Mohammad Hossein Tabatabaei, Roman Vitenberg, Narasimha Raghavan Veeraragavan
The explosive advent of the blockchain technology has led to hundreds of blockchain systems in the industry, thousands of academic papers published over the last few years, and an even larger number of new initiatives and projects. Despite the emerging consolidation efforts, the area remains highly turbulent without systematization, educational materials, or cross-system comparative analysis. In this paper, we provide a systematic and comprehensive study of four popular yet widely different blockchain systems: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and IOTA. The study is presented as a cross-system comparison, which is organized by clearly identified aspects: definitions, roles of the participants, entities, and the characteristics and design of each of the commonly used layers in the cross-system blockchain architecture. Our exploration goes deeper compared to what is currently available in academic surveys and tutorials. For example, we provide the first extensive coverage of the storage layer in Ethereum and the most comprehensive explanation of the consensus protocol in IOTA. The exposition is due to the consolidation of fragmented information gathered from white and yellow papers, academic publications, blogs, developer documentation, communication with the developers, as well as additional analysis gleaned from the source code. We hope that this survey will help the readers gain in-depth understanding of the design principles behind blockchain systems and contribute towards systematization of the area.
Blockchain technology remains popular for several reasons. The main one is that it has facilitated the rise of digital currencies over the past several years and many other uses of non-crypto currency. There is a belief that the technology itself could far exceed cryptocurrencies by its impact. Thus, researchers are still discovering the real potential of blockchain. This study aims to conduct a comprehensive blockchain analysis with a bibliometric study. The data was retrieved from the Scopus database and was analyzed using the VOSviewer software, developed at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, the Netherlands. The study is based on the analysis of 1842 documents published in the 2007–2021 period using Scopus. From the visualization, three main groups of six clusters are generated. The red area includes topics related to blockchain technology, supply chain management, and sustainable development. The green cluster stands for such keywords as blockchains, smart contracts, electronic money, and Bitcoin and Ethereum. The blue cluster area focuses on issues related to artificial intelligence, big data, health care, and COVID-19. The analysis helps to improve the quality of the review by directing researchers to the most significant documents and mapping areas of publications.
Rapidly growing distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have recently received attention among researchers in both industry and academia. While a lot of existing analysis (mainly) of the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks is available, the lack of measurements for other crypto projects is observed. This article addresses questions about tokenomics and wealth distributions in cryptocurrencies. We analyze the time-dependent statistical properties of top cryptocurrency holders for 14 different distributed ledger projects. The provided metrics include approximated Zipf coefficient, Shannon entropy, Gini coefficient, and Nakamoto coefficient. We show that there are quantitative differences between the coins (cryptocurrencies operating on their own independent network) and tokens (which operate on top of a smart contract platform). Presented results show that coins and tokens have different values of approximated Zipf coefficient and centralization levels. This work is relevant for DLTs as it might be useful in modeling and improving the committee selection process, especially in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) blockchains.
Smart contracts continue to formulate the backbone of blockchain transactions. After the foundation of the Ethereum protocol, the Initial Coin Offerings, Security Token Offerings, and Non-Fungible Tokens have all relied on smart contracts, with enormous market volume. The broad scope of smart contracts’ (potential) application is undisputed, yet many countries have been silent on the regulation of smart contracts. These same countries, however, have already set some standards regarding crypto assets and crypto asset service providers. We can include Switzerland and the European Union, that has already prepared a draft Regulation for Markets in Crypto Assets, in this first group. Some jurisdictions, such as the UK and the US, have already concluded that common law principles suffice to tackle with smart contracts. The third group, including Italy, has defined smart contracts but has no comprehensive regulatory framework. There is a final group of countries that have chosen not to regulate any aspects of the distributed ledger technology (yet). It is without a doubt that the use of smart contracts will cause problems regarding formation, contract performance, applicable law, jurisdiction, protection of consumers, and personal data.
