Blockchain Papers

Shiv Hari Tewari

No abstract is available for this record.

Kwok Ping Tsang, Zichao Yang

Bitcoin is traded in a number of exchanges, and there is a large and time-varying price dispersion among them. We identify the sources of price dispersion using a standard time-varying vector auto-regression model with stochastic volatility. Using weekly data over the past 3 years, we find that shocks to transaction fees and bitcoin price growth explain on average 20%, and sometimes more than 60%, of the variation of price dispersion. We argue that the two variables are related to the profitability and risk of trading across the exchanges, and the impulse response functions are consistent with our interpretation.

Rina Sriwiji, Arum Handini Primandari

In recent years, Bitcoin has attracted a lot of attention because of its nature that supports encryption technology and monetary units. For traders, Bitcoin becomes a promising investment since its fluctuating prices potentially draw high profit (the higher the risk the higher the return). Unlike co

Günther Schuh, Jan Hicking, Max-Ferdinand Stroh, Justus Benning

The number of available technologies is constantly rising. Be it additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence (AI) or distributed ledger technologies. The choice of the right technologies may decide the fate of a company. Due to the overwhelming amount of information sources, regular technology market research becomes increasingly challenging, especially for SMEs. In order to assist the technology management process, the authors will introduce the architecture of an automated, AI-based technology radar. The architecture will automatically collect data from relevant sources, assess the relevance of the respective technology (i.e. their maturity level) and then visualize it on the radar map.

Faizura Haneem, Hussin Abu, Nazri Kama, Nik Zalbiha · 6 authors

Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed ledger technology that aims to ensure transparency, data security, and integrity. There are rising interest and investment by the governments and industries in Blockchain to deliver significant cost savings and increase efficiency. Identifying Blockchain initiatives that are currently implemented in the government world-wide could improve understanding as well as set benchmarks for specific countries. However, although some review studies on Blockchain initiatives have been carried out, there are very few studies that uncover Blockchain initiatives implemented by the government in Asian countries. Hence, this study reviews Blockchain initiatives in the five-top e-government development index (EGDI) countries in Asia; South Korea, Singapore, Japan, United Arab Emirates, and Cyprus. We strategized our review methods by utilizing relevant keyword searches in existing literature, books, academic journals, conferences, and industrial reports. The results of this study will help other researchers and practitioners to recognize the current stage of Blockchain initiatives in the government of Asian countries.

Theophilus Onyekachukwu Oshoba, Nafiu Ikeoluwa Hammed, Olushola Damilare Odejobi

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud computing to achieve scalability and agility, ensuring compliance and maintaining secure audit trails in cloud configuration management have become critical challenges. Traditional configuration management approaches often lack transparency, are vulnerable to tampering, and offer limited assurance to regulators and stakeholders in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and government. This paper proposes a Blockchain-Enabled Compliance and Audit Trail Model for Cloud Configuration Management, designed to enhance accountability, trust, and regulatory alignment through the integration of distributed ledger technology. The model employs a layered architecture comprising configuration management tools, a blockchain layer, compliance enforcement mechanisms, and user-facing dashboards. Configuration changes initiated through DevOps pipelines or cloud-native tools are first validated against compliance requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or ISO 27001. Approved changes are then immutably recorded on a blockchain, ensuring tamper-proof logs that serve as an authoritative audit trail. Smart contracts embedded within the blockchain automate compliance enforcement by validating configuration states in real time, rejecting or flagging non-compliant changes before deployment. Key features of the framework include immutable audit trails, automated compliance validation, multi-stakeholder transparency, and cryptographic assurance of integrity. The use of blockchain ensures that no single entity can alter audit records, fostering trust between cloud providers, enterprises, and regulators. Interoperability with APIs allows integration into diverse cloud environments and DevOps workflows, enabling seamless adoption without disrupting existing operations. Use cases span across sectors where compliance is mission-critical: financial services requiring stringent auditability, healthcare systems protecting sensitive patient data, and government services demanding transparent accountability. While challenges remain—such as blockchain scalability, transaction costs, and integration complexity—the model offers a promising pathway toward resilient, compliance-driven cloud governance. Ultimately, it transforms cloud configuration management into a secure, verifiable, and regulator-friendly ecosystem.

