Hermanky
With a view to developing the Eurosystem’s TARGET2-Securities (T2S) system further, we propose a system based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) that covers all major T2S settlement functionalities and investigate it with regard to regulatory compliance, performance, cost efficiency and risk. The system we propose is a federated system comprising European central banks and central securities depositories (CSDs) as node operators. The role of the central banks is to maintain the cash accounts; provide regulatory-approved “smart contract factories” defining workflows for securities issuance, lifecycle management and matching, settlement, auto-collateralization and corporate actions; and perform the oversight function. The CSDs maintain securities accounts, offer notary services for issuers, perform corporate actions, and carry out settlement. CSD nodes collect settlement requests from external trading and clearing systems, forward them to other CSDs for cross-border settlement, bundle them into transaction blocks and prepare the blocks for settlement. The ensuing ledger updates occur via a fully automated consensus process between the central banks. In T2S on DLT, specialized smart contracts provide the flexibility to settle a range of digitally represented assets, define novel workflows – and allow for variable settlement times. Rather than having to conform to a uniform settlement time of T+2, participants can choose among smart contracts that settle within seconds or longer periods of time. This feature is expected to reduce capital costs and, given the DLT-based enforcement of settlement discipline, settlement failures. Apart from conforming to the current regulatory requirements, the DLT framework also enables the central banks and authorized actors to conduct status checks at a granular level and in real time.
Tim Weingärtner, Danielle Alves Batista, Sandro Köchli, Gilles Voutat
Corruption in public procurement is a worldwide appearance that causes immense financial and reputational damages. Especially in developing countries, corruption is a widespread issue due to secrecy and lack of transparency. An important instrument for transparency and accountability assurance is the record which is managed and controlled by recordkeeping systems. Blockchain technology and more precisely blockchain-based smart contracts are emerging technological tools that can be used as recordkeeping systems and a tool to mitigate some of the fraud involving public procurement records. Immutability, transparency, distribution and automation are some of the features of smart contracts already implemented in several applications to avoid malicious human interference. In this paper, we discuss some of the frauds in public procurement, and we propose smart contracts to automatize different stages of the public procurement procedure attempting to fix their biggest current weaknesses. The processes we have focused on include the bidding process, supplier habilitation and delivery verification. In the three subprocesses, common irregularities include human fallibility, improper information disclosure and hidden agreements which concern not only governments but also civil society. To show the feasibility and usability of our proposal, we have implemented a prototype that demonstrates the process using sample data.