Blockchain Papers

Lidia Brailovskaya

No abstract is available for this record.

Ayotunde Oyatomi

No abstract is available for this record.

Miranda Risang Ayu Palar, Dakshina Saraswathy

A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a digital token without equivalence, so unlike a digital currency, NFT cannot be used as a tool of exchange. Instead, NFT represents an object and certifies the scarcity of the object, verifies the owner of the object, and provides the owner with a specific means to move the object as a digital asset. Objects which are represented by NFTs can consist of artistic works, signs, and other visual objects on the internet. So, NFT objects can also be the object of Copyrights’ artistic works or unique aspects of Geographical Indications and Cultural Heritage. The problem is, guaranteeing the scarcity of NFT’s objects is not exactly the same with guaranteeing the originality of Copyrights’ works nor the true origin of Geographical Indications and Cultural Heritage’s objects. There are phenomena where the unique appearances of Champagne wine’s bottle and India’s cultural heritage have been minted as NFTs by individuals other than the collective right holders and being sold at high prices. In this regard, using case study, juridical analytic and legal comparison methods, this article analyzes the potential problems of the intersection between NFT with Geographical Indications and Cultural Heritage and how the problems could be solved in the further amendments of the related laws.

Hang-Yu Zhou

No abstract is available for this record.

Nihar Shah

No abstract is available for this record.

Supradip Baul, Minal Dutta, Joydeep Dey, Sanyukta Deb · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Andreas Park

No abstract is available for this record.

Marc Leinweber

Resilience is the ability of a (distributed) system to withstand any stressful situation without imposing massive restrictions and, above all, without long-term consequences. Permissioned distributed ledgers based on state machine replication (SMR) offer a promising approach to achieving high resilience and fairness in federated systems. SMR provides a fault-tolerant service for clients by relying on all replicas being in a consistent state. The consistent state is achieved through a consensus algorithm, typically an atomic broadcast, that decides on a total order of client requests. In the Byzantine fault model, replicas are assumed to be potentially malicious; a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocol withstands a fixed share of malicious actors. Classic BFT SMR protocols require $n>3t$ replicas and multiple rounds of communication to withstand $t$ faulty replicas, making the implementation complex and limiting achievable throughput and increasing latency. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) allow to implement SMR in the so-called hybrid fault model in which replicas are assumed to be potentially Byzantine but the TEE is restricted to only fail by crashing. In the hybrid fault model, SMR requires less communication and can be implemented with a fault tolerance of $n>2t$ replicas. While many proposals aim to optimize BFT SMR by using TEEs, they still rely on a so-called leader that coordinates the agreement process among the replicas. The leader is known to be a bottleneck and, if it fails, the system has to recover from the failure and elect a new leader. The additional coordination required to elect a new leader can cause significant performance degradation, limiting the achieved resilience. Asynchronous protocols based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) eliminate the reliance on distinguished replicas by allowing all replicas to participate equally in the agreement process. While asynchronous approaches and the hybrid fault model independently contribute to increasing the resilience of BFT SMR systems, their combination has largely been unexplored. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by answering the following research question: What is the achievable performance and resilience of DAG-based, hybrid fault-tolerant state machine replication and under which preconditions can the leaderless nature be safely exploited to maximize throughput? We proceed in three steps to enhance the resilience and performance of BFT SMR systems and to identify potential trade-offs that arise from the assumption of TEEs and asynchrony in BFT SMR. First, we investigate the fit of TEE-based SMR for consortium-operated applications using the example of Mobility-as-a-Service ticketing systems. We propose an SMR application that uses TEEs to protect sensitive customer and mobility provider data while limiting possibilities for fraud by both customers and mobility providers, and ensuring correct billing. We find that as long as secure multiparty computation is not competitive in terms of performance, TEE-based SMR can provide significant advantages in terms of efficiency and resilience while providing reasonable confidentiality guarantees. We describe the characteristics of the Mobility-as-a-Service use case and identify similar use cases from other domains, e.g., central bank digital currencies, allowing us to conclude that our findings generalize. In the second step, we establish the foundation for a comprehensive analysis by proposing and proving TEE-Rider, the first hybrid fault-tolerant, asynchronous, and DAG-based atomic broadcast protocol. TEE-Rider builds upon the DAG-Rider protocol family and an optimized, DAG-aware, and TEE-based causal order broadcast we propose and prove. We then identify fundamental issues that arise from the combination of TEEs and asynchrony in BFT SMR. These are the impossibility of a fault-tolerant setup and the impossibility of garbage collection. Furthermore, we prove that for partially synchronous, TEE-based reliable broadcast it is impossible to reinitialize a TEE after a crash without relying on the participation of all $n$ replicas. We conclude the theoretical contributions with the proposal of the NxBFT SMR framework. Following an assumption-algorithm co-design, NxBFT is built upon TEE-Rider for the "Not eXactly Byzantine" (NxB) operating model to maximize throughput without sacrificing resilience. Moreover, NxBFT leverages SMR state transfer to circumvent the limitations imposed by TEEs and asynchrony and provides, under the assumption of partial synchrony, garbage collection, recovery, and reconfiguration. Finally, we contribute an extensive empirical evaluation. To this end, we develop the ABCperf evaluation framework focusing on the fair and straightforward comparison of fault-tolerant SMR and agreement protocols. We investigate the performance characteristics of NxBFT and find that cryptographic operations for signature creation and verification are the main bottleneck. We compare the performance of NxBFT with the state-of-the-art leader-based, hybrid fault-tolerant protocols MinBFT and Chained-Damysus and investigate the impact of the SMR client model (BFT vs. NxB), payload sizes, network sizes, network latencies, and crash faults. While all algorithms can benefit from the NxB client model, NxBFT achieves the highest throughput in all scenarios with up to $\sim500\,000$ requests per second. All algorithms show an improvement of the end-to-end latency when using the BFT instead of the NxB client model. When small latencies are required, MinBFT and Damysus are at an advantage with Damysus showing competitive throughput and impressively low latencies for small deployments. In contrast to leader-based approaches, NxBFT's performance is almost not impacted when actual crash faults occur.