Hailin Chen, Gang Xu, Yuling Chen, Xiu‐Bo Chen · 8 authors

Most existing blockchain schemes are based on the design concept “openness and transparency” to realize data security, which usually require transaction data to be presented in the form of plaintext. However, it inevitably brings the issues with respect to data privacy and operating performance. In this paper, we proposed a novel blockchain scheme called Cipherchain, which can process and maintain transaction data in the form of ciphertext while the characteristics of immutability and auditability are guaranteed. Specifically in our scheme, transactions can be encrypted locally based on a searchable encryption scheme called multi-user public key encryption with conjunctive keyword search (mPECK), and can be accessed by multiple specific participants after appended to the globally consistent distributed ledger. By introducing execution-consensus-update paradigm of transaction flow, Cipherchain cannot only make it possible for transaction data to exist in the form of ciphertext, but also guarantee the overall system performance not greatly affected by cryptographic operations and other local execution work. In addition, Cipherchain is a promising scheme to realize the technology combination of “blockchain+cloud computing” and “permissioned blockchain+public blockchain”.

Dimitrios Sikeridis, Ali Bidram, Michael Devetsikiotis, Matthew J. Reno

Distribution and transmission protection systems are considered vital parts of modern smart grid ecosystems due to their ability to isolate faulted segments and preserve the operation of critical loads. Current protection schemes increasingly utilize cognitive methods to proactively modify their actions according to extreme power system changes. However, the effectiveness and robustness of these information-driven solutions rely entirely on the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of the data and control signals exchanged on the underlying relay communication networks. In this paper, we outline a scalable adaptive protection platform for distribution systems, and introduce a novel blockchain-based distributed network architecture to enhance data exchange security among the smart grid protection relays. The proposed mechanism utilizes a tiered blockchain architecture to counter the current technology limitations providing low latency with better scalability. The decentralized nature removes singular points of failure or contamination, enabling direct secure communication between smart grid relays. We also present a security analysis that demonstrates how the proposed framework prohibits any alterations on the blockchain ledger providing integrity and authenticity of the exchanged data (e.g., realtime measurements/relay settings). Finally, the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated through simulation on a blockchain benchmarking framework with the results demonstrating a promising solution for secure smart grid protection system communication.

Hao Guo, Wanxin Li, Mark Nejad, Chien‐Chung Shen

Autonomous vehicles are capable of sensing their environment and navigating without any human inputs. However, when autonomous vehicles are involved in accidents between themselves or with human subjects, liability must be indubitably decided based on accident forensics. This paper proposes a blockchain-inspired event recording system for autonomous vehicles. Specifically, we design the mechanism of “Proof-of-Event” with a dynamic federation consensus to achieve indisputable accident forensics by providing trustable and verifiable event information. We propose a dynamic federation consensus scheme to verify and confirm the new block of event data in an efficient way without any central authority. We conduct numerical analyses and prototyped experiments based on the proposed fast leader election algorithm and the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network. The results show that our system is effective and feasible in generating and storing accident records in blockchain-based vehicular networks. The security capability of the proposed scheme is also discussed against multiple threats and attack scenarios.

Hui Cui, Zhiguo Wan, Xinlei Wei, ‪Surya Nepal‬ · 5 authors

The concept of functional encryption (FE) has been introduced to address the shortcomings of public-key encryption (PKE) in many emerging applications which require both data storage and data sharing (e.g., cloud storage service). One of the major issues existing in most FE schemes is the efficiency, as they are built from bilinear pairings of which the computation is very expensive. A widely accepted solution to this problem is outsourcing the heavy workloads to a powerful third party and leaving the user with the light computation. Nevertheless, it is impractical to assume that the third party (e.g., the cloud) will provide free services. To our knowledge, no attention has been paid to the payment procedure between the user and the third party in an FE with outsourced decryption (FEOD) scheme under the assumption that neither of them should be trusted. Leveraging the transactions on cryptocurrencies supported by the blockchain technology, in this paper, we aim to design FE with payable outsourced decryption (FEPOD) schemes. The payment in an FEPOD scheme is achieved through a blockchain-based cryptocurrency, which enables the user to pay a third party when it correctly completes the outsourced decryption. We define the adversarial model for FEPOD schemes, and then present a generic construction of FEPOD schemes. Also, we evaluate the performance of the proposed generic construction by implementing a concrete FEPOD scheme over a blockchain platform.

