Blockchain Papers

Abderahman Rejeb, Karim Rejeb

No abstract is available for this record.

Alexandra Sims

No abstract is available for this record.

Xuanping Wu, Yan-Jun Lin

With the rapid development of the Internet and the Internet of Things, product recall, especially pharmaceutical recall, have attracted various stakeholders as a phase of product service. However, there are some the long-term problems on pharmaceutical recall, such as low effectiveness, seldom transparent, data can be tampered easily and so on. We have proposed a service system of pharmaceutical recall based on blockchain to solve these problems. The solution runs through the entire recall process that includes decision making, the OOS/OOT investigation, the action of working group and the Corrective and Preventative Action (CAPA). Through the management of recall, we are capable of shortening time, enhancing transparency and protecting the integrity of data in pharmaceutical recall.

Amalia Amaya

No abstract is available for this record.

Erum Sattar

No abstract is available for this record.

Mark Fenwick, Erik P. M. Vermeulen

No abstract is available for this record.

Larisa Govender

The purpose of the study was to explore and describe the phenomenon of cryptocurrency mining using renewable energy through the investigation of innovative business models. The focus was on crypto-mining companies located in Europe, which use renewable energy to power their operations. The aim of the research was to find answers to the research questions about sustainable cryptocurrency mining as a concept, about the future of the industry, as well as to identify if their business models can be considered eco-innovative. The study was limited to cover only the cryptocurrency mining centers that rely on renewable energy for their business and are situated in Europe. The theoretical studies included concepts of business model, eco-innovation and eco-innovation in business models. The empirical study consisted of three interviews with the representatives of three cryptocurrency mining centers that rely on renewable energy, as well as two e-mail interviews with expert cryptocurrency researchers. Additionally, information on cryptocurrency mining as a business and energy consumption by crypto-mining was gathered. The description of renewable energy was also covered. The results showed that cryptocurrency mining using renewable energy is a growing business niche driven by maximizing profits through using the cheapest renewable energy available. Such a business model could be defined as eco-innovative. The study also speculated on the potential future of crypto-mining and could not come to a definite conclusion. Ideas for future studies include cryptocurrency evolution and its applications and impact on other industries, and development and implementations of Blockchain technologies in various sectors.

А. Kramarenko, Anton Kvitka, Віталій Дячек, Denis Davydov

The article considers the place of cryptocurrency markets in the global economy. The key risks of active implementation of IT achievements in the financial sector were defined. It was shown that cryptocurrencies are associated with settlement operations, investment activities and speculation in the currency markets. It was argued that the availability of equipment for the production of digital currencies, the spread of trust on the part of users and business representatives contribute to the promotion of cryptocurrencies and the penetration of digital currencies in various spheres of economic activity. The attraction of additional resources in the economy in the conditions of insignificant costs for entering the cryptocurrency market that become a factor in the spread of cryptocurrency assets was considered.

Mohammad Motlaq Assaf

أهداف البحث: يهدف البحث إلى التوصل لحكم العملات المشفرة في ضوء المقاصد الشرعية، وهناك أسئلة كثيرة حول العملات المشفرة، وحكم الاشتراك في مجمعات تعدينها، وحكم تداولها في عقود البيع والشراء والصرف؛ فجاء البحث ليجيب عنها في ضوء مقاصد الشريعة الإسلامية. منهج الدراسة: تم استخدام المنهج الوصفي مع الاستعانة بالمنهجين الاستنباطي والتحليلي، كما تم دراسة المسألة وفق الأسس العلمية لبحث فقه النوازل المعاصرة، واستشارة عدد من الخبراء؛ لفهم المسألة فهمًا صحيحًا مطابقًا للواقع. النتائج: تم التوصل إلى أن العملات المشفرة لا تتوافر فيها شروط النقد الشرعي؛ حيث تفتقد القبول العام والرواج بين الناس، ولا تصلح أن تكون مقياسًا للسلع والخدمات بشكل عام، فلا تعتبر مستودعًا للقيمة، ولا معيارًا للمدفوعات الآجلة، ولا يوجد دولة أو سلطة تتبناها وتقدر على ضمانها. أصالة البحث: إن حجم المشاكل الاقتصادية والنقدية التي يمكن أن تنشأ كنتيجة لتداول العملات المشفرة، يوجب أن تكون تلك العملات محل بحث فقهي؛ فجاء هذا البحث ليتناول حكم تلك العملات في ضوء المقاصد المتعلقة بالتصرفات المالية، مع التوصية بعرض المسألة على المجامع الفقهية؛ للتوصل إلى كل ما يتعلق بها من أحكام شرعية.

Vandana Beessoo, Aaynab Foondun

No abstract is available for this record.

