Blockchain Papers

Lauren Rhue

No abstract is available for this record.

Dirk Andreas Zetzsche, Ross P. Buckley, Douglas W. Arner

No abstract is available for this record.

Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

No abstract is available for this record.

Joseph Lee

No abstract is available for this record.

Naoyuki Yoshino, Tim Schloesser, Farhad Taghizadeh–Hesary

To achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) as well as the Paris Agreement major investments in renewable energy (RE) production are necessary worldwide. In particular, decentralized, small-scale projects offer copious potential to create energy access as well as to contribute to an affordable, reliable and sustainable energy supply system. However, in developing countries such projects often face issues in finding funding. Direct private investment tools like the community-based hometown investment trust (HIT) fund address this issue and offer a way of financing for those projects. Technical developments in the sphere of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) provide the opportunity to increase the fund's transparency and thus to improve its functioning. On that basis, this paper contributes to the literature in two ways: First, it delineates a concrete application of DLTs in the field of green financing, which offers the potential to increase social welfare. Second, the decision problem of investors is modeled, which illustrates through which channel the use of DLTs impacts the investors' behavior.

Charles Shen, Feniosky Peña‐Mora

Blockchain is considered one of the most disruptive technologies of our time. Numerous cities around the world are launching blockchain initiatives as part of the overall efforts toward shaping the urban future. However, the infancy stage of the blockchain industry leads to a severe gap between the knowledge we have and the actions urban policy makers are taking. This paper is an effort to narrow this rift. We provide a systematic literature review on concrete blockchain use cases proposed by the research community. At the macro-level, we discuss and organize use cases from 159 selected papers into nine sectors recognized as crucial for sustainable and smart urban future. At the micro-level, we identify a component-based framework and analyze the design and prototypes of blockchain systems studied in a subset of 71 papers. The high-level use case review allows us to illustrate the relationship between them and the four pillars of urban sustainability: social, economic, environmental, and governmental. The system level analysis helps us highlight interesting inconsistencies between well-known blockchain applicability decision rules and the approaches taken by the literature. We also offer two classification methodologies for blockchain use cases and elaborate on how they can be applied to stimulate cross-sector insights in the blockchain knowledge domain.

Ioannis Karamitsos, Maria Papadaki, Nedaa Baker Al Barghuthi

Blockchain is a fast-disruptive technology becoming a key instrument in share economy. In recent years, Blockchain has received considerable attention from many researchers and government institutions. This paper aims to present the Blockchain and smart contract for a specific domain which is real estate. A detailed design of smart contract is presented and then a use case for renting residential and business buildings is examined.

Taylor C. Nelms, Bill Maurer, Lana Swartz, Scott Mainwaring

The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics.

Premkumar Chithaluru, Kulvinder Singh, Manish Sharma

As the technologies are evolving day by day, they are able to rejuvenate any sector either individually or by incorporating other technologies. There are many prominent sectors in the market such as healthcare, education, entertainment, business, information technology, retail, etc. Every sector has its own set of profits and consequences, but apart from all, the banking or finance sector is the only sector that provides dynamicity to all other sectors and helps them to generate maximum revenue from their principal investment. In this chapter, the authors are focusing on the traditional and modern ways of banking, currencies such as cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and how the modern currency will change the transaction procedure in the global banking system, creating an amalgamation of such currency with a current transaction system with the role of technology such as Blockchain in the betterment of the global banking system making the system fully decentralized, distributed, transparent, fast, immutable, and efficient.

Andrea Pinna, Simona Ibba

Temporary work is an employment situation useful and suitable in all occasions in which business needs to adjust more easily and quickly to workload fluctuations or maintain staffing flexibility. Temporary workers play therefore an important role in many companies, but this kind of activity is subject to a special form of legal protections and many aspects and risks must be taken into account both employers and employees. In this work we propose a blockchain-based system that aims to ensure respect for the rights for all actors involved in a temporary employment, in order to provide employees with the fair and legal remuneration (including taxes) of work performances and a protection in the case employer becomes insolvent. At the same time, our system wants to assist the employer in processing contracts with a fully automated and fast procedure. To resolve these problems we propose the D-ES (Decentralized Employment System). We first model the employment relationship as a state system. Then we describe the enabling technology that makes us able to realize the D-ES. In facts, we propose the implementation of a DLT (Decentralized Ledger Technology) based system, consisting in a blockchain system and of a web-based environment. Thanks the decentralized application platforms that makes us able to develop smart contracts, we define a discrete event control system that works inside the blockchain. In addition, we discuss the temporary work in agriculture as a interesting case of study.

