Blockchain Papers

Mikołaj Barczentewicz, Alexander Sarch

No abstract is available for this record.

Khaled Riad, Mohamed Elhoseny

Open banking allows banks and financial sectors to easily access the customers’ financial data which is revolutionizing. It also provides the customers with excellent cloud access to various providers’ wide range of financial services. The storage of such sensitive services and data on cloud servers is a double‐edged sword. It can ease and support fine‐grained access to such services/data anywhere and anytime, supporting the open banking system. But, on the other hand, data privacy and secrecy are a challenge. Thus, efficient access control should exist for open banking’s services and data to protect cloud‐hosted financial sensitive data from unauthorized customers. This paper proposes a new access control scheme that employs blockchain for the key‐revocation process. We implement the smart contract’s functions on the Ethereum platform and test the contract’s code on the Kovan Testnet before deploying it to the Mainnet. Although the customer is authenticated to open banking, his key/s can be revoked according to the status response of the bank branch. Thus, his access to financial services and data is denied. We did comprehensive experiments for the revocation status response time, data exchanged until receiving the revocation status, and the time spent updating the policy. Also, we compared the results of our proposed scheme with two well‐known methods—Certificate Revocation List (CRL) and Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP). The experimental results show that our proposed scheme (BKR‐AC) has a faster response time than Certificate Revocation List (CRL) and Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) in case of nonrevoked keys/certificates and a slower response time in case of revoked keys to avoid nonrevoking a revoked key. But the data exchanged is an average for BKR‐AC between CRL and OCSP, which is still a tiny amount and accepted. The security analysis proved that our scheme is secure against some well‐known attacks on open banking systems. In addition, it is also secured against the chosen‐text attack by employing the challenge‐response authentication mechanism.

Yustus Eko Oktian, Thi-Thu-Huong Le, Uk Jo, Howon Kim

Bandwidth trading procedures can be made to incentivize users to sell their needless traffic and indirectly reduce the probability of traffic congestion. However, implementation of bandwidth trading is opex-heavy from Internet Service Provider (ISP) perspective, while on the other hand, users also do not trust network executions from the ISP due to its heavily centralized control. These issues hinder the applicability of bandwidth trading and become our motivation to propose this paper. Our bandwidth-trading framework utilize software-defined networking (SDN) and blockchain. SDN automates the bandwidth trading executions from the ISP side and reduces the opex. Meanwhile, the smart contract is a trusted platform for building a trading marketplace where buyers, sellers, and SDN controllers can negotiate the trading terms. Once the trading is executed, SDN controllers generate proof of trading that must be submitted to the smart contract as proof of provisioning. We implement our works using Ethereum and POX SDN controllers, and the results prove that it can provide a seamless bandwidth trading experience with reasonable overhead. Furthermore, by committing to our framework, bandwidth trading can be executed fairly and securely because all previous provisioning can be cross-checked through the provided proof-of-trading.

Jorge Saldivar, Elena Martínez, David Rozas, María Cruz Valiente · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Agostino Capponi, Ruizhe Jia, Shihao Yu

Decentralized exchanges DEXs allow traders to express their willingness to pay for quick execution through a public priority fee bidding mechanism. We provide empirical evidence that high-fee DEX trades are more informative and contribute more to price discovery. Using address-level blockchain transaction data, we show that informed traders persistently bid higher fees to secure early execution, revealing a strong willingness to pay for execution priority. Further, analysis of Ethereum mempool data demonstrates that informed traders employ a "jump bidding" strategy, placing high initial bids to deter potential competitors.

Denys Yu. Lukianchuk

The article is aimed at studying the evolution of money. The article examines the history of the emergence and evolutionary development of money and cryptocurrencies. Blockchain technology is analyzed, as well as the technological difference between Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana cryptocurrencies is considered. The issues of the operation of the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts are covered. An analysis of blockchain technology and the use of cryptocurrencies as a means of payment is carried out. The type of cryptocurrency such as a stablecoin is revealed in its variety. Comparisons of native blockchain coins and stablecoins as a means of payment, further of USDC and USDT stablecoins, are made. An analysis of differences between the centralized and decentralized stablecoins is carried out. It is specified what the stablecoins USDC, USDT, DAI are backed by. It is analyzed what share of the market is occupied by USDT, USDC, and DAI. The advantages and disadvantages of stablecoins are identified. A characterization of activity of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) with its connection to central banks is presented. It is determined that stablecoins are an attempt to objectively eliminate the high volatility of traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum by tying the value of a stablecoin to one or more other assets, such as fiat currency. Blockchain technology along with stablecoins can increase the efficiency of cross-border payments. With the growing demand for use, a stablecoin can become one of the important elements of the payment infrastructure. As result of the study, a comparison between cryptocurrencies and the companies Visa, Paypal in terms of processing speed and the amount of payment commissions is made. It is determined that blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies are a new evolutionary stage in the development of money. It is substantiated that the effect of using blockchain technology allows to cheaper and faster money transfers. It is noted that blockchain technology is young, but cooperation between traditional financial companies and cryptocurrencies is already visible.