Benoît Libert, Khoa Nguyen, Alain Passelègue, Radu Ţiţiu

No abstract is available for this record.

Michael E. Woods

What would Abraham Lincoln do? Can his wisdom elucidate 21st-century problems? Particularly during times of discord and polarization, Americans regularly revisit the life and legacy of the sixteenth president. Writers of all political stripes have loved Lincoln and loathed him; some eagerly co-opt his image, while others curse his memory. Various left-leaning authors have praised Lincoln’s virtues, rebuked his racism, and debunked the “Great Emancipator” narrative.1 As a group, conservatives tend to be more critical. Libertarian revisionists, for instance, have condemned Lincoln for using the Civil War as a pretext to aggrandize his power. By their reckoning, an ongoing decline in American liberty can be traced directly to Lincoln’s presidency.2 Others have tarred Lincoln as a socialist sympathizer with dictatorial tendencies.3 In contrast, conservative scholar Thomas Krannawitter has defended Lincoln against attacks from the right and left alike.4 Lincoln’s legacy remains fiercely contested within and between segments of the political spectrum.The worst of these books, which are legion, rip facts and quotations out of context and arrange them to support a pre-ordained partisan position. But when trained scholars, who respect nuance and are well-versed in primary and secondary sources, take up the case, their findings deserve close consideration. A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity is a good example. Co-authored by prolific Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer and economist Norton Garfinkle, this book reappraises Lincoln in light of the economic issues, including wealth disparities and diminishing social mobility, which shape modern political debate. Much like scholars who probed Lincoln’s racial beliefs during the Civil Rights Movement,5 Holzer and Garfinkle invite us to reevaluate Lincoln’s economic ideas in the era of Occupy Wall Street and the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. Lincoln regularly fell short of 20th-century standards for racial egalitarianism, but Holzer and Garfinkle find that Lincoln has much to teach us about liberty, equality, and economic opportunity. They contend that “Lincoln, as our most clear-eyed president, was the first to fully understand what America is all about and to tell us so in unfailingly clear terms how to use positive government action to build and maintain a successful middle-class society.” (257)The authors develop their two-pronged thesis in a fast-paced and accessible book divided into two parts. Part One focuses on Lincoln’s life, weaving his economic thought into an engaging narrative which covers his humble origins, swift rise to prominence, and tumultuous presidency. The main point is that Lincoln, a quintessential antislavery Whig, consistently supported public policies that fostered upward mobility by creating opportunities for working people to attain middle-class comfort and security. For Lincoln, government was part of the solution, not part of the problem. Tariffs, internal improvements, and investment in education helped make his dream of a vibrant middle-class society a reality—at least in the North.Lincoln’s middle-class American Dream also shaped his stance on slavery. Restrictions on slavery’s expansion would shield socially mobile northerners from the stagnant, aristocratic South, where laborers languished in servitude or grinding poverty. Fully convinced of American—specifically free-state—exceptionalism, Lincoln believed that the fate of working people was at stake in the battle over slavery’s westward extension. It was to protect their opportunities that Lincoln joined the Republican Party and, eventually, fought the Civil War. “Lincoln focused his entire political career, in peace and war alike, in pursuit of economic opportunity for the widest possible circle of hardworking Americans,” write Holzer and Garfinkle. “To achieve this ambition he was willing to fight a war to maintain the perpetual existence of the one nation in the world that held the highest promise for people dedicated to his cause.” (2) Economic ideals formed the bedrock of Lincoln’s