Adrian Mackenzie

Platforms are important actors in contemporary cultural economic processes. They include social network sites, online content management systems, streaming media platforms, mobile communication infrastructures, supply chain logistics solutions, and cryptocurrencies. Analysis of platforms and their capitalization should take into account the ways they structure social practice as assets and the constitutive opacity of platforms as configured realities. It explores capitalization by focusing on the problems of counting people and things on platforms. Via a case study of the software repository platform [Github.com] (https://github.com), it analyzes how 'platform numbers’ participate in capitalization. It describes attempts to enumerate the elements of the platform by counting, mapping or listing them. The paper shows how attempts to enumerate people and things encounter forms of association, duplication, combination, imitation and configuration that are crucial to the ensemble but remain refractory to capitalization. It proposes configurative enumeration of the platform numbers as a way of conceptualizing these un-enacted excesses. In a configurative enumeration, the composition, the rhythms of imitation, variation and commutation, and constant relating, repairing and adjusting of configurations crucial to the ongoing formation of platforms come into view. Configurative enumerations engage the inventive realities of platformization, realities that precede and sometimes overflow their capitalization.

Richard Adams, Beth Kewell, Glenn Parry

No abstract is available for this record.

Yan Chen

Over the past few years, Bitcoin has emerged as the first decentralized, global currency. The rise of Bitcoin has brought attention not only to digital currencies but also to the underlying technology empowering digital currencies: blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed ledger that records and secures transactions in a peer-to-peer network. Besides empowering digital currencies, blockchain technology has given innovators the capability of creating digital tokens to represent scarce assets, potentially reshaping the landscape of entrepreneurship and innovation. Blockchain tokens may democratize (1) entrepreneurship by giving entrepreneurs new ways to raise funds and engage stakeholders, and (2) innovation by giving innovators a new way to develop, deploy, and diffuse decentralized applications. Blockchain technology and tokens have sparked a new wave of innovation, which may start to revolutionize entrepreneurship and innovation.

W. Blake Marsh, Jesse Leigh Maniff

Despite its promise, distributed ledger technology is unlikely to draw unbanked consumers into the financial mainstream

Beth Kewell, Richard Adams, Glenn Parry

Abstract The blockchain innovation appears to represent viable catalysts for achieving global sustainable development targets. Projects and initiatives seeking to extend the reach of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) seem mostly intended for the benefit of for‐profit businesses, governments, and consumers. DLT projects devised for the public good could aim, in theory, to fulfill the United Nation’s current sustainable development goals. Blockchain technology is being applied in ways that could transform this ambition for good into a practical reality.

Yong Ming Kow

Cryptocurrencies — being digitally transmitted and embodied within peer-to-peer infrastructures — may mediate new forms of peer-driven interactions and collaborations among Internet users. In this paper, I performed in-depth interviews of cryptocurrencies’ emerging uses with 16 participants between September 2013 and March 2015. My analysis of how these users have used cryptocurrencies revealed a new feature, large-crowd, cost-effective transactions (trades involving massive numbers of participants), that can drive trades involving massive numbers of participants. Cryptocurrencies, having a peer-driven logical infrastructure, are already known to offer a freer alternate medium for users to customize or automate monetary processes. But the newly identified feature makes it possible for peer producers to organize work payment options involving a large crowd of contributors. This capacity suggests the emergence of many-to-many financial flows in small individual amounts. Taken together, I identify a cluster of temporal and spatial ways that cryptocurrencies remix and automate payment mechanisms and pathways.

Daniel Hellwig, Goran Karlic, Arnd Huchzermeier

This chapter looks beyond the novelty of self-executing ‘smart contracts’ in blockchain networks and explores developments against the background fact that commercial parties have, for centuries, used documentary credit to simulate autonomous performance. Blockchain-based smart contracts and documentary credit share three core functionalities which are essential to any effective autonomous performance, analogue or digital—they both (i) act through internalized media of exchange; (ii) operate as closed systems; and (iii) provide means of securing sufficient resources to guarantee contractual performance. Using these three functionalities as a framework, this chapter conducts a comparative analysis of mechanisms for effecting autonomous contractual performance in a commercial setting. From this comparison, a few hypotheses are drawn regarding the potential areas where smart contract technology is more likely to find fruitful application. In particular, the chapter considers potential limitations to applying smart contracts to scenarios beyond digital asset transfers, how dispute resolution mechanisms should be designed to complement (rather impair) the autonomous nature of contractual performance under smart contracts, and potential capital cost implications which might arise in some cases when parties seek to replace human intermediaries with smart contracts.

Alex Pazaitis, Primavera De Filippi, Vasilis Kostakis

No abstract is available for this record.