Kamilla Marchewka-Bartkowiak, Marcin Wiśniewski

The aim of the paper is to evaluate the investment attractiveness of selected energy tokens from the point of view of the effectiveness measures applied to ordinary financial instruments. The authors also classify energy tokens among climate-aligned tokens and digital instruments of green investments financing. In this way, it was possible to compare energy tokens against traditional financial instruments. Furthermore, the authors attempted to investigate the relationship between the formation of returns of the researched energy tokens and the returns on stock and commodity markets. The results of the study indicate the low investment attractiveness of energy tokens compared to investments in stock markets, commodity markets and investments in major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The research therefore indicates that buyers of energy tokens today should not be driven by investment or speculative motives but rather by a desire to obtain a means of clearing energy trading, or other utility.

Christopher Cordi, Michael P. Frank, Kasimir Gabert, Carollan Helinski · 8 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Chaitali Narkhede, Atharva Hankare, Rushi Redkar, Smita Bharne

Ridesharing entails the sharing of journeys in order to make optimal use of fuel by allowing people to go along the same route to share rides. It allows regular passengers to share trips with others, having the additive benefit of lowering travel costs and reducing traffic congestion. Most current ride choices rely on a centralized authority to enable the system, leaving it vulnerable to faults at a specific point in the system and raising concerns about privacy disclosure to attackers acting both within and outside. Furthermore, they are vulnerable to external threats and fraud, and the payment made by the current ride-sharing service provider is rather costly. As a result, we have proposed the system named EtherRider, based on the Ethereum blockchain technology. EtherRider enables drivers to provide transportation services without the need for a central system. Both the passenger and the driver will know about sharing ride details, secure their travel details, such as pick-up and drop-off locations, arrival/departure times, and secure payment through the ethereum blockchain.With a distributed ledger, drivers and riders could create a more user-driven,value-oriented marketplace.In the context of car-sharing systems, our work also indicates that the design of such an integrated platform is dependent on striking the correct balance between important design concepts (such as security and privacy, authenticity, traceability and reliability, scalability, and interoperability).

Rongyu Xiao, Guozi Sun, Jiale Yang, Yao Wang · 5 authors

Public chains represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum do not require users to use their real names, and transaction data are open to the whole network. Analysed based on this, researchers have achieved the deanonymization of blockchain transactions to a certain extent. Based on the existing blockchain transaction privacy protection scheme, the true link relationship between the transaction sender and receiver is hidden, which brings difficulties to regulation. In this paper, we propose a cryptocurrency mixing service RBSmix, which allows users to reestablish their financial privacy in Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies. RBSmix, through blind signature to prevent attackers from linking input and output addresses, by the threshold secret sharing algorithm, encryption technology, and a regulation team, combined with the idea of voting, tracks the source of funds for illegal addresses. Experiments show that the scheme scales to large numbers of users and can provide users with better privacy protection.

Ali H. Ahmed, Nagwa M. Omar, Hosny M. Ibrahim

In the last era the number of internet-connected devices surpassed the human population. IoT integration rate into human world equals at least five times the rate of electricity and telephony. Currently in 2020 the number of IoT devices is around 50 billion smart objects. This great invasion to our live requires extensive efforts for controlling and securing those devices. BlockChain (BC) is a distributed write-only ledger that eliminates the need for third party in securing and verifying transactions between peers. BC is considered the most powerful technique for securing transactions between IoT devices. In this work, a robust and scalable blockchain-based security framework for IoT is proposed. This framework comprises clients, device gateways, and administrators. IoT devices access BC through gateways. Ethereum BlockChain is utilized in addition to Ethereum smart contracts for enforcing a set of rules defined by the system administrator. Finally metrics that fulfill both efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed framework are introduced. In the results section, the proposed work provides robust and scalable security framework for the IoT devices under different attack probabilities in addition to satisfying the conditions of lightweight, transparency, and timeliness.

Xue Tan, Yong Tan

No abstract is available for this record.

Brian L. Frye

No abstract is available for this record.

