This paper is a review of the literature on fintech and its interaction with banking. Included in fintech are innovations in payment systems (including cryptocurrencies), credit markets (including P2P lending), and insurance, with Blockchain-assisted smart contracts playing a role. The paper provides a definition of fintech, examines some statistics and stylized facts, and then reviews the theoretical and empirical literature. The review is organized around four main research questions. The paper summarizes our knowledge on these questions and concludes with questions for future research.
Robiyanto Robiyanto, Yosua Arif Susanto, Rihfenti Ernayani
Cryptocurrency market is an attractive field for researchers in finance nowadays. One topic that can be studied is related to the existence of anomalies in the cryptocurrency market. This research was conducted to examine whether the cryptocurrency market, especially on Bitcoin and Litecoin, has day-of-the-week and month-of-the-year effects. The Bitcoin and Litecoin were used as objects because they were a cryptocurrency with a large market capitalization. The data used were monthly cryptocurrency returns for examining the month-of-the-year-effect and daily returns for examining the day-of-the-week-effect from 2014-2018. GARCH (1,1) analysis was done to see these effects on the cryptocurrency market. The results indicate that the phenomena of day-of-the-week and month-of-the-year effect existed in the cryptocurrency market. Therefore, the cryptocurrency market was not an efficient market. The pattern in the Bitcoin and Litecoin could later be utilized by investors. The investors should buy Bitcoin at the end of January and they should sell them at the end of February. While, for the investors who traded daily, can trade Bitcoin in Monday, Wednesday and Thursday because in these days, the Bitcoin have the potential to generate daily profits. JEL Classification: G14, G19 DOI: https://doi.org/10.26905/jkdp.v23i3.3005
This paper examines the impact of South Korea’s ban on Bitcoin futures on intraday spot volatility, liquidity and volatility–volume relationship. The results show that while reducing the permanent component of intraday spot volatility, the imposition of a ban on Bitcoin futures trading increases the transitory component. For intraday spot liquidity, different liquidity proxies indicate heterogeneous results. Moreover, we identify a positive and unidirectional effect of intraday spot volume on volatility. This effect appears to be stronger in the post-ban period. Overall, over the past few months, South Korea’s Bitcoin futures ban generally has had a significant impact on the intraday dynamics of the Bitcoin spot market.
Andreas Kamilaris, Agusti Fonts, Francesc X. Prenafeta‐Boldú
Blockchain is an emerging digital technology allowing ubiquitous financial transactions among distributed untrusted parties, without the need of intermediaries such as banks. This article examines the impact of blockchain technology in agriculture and food supply chain, presents existing ongoing projects and initiatives, and discusses overall implications, challenges and potential, with a critical view over the maturity of these projects. Our findings indicate that blockchain is a promising technology towards a transparent supply chain of food, with many ongoing initiatives in various food products and food-related issues, but many barriers and challenges still exist, which hinder its wider popularity among farmers and systems. These challenges involve technical aspects, education, policies and regulatory frameworks.
Ariel Futoransky, Carlos Sarraute, Ariel Waissbein, Daniel Fernandez · 6 authors
We are tackling the problem of trading real-world private information using only cryptographic protocols and a public blockchain to guarantee honest transactions. In this project, we consider three types of agents --buyers, sellers and notaries-- interacting in a decentralized privacy-preserving data marketplace (dPDM) such as the Wibson data marketplace. This framework offers infrastructure and financial incentives for individuals to securely sell personal information while preserving personal privacy. Here we provide an efficient cryptographic primitive for the secure exchange of data in a dPDM, which occurs as an atomic operation wherein the data buyer gets access to the data and the data seller gets paid simultaneously.
User authentication can rely on various factors (e.g., a password, a cryptographic key, biometric data) but should not reveal any secret or private information. This seemingly paradoxical feat can be achieved through zero-knowledge proofs. Unfortunately, naive password-based approaches still prevail on the web. Multi-factor authentication schemes address some of the weaknesses of the traditional login process, but generally have deployability issues or degrade usability even further as they assume users do not possess adequate hardware. This assumption no longer holds: smartphones with biometric sensors, cameras, short-range communication capabilities, and unlimited data plans have become ubiquitous. In this paper, we show that, assuming the user has such a device, both security and usability can be drastically improved using an augmented password-authenticated key agreement (PAKE) protocol and message authentication codes.