antislavery Unionism.After outlining the origins and substance of Lincoln’s economic worldview, the authors argue that it shaped his handling of the Union war effort and his eventual support for abolition. At times Lincoln’s economic vision seems rather tangential to the narrative, particularly during discussions of Civil War strategy and campaigns. But the authors demonstrate the depth of Lincoln’s commitment to upwardly mobile free labor and illustrate how profoundly it shaped his Unionism and his critique of slavery. Anyone wondering why “the Union” mattered so much to Lincoln, or why an Illinois attorney was so preoccupied by the fate of Kansas, will find compelling explanations here. As a fresh and accessible discussion of Lincoln’s political and economic thought, A Just and Generous Nation is a welcome contribution to a crowded field.Part Two traces the post-1865 history of Lincolnian political economy. Building on Garfinkle’s The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth: The Fight for a Productive Middle-Class Economy (2007), the authors argue that American politics has hinged on a contest between Lincoln’s version of the American Dream, upheld by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and an elitist Gospel of Wealth which coalesced during the Gilded Age and persists under the guise of supply-side economics. Ironies abound. Post-Civil War economic development supplanted Lincoln’s society of independent producers with one dominated by corporate titans who defined freedom in Social Darwinian terms and rejected public programs to help working people. Long-cherished ideals of thrift, industriousness, and personal responsibility now justified staggering inequality. According to the increasingly authoritative Gospel of Wealth, the notion that one could rise through hard work was “transmuted from Lincoln’s message of hope” into a “rationale for . . . condemning the working poor for their very poverty.” (175)When Lincoln’s vision returned in the 20th century, it was primarily embraced by Democrats, who consciously aligned themselves with the first Republican president. None did so more faithfully than Franklin Roosevelt. Holzer and Garfinkle contend that the New Deal “was a modern version of Lincoln’s commitment to government action to support a prosperous middle-class society.” (198) It updated Lincoln’s policy prescriptions to fit the realities of an industrial society, but its spirit was similar. Crucially, it worked. For several generations, key New Deal innovations, including unemployment insurance, regulation of financial markets, and Social Security, undergirded a flourishing middle-class society. Late in the 20th century, however, conservatives counterattacked by giving the Gospel of Wealth a populist appeal. Claiming to be Lincoln’s heirs, they sponsored policies that created vast disparities of wealth and limited upward mobility for the poor. Perhaps nothing better demonstrated their misappropriation of Lincoln than Ronald Reagan’s speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Reagan contended that Republicans adhered to Lincoln’s principles, quoting several memorable maxims as proof: “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. . . . You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.” (224) Days later, a sharp-eyed journalist showed that the sayings were not Lincoln’s at all, but aphorisms written fifty years after Appomattox by William Boetcker, a minister who conscripted Lincoln into serving his anti-trade union activities.Holzer and Garfinkle admire Lincoln’s American Dream and urge present and future policymakers to rediscover it. They argue that Lincoln “left a legacy of guidance for subsequent American leaders” to achieve his worthy goals. (156) In a prescriptive final chapter, they endorse proposals, from an estate tax hike to investment in infrastructure that would harmonize federal policy with Lincoln’s ideals. They acknowledge the difficulty of selling these programs to a skeptical electorate and a recalcitrant Congress. But they also demonstrate that Americans need not look overseas to figure out how to use “the resources of the federal government to give reality to the idea of America as an enduring middle-class