The cloud storage is far away from us and it is not capable of handling huge bandwidth data due to network latency. The goal of the Fog computing is to decrease the data that needs to be transferred to the cloud for data processing and to increase the efficiency. Fog computing improves the QoS and also reduces network bandwidth. All machine learning algorithm performances are dependent on the quality of the training data. If the training data is inadequate or it is modified by attackers, then the machine learning algorithm will miss predict and may give invalid results. In order to avoid modification of training data, it is preferable to store it in Blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized model and its data structure is practically difficult to forge, hence it has attracted both industry and research now-a-days. Proposed system uses Ethereum platform to implement Blockchain. Ethereum allows users to create and run decentralized applications (DApps) to make agreements and to conduct transactions directly with each other without any third party by making use of smart contracts. Blockchain is convenient to store only a small amount of data, hence alternative solution to store large amount of data, for example in healthcare, in Blockchain is possible with the help of IPFS (Interplanetary File System). In e-healthcare applications, Activity Recognition System (ARS) is the most significant undertaking in remote checking of patients experiencing physical medical issues for taking quick action. Hence this paper, especially concentrate on the overall framework of the e-healthcare ARS and implementation of Blockchain to store e-healthcare training data to avoid forging, ultimately which improves ARS results. Our implementation results also show that constant and less transaction fee required to store into Blockchain irrespective of size of training data with help of IPFS and also proved transaction throughput increases and network delay decreases with help of IPFS. HIGHLIGHTS All machine learning algorithm performances are dependent on the quality of the training data. If the training data is inadequate or it is modified by attackers, then the machine learning algorithm will miss predict and may give invalid results To avoid modification of training data, it is preferable to store it in Blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized model, and its data structure is practically difficult to forge Proposed system uses Ethereum platform and IPFS to implement Blockchain using smart contracts for health care applications Our implementation results also show that constant and less transaction fee required to store into Blockchain irrespective of size of training data with help of IPFS, and proved transaction throughput increases and network delay decreases with help of IPFS GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Seth Larweh Kodjiku, Yili Fang, Tao Han, Kwame Omono Asamoah · 9 authors
Because of the rise of cryptocurrencies and decentralized apps, blockchain technology has generated a lot of interest. Among these is the emergent blockchain-based crowdsourcing paradigm, which eliminates the centralized conventional mechanism servers in favor of smart contracts for task and reward allocation. However, there are a few crucial challenges that must be resolved properly. For starters, most reputation-based systems favor high-performing employees. Secondly, the crowdsourcing platform’s expensive service charges may obstruct the growth of crowdsourcing. Finally, unequal evaluation and reward allocation might lead to job dissatisfaction. As a result, the aforementioned issues will substantially impede the development of blockchain-based crowdsourcing systems. In this study, we introduce ExCrowd, a blockchain-based crowdsourcing system that employs a smart contract as a trustworthy authority to properly select workers, assess inputs, and award incentives while maintaining user privacy. Exploration-based crowdsourcing employs the hyperbolic learning curve model based on the conduct of workers and analyzes worker performance patterns using a decision tree technique. We specifically present the architecture of our framework, on which we establish a concrete scheme. Using a real-world dataset, we implement our model on the Ethereum public test network leveraging its reliability, adaptability, scalability, and rich statefulness. The results of our experiments demonstrate the efficiency, usefulness, and adaptability of our proposed system.
Mirza Jabbar Aziz Baig, M. Tariq Iqbal, Mohsin Jamil, Jahangir Khan
A low-cost, open-source peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading system for a remote community is presented in this paper. As a result of its geographic location, this community has never been able to access electricity and other modern amenities. This study aims to design and implement a P2P energy trading system for this remote community that allows residents to take advantage of distributed energy resources. A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (Pi4B) hosts the main server of the trading system that includes the user interface and a local Ethereum blockchain server. The Ethereum blockchain is used to deploy smart contracts. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) servers run on ESP32 microcontrollers. Sensors and actuators connected to the ESP32 are field instrumentation devices that facilitate acquiring, monitoring, and transferring energy data in real-time. To perform trading activities, React.JS open-source library was used to develop the blockchain-enabled user interface. An immutable blockchain network keeps track of all transactions. The proposed system runs on a local Wi-Fi network with restricted authorization for system security. Other security measures such as login credentials, private key, firewall, and secret recovery phrases are also considered for information security and data integrity. A Hypertext Transfer Protocol is implemented for communication between the servers and the client. This explains the overall system design, implementation, testing, and results.