Natkamon Tovanich, Nicolas Heulot, Jean‐Daniel Fekete, Petra Isenberg

We contribute a systematic review of online visualizations of the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin is currently the most active cryptocurrency with the largest market share among other cryptocurrencies. It has attracted a large user base and more and more businesses are beginning to accept Bitcoin as payment. While there are still relatively few visualization research papers on Bitcoin, a growing number of online tools visualize data about the Bitcoin blockchain. We provide a first systematic assessment of these online tools to inform future research efforts on making the Bitcoin blockchain more accessible.

Asad Razzaq, Muhammad Murad, Ramzan Talib, Arslan Dawood · 7 authors

Blockchain is a distributed network based ledger that is secured by the methods of cryptographic proof. It enables the creation of self-executable digital contracts i.e. smart contracts. This technology is working in collaboration with major areas of research including governance, IoT, health, banking and education. It has anticipated revolutionary ways, which helps us to overcome the problems of governance such as human error, voting, privacy of data, security and food safety. In governance, there is a need to ameliorate the services and facilities with the assistance of blockchain technology. This paper aims to explore the issues of governance which can be resolved with the assistance of Blockchain features. Furthermore this paper also provides the future work directions.

Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

No abstract is available for this record.

Mays Alshaikhli

The Internet of Things is a novel paradigm which involves the increasing prevalence of objects and entities supported with identifiers and the ability to exchange the data over a network. However, with all these advantages the risk comes, as the huge number of connected devices gives hackers more entry points. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) can stave off security threats to Internet enabled devices by providing a distributed ledger for their functioning, thereby eliminating the central node that networks usually depend on for management by their users. Internet of Things and Application (IOTA) is a new technology designed specifically for the Internet of Things (IoT) industry which depends on the distributed ledger for storing transactions. The main contribution of this thesis is to study and run a set of test cases in healthcare industry to prove the effectiveness and viability of using IOTA in many healthcare applications using data, images or even videos. We will also do a comparative analysis with Blockchain to prove that IOTA technology could stand all odds in terms of feasibility, reliability and robust data security.

Lu Wang, Xin Luo, Ying Hua, Jing Wang

How to keep customers motivated in participative behaviors remains one major challenge in extant loyalty program (LP) studies. While some companies have initiated efforts to utilize blockchain-based distributed ledgers and smart contract capabilities to enhance customer experience and improve LP efficiencies, academic assessment of blockchain application in the LP context remains scarce. This research attempts to establish a theoretical overview of how the key natures of blockchain influence customers’ varying motivations (economy, autonomy, competence and relatedness) and perceived value, which consequently induce participative behaviors in a loyalty points context. Then, using an exploratory case study of Bubichain in China, we verify that the blockchain-enabled loyalty points scheme not only improves customers’ economic perceived value by meeting their economic motives, as the traditional one does, but also enhances their social interaction and psychological self-fulfillment value perception by meeting their intrinsic motivations, thus increasing customers’ experience and participation behaviors.

Usman W. Chohan

No abstract is available for this record.

Antonio Tenorio-Fornés, Viktor Jacynycz, David Llop-Vila, Antonio A. Sánchez‐Ruiz · 5 authors

The current processes of scientific publication and peer review raise concerns around fairness, quality, performance, cost, and accuracy. The Open Access movement has been unable to fulfill all its promises, and a few middlemen publishers can still impose policies and concentrate profits. This paper, using emerging distributed technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS, proposes a decentralized publication system for open science. The proposed system would provide (1) a distributed reviewer reputation system, (2) an Open Access by-design infrastructure, and (3) transparent governance processes. A survey is used to evaluate the problems, proposed solutions and possible adoption resistances, while a working prototype serves as a proof-of-concept. Additionally, the paper discusses the implementation, in a distributed context, of different privacy settings for both open peer review and reputation systems, introducing a novel approach supporting both anonymous and accountable reviews. The paper concludes reviewing the open challenges of this ambitious proposal.

Evmorfia Biliri, Minas Pertselakis, Marios Phinikettos, Marios Zacharias · 6 authors

In recent years, there is growing interest in the ways the European aviation industry can leverage the multi-source data fusion towards augmented domain intelligence. However, privacy, legal and organisational policies together with technical limitations, hinder data sharing and, thus, its benefits. The current paper presents the ICARUS data policy and assets brokerage framework, which aims to (a) formalise the data attributes and qualities that affect how aviation data assets can be shared and handled subsequently to their acquisition, including licenses, IPR, characterisation of sensitivity and privacy risks, and (b) enable the creation of machine-processable data contracts for the aviation industry. This involves expressing contractual terms pertaining to data trading agreements into a machine-processable language and supporting the diverse interactions among stakeholders in aviation data sharing scenarios through a trusted and robust system based on the Ethereum platform.