Tamadun Malayonesia yang sarjananya menggunakan bahasa Melayu sebagai pengungkap kecendekiawanannya, masih belum diiktiraf kewujudannya oleh sarjana Barat kerana ketiadaan bukti bertulis pencapaiannya yang tinggi dalam KeJuTSAMA/STEM. Dalam usaha memperbaiki keadaan inilah maka kami telah melakukan penyelidikan, ekskavasi ilmu, sejak 1990-an bagi memperoleh unsur-unsur sains dan matematik (SAMA) dalam bahasa Melayu yang asli dan terkehadapan daripada bangsa lain sezamannya terutamanya Inggeris. Di sini dipaparkan beberapa hasil penyelidikan yang mutakhir tentang perkara tersebut, khususnya untuk bidang angka. Ditunjukkan bahawa bangsa Malayonesia berbahasa Melayu adalah pencipta terawal di dunia sistem angka perpuluhan seperti sekarang ini, sekaligus menjadikan bangsa pencipta angka kosong yang tertua di dunia. Hal ini bertentangan dengan kepercayaan dunia selama ini bahawa sistem angka perpuluhan dengan kosong adalah ciptaan tamadun Hindu, Islam atau Khmer Lama. The existence of the Malayonesian civilization in which her scholars used Malay as the their intellectual expresions, has not yet been recognised by Western sholars because of lack of written proof in her achievement in STEM. In an effort to improve the situation, we have done some knowledge excavation since 1990s in order to obtain original elements of science in Malay language which were ahead of their counterpart in different countries in Europe especially UK at the same period of time. The latest results are presented here, particularly in the fields of numerals. It is shown that the Malayonesian numeral decimal system with her own zero symbol is the oldest in the world. This contradicts the present belief that the decimal numeral system was invented by the Hindu, the Islamic or the Old Khmer civilisation.
Abstract With the exponential growth in the number of vital infrastructures such as nuclear plants and transport and distribution networks, these systems have become more susceptible to coordinated cyberattacks. One of the effective approaches used to strengthen the security of these infrastructures is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for surveillance and data collection. However, UAVs themselves are prone to attacks on their collected sensor data. Recently, blockchain (BC) has been proposed as a revolutionary technology that can be integrated within Internet of things (IoT) to provide a desired level of security and privacy. However, the integration of BC within IoT networks, where UAV's sensors constitute a major component, is extremely challenging. The major contribution of this study is twofold:(1) survey the security issues for UAV's collected sensor data, define the security requirements for such systems, and identify ways to address them; and (2) propose a novel BC‐based solution to ensure the security of and the trust between the UAVs and their relevant ground control stations. Our implementation results and analysis show that using UAVs as means for protecting critical infrastructure is greatly enhanced through the utilization of trusted BC‐based unmanned aerial systems.
Tiago M. Fernández‐Caramés, Iván Froiz-Míguez, Óscar Blanco-Novoa, Paula Fraga‐Lamas
Diabetes patients suffer from abnormal blood glucose levels, which can cause diverse health disorders that affect their kidneys, heart and vision. Due to these conditions, diabetes patients have traditionally checked blood glucose levels through Self-Monitoring of Blood Glucose (SMBG) techniques, like pricking their fingers multiple times per day. Such techniques involve a number of drawbacks that can be solved by using a device called Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), which can measure blood glucose levels continuously throughout the day without having to prick the patient when carrying out every measurement. This article details the design and implementation of a system that enhances commercial CGMs by adding Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities to them that allow for monitoring patients remotely and, thus, warning them about potentially dangerous situations. The proposed system makes use of smartphones to collect blood glucose values from CGMs and then sends them either to a remote cloud or to distributed fog computing nodes. Moreover, in order to exchange reliable, trustworthy and cybersecure data with medical scientists, doctors and caretakers, the system includes the deployment of a decentralized storage system that receives, processes and stores the collected data. Furthermore, in order to motivate users to add new data to the system, an incentive system based on a digital cryptocurrency named GlucoCoin was devised. Such a system makes use of a blockchain that is able to execute smart contracts in order to automate CGM sensor purchases or to reward the users that contribute to the system by providing their own data. Thanks to all the previously mentioned technologies, the proposed system enables patient data crowdsourcing and the development of novel mobile health (mHealth) applications for diagnosing, monitoring, studying and taking public health actions that can help to advance in the control of the disease and raise global awareness on the increasing prevalence of diabetes.
