This paper describes one of Oxfam’s pilot projects exploring blockchain technology, focusing on the non-technological, institutional challenges faced by the organisation. There is an emerging literature on blockchain for social good, however, this predominantly focuses on the use cases and issues relating to applying the technology in international development projects. A gap in the literature exists regarding the non-technological aspects of blockchain projects both within the sector and more broadly. Addressing this gap is critically important as many of the promises of blockchain technology will only eventuate in their fullest when whole ecosystems are using the technology. To get there requires a transition period and it is this transition period that holds the key to success for organisations exploring the technology. This paper goes some way to addressing this gap. It does so by describing a specific case study and unpacking some of the organisational challenges associated with implementing a blockchain-based project in the international development and humanitarian sector. This has important implications for the sector as blockchain technology becomes ever more present as a tool capable of reducing inequality and addressing power imbalances. The Oxfam case study described in this paper highlights the difficulty many not-for-profits are having engaging with the technology. The lessons are drawn from a specific use case of a current pilot project using blockchain technology in a cash transfer preparedness project in a small island developing state. Although important and insightful, this paper does not focus on the specifics of the application of the technology but rather discusses the myriad non-technological challenges faced from Oxfam Australia’s perspective. These are categorised into three main areas: awareness and understanding of the technology, capacity constraints of in-house support services in providing relevant support for a nascent technology, and issues related to engaging in non-traditional partnerships. The paper concludes by recommending further areas of research and suggestions to develop practical tools and guidance to help the international development and humanitarian sector navigate this emerging technology.
In this growing world, Internet has changed so much to an extent that it turned into a powerful tool in every aspects of our lives.E-auction is one of those things which helps the bidders to take part in an auction online over the air. In a sealed bid third parties need to pay an extra cost to help the buyers and sellers carry out their exchange without any hassle. But there can be a breach of trust by the third parties. Owners of the auction or the company that is auctioning can have direct entry to it when the auction is run on a decentralized platform. When the users auction off something on the chain, the smart contract takes control of the auctioned asset and thereafter it manages the bids associated. In this paper, we execute a smart contract for a verifiable sealed-bid auction on the Ethereum blockchain. The type of auction used is sealed-bid in which the bidders submit their bids privately and each bidder can participate only once. As per the biddings received, the highest bidder wins and pays the highest corresponding highest submitted bid. Additionally, before the auction ends the bidder can withdraw the bid after submitting it. In such a case the bidder will have another chance to place the bid. This smart contract implementation abides by the true essence of a sealed-bid, to be precise, no information about the biddings is leaked to the bidders except for the highest bid
Blockchain for business is a new concept which enables many industries and organizations to implement even the basic of systems on foundation of blockchain technology. Using this technology, our goal is to develop a payments system that enables transfer of funds for a monetary transaction between two parties. Hyperledger is an open source community oriented effort which was made to propel cross-industry blockchain advances that were available. The Linux Foundation has it. It has partners from everywhere throughout the world , at a worldwide dimension and incorporates ventures like funding, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, assembling and Technology. Using Blockchain for Enterprise technology, we are going to develop a new payments system that makes use of regulated cryptocurrency. Using this system, we want to create a new cryptocurrency specific to the payment portal for people to buy, sell and pay or earn rewards using this cryptocurrency. This system will majorly consist of participants and admins that will be divided based on the certificates assigned to every participant. Our implementation involves. using the fabric for creating a payment system run on the backend of blockchain technology. This will involve having a regulatory authority to maintain the cryptocurrency, ledger and authenticity of the users. Theoretically, the blockchain technology maintains anonymity for transactions. It uses a distributed ledger to record transactions for people to be able to make secure transactions without any repercussions. Blockchain for Enterprise implements Blockchain technology by using concepts like Trust, Privacy and Smart contracts in addition to the distributed ledger to create an industry friendly Blockchain business application. Blockchain is a rapidly growing field with multiple implementations which can be explored not just on anonymity but also on actual life implementations. Distributed ledger technology is applied to the payment systems. Cryptocurrency would now not only be used for anonymous transactions but also for regular day to day transactions.
Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
The blockchain technology is taking the world by storm. Blockchain with its decentralized, transparent and secure nature has emerged as a disruptive technology for the next generation of numerous industrial applications. One of them is Cloud of Things enabled by the combination of cloud computing and Internet of Things. In this context, blockchain provides innovative solutions to address challenges in Cloud of Things in terms of decentralization, data privacy and network security, while Cloud of Things offer elasticity and scalability functionalities to improve the efficiency of blockchain operations. Therefore, a novel paradigm of blockchain and Cloud of Things integration, called BCoT, has been widely regarded as a promising enabler for a wide range of application scenarios. In this article, we present a state-of-the-art review on the BCoT integration to provide general readers with an overview of the BCoT in various aspects, including background knowledge, motivation, and integrated architecture. Particularly, we also provide an in-depth survey of BCoT applications in different use-case domains such as smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation and smart industry. Then, we review the recent BCoT developments with the emerging blockchain and cloud platforms, services, and research projects. Finally, some important research challenges and future directions are highlighted to spur further research in this promising area.
Mohamad Kassab, Joanna F. DeFranco, Tarek Malas, Phillip A. Laplante · 6 authors
Healthcare is a data-intensive domain, once a considerable volume of data is daily to monitoring patients, managing clinical research, producing medical records, and processing medical insurance claims. While the focus of applications of blockchain in practice has been to build distributed ledgers involving virtual tokens, the impetus of this emerging technology has now extended to the medical domain. With the increased popularity, it is crucial to study how this technology accompanied with a system for smart contracts can support and challenge the healthcare domain for all interrelated actors (patients, physicians, insurance companies, regulators) and involved assets (e.g., patients’ data, physician’s data, equipment’s and drug’s supply chain, etc.). The contributions of this paper are the following: (i) report the results of a systematic literature review conducted to identify, extract, evaluate and synthesize the studies on the symbiosis of blockchain in healthcare; (ii) summarize and categorize existing benefits/challenges on incorporating blockchain in healthcare domain; (iii) provide a framework that will facilitate new research activities; and (iv) establish the state of evidence with in-depth assessment.
Purpose The transaction process of an office building is known to be time consuming and inefficient, in part due to the lack of market transparency. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the development of a blockchain application that can improve the transaction process of office buildings in the Netherlands. Design/methodology/approach Conducting design science research, the current transaction process of an office building and status quo of blockchain technology in real estate is investigated. Subsequently, multiple parties are interviewed to define major pain points within the process. The interview findings are used to design a blockchain solution which overcomes the aforementioned pain points. After designing, the interviewees are asked again to pragmatically validate the proposed model. Findings One of the major pain points identified concerning the transaction process of an office building is that it is difficult to define the characteristics of a property, due to lack of data structure and quality. The proposed application improves the way specific assets are understood by structuring physical and contractual information in one place and guarantees the quality of the data by using the blockchain mechanisms. Practical implications A blockchain application is proposed, which can improve the transaction process of an office building. Originality/value Recent studies indicate that blockchain technology could lead to improvements in efficiency, transparency and therefore trust within the transaction process. Therefore, the proposed application is of value for the future of real estate data management and the transaction process.
Purpose The application of smart contract can greatly reduce transaction costs and improve transaction efficiency. The existing smart contract are expensive, single application scenario and inefficient. This paper aims to propose a new smart contract model to solve these problems. Design/methodology/approach By investigating the research history, models and platforms, this paper summarizes the shortcomings of existing smart contracts. Based on the content and architecture of traditional contract, a smart contract model with wider application scope is designed. Findings In this paper, several models are used to describe the operation mechanism of smart contracts. To facilitate computer execution, a decomposition method is proposed, which divides smart contracts into several sub-contracts. Then, the advantages and deployment methods of smart contract are discussed. On this basis, a specific example is given to illustrate how the application of smart contract will change our life. Originality/value Smart contract is gradually applied to more fields. In this paper, the structure and operation mechanism of smart contract system in reality are given, which will be beneficial to the application of smart contract to more complex systems.