society.” (259) Lincoln and Roosevelt can be our guides.Some of the ideas in this book will be familiar to specialists. In 1978, renowned historian Gabor Boritt published Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, in which he argued that the “right to rise” was essential to Lincoln’s vision of a just and prosperous society. Striving to find consistency between Lincoln’s obscure early career and his illustrious presidency, Boritt argued that Lincoln’s commitment to “the ideal that all men should receive a full, good, and ever increasing reward for their labors so that they might have the opportunity to rise in life” was a “central theme” of his political life.6 Early on, it encouraged Lincoln to champion a Whiggish program of state-supported economic development. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), it inspired Lincoln’s antislavery activity and steeled him to battle the Confederacy. Published in a time of economic stagnation, popular disillusionment, and ideological polarization, Boritt’s study remains relevant today, and Holzer and Garfinkle cite it approvingly. Their book can be read as an effort to reinvigorate and popularize Boritt’s thesis after forty years of political history shaped by the Reagan Revolution and the ascendancy of the Gospel of Wealth.Holzer and Garfinkle’s post-1865 analysis and policy prescriptions distinguish A Just and Generous Nation from Boritt’s work and will likely make their volume more controversial. Some readers might balk at the authors’ candid search for a useful past. But if we refuse to learn from history, what good is it? Still, even the most sympathetic readers may wonder if this book will change many minds. Holzer and Garfinkle write with great passion and sophistication. But in a contentious political climate, a direct appeal to Lincoln’s legacy may not win many converts. The recent popular literature on Lincoln—not to mention the sentiments expressed in customer reviews and other online sounding boards—suggests that many people who support policies associated with the Gospel of Wealth also detest Lincoln. In this context, it would require Lincolnian political skill to convince skeptics that an active federal government can promote individual freedom, upward mobility, and economic growth.Some specialists may also wish that the authors had explored the less-inspiring foundations of the middle-class northern society for which Lincoln spoke, fought, and died. In terms of labor and social mobility, it was certainly very different from the Old South; no honest reader of James H. Hammond’s “Mudsill” address could deny it. But the slave plantation was an integral part of the national and global economy.7 Northern workers processed slave-grown cotton. Northern consumers smoked slave-grown tobacco. Northern farmers sold food to slaveholding buyers. These interconnections suggest that antebellum America’s distinctive but interdependent regional economies cannot be compartmentalized. Upward mobility for northern laborers may have been threatened by slavery’s expansion, but it was also bolstered by slavery’s existence. When one reflects on the dispossession of Native Americans—who appear as shadowy foes during Lincoln’s abbreviated Black Hawk War service—the story of northern economic opportunity grows even grimmer.These observations do not discredit Holzer and Garfinkle’s key arguments about Lincoln’s economic and political ideals. They have grounded Lincoln’s career in an inspirational vision of broad opportunity, and they have clarified what Lincoln was doing when he fought to preserve, and eventually expand, American liberty. But one hopes that efforts to revive Lincoln’s American Dream will not promote veiled or invisible injustices. Lincoln’s contemporaries readily ignored the miseries of those who were overlooked or oppressed by the American Dream. It would be easy for us to do the same, particularly because we have outsourced so much of the labor exploitation and environmental devastation that makes modern middle-class life possible. Holzer and Garfinkle have explored many pertinent questions about liberty, opportunity, and public policy in the 19th and the 21st centuries. Hopefully, their work will inspire other scholars to follow suit.