Oleksii Konashevych

This paper presents a concept of the protocol for public registries based on block-chain. The proposed mechanism allows creating a standard database over a bun-dle of distributed ledgers. It ensures a blockchain agnostic approach and utilizes the benefits of various blockchain technologies in one ecosystem. In this scheme, blockchains play the role of journal storages (immutable log), while the overlaid database is the indexed storage. The distinctive feature of such a system is that in blockchain, users can perform peer-to-peer transactions directly in the ledger us-ing blockchain native mechanism of user access management with public-key cryptography (blockchain does not require to administrate its database). The pro-tocol is designed for public property registries, i.e., land titles, cars, boats, corpo-rate rights, etc. Users can create and manage their rights using the full power of blockchain technologies and smart contracts. The governance component in this protocol is introduced as Smart Laws and Digital Authorities, the algorithms to manage the overlaid system and address legal issues with property rights and law enforcement.

Christian Fries, Peter Kohl-Landgraf, Björn Paffen, Stefanie Weddigen · 11 authors

In this note we describe the application of existing smart contract technologies with the aim to construct a new digital representation of a financial derivative contract. We compare several existing DLT based technologies. We provide a detailed description of two separate prototypes which are able to be executed on a centralized and on a DLT platform respectively. Beyond that we highlight some insights on legal aspects as well as on common integration challenges regarding existing process and system landscapes. For a further introductory note and motivation on the theoretical concept we refer to https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/business-law-blog/blog/2018/12/smart-derivative-contract-constructing-digital-financial-derivative . A very detailed methodological overview of the concept of a smart derivative contract can be found in doi:10.2139/ssrn.3163074.

Mayra Samaniego, Ralph Deters

With the advent of blockchain technology, some management tasks of IoT networks can be moved from central systems to distributed validation authorities. Cloud-centric blockchain implementations for IoT have shown satisfactory performance. However, some features of blockchain are not necessary for IoT. For instance, a competitive consensus. This research presents the idea of customizing and encapsulating the features of blockchain into software-defined components to host them on edge devices. Thus, blockchain resources can be provisioned by edge devices (e-miners) working together closer to the things layer in a cooperative manner. This research uses Edison SoC as e-miners to test the software-defined blockchain components.

David Cerezo Sánchez

The Holy Grail of a decentralised stablecoin is achieved on rigorous mathematical frameworks, obtaining multiple advantageous proofs: stability, convergence, truthfulness, faithfulness, and malicious-security. These properties could only be attained by the novel and interdisciplinary combination of previously unrelated fields: model predictive control, deep learning, alternating direction method of multipliers (consensus-ADMM), mechanism design, secure multi-party computation, and zero-knowledge proofs. For the first time, this paper proves: - the feasibility of decentralising the central bank while securely preserving its independence in a decentralised computation setting - the benefits for price stability of combining mechanism design, provable security, and control theory, unlike the heuristics of previous stablecoins - the implementation of complex monetary policies on a stablecoin, equivalent to the ones used by central banks and beyond the current fixed rules of cryptocurrencies that hinder their price stability - methods to circumvent the impossibilities of Guaranteed Output Delivery (G.O.D.) and fairness: standing on truthfulness and faithfulness, we reach G.O.D. and fairness under the assumption of rational parties As a corollary, a decentralised artificial intelligence is able to conduct the monetary policy of a stablecoin, minimising human intervention.

Md. Mehedi Hassan Onik, Mahdi H. Miraz

Both blockchain technologies and cloud computing are contemporary emerging technologies. While the application of Blockchain technologies is being spread beyond cryptocurrency, cloud computing is also seeing a paradigm shift to meet the needs of the 4th industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). New technological ad-vancement, especially by the fusion of these two, such as Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS), is considered to be able to significantly generate values to the en-terprises. This article surveys the current status of BaaS in terms of technological development, applications, market potentials and so forth. An evaluative judge-ment, comparing amongst various BaaS platforms, has been presented, along with the trajectory of adoption, challenges and risk factors. Finally, the study suggests standardisation of available BaaS platforms.

Michał Ostapowicz, Kamil Żbikowski

Applications of blockchain technologies got a lot of attention in recent years. They exceed beyond exchanging value and being a substitute for fiat money and traditional banking system. Nevertheless, being able to exchange value on a blockchain is at the core of the entire system and has to be reliable. Blockchains have built-in mechanisms that guarantee whole system's consistency and reliability. However, malicious actors can still try to steal money by applying well known techniques like malware software or fake emails. In this paper we apply supervised learning techniques to detect fraudulent accounts on Ethereum blockchain. We compare capabilities of Random Forests, Support Vector Machines and XGBoost classifiers to identify such accounts basing on a dataset of more than 300 thousands accounts. Results show that we are able to achieve recall and precision values allowing for the designed system to be applicable as an anti-fraud rule for digital wallets or currency exchanges. We also present sensitivity analysis to show how presented models depend on particular feature and how lack of some of them will affect the overall system performance.