Amer A. Sallam, Taha H. Rassem, Hanadi Abdu, Haneen Abdulkareem · 6 authors
On the Ethereum network, users communicate with one another through a variety of different accounts. Pseudo-anonymity was enforced over the network to provide the highest level of privacy. By using accounts that engage in fraudulent activity across the network, such privacy may be exploited. Like other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum blockchain may exploited with several fraudulent activities such as Ponzi schemes, phishing, or Initial Coin Offering (ICO) exits, etc. However, the identification of parameters with abnormal account characteristics is not an easy task and requires an intelligent approach to distinguish between normal and fraudulent activities. Therefore, this paper has attempted to solve this a problem by using machine learning techniques to introduce a robust approach that can detect fraudulent accounts on Ethereum. We have used a K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest and XGBoost over a collected dataset of 4,681 instances along with 2,179 fraudulent accounts associated and 2,502 regular accounts. The XGBoost, RF, and KNN techniques achieved average accuracies of 96.80 %, 94.8 8%, and 87.85% and an average AUC of 0.995, 0.99 and 0.93, respectively.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Discover the intersectionality of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Non-Fungible Token (NFTs) usage within the Ethereum blockchain by analyzing Ethereum and NFT platforms to provide as much qualitative and quantitative context as possible.
Syada Tasmia Alvi, Mohammed Nasir Uddin, Linta Islam, Sajib Ahamed
Voting is a fundamental democratic activity. Many experts believe that paper balloting is the only appropriate method to ensure everyone’s right to vote. But this method is prone to errors and abuse. Many nations utilize digital voting methods to solve the difficulties of paper balloting. A single flaw in digital voting may lead to massive vote-rigging. Election voting methods must be legal, accurate, safe, and convenient. However, issues with digital voting methods may restrict acceptance. Due to its end-to-end verification capabilities, blockchain technology was developed to address these problems. To guarantee We have used blockchain technology anonymity, privacy, verifiability, mobility, integrity, security, and fairness in voting. By using blockchain our proposed system ensures security, privacy, and integrity. This system provides voter anonymity by keeping the voter information as a hash in the blockchain. It also provides fairness by keeping the casted vote encrypted till the ending time of the election. After ending time, the voter can verify their casted vote, ensuring verifiability. To test our protocol, we put it on Ethereum 2.0, a blockchain platform that uses Solidity as a programming language to create smart contracts. The adoption of smart contracts provides a safe means for performing voter verification, ensuring the correctness of voting results, making the counting system public, and protecting against fraudulent activities. We analyzed the system’s performance based on security and gas costs. It improves in terms of security characteristics and the related cost for the necessary infrastructure.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Adel Albshri, Ali Alzubaidi, Bakri Awaji, Ellis Solaiman
Recently, distributed ledger technologies like blockchain have been proliferating and have attracted interest from the academic community, government, and industry. A wide range of blockchain solutions has been introduced, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger technologies in the literature. However, tools for evaluating these solutions and their applications are still lacking, limiting the exploration of their potentiality and associated challenges/limitations. That is, experimenting with real blockchain networks usually requires a solid budget; and thus, sophisticated blockchain simulators can facilitate designing and evaluating solutions before the actual implementation stage. The quality of such simulators depends on several factors such as usability, reliability, provided capabilities, and supported features. This paper aims to provide a systemic mapping review of blockchain simulators focusing on these quality factors. This paper also sheds light on the configuration parameters (inputs) and produced metrics (outputs) supported by each simulator. Furthermore, it investigates which metrics supported by each simulator are scientifically validated/evaluated. Moreover, code quality comparison is carried out to assess the source code of the covered simulators. The results reveal that no simulator fully covers the wide operational range of features and capabilities of existing blockchain technologies. However, several promising efforts exist in the domain of blockchain simulation with interesting and useful features. Finally, we discuss the subject of blockchain simulation and provide our insight into the matter.