N F N N A Rahman, Ruzian Markom, Hizri Hasshan

The rapid expansion of decentralised finance (DeFi) has elevated digital assets, particularly Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), to a prominent position within contemporary financial markets. NFTs are blockchain-based digital tokens enabled by smart contracts that facilitate verifiable ownership and authentication in decentralised environments. Despite growing international efforts to regulate NFT markets, clear legal frameworks—especially those addressing Shariah-compliant NFTs—remain underdeveloped. In Malaysia, the Islamic Financial Services Act 2013 (IFSA) and the Securities Commission Malaysia’s Digital Assets Guidelines provide only limited guidance on the classification, ownership, and enforceability of NFT-based financial products. This article examines the development of NFTs, analyses the existing Malaysian legal framework, and evaluates the readiness of Malaysia’s regulatory architecture to accommodate Shariah-compliant NFTs. Adopting a doctrinal methodology supported by case analysis, the study explores the applicability of current laws to NFT transactions and undertakes a comparative assessment of regulatory developments in the United Arab Emirates. The absence of explicit regulatory provisions raises significant Shariah compliance concerns, particularly in relation to gharar (uncertainty), riba (usury), and the recognition of māl (legitimate ownership), which may impede Malaysia’s aspiration to emerge as an Islamic DeFi hub. This study finds that Malaysia’s existing legal framework lacks specific Shariah compliance mechanisms for the legal recognition and governance of NFTs. Accordingly, targeted regulatory reforms are necessary to address the legal and Shariah complexities associated with NFTs and to facilitate responsible digital innovation within Malaysia’s Islamic DeFi ecosystem.

Tim Baumgartner

No abstract is available for this record.