The paper contains theoretical considerations on cryptocurrencies in the context of innovation and specifically focuses on the most popular cryptocurrency – bitcoin (BTC). Based on critical analysis of domestic and foreign writings, bitcoin was classified as a modular innovation despite some of its features suggesting the continuous and breakthrough nature of the solution. The conclusion helped positively validate the research hypothesis proposed in this paper according to which cryptocurrencies, despite their characteristics of an incremental and breakthrough innovation, can be treated as modular innovations.
Cryptocurrencies provide an important dimension of innovation to the evolution of the exchange medium we call money. There are now over 2,000 such currencies, and their potential and volume is growing. However, they will, collectively and in volume, create real problems for the monetary system of a country. Central banks, which are institutions tasked with providing monetary stability, are more essential than ever. Yet they will see their problems rise while the power of their traditional tools to control money supply and interest rates — such as reserve requirements and the discount rates — is declining. But the new digital technologies — such as distributed ledgers — and new approaches provide regulatory bodies also with new and potentially powerful tools. The task for central banks and policy makers is not to resist private digital currencies as troublesome irritants, but to create approaches to use, regulate, and incent them in shaping the macro-economic path of their economy. In the process, central banks will also issue their own digital currencies, and a small number of those will become global super-currencies.
For decades, changing technology and policy choices have worked to fragment securities markets, rendering them so dark that neither ownership nor real-time price of securities are generally visible to all parties multilaterally. The policies behind these developments are found in the US National Market System and the EU Market in Financial Instruments Directive, together with universal adoption of the indirect holding system, and have painted Western securities markets into a corner from which escape to full transparency has seemed either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Although the reader has a right to skepticism given the exaggerated promises surrounding blockchain in recent years, we demonstrate in this paper that distributed ledger technology (DLT) contains the potential to lead fragmented securities markets back to multilateral transparency.
Leading markets generally lack transparency in two ways that derive from their basic structure: multiple platforms on which trades in the same security are matched have separate bid/ask queues and are not consolidated in real time (fragmented pricing), and high-speed transfers of securities are enabled by placing ownership of the securities in financial institutions, preventing transparent ownership (depository or street name ownership). The distributed nature of DLT allows multiple copies of the same pricing queue to be held simultaneously by a large number of order-matching platforms, curing the problem of fragmented pricing. This same distributed nature of DLT would allow the issuers of securities to be nodes in a DLT network, returning control over securities ownership to those issuers and thus restoring transparent ownership through direct holding with the issuer.
A serious objection to DLT is that its latency is very high – with a Bitcoin blockchain transaction taking up to 10 minutes. To cure this, we first propose a private network without cumbersome proof-of-work cryptography and, second, introduce into our model the quickly evolving technology of “lightning networks”, which are advanced two-layer off-chain networks conducting high-speed transacting with only periodic memorialization in the permanent DLT network. This paper demonstrates against the background of existing securities trading and settlement that a DLT network could bring multilateral transparency and thus represent the next step in evolution for markets in their current configuration.
Zheng Che, Yu Wang, Juanjuan Zhao, Yan Qiang · 6 authors
With the rapid development of the energy internet, the transaction of distributed renewable energy (DRE) is playing an increasingly important role in the energy market. However, in the transaction model of distributed renewable energy combined with public blockchain technology, nodes in the trading network can join or leave the network at any time without any permission, which hinders the regulation of electricity institutions. Corresponding to the transaction principle, a distributed renewable energy transaction authentication mechanism based on consortium blockchain is proposed in this paper. First, certificate authority nodes were set in the transaction network to provide nodes with access authority by controlling the public keys and private keys of trading participants so that they can complete their identity authentication. Next, essential chaincodes in the transaction authentication were designed and deployed on a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain site, and a simulation experiment of a simple DRE transaction was used to elaborate the details on the transaction process. Finally, the proposed model was evaluated according to its performance and proved to be practical and effective.