Makoto Yano, Chris Dai, Kenichi Masuda, Yoshio Kishimoto

As the blockchainBlockchain industry becomes larger, a new decentralized financial ecosystemDecentralized financial ecosystem is now developing. New financial instruments, represented by terms like tokensTokens, coinsCoins, and ICOsInitial Coin Offering (ICO) are introduced to finance projects on blockchainBlockchain. BlockchainBlockchain is a technology that makes it possible to assign ownershipOwnership of each piece of data to individuals who create that piece. As Pu and Yano (Blockchain and Crypt Currency: A High-Quality Marketplace for Crypt Data. Springer, 2020) points out, that may be the first step towards creating a high quality marketHigh-quality markets. At the same time, like a lock, blockchainBlockchain is merely a technology that is designed to protect a type of property. Such a technology is of no use unless the society agrees a proper set of rules concerning how to prevent the abuse of the technology, what should be protected and how to protect it. The present study is concerned with this issue.

Dameng Luo, Yun Zhang

Policy tools are the mechanism by which policy ideas and policy goals are transformed into specific policy actions, the bridge connecting goals and results, and the necessary path for policy implementation. The choice of policy tools will be affected by multiple factors such as policy environment, policy objectives, policy objects, governance structure, and tool characteristics. And constructed a policy tool selection model. Based on this theory, it analyzes the selection of policy tools for characteristic towns in the fields of planning, comprehensive development, operation, investment and financing. The article believes that the policy tools that can be used in the planning stage of characteristic towns are: deregulation, decentralization, families and communities, social organizations, public participation, contract outsourcing, etc. The policy tools that can be used in comprehensive development are: deregulation, financial allocation, contract outsourcing, public-private partnership, etc. The policy tools that can be used during the operation phase are: regulation and deregulation, franchising, privatization, user payment, government purchases, social forces, and public participation. The policy tools that can be used in investment and financing are: bonds, funds, product crowdfunding, financial leasing, PPP financing, etc.

Lingxiao Song

Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology (DLT), is expected to enable a highly decentralized and trusted business environment. Yet the business pursuit for profit maximization calls for a more centralized structure and thereby conflicts with the decentralized ideology of blockchain. In the blockchain-driven supply chain finance (SCF) platforms, focal buyer companies can issue “cash tokens” which are blockchain-based electronic invoices/certificates with due days of payment and pay the “cash tokens” to their direct suppliers instead of using traditional open-account techniques. Direct suppliers can hold the “cash tokens” to maturity, use the “cash tokens” as collateral for loans, or pay the “cash tokens” to the upper tier suppliers in goods transactions (we call the last option “token delivery” in the following). Because the “cash tokens” are delivered tier by tier based on transactions, mid-tier suppliers can become a “bottleneck” in the blockchain-driven SCF application. In this paper, we consider the supply chain network as a complex system where firms are self-organized and adaptive to their competitive environment. Via this theoretical lens, we investigate how the mid-tier suppliers’ token delivery and supply chain transaction structures interplay over time in the blockchain-driven SCF platforms; meanwhile, how industry characteristics such as the number of firms in each tier and firm size in each tier can influence the interactions. We propose that in the short term, blockchain technology increases mid-tier suppliers’ transaction efficiency and thus motivates mid-tier suppliers’ token delivery and promotes the decentralization of supply chain transaction structure, i.e., upper-tier suppliers make new transaction links with mid-tier suppliers and focal buyers; in the long term, the more decentralized supply chain transaction structure will in turn negatively affect mid-tier suppliers’ token delivery motivation and drive the supply chains more centralized, i.e., the upper-tier suppiers start to face financing difficulties again and some of the transaction links will diminish. Besides, supply chains with a flatter organizational structure, a larger setup cost gap between mid-tier suppliers and upper-tier suppliers, and a higher operation cost of upper-tier suppliers can remain decentralized longer. We will test our theoretical propositions by a series of simulation experiments in an agent-based model.

Daniel Mago Vistro, Attique Ur Rehman, Adnan Abid, Muhammad Shoaib Farooq · 5 authors

Block chain is the technology that backs up cloud computing and internet of things in most cases such as cryptocurrency. It is often known as a public and decentralized ledger. The blockchain technology stores data in the form of blocks based on its type and data programming, these blocks are linked together, thus, named as blockchain. Some case studies where blockchain has been successfully used such as in the sectors of public health, public safety, smart cities, supply chains etc. but have revealed that blockchain remains at the heart of bitcoin. The compilation does not highlight the issues and challenges of blockchain despite its need. The data is retrieved with corresponding technology of IoT and Cloud Computing. This article discusses the ability of blockchain to facilitate various walks of life other than just banking and finance. The article builds strong foundation for blockchain by acknowledging its abilities and the phenomenal potentials that it holds.

Kidjie Saguin, M. Ramesh

Educational systems around the world have undergone major reforms since the 1980s, with largely disappointing results. The objective of this paper is to understand the reasons behind the lackluster results with the purpose of devising ways to address them. Analysis in the paper is based on the understanding that the education sector is characterized by distinct functional imperatives that need to be addressed in policy responses that must involve a wide array of actors to be effective. In this view, education policy is fundamentally about establishing a governance structure to ensure that all the essential functions necessary to achieve the chosen policy goals are performed. Accordingly, the paper proposes a governance framework for education comprising political and operational functions, which it then applies to education policy reforms in the Philippines since the 1970s. The analysis finds that the reforms have focused on financing and decentralization issues while overlooking many other critical governance functions. The lackluster results are unsurprising given that the sector has been beset by many problems unrelated to centralized bureaucratic administration and which have been left unattended. The conclusions regarding the importance of comprehensive governance to emerge from this study are relevant not only for understanding education policy reforms in the Philippines and elsewhere but will also help develop a fuller understanding of the functioning of the education sector in general.

Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich

No abstract is available for this record.

John Kolb

Blockchain-based smart contracts have emerged as a popular means of enforcing agreements among a collection of parties without a prior assumption of trust. However, it has proven difficult to write correct contracts that are robust when operating in the adversarial environment of public blockchains. This thesis evaluates the ability of a domain-specific contract programming language to support the expression and systematic testing of practical smart contracts. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Quartz, a contract language based on the state machine model of execution.The design and evaluation of Quartz is grounded in a suite of case study smart contracts. These are intended to span a wide range of application scenarios and design patterns encountered in practice by contract developers. The language's implementation is organized around the translation of a contract to two targets: a formal specification expressed in TLA+ and an implementation expressed in Solidity. Through its support for model checking contract specifications, Quartz enables the discovery of implementation flaws identical to those that have compromised real-world smart contracts. Moreover, its generated Solidity code imposes at most minor execution overhead compared to equivalent handwritten code. Finally, we discuss Quartz's future potential to validate contracts against economic notions of correctness, which are often central concerns in contract design yet are not addressed by current verification techniques.

Irina Buzu

Blockchain, smart contracts and copyright management disruption. The article examines the differences between new, blockchain and smart contract-based private ordering regime and the fundamental components of copyright law, such as exceptions and limitations, the doctrine of exhaustion, restrictions on formalities, the public domain and fair remuneration.

Moritz Tobias Bruckner, Adeline Frenzel, Daniel Veit

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) allows organizations and individuals to benefit from a collective source of intelligence, skills and insights from a global population, but MTurk withdraws from responsibilities and the obligation of overlooking payment transactions. Consequently, there is no contractual agreement between the crowd worker and the requester on when payments should be authorized. Requesters even obtain ownership of the work without having to pay for it. This situation of lock-up poses a serious issue for crowd workers. As a solution to this problem, the present study introduces smart contracts to transactions on crowd work platforms, arguing that smart contracts can mitigate risks from lock-up situations and support trust, through non-alterable terms and conditions imprinted into the code of a smart contract. This research conceptualizes an online experimental study to validate the trust building and risk mitigating effects of smart contracts in crowd work transactions on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Dirk G. Baur, Thomas Dimpfl

No abstract is available for this record.

EBELOGU Christopher U, ORIAKHI Joseph E, OJO Samuel D, AGU Edward O

Cryptocurrency is generally known to be a digital record of ownership of nominal balance which can be used to pay for transactions. Thus, for any transaction, the buyer gives instructions to transfer ownership of a certain amount of his balances tothe seller. The use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum in performing online transactions has been on the rise andalmost accepted generally in the world. Africa as a continent is not left out in the adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.Today, in 2019, the question of whether or not digital money can actually become a useful and secure part of the Nigerianeconomy is being seriously debated. This paper explores how cryptocurrency technology can be a means of leveraging theNigeria economy and its extremely large population.

Nenad Tomić, Violeta Todorović

Cryptocurrencies have been in the center of interest of both scientific and professional public for over ten years. Due to the volatile exchange rate against convertible currencies, investors predominantly use cryptocurrencies as an instrument of speculative investment, while their use in the payments is at a negligible level. On June 18, 2019, the Internet giant Facebook announced the creation of a consortium of financial and technology companies aimed at establishing a global cryptocurrency with stable value called Libra. It is planned to create an open blockchain through a new programming language, which will serve development teams in the future for creation of smart contracts. The subject of research in the paper will be the potential operational performances of Libra concept. The basis for the research will be a white paper published by Facebook and knowledge about the functioning of other cryptocurrencies, notably Bitcoin. The aim of the paper is to highlight the expected economic and security implications of Libra concept.