The unique combination of social and economic factors has brought about a dynamic and rapidly-evolving blockchain ecosystem in Asia. This paper systematically reviewed the development of four fast-growing blockchain hubs in Asia, namely China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea using secondary data sources. These countries are fast-growing based on the development of its digital, technological and regulatory infrastructure, patent applications, cryptocurrency trading volume and Initial Crypto-token Offerings (ICOs) activities. The review included insights into the different regulatory approaches, the blockchain startup scenes, selected enterprise or government-backed projects, as well as the research and educational landscape. Our findings suggested that the regulators, industry players, and academic institutions were purposeful and deliberate in nurturing blockchain technology innovation. Future development would be dependent on the regulatory, technological, as well as talent capability support unique to each blockchain hub.
While Ethereum run in public networks which make the blockchain size large and transaction run time longer than time for private or national network, that led to continuous worries over the expanding size of Ethereum Blockchain, which certainly reduce Cryptocurrency's effectiveness. The estimations were on increase and believed it would cross the node limit of 1 TB terribly shortly. If new consumer a full node enters to that blockchain and cryptocurrency world, a node is a computer software cum database of the blockchain, which a full node client must download on their personal computers to become a full node in the blockchain. in this way, the client can be verifying transaction on the network with the help of other nodes on the system. We proposed to implement national cryptocurrency which developed using Ethereum as a development platform that could serve national or regional people that has limited or slow internet connections like Iraq, in addition payments in countries with unstable fiat currencies, although cryptocurrencies are suffering from unstable exchange rates against fiat currencies, the use of national cryptocurrency instead of the native fiat cash could even be a far better alternative for individuals in certain countries like Iraq, Iran and Syria, with high rate of inflation. The reminder of this paper is arranging as following: an introduction, the advantages and drawbacks of cryptocurrencies, Background on Blockchain and Ethereum, implementation, results and conclusion.
Çoğu ülkede Sanal para, bitcoin gibi isimlerle adını duyuran kripto paraların işlem hacimleri üst düzey boyutlara ulaştığı görülmüştür. Hatta günümüzde birçok firma ödemelerini iş çi ücretlerini kripto paralarla yapmaktadır.Bu paraların bir çok avantajının olması yanında bir takım dezavantajlarının olduğu görülmüştür. Kripto paralar hukuki anlamda kabul görmüş olmasa da yüksek kar getiri oranı, kolay transfer edilmesi, işlem çok az olması gibi sebeplerle işletmeleri hayran bırakan bir yatırım aracına dönüştürmüştür. Günümüzde Ticari işletmeler kripto paralarla tediyeişlemleri borçlanma işlemleri veya tahsilatlarını gerçekleştirebilmekte olup ayrıca kur getirisinden extra yararlanmak sebebiyle kripto paralara çok sık yatırım yaptıkları görülmektedir. Ayrıca bu paraların piyasada bir çok modeli olması ve bu paraların kendine has bir borsası vardır. Very madenciliği yapılmasada aynı borsadaki gibi arz talep dengesine bağlı olarak kar getirisi elde etmek mümkündür. Bu çalışmanın amacı sanal paralar ve bitcoin özelinde tüm kripto paraların nasıl çalıştığı ve bu paraların özellikleri hakkında bilgi verip Türkiye’de Bitcoin ile yapılan ticari işlemlerinin muhasebeleştirilmesi hakkında değerlendirmelerde bulunmaktır.
Masarah Paquet-Clouston, Matteo Romiti, Bernhard Haslhofer, Thomas Charvat
In the past year, a new spamming scheme has emerged: sexual extortion messages requiring payments in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, also known as sextortion. This scheme represents a first integration of the use of cryptocurrencies by members of the spamming industry. Using a dataset of 4,340,736 sextortion spams, this research aims at understanding such new amalgamation by uncovering spammers' operations. To do so, a simple, yet effective method for projecting Bitcoin addresses mentioned in sextortion spams onto transaction graph abstractions is computed over the entire Bitcoin blockchain. This allows us to track and investigate monetary flows between involved actors and gain insights into the financial structure of sextortion campaigns. We find that sextortion spammers are somewhat sophisticated, following pricing strategies and benefiting from cost reductions as their operations cut the upper-tail of the spamming supply chain. We discover that one single entity is likely controlling the financial backbone of the majority of the sextortion campaigns and that the 11-month operation studied yielded a lower-bound revenue between \$1,300,620 and \$1,352,266. We conclude that sextortion spamming is a lucrative business and spammers will likely continue to send bulk emails that try to extort money through cryptocurrencies.