Michal Elzbieta Janton-Drozdowska, Alicja Mikołajewicz-Woźniak

The year 2016 ended the period of migration from national payment services to the SEPA instruments and it has become apparent that some problems remained unresolved. Overcoming them requires finding suitable technological solutions. The potential of distributed ledger technology (DLT) is currently explored by financial sector and its implementation may affect the SEPA schemes in a variety of dimensions. The aim of the article is to determine the potential impact of the DLT transfer to banking sector on the future SEPA's functioning. The paper presents SEPA's assumptions and the project's current status as well as DLT's concept. It describes the technology transfer implications for banking industry and compares currently operating SEPA schemes with those based on DLT. It also indicates opportunities and threats being the consequence of the new technology implementation and their significance for SEPA.In the article the qualitative analysis is supplemented by the quantitative one. While characterizing the functioning of the main pillars of the SEPA Schemes the elements of descriptive statistics are used. The final conclusions are based on the comparative analysis of SEPA schemes and developed DLT applications. The existing problems might be solved by supplementing currently operating SEPA payment schemes with the applications based on DLT. The developed systems shall provide required real-time processing and a global reach as well as extend the SEPA schemes' functionalities with the ability to transfer other currencies. The technology implementation shall result not only in new financial products but first of all - in creating new business models. Consequently, we shall expect the modification of currently operating SEPA schemes, based rather on their supplement than total replacement in a short time horizon.

Lynden Griggs, Rod Thomas, Rouhshi Low, James Scheibner

Electronic conveyancing is here. But how will it evolve with the development of blockchains being touted as one means by which fraud in relation to land can be minimised, if not eliminated? With centralised land registries requiring expensive risk minimisation strategies such as a government-funded assurance fund, or the taking out of private title insurance, can blockchains provide a systemic level of security that can improve the land titles system, and lessen the need for other forms of risk minimisation? Advocates of blockchain technology are high on hyperbole with what it can offer to support smart transaction types in a number of fields. For others, blockchains have no great advantage when applied to physical assets such as real property, and are limited in their utility.This article seeks to advance the discussion, particularly in the context of land administration. Against a backdrop of fraud occurring in title by registration systems, the authors explain what blockchain technology is, before testing its validity by outlining four common fraud scenarios within land administration, and asking whether blockchain technology would have eliminated the frauds in question. The findings show that blockchains would have prevented the fraud in two of the scenarios, but not in the remaining two. In addition, the findings note some of the known unknowns that will need to be resolved prior to any enactment of a blockchain solution. The articles conclusion is that where the process leading to registration is in some way unreliable, blockchains may offer some advantages. However, once the entry of the transaction is registered, blockchains can play no role in testing or checking the veracity of that entry. The authors also consider that, in the context of derivative interests in land, such as easements, mortgages and fee simples, blockchain technology is limited in capacity. Similarly, joint ownership of land is routine, yet the security nuances of blockchains may make joint ownership within a blockchain context difficult. These last two limitations restrict the current applicability of blockchains and make its application questionable for existing, soundly established land administration systems.

Usman Chohan

No abstract is available for this record.

Darcy W E Allen

No abstract is available for this record.

Richard Holden, Anup Malani

Two parties sign a contract but before they fully perform they modify the contract.Should courts enforce the modified agreement?The modification may enable efficient trade in response to changed circumstances, or one party may have made an efficient relationship-specific investment and then been held-up by the other.Courts have had difficulty tackling this problem because the facts required to discriminate between the two situations are non-verifiable.A private remedy is for the parties to write a contract that is robust to hold-up or that makes the facts relevant to modification verifiable.But implementing such remedies requires commitment to the provisions, i.e., they themselves are subject to non-compliance.Conventional contract technology, e.g., the use of liquidated damages, to ensure commitment are disfavored by courts and subject to renegotiation.Smart contracts written on blockchain ledgers may offer a solution.We explain the basic economics of these technologies.We argue that they can used to implement liquidated damages without court involvement and thereby obtain commitment to renegotiation design and revelation mechanisms.We address the hurdles courts may impose to use of smart contracts and argue that sophisticated parties' ex ante commitment to them may lead courts to allow their use as pre-commitment devices.

Maria Letizia Perugini

Italian Abstract: Questo studio si propone di analizzare il complesso delle novità introdotte al sistema dei pagamenti e al trasferimento di diritti da Distributed Ledger e Blockchain, in una prospettiva che tenga conto delle applicazioni di mercato di queste innovazioni tecnologiche e della tutela giuridica degli interessi economici e delle posizioni soggettive che ne derivano. In particolar modo, l’opera vuole stimolare la discussione volta alla definizione di un quadro normativo socialmente adeguato che sostenga l’efficienza di questi strumenti in un’ottica di scambio economico globalizzato. English Abstract: This essay aims at analyzing the ensemble of innovation introduced by Distributed Ledger and Blockchain to the payment system and the transfer of rights, in a perspective considering the market applications of these new technologies and the legal protection of deriving economics interests and individual rights. Purposely, our dissertation aspires to encourage the discussion for the definition of a socially adequate legal framework sustaining the efficiency of these instruments in a global exchange perspective.