Felix Härer, Hans-Georg Fill

The distribution of information through web protocols is today based on the client-server model. Recently, decentralized protocols with greater availability appear as well as blockchain-based attestation methods, allowing for proving the existence of information. In combination, these methods promise a secure, decentralized and long-term storage. However, there exist two major problems: (1) the scalability of blockchains limits their storage capacity and (2) various (de)centralized web protocols are in use and could alleviate this problem, but they do not support blockchain-based attestations. In this paper, we extend an approach for blockchain-based attestation with compatibility for multi-protocol storage. Instead of specific protocols or blockchains, the extended approach aims to contribute novel concepts to the discussion on blockchain scalability. It augments the capabilities of existing protocols for applications such as certification or timestamping of digital artifacts. With the use of decentralized protocols such as IPFS, further availability and inherent resilience properties are gained, allowing for applications such as open research repositories and digital registries. We discuss the architecture of the extended approach, a possible implementation in a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain with IPFS and Git, and evaluate the time and cost of attestations.

Jingzhe Wang, Balaji Palanisamy

No abstract is available for this record.

Aanchal Mani, Samarjeet Patil, Soham Sheth, Lakshmi Sudha Kondaka

Blockchain is a distributed system that confirms security and reliability. It has started a new era of a solid and consensus system. Because of blockchain's emphasis on security, many other operations and processes are adopting the same reliable approach. Almost all processes and operations are now encouraged to be computed electronically in the digital Ethereum network that has been presented. In the current situation, we have seen what the conduction of elections has done to the worsening situation of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The proposed system uses an Ethereum network on a blockchain platform to implement a college voting system, making use of the Aadhar API. E-voting will help to support transparency and voters' trust to reduce corruption and unreliability in the voting processes. The use of this system will allow a voter to vote from home while also having the assurity that this process is completely secure and reliable due to the use of blockchain technology.

Wei Jian, Baochuan Fu, Zhengtian Wu, Baoping Jiang · 6 authors

As a decentralized database technology, blockchain is increasingly being applied to smart grids. This paper proposes a blockchain-based smart microgrid power transaction model. The model realizes the power dispatching between users and agents in the microgrid through two-way auctions and point-to-point transactions and optimizes energy allocation through market regulation. And based on the Ethereum private chain, it ensures the openness, transparency, safety, and reliability of transactions. The simulation results show that the open and reliable features of the blockchain improve the efficiency of power dispatching, and verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the model.

Judyta Przyłuska-Schmitt, Dorota Jegorow, Jaroslava Bučková

Purpose: The aim of the article is a comparative analysis of selected cryptocurrencies and gold in the context of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: The study covered the stock exchange of Gold and the four largest cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Coin, and Cardano. The data for the analysis for the period 2020-2021 was taken from the internet platform www.coinmarketcap.com, where all cryptocurrencies are published in daily intervals, and from the Investing website www.investing.com for Gold. The analysis of data in the form of time series was carried out, based on the assumption that successive values in the data set represent successive measurements made at equal time intervals. Findings: Our findings prove that the studied cryptocurrencies proved to be resistant to economic fluctuations related to the pandemic crisis. Originality/value: We present original scientific research that provides useful information in a practical dimension for investors interested in the cryptocurrency market and safe assets, and anyone interested in the specificity of the problem at hand.

Zhenpeng Liu, Yongjiang Feng, Lele Ren, Weihua Zheng

Increasing numbers of users are outsourcing data to the cloud, but data integrity is an important issue. Due to the decentralization and immutability of blockchain, more and more researchers tend to use blockchain to replace third-party auditors. This paper proposes a data integrity system based on blockchain expansion technology that aims to solve the problem of high cost for blockchain network maintenance and for user creation of new blocks caused by the rapid growth of blocks in the data integrity audit scheme of existing blockchain technology. Users and cloud service providers (CSP) deploy smart contracts on the main chain and sub-chains. Intensive and frequent computing work is transferred to the sub-chain for completion, and the computation results of the sub-chain are submitted to the main chain periodically or when needed to ensure its finality. The concept of non-interactive audit is introduced to avoid affecting user experience due to the communication with the CSP during the audit process. In order to ensure data security, a reward pool mechanism is introduced. Comprehensive analysis from aspects such as storage, batch auditing and data consistency proves the correctness of the scheme. Experiments on the Ethereum blockchain platform demonstrate that this scheme can effectively reduce storage and computational overhead.