Zhenzhou Tian, Yaqian Huang, Jie Tian, Zhongmin Wang · 6 authors
Smart contracts are programs that run on a blockchain, where Ethereum is one of the most popular ones supporting them. Due to the fact that they are immutable, it is essential to design smart contracts bug-free before they are deployed. However, various defects have been found in the deployed smart contracts, causing huge economic losses and lowing people's trust. Writing secure smart contracts is far from trivial, where developers tend to engage in reliable resources or social coding platforms to reuse code. This leads to a large number of similar contracts with potential security risks. Therefore, detecting similarity of smart contracts helps to avoid vulnerabilities, identify threats, and improve the security of Ethereum. In this paper, we design a learning-effective and costefficient model, called SmartSD, for Ethereum smart contract similarity detection. Different from the current research efforts, SmartSD is performed on a bytecode level and leverages deep neural networks to learn the latent representations from the opcode sequences for smart contract bytecodes, where the representation learning and similarity measurement are supervised via siamese neural networks. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that SmartSD outperforms EClone's 93.27% accuracy, achieving 98.37% high detection accuracy and 0.9850 F1-score, which is computationally tractable and effectively mitigates the interference caused by compilers.
Knut Erik Knutsen, Liang Qin, Nikita Karandikar, I.H. Ibrahim · 6 authors
Abstract In recent years, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), especially blockchain technology, has become a popular topic and is being implemented in different industries. Ships are expected to be equipped with more advanced equipment and less crew onboard. The communication and information sharing between different maritime stakeholders such as business partners, port authorities, tax authorities, class societies, flag states, IMO and EU become more important than ever. Trust and authenticity are key properties when utilizing data for safety or business critical applications, and will only increase in importance as automation levels increase towards fully autonomous ships and trading systems. The implementation of DLTs as close as possible to the data source helps provide a reliable, trustworthy way to share, process and verify the data. The objective of this paper is to explore how tamperfree maritime data sharing can enable automated transactions between vessels and shore-based entities. Singapores TradeTrust platform has shown that digitalization of international trade has great potential. In this paper we explore how further enhancements may be implemented and how the distributed ledger VeChain, as compared to Ethereum, have some distinct advantages that may be beneficial for continued automation and efficiency gains. The electronic Bill of Lading was taken as an example to demonstrate the concept. Reporting requirements from the other maritime data sharing scenarios are also expected to require a way of ensuring tamperfree data.
Sanaz Taheri-Boshrooyeh, Oskar Thorén, Barry Whitehat, Wei Jie Koh · 6 authors
In this paper, we propose WAKU-RLN-RELAY as a spam-protected gossip-based routing protocol that can run in heterogeneous networks. It features a privacy-preserving peer-to-peer (p2p) economic spam protection mechanism. WAKU-RLN-RELAY addresses the performance and privacy issues of the state-of-the-art p2p spam prevention techniques including peer scoring utilized by libp2p, and proof-of-work used by e.g., Whisper, the p2p messaging layer of Ethereum. In WAKU-RLN-RELAY, spam protection works by limiting the messaging rate of each network participant. Rate violation is disincentivized since it results in financial punishment where the punishment is cryptographically guaranteed. Peers who identify spammers are also rewarded. To enforce the rate limit, we adopt the suggested framework of Semaphore and its extended version, however, we modify that framework to properly address the unique requirements of a network of p2p resource-restricted users. The current work dives into the end-to-end integration of Semaphore into WAKU-RLN-RELAY, the modifications required to make it suitable for resource-limited users, and the open problems and future research directions. We also provide a proof-of-concept open-source implementation of WAKU-RLN-RELAY, and its specifications together with a rough performance evaluation.