Performance measurement has attracted the attention of many researchers in the area of managerial accountability over the last two decades. However, most of them focus on measuring performance only in the private sector. Meanwhile, since several years, especially after the publication of the "New Public Management" doctrine, performance measurement has emerged as an important research priority in the public sector. This does not mean that it has not previously shown interest in the public sector's efficiency problem, but it has been limited in the context of the policy appraisal concept. This concept has functioned more as a tool for assessing public policy delineation and has eventually served to redraft existing policies or practices rather than a system of measurement and performance management of public institutions.Policy evaluation methodologies are very useful, but they can only be used within a framework that assumes the presence of managerial behavior in the public sector. Where legal laws and regulations serve as a basis for dealing with issues, it is very difficult to it is assumed that efficiency will be a fundamental priority. The concept of governance, recent decades, is closely related to the process of modeling assessment procedures. Governance, as such, generally refers to the tools that serve to direct, control and co-ordinate individuals and organizations, partly autonomous ones, in the name of the interests they contribute to (Lynn, Heinrich and Hill, 1999).Some of the recent problems in the area of governance include issues of formal control over authoritative decision-makers and decentralization; focusing on powerful interest groups or goals that are difficult to describe (eg "efficiency" and "high credibility"), as well as comparing different governance regimes.A full description and analysis of the governance model is a prerequisite for further study of performance measurement in public sector activity.The logic of governance in the public sector is simple: lawmakers create the legal framework, administrators deal with enforcement, and the public pays, at least in theory, enjoys the benefits. Lawmakers are elected to act during a mandate (usually four years), but also the administrators (bureaucrats and civil servants) are nominated and supposed to have a long-term career in implementing policies and legal acts. The latter should serve professionally and implement legal acts adopted by lawmakers, using the maximum of their knowledge. There is still an open discussion on how to evaluate the achievements of civil servants and the policy effectiveness they implement.Governance is a division of responsibilities, it should serve as a tool that facilitates the continuous improvement of work in the public sector. Only redistribution of formal authority can have little or no effect on the desirable consequences with all the opposing claims expressed by some administrative reformers.
Bitcoin denkler arası/eşitler arası ağa dayalı olan kripto bir birimidir. Bitcoinin en temel özelliği herhangi bir otorite tarafından arz ve garanti edilmemesidir. Bitcoin işlemleri, bunları dijital bir deftere kaydeden blok zinciri ile bütün kullanıcılar için umumi hâle gelir. Bitcoin ağının merkezî olmayan yapısı, cebri icra süreci bakımından bazı sorunları da beraberinde getirmektedir. Bir taraf akdi bir ilişkiye istinaden belirli bir tutar bitcoini ifa etmeyi taahhüt ederse, diğer taraf kararlaştırılan bitcoini almak için cebri icra takibi başlatabilmelidir. Diğer taraftan, bir icra dairesi, takip alacaklısının talebi üzerine, bir bitcoin kullanıcısının para borcundan ötürü bitcoinini haczedebilmelidir. Haciz işleminde bitcoinin merkezî olmayan yapısı dikkate alınmalıdır.
Blockchain sistemi blokların birbirine zincir gibi bağlandığı bir dağıtık veri tabanıdır. Bu sistemde merkezi bir sunucu bulunmamaktadır. Sistemdeki işlemler eşler arası aracısız bir şekilde gerçekleşmektedir. Blockchain’in işlevleri arasında kripto paraların işleyişi de bulunmaktadır. Kripto para kavramı Bitcoin, Altcoin ve Token’ları kapsamaktadır. Blockchain temelinde işleyen Bitcoin ilk ve en popüler kripto para konumundadır.   Şu an için dünya genelinde binin üzerinde kripto para bulunmaktadır. Bunların toplam piyasa değeri şu an için 320 milyar dolar civarındadır. Kripto paraların ticaret şirketlerine getirilmesiyle etkin bir şekilde ekonomi çarkının içine dâhil edilmesi oldukça önem arz etmektedir. Çalışmamızda Bitcoin’in ticaret şirketlerine sermaye olarak getirilip getirilemeyeceği tespit edildikten sonra bunların sermaye niteliğine ve ticaret şirketlerine sermaye olarak konulması usulüne değinilecektir. 
The decentralized nature of blockchain technologies can well match the needs of integrity and provenances of evidences collecting in digital forensics (DF) across jurisdictional borders. In this paper, a novel blockchain-based DF investigation framework in the Internet of Things (IoT) and social systems environment is proposed, which can provide proof of existence and privacy preservation for evidence items examination. To implement such features, we present a block-enabled forensics framework for IoT, namely, IoT forensic chain (IoTFC), which can offer forensic investigation with good authenticity, immutability, traceability, resilience, and distributed trust between evidential entitles as well as examiners. The IoTFC can deliver a guarantee of traceability and track provenance of evidence items. Details of evidence identification, preservation, analysis, and presentation will be recorded in chains of block. The IoTFC can increase trust of both evidence items and examiners by providing transparency of the audit train. The use case demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.