Sandro Rodriguez Garzon, Awid Vaziry, Enis Mert Kuzu, Dennis Enrique Gehrmann · 7 authors

A fundamental limitation of current LLM-based AI agents is their inability to build differentiated trust among each other at the onset of an agent-to-agent dialogue. However, autonomous and interoperable trust establishment becomes essential once agents start to operate beyond isolated environments and engage in dialogues across individual or organizational boundaries. A promising way to fill this gap in Agentic AI is to equip agents with long-lived digital identities and introduce tamper-proof and flexible identity-bound attestations of agents, provisioned by commonly trusted third parties and designed for cross-domain verifiability. This article presents a conceptual framework and a prototypical multi-agent system, where each agent is endowed with a self-sovereign digital identity. It combines a unique and ledger-anchored W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) of an agent with a set of third-party issued W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs). This enables agents at the start of a dialog to prove ownership of their self-controlled DIDs for authentication purposes and to establish various cross-domain trust relationships through the spontaneous exchange of their self-hosted DID-bound VCs. A comprehensive evaluation of the prototypical implementation demonstrates technical feasibility but also reveals limitations once an agent's LLM is in sole charge to control the respective security procedures.

Tolulope Falokun

No abstract is available for this record.

Vincenzo Marino

No abstract is available for this record.

Reachsak Ly, Alireza Shojaei, Xinghua Gao, Philip Agee · 5 authors

While traditional AI and data-driven facilities management approaches have improved building operational efficiency, they remain constrained by centralized organizational structures that are vulnerable to cyber attacks, limited contextual understanding, and decision-making processes that exclude key stakeholders from governance. This paper introduces a novel AI- and data-driven distributed governance framework for smart building management that integrates decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), digital twins, large language models (LLMs), and blockchain technology. The framework enables transparent collective decision-making through a DAO governance platform, implements data-driven management using IoT and digital twins, incorporates LLM-based virtual assistants for enhanced decision support, and utilizes blockchain for secure building automation. A full-stack decentralized application was developed to facilitate user interaction with these integrated components. The system was evaluated for cost efficiency, scalability, data security, and usability using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Expert interviews were also conducted to assess its practical benefits and implementation challenges.

tony hu

No abstract is available for this record.

Alex Chen

No abstract is available for this record.

Nuha Omran Abokhdair, Ali Alissawi Ahmed AlQudairi

Decentralized storage networks increasingly rely on blockchain-based verification to ensure data integrity without centralized control; however, proof-intensive workloads introduce significant latency and on-chain cost overhead. This paper presents a lifecycle-based comparative analysis of major zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) models used in decentralized storage, focusing on zk-SNARK frameworks and transparent zk-STARK constructions. A multi-layer evaluation framework is introduced, aligning performance analysis with the core stages of the proof lifecycle: generation, aggregation, and on-chain verification. Building on this analysis, the paper proposes a hybrid architecture that combines parallel STARK-based proof generation with recursive SNARK-based compression, reducing on-chain verification complexity to near-constant. A Filecoin-inspired case study, supported by a quasi-empirical performance model, demonstrates that the proposed hybrid approach significantly reduces verification latency and data overhead while mitigating the linear growth of verification costs. The results indicate that hybrid ZKP architectures offer a scalable and economically viable solution for decentralized storage systems and large-scale blockchain networks. Keywords: Zero-knowledge proofs, zk-SNARKs, zk-STARKs, recursive aggregation, decentralized storage, verifiable cryptography, scalability, gas cost.