Ku Ruhana Ku‐Mahamud, Mazni Omar, Nur Azzah Abu Bakar, Ishola Dada Muraina
Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are attracting increasing attention from consumers, investors, investment industry and regulators. Cryptocurrency has great potential to be used for transaction or investment in the future. However, level of awareness of the blockchain technology and cryptocurrency is still at infant stage, specifically in developing countries. Thus, this study aims to investigate the level of awareness, trust and adoption of blockchain technology among blockchain community in Malaysia. Quantitative approach was adopted in this study where a new questionnaire was developed in the first phase to measure the level of awareness, adoption, and trust of blockchain technology applications among Malaysian blockchain communities. The resulting questionnaire consists of items on respondents’ demographic, their awareness, trust, and adoption of FinTech particularly on blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. In the second phase, a pilot study was conducted to validated the new questionnaire from 304 respondents. Reliability test using Cronbach’s alpha with a value of 0.908. A real survey was also conducted in this phase using the validated queationnaire and data were obtained online from 304 respondents. Descriptive statistics were used in the analysis during the third phase of the study, and results demonstrate that the awareness level of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are at the intermediate level. Nevertheless, the majority of respondents are confident and trust that the blockchain technology can offer a stable and secure platform, which gives positive impact on the application of the technology. Empirical results provide significant insights into the development of the blockchain technology industry in the country.
Suhag Pandya, Murugan Mittapalli, Sri Vallabha Teja Gulla, Ori Landau
Abstract This research paper is a holistic review done on the rise of Blockchain and cryptocurrency, then elaborate about the great advantages of having a decentralized finance system. The existing scenarios from a sample of countries were reviewed in regards to their effort to adopt cryptocurrency to find some of the challenges like what are the security challenges this new monetary system faces, and limitations faced by different countries. A detailed analysis was done to answer some of the vital questions as such why cryptocurrency is banned in a few countries when other countries see cryptocurrency as a secured mode of payment transaction or what kind of security is provided by cryptocurrency compared to the traditional payments such as pay by cash, credit, or checks. Lastly, this paper also summarizes a high-level overview to propose recommended solutions to overcome the security concerns associated with the adoption of cryptocurrencies and how does the future of cryptocurrency look.
SUMMARY Blockchain offers a drastically new way to record, process, and store financial transactions and information, and has the potential to fundamentally change the landscape of the accounting profession and reshape the business ecosystem. In this article, we introduce two types (i.e., permissionless and permissioned) of blockchain and lay out their technological features. We further discuss implications of blockchain to auditing and elaborate on opportunities and challenges of the two types of blockchain to auditors. We conclude by making specific recommendations for auditors to adapt, adjust, and elevate themselves to the role of strategic partners in blockchain implementation. JEL Classifications: M15; M41; M42; O14; O33; O55.