In recent years, technological research and studies have accelerated in the agriculture and food industry to protect and improve the trust of consumers. In 2008, with the publication of the white paper on “Bitcoin: Peer-to-peer Electronic Cash Payment System” by Satoshi Nakamoto, the world met with blockchain technology, where there are no middlemen and transfers are made securely. In the following years, with the development of Ethereum by Vitalik Buterin and the interpretation of the concept of Smart Contracts with blockchain technology, blockchain technology has begun to influence all sectors, thanks to its benefits such as increasing transparency and reliability in contracts between parties. Blockchain technology, in addition to providing solutions to financial systems that have become dysfunctional, also brings alternatives to supply chain management, where data needs to be transferred securely and quickly. Blockchain applications used in FSC emerge as a technology that will enable us to solve problems such as food security, food integrity, food fraud, etc. In this paper, It has been studied on how to use blockchain technology in the food supply chain, how to choose the suitable blockchain platform, and how It will be facilitating for solutions such as tracking from field to fork, back-tracking are examined the data saved in the blocks and the working mechanism will be discussed in the background.
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have gained popularity in television and digital media channels with the highest value records of all time broke in a row, both in academic studies and in recent times. In the framework of the study conducted to provide data to those who want to assess their investments in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. In the research it is aimed to examine correlation between Bitcoin as an independent variable and S&P500 Index, US 10-year Treasury and altcoins like Ethereum, Cardano, Chainlink with Granger causality test. Findings shows that Chainlink as an investment tool has the highest return with 6.22% and it is followed by Cardano with 5.74%, Ethereum with 5.20% and ultimately Bitcoin. The US 10-year Treasury offers not only the lowest rate of return with 10% loss but also riskier tool than Bitcoin. S&P500 Index offers lower rate of return and riskier in comparison with FED interest rate. According to the covariance values, it has been determined that Bitcoin has an increasing linear relationship with Ethereum, Cardano and Chainlink, and a decreasing linear relationship with the FED interest rates and US 10-year Treasury, while it is unrelated to the S&P500 Index.
The cryptocurrency was a very popular issue in recent years. There was a debate among scientists regarding the prohibition of cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange. Some Islamic institutions use cryptocurrencies and blockchain platforms in the financial transaction. This study analyzes the arguments of classical and modern Muslim scientists regarding the evolution of money to become modern Islamic digital money in the form of cryptocurrency. We used ARCH GARCH to predict the volatility of cryptocurrencies. Our samples are Bitcoin, Ethereum, IDR Token, and Tether USD Token. IDRT and USDT are stablecoins. Bitcoin and Ethereum are cryptocoin. We use daily data of cryptocurrency fluctuations from August 7, 2015, to May 21, 2021. The data were taken from the official website for cryptocurrency transactions, coinmarketcap.com and blockchain. com. This study proves that Bitcoin and Ethereum are types of cryptocurrencies which have very high volatility. Meanwhile, IDRT Rupiah Token and Tether USD Token are more stable types of cryptocurrencies. In terms of using digital money for modern Islamic financial transactions, we suggest using cryptocurrencies of the token type.
The objective of this article is to analyze the co-movements in the G7 stock markets, such as DJ index, S&P500 (representing the USA stock market), FTSE 100 (United Kingdom), S&P/TSX (Canada), DAX 30 (Germany), CAC 40 (France), Nikkei 225 (Japan), Italy Ds market (Italy) and the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Crypto 10, during the period of February of 2018 to November of 2021. The results show that the cryptocurrencies BTC, ETH, and LTC increase the co-movements between their pairs, while the Crypto 10 index reduces the number of shocks when compared with the sub-period before COVID-19. Regarding the stock markets, DJ index kept the same level of shocks, whereas the Nikkei 225 decreased. For Germany (DAX), EUA (S&P500), Canada (S&P/TSX), United Kingdom (FTSE 100), France (CAC40), and Italy (Italy Ds Market) markets the results show an increase in movements during the global pandemic period. It is then possible to conclude the existence of evidence regarding synchronization and high co-movements, the results put at risk the implementation of efficient portfolio diversification strategies. These conclusions also open space for the market regulators to take steps to ensure better information on the dynamics of the international financial markets.