By expanding the connection of objects to the Internet and their entry to human life, the issue of security and privacy has become important. In order to enhance security and privacy on the Internet, many security protocols have been developed. Unfortunately, the security analyzes that have been carried out on these protocols show that they are vulnerable to one or few attacks, which eliminates the use of these protocols. Therefore, the need for a security protocol on the Internet of Things (IoT) has not yet been resolved. Recently, Khor and Sidorov cryptanalyzed the Wang et al. protocol and presented an improved version of it. In this paper, at first, we show that this protocol also does not have sufficient security and so it is not recommended to be used in any application. More precisely, we present a full secret disclosure attack against this protocol, which extracted the whole secrets of the protocol by two communication with the target tag. In addition, Sidorv et al. recently proposed an ultralightweight mutual authentication RFID protocol for blockchain enabled supply chains, supported by formal and informal security proofs. However, we present a full secret disclosure attack against this protocol as well.
Baraka William Nyamtiga, Jose Costa Sapalo Sicato, Shailendra Rathore, Yunsick Sung · 5 authors
As a core technology to manage decentralized systems, blockchain is gaining much popularity to deploy such applications as smart grid and healthcare systems. However, its utilization in resource-constrained mobile devices is limited due to high demands of resources and poor scalability with frequent-intensive transactions. Edge computing can be integrated to facilitate mobile devices in offloading their mining tasks to cloud resources. This integration ensures reliable access, distributed computation and untampered storage for scalable and secure transactions. It is imperative therefore that crucial issues of security, scalability and resources management be addressed to achieve successful integration. Studies have been conducted to explore suitable architectural requirements, and some researchers have applied the integration to deploy some specific applications. Despite these efforts, however, issues of anonymity, adaptability and integrity still need to be investigated further to attain a practical, secure decentralized data storage. We based our study on peer-to-peer and blockchain to achieve an Internet of Things (IoT) design supported by edge computing to acquire security and scalability levels needed for the integration. We investigated existing blockchain and associated technologies to discover solutions that address anonymity, integrity and adaptability issues for successful integration of blockchain in IoT systems. The discovered solutions were then incorporated in our conceptual design of the decentralized application prototype presented for secure storage of IoT data and transactions.
The paper focuses on the study of the effect of long memory and the analysis of the multifractal properties of the time series of the most capitalized cryptocurrencies for the period from 2010 to 2018. To do this, the Hurst exponent is calculated by both R/S analysis and the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis being more stable in the case of non-stationary time series. Our results show that time series of cryptocurrencies to be persistent during almost the whole study period that do not allow accepting the hypothesis concerning the efficiency of the cryptocurrency market. We also found that (i) time series became anti-persistent during the periods of market crisis phenomena and turbulence; (ii) the Hurst exponents showed significant fluctuations about the value of 0.5. In addition, we conduct a multifractal analysis of cryptocurrency time series that allows us to assess the state and stability of the market.The calculated spectrum of multifractality shows that the cryptocurrency market comes out of a crisis state, since the width of the multifractality spectrum has the maximum value for all cryptocurrencies.
Jernej Mihelj, Yuan Zhang, Andrej Kos, Urban Sedlar
Real-time data about various traffic events and conditions-offences, accidents, dangerous driving, or dangerous road conditions-is crucial for safe and efficient transportation. Unlike roadside infrastructure data which are often limited in scope and quantity, crowdsensing approaches promise much broader and comprehensive coverage of traffic events. However, to ensure safe and efficient traffic operation, assessing trustworthiness of crowdsourced data is of crucial importance; this also includes detection of intentional or unintentional manipulation, deception, and spamming. In this paper, we design and demonstrate a road traffic event detection and source reputation assessment system for unreliable data sources. Special care is taken to adapt the system for operation in decentralized mode, using smart contracts on a Turing-complete blockchain platform, eliminating single authority over such systems and increasing resilience to institutional data manipulation. The proposed solution was evaluated using both a synthetic traffic event dataset and a dataset gathered from real users, using a traffic event reporting mobile application in a professional driving simulator used for driver training. The results show the proposed system can accurately detect a range of manipulative and misreporting behaviors, and quickly converges to the final trust score even in a resource-constrained environment of a blockchain platform virtual machine.
Danil Annenkov, Jakob Botsch Nielsen, Bas Spitters
We present a new way of embedding functional languages into the Coq proof assistant by using meta-programming. This allows us to develop the meta-theory of the language using the deep embedding and provides a convenient way for reasoning about concrete programs using the shallow embedding. We connect the deep and the shallow embeddings by a soundness theorem. As an instance of our approach, we develop an embedding of a core smart contract language into Coq and verify several important properties of a crowdfunding contract based on a previous formalisation of smart contract execution in blockchains.