Cryptocurrencies have received important attention as alternative mediums of exchange that can complement or even replace traditional ones. For this reason, cryptocurrencies have become an attractive investment vehicle with a constantly growing market cap. Cryptocurrencies’ role and economic impact cannot be concluded further than just a disruptive technology to the conventional financial system. The unstable and highly speculative value fluctuations coupled with a relatively new technological system have resulted in a lack of research to predict the future cryptocurrency market development. The research method used in this legal research is the juridical-normative method. The juridical-normative method is intended to seek or find rules, principles, and legal doctrines, which are then applied to analyze a phenomenon that is a legal subject. The presence of cryptocurrency has its own impact on social life. These impacts stem from the main feature of cryptocurrencies, the blockchain. Blockchain offers a revolution in the paradigm of the financial system, which was initially centered on the existence of central authorities such as governments and banks to become user-centered or user-centered. In addition, the philosophical values applied in cryptocurrency and blockchain reflect ideas that are synonymous with the collegial collective spirit, such as decentralization, transparency, equality, and accountability. Abstrak Mata uang kripto telah mendapat perhatian penting sebagai media pertukaran alternatif yang dapat melengkapi atau bahkan menggantikan yang tradisional. Karena alasan ini, Mata uang kripto telah menjadi sarana investasi yang menarik dengan kapitalisasi pasar yang terus berkembang. Untuk saat ini, peran dan dampak ekonomi dari Mata uang kripto tidak dapat disimpulkan lebih jauh dari sekadar teknologi yang mengganggu sistem keuangan konvensional. Fluktuasi nilai yang tidak stabil dan sangat spekulatif ditambah dengan sistem teknologi yang relatif baru mengakibatkan kurangnya penelitian untuk memprediksi perkembangan pasar Mata uang kripto di masa depan. Metode penelitian yang digunakan dalam penelitian hukum ini adalah metode yuridis normatif. Metode yuridis-normatif dimaksudkan untuk mencari atau menemukan kaidah, asas dan doktrin hukum yang kemudian diterapkan untuk menganalisis suatu fenomena yang menjadi subjek hukum. Kehadiran cryptocurrency memiliki dampak tersendiri dalam kehidupan sosial. Dampak ini berasal dari fitur utama Mata uang kripto, blockchain. Blockchain menawarkan revolusi paradigma sistem keuangan yang awalnya berpusat pada keberadaan otoritas pusat seperti pemerintah dan bank menjadi user-centered atau berpusat pada pengguna. Selain itu, nilai-nilai filosofis yang diterapkan dalam cryptocurrency dan blockchain mencerminkan ide-ide yang identik dengan semangat kolektif kolegial seperti desentralisasi, transparansi, kesetaraan, dan akuntabilitas. Kata kunci: Mata uang kripto, Bitcoin, Hukum, Ekonomi, Malaysia
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.
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.
Personal Health Records (PHRs) have the potential to give patients fine-grained, personalized and secure access to their own medical data and to enable self-management of care. Emergent trends around the use of Blockchain, or Distributed Ledger Technology, seem to offer solutions to some of the problems faced in enabling these technologies, especially to support issues consent, data exchange, and data access. We present an analysis of existing blockchain-based health record solutions and a reference architecture for a "Ledger of Me" system that extends PHR to create a new platform combining the collection and access of medical data and digital interventions with smart contracts. Our intention is to enable patient use of the data in order to support their care and to provide a strong consent mechanisms for sharing of data between different organizations and apps. Ledger of Me is based on around the principle that this combination of event-driven smart contracts, medical record data, and patient control is important for the adoption of blockchain-based solutions for the PHR. The reference architecture we present can serve as the basis of a range of future blockchain-based medical application architectures.
Fengkie Junis, Faisal Malik Widya Prasetya, Farouq Ibrahim Lubay, Anny Kartika Sari
Blockchain-based smart contract has become a growing field in the blockchain technology. What was once a technology used to solve digital transaction issues turns out to have some wider usage, including smart contract. The development of smart contract can be traced from the numerous platforms facilitating it, however the issue on how well each platform works as oppose to each other has yet been fully explored. The usage of smart contract can be seen from the applications that are built on top of the smart contract platform, such as the tokenization of real world to virtual world assets. However smart contract contains several issues concerning security and codifying which could be solved by various tools that are proposed by existing research. This paper aims to revisit the blockchain-based smart contract technology in order to understand and discuss the research gaps gathered from existing research and to provide guidance for future research.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This is an in-progress research project that aims to explore how archival science and cybersecurity can be applied to evaluate the trustworthiness and security of smart contracts. The analysis will be made using the requirements of trustworthy records and the investigation of vulnerabilities related to the development and implementation of smart contracts. The expected contribution is to improve smart contracts’ trustworthiness as archival records and evidence.
Devrim Ünal, Mohammad Hammoudeh, Mehmet Sabır Kiraz
Blockchain offers unprecedented opportunities for innovation in financial transactions. A whole new world of opportunities for banking, lending, insurance, money transfer, investments, and stock markets awaits. However, the potential for wide-scale adoption of blockchain is hindered with cybersecurity and privacy issues. We provide an overview of the risks and security requirements and give an outlook for future research that could be helpful in solving some of the challenges. We also present an approach for policy specification and verification of financial transactions based on smart contracts.