Sudarshan D. Jadhav, Chavan Patil Sourabh Raghunath, WalandkarAshif Hamid, More Vaishali Anil
Technology made many changes to the payment system. Students are more familiar with the technology. After the bitcoin boom in India, the mostly young generation are attracted to cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is decentralized and it is based on blockchain technology. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Potcoin are more popular cryptocurrencies in India. The majority of investors are the age of between 18 and 24 years old. This study mainly focuses on the awareness of college students about cryptocurrency. This study also focuses on various factors that affected awareness of cryptocurrency. For this study, we collected 120 students’ responses. Samples were selected based on the non-probability snowball sampling method. The finding of this study is, that most respondents are aware through friends and social media about the cryptocurrency. And male respondents are more aware than female respondents. The higher level of educational qualification also impacts the high-level awareness of cryptocurrency. The majority of respondents are interested to invest in cryptocurrency.
It has been emphasized in many studies that the developments in the crypto money markets have a serious impact on the world stock markets. Due to these effects, the fluctuations in the world stock markets have increased, and it has become necessary for investors to follow these markets more closely and determine their strategies according to these developments. In this study, it was examined whether the developments in the crypto money market have an effect on Borsa Istanbul (BIST) indices. For this purpose, data of the three most popular cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple were used, and their spillover effects on BIST100, BIST30 and banking (XBANK) indices were investigated. Oil prices (WTI) and fear index (VIX) variables were also used as control variables in the study. The findings obtained from the analyses in our study carried out for the period 01/01/2014-31/12/2021 showed that there is a positive spillover effect from the crypto money markets to the indices we examined. While oil prices were found to be statistically significant in all models among the control variables, different results were obtained on the effect of the fear index. The findings show that it is imperative for stock market investors to closely monitor the developments in the crypto money market in addition to track various economic variables, in their investment decisions.
With the evolution of technology, blockchain a swiftly impending phenomenon i.e., "decentralized computing” is observed. The emergence of Smart Contracts (SC) has resulted in advancements in the application of blockchain technology. The Ethereum network’s computing capabilities and functionalities are founded on the basis of SC. A smart contract is a self-executing agreement between buyer and seller with the terms of the settlement between them, written directly as lines of code, existing across a distributed decentralized blockchain network. It is a decentralized software that runs on a blockchain autonomously, consistently, and publicly. Conversely, due to the complex semantics of fundamental domain-specific languages and their testability, constructing reliable and secure SC can be extremely difficult. SC might contain some vulnerabilities. Security vulnerabilities can originate from financial tribulations; there are a number of notorious events that specify blockchain SC could comprise numerous code-security vulnerabilities. Security and privacy of blockchain-based SC are very important, we must first identify their vulnerabilities before implementing them widely. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of two current security testing tools: Remix solidity static analysis plugin and Solium which are used for static analysis of SC. We have conducted an empirical analysis of SC for finding tangible and factual evidence, controlled by the scientific approach. The methodology’s first step is to gather all of the Ethereum SC and store them in a repository. The next step is to use the Remix solidity static analysis plugin and Solium to perform vulnerability assessments. The last step is to analyze the result of both tools and evaluate them on the basis of accuracy and effectiveness. The goal of this empirical analysis is to evaluate the two FOSS tools: Remix solidity static analysis plugin and Solium on the basis of accuracy and effectiveness. Some research questions were considered to reach the stated goal: What automated tools and frameworks are proposed in supporting the state-of-the-art empirical approach to SC vulnerability detection? How accurate are security analysis tools? And which tool has more accuracy rate? How effectively security analysis tools are detecting vulnerabilities in SC? And which is the most effective security analysis tool? We investigated the effectiveness and accuracy of security code analysis tools on Ethereum by testing them on a random sample of vulnerable contracts. The results indicate that the tools have significant discrepancies when it comes to certain security characteristics. In terms of effectiveness and accuracy, the Remix plugin outperformed and beat the other tool.