Aqsa Rashid, Atta ur Rehman Khan

In the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT), users and sensor-equipped entities send multiple messages to the Command Control Center (CCC) over the network. The authentication and integrity of these messages are crucial because if an adversary or malicious node transmits, alters, or replays these messages, the consequences will be disasters. Current centralized authentication systems are not suitable for the distributed environment because such schemes are prone to a single point of failure, privacy, and scalability issues. Moreover, the high communication overhead caused by centralization increases energy consumption. In this work, we propose a technique called Blockchain-based Autonomous Authentication and Integrity for the Internet of Battlefield Things (BIoBT) for the C3I system. The proposed technique does not require an explicit authentication channel for the authentication of entities because it is performed on the blockchain side when receiving the data. In addition, it provides data integrity and non-repudiation. BIoBT prototype is created, deployed, and tested on the Ethereum test network. The results prove that BIoBT is efficient, cost-effective, and satisfies the security requirements of a distributed environment for IoBT. BIoBT also outperforms contemporary mechanisms in terms of the number of messages required to establish a secure channel, thereby reducing communication overhead and resource consumption.

Chaochen Hu, Chao Li, Guigang Zhang, Zhiwei Lei · 9 authors

The healthcare industry faces serious problems with health data. Firstly, health data is fragmented and its quality needs to be improved. Data fragmentation means that it is difficult to integrate the patient data stored by multiple health service providers. The quality of these heterogeneous data also needs to be improved for better utilization. Secondly, data sharing among patients, healthcare service providers and medical researchers is inadequate. Thirdly, while sharing health data, patients' right to privacy must be protected, and patients should have authority over who can access their data. In traditional health data sharing system, because of centralized management, data can easily be stolen, manipulated. These systems also ignore patient's authority and privacy. Researchers have proposed some blockchain-based health data sharing solutions where blockchain is used for consensus management. Blockchain enables multiple parties who do not fully trust each other to exchange their data. However, the practice of smart contracts supporting these solutions has not been studied in detail. We propose CrowdMed-II, a health data management framework based on blockchain, which could address the above-mentioned problems of health data. We study the design of major smart contracts in our framework and propose two smart contract structures. We also introduce a novel search contract for searching patients in the framework. We evaluate their efficiency based on the execution costs on Ethereum. Our design improves on those previously proposed, lowering the computational costs of the framework. This allows the framework to operate at scale and is more feasible for widespread adoption.

Liutao Zhao, Jiawan Zhang, Hairong Jing, Jianping Wu · 5 authors

We constructed a cryptographic interaction method museum art exchange protocol (MAXP) for museum digital collections on the basis of blockchain technology. Using our method, we build a digital collection exchange system on Ethereum to realize the digital collection’s online exchange between two museums. Compared with the traditional centralized collection digital resource database method, MAXP can avoid the security risks caused by subjective factors and force majeure factors in the exchange process of digital collections, such as hackers and network viruses. In our exchange system we have built, the expression of content covered by digital collections is more convenient, and copyright disputes can be quickly resolved. Concurrently, given the decentralization and anonymity of the blockchain, a regulatory mechanism has been added to MAXP to avoid fraud, illegal fundraising, money laundering and smuggling. The regulatory mechanism we constructed is a dual receiver public key encryption scheme based on the Diffie-Hellman algorithm and the SM2 elliptic curve public key encryption algorithm. The sender encrypts the collection data, and both receivers can decrypt the messages using their respective private keys. One of the receivers is the museum that obtained the collection information, and the other receiver is the regulator. These two receivers can decrypt simultaneously, and the regulator can regulate the information exchange on the blockchain. The Beijing Planetarium and the Beijing Museum of Natural History have completed the exchange of collections through the system we have built. The analysis results show that the regulatory scheme based on the exchange blockchain system of the museum’s digital collections proves to be feasible, with security and expansibility. Our new encrypted exchange management method of digital collections in museums can effectively promote the exchange of collections between museums, and is of great significance to the promotion of cultural heritage and the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

Stefan Seifermann, Indah Hapsara Murti, Janis Oberle

The paper deals with using blockchain technology for tracking and tracing in manufacturing supply chains. After reviewing the current state-of-the-art, basic requirements for tracking and tracing using blockchain technology are developed. In order to raise acceptance in the industry and to keep complexity and transaction costs low, the focus is set on minimum data transferred and stored in the blockchain. The resulting framework is transformed into a model that has been implemented in a Proof-of-Concept using smart contracts in the Ethereum blockchain. Several test cases were identified and have been used to verify the functionality of the framework and the Proof-of-Concept.

Emmanuel Joel Aikins Abakah, Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil‐Alana

No abstract is available for this record.