Lodovico Parmegiani, A. Arnone, Silvia Bernardi, Walter Ciampaglia · 7 authors
Abstract Study question To date, no publications exist describing Blockchain in IVF (Hickman, 2020). Can Blockchain technology be used for traceability and accountability in IVF laboratory procedures? Summary answer Blockchain is an easy-to-implement technology for incorruptible traceability of a “Virus-Free” vitrification/warming procedure. What is known already In healthcare, Blockchain can become a tool to address challenges regarding sensitive data-sharing and traceability of medical and laboratory procedures. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many authors warned about the role of LN2 as a potential vector for virus contamination, and vitrification and warming were identified as critical procedures for risk of contamination for environments, surfaces, operators and cells. In this study we describe the first application of Blockchain in IVF for incorruptible traceability of a “Virus-Free” vitrification/warming procedure based on the combined use of UVC-Sterilized Liquid Nitrogen (LN2) and CE Medical Devices (CE-MD). Study design, size, duration Report on 2346 Ethereum Blockchain data transactions for IVF laboratory procedures mined from 01/10/2019 to 31/12/2021. The procedures were oocyte/embryo vitrification, warming or handling in LN2 after cryopreservation. For each vitrification, warming and handling a UVC-sterilized batch of LN2 was associated with the code assigned to the vitrification/warming procedure and with the lot number of the single-use sterile vitrification box (N-Sleeve). The clinical results obtained from warmed oocytes/embryos were observed as completion of this process. Participants/materials, setting, methods A Blockchain trusted “Virus-Free” vitrification/warming programme was set up using a specifically designed CE-MD N-Bath-System (Nterilizer-Italy). Each procedure was traced by the CE-MD’s software and a dedicated web application. Finally, data were made incorruptible by Ethereum Blockchain transactions. Before oocyte/embryo warming, vitrification carrier washing with UVC-sterilized LN2 was performed in accordance with Parmegiani et al (2012) and recent international anti-Covid guidelines. Main results and the role of chance Of the 2346 Blockchain transactions 1268 regarded vitrification and cryopreserved specimen handling procedures; 1078 transactions were frozen cell warmings (308 oocytes and 770 embryos) performed on 799 patients. To date, 445 pregnancies have been obtained (pregnancy rate: 41% per cycle; 56% per patient) and 219 babies have been born. Limitations, reasons for caution Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency which is highly susceptible to cost changes. Other public or private Blockchains may be used in future in healthcare with more stable transaction costs. Wider implications of the findings This is the first evidence of the application of Blockchain in IVF and many others will probably follow. Blockchain immutable records of LN2 sterilization combined with procedure codes and disposable lots represent incorruptible traces for “Virus-Free” vitrification/warming. During this pandemic 219 babies were born from cryopreservation procedures powered by Blockchain. Trial registration number Not Applicable
Abstract:The DApp (Decentralised application) being developed enables easy verification of credentials by storing the certificates on Ethereum blockchain network using IPFS (Inter Planetary File System) which is a distributed file system, thereby making the information stored immutable and secure. The website is being developed in three phases. In the first phase, the college enrolls students and uploads their credentials on the Ethereum blockchain. In the second phase, students can view their credentials and access requests sent by companies. In the third phase, companies can send access requests to students whose credentials they want to verify. Once the students accept the access requests, companies can view and verify the certificates.
NFT piyasası son yıllarda hızla gelişmektedir. NFT kavramı, aslen bir blokzincir altyapısına ait olan Ethereum standardından gelmektedir. Oluşturulan benzersiz kimlikler, dijital varlıklarla ilgilidir. NFT, özelleştirilmiş değerlerle şeffaf bir ticaret sağlamaktadır. Dijital sanat kavramı benimsenirken, yeni bir pazar da oluşmaktadır. Günümüzde, NFT satışları milyonlarca USD'ye ulaşmıştır. Gelişen NFT pazarı dikkat çekmektedir. NFT'nin arkasındaki teknolojiler olgunlaşmadığından, NFT keşfedilmeyi ve anlaşılmayı bekleyen bir ekosistem haline gelmektedir. Bu çalışmada, dijital sanat ve NFT'nin avantajları ve fırsatları tartışılırken, NFT ekosistemi önemli örneklerle gözden geçirilmektedir.