Wencheng Chen, Jun Wang, Jeng-Shyang Pan, R. Simon Sherratt · 5 authors

The rapid advancement of Industry 5.0 has accelerated the adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, challenges such as data privacy breaches, malicious attacks, and the absence of trustworthy mechanisms continue to hinder its secure and efficient operation. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes an enhanced blockchain-based data storage framework and systematically improves the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. A four-party evolutionary game model is developed, involving agent nodes, voting nodes, malicious nodes, and supervisory nodes, to comprehensively analyze the dynamic effects of key factors—including bribery intensity, malicious costs, supervision, and reputation mechanisms—on system stability. Furthermore, novel incentive and punishment strategies are introduced to foster node collaboration and suppress malicious behaviors. The simulation results show that the improved DPoS mechanism achieves significant enhancements across multiple performance dimensions. Under high-load conditions, the system increases transaction throughput by approximately 5%, reduces consensus latency, and maintains stable operation even as the network scale expands. In adversarial scenarios, the double-spending attack success rate decreases to about 2.6%, indicating strengthened security resilience. In addition, the convergence of strategy evolution is notably accelerated, enabling the system to reach cooperative and stable states more efficiently. These results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism effectively improves the efficiency, security, and dynamic stability of IIoT data storage systems, providing strong support for reliable operation in complex industrial environments.

Oleksandr Manoylenko, Arsenii Rohoza

The article provides a theoretical substantiation of the essence of investment technologies within the system of decentralized finance. Based on a synthesis of existing scientific approaches, the author proposes original definitions for key concepts: "investment technologies", "financial technologies", and "decentralized finance". It is demonstrated that decentralized finance represents an alternative ecosystem built on public blockchains and smart contracts, which ensures the complete elimination of intermediaries. The formulated theoretical propositions establish a foundation for the further development of the organizational and economic framework for managing investment technologies within the DeFi space.

Wenbin Wu

In traditional banking, repeated deposit-and-lend cycles let a single dollar of reserves support multiple dollars of claims. Decentralized finance produces an analogous structure with tokens. Constructing a Token Graph of 10,200 tokens across 200 blockchains, this paper maps the resulting hierarchy and shows that, by late 2025, each dollar of base assets supports $4.7 of total claims. An embedded yield correction disentangles two channels that raw data conflates: a compositional channel, where lending protocols concentrate in deeper tiers and mechanically raise average yields; and a liquidity channel, where each derivation step reduces secondary-market depth and depresses yields in liquidity-sensitive pools. The liquidity channel concentrates in DEX pools and vanishes in lending pools. A yield decomposition shows that the tier gradient operates entirely through fundamental protocol yields, not incentive-token emissions; quantile regressions reveal that the structural associations concentrate in the upper tail of the yield distribution, with near-zero effects at the median. These findings reframe DeFi's "double counting" as a structural risk question and identify liquidity fragmentation as the primary mechanism associated with yield variation across the token hierarchy.

Jean-Marc Seigneur, Ilona Maklakova, Trang Fernandez-Leenknecht, Bruno Lenski · 14 authors

This Technical Report provides an overview of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Token (NFT). It sets out the principal technical concepts and examines selected legal considerations relevant to these domains, given the close interaction between technological design and regulatory treatment. The report also identifies practical measures to strengthen trust and legal certainty, particularly in relation to NFT metadata integrity, content-addressed storage, smart-contract auditability, and the use of Digital Art Certificate (DAC), including the DAC+NFT model supported by Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) where a reliable link to real-world identity signature and rights is required. Extended with Human Time Token (HTT), a DAC+ can even certify how many hours of human time has been spent by an artist for a specific piece of art. These proposals are also relevant to future standardization work on legally robust off-chain certification and interoperability between Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) technical and legal layers.

Carol Alexander, Xi Chen

No abstract is available for this record.

William N. Goetzmann, Dong Huang, Milad Nozari

NFTs provided an extraordinary real-time laboratory for bubble economics: returns were exceptionally right-skewed, illiquidity pervaded even the most active platforms, and a handful of trades drove aggregate performance. Investors extrapolating from realized returns without recognizing selection bias and survivorship faced a substantial risk of disappointment. As our data and simulations confirm, successful NFT investing during the bubble required an almost perfect confluence of timing, liquidity, and luck. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org .

Uri Volovelsky, Sivan Shlomo Agon

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are blockchain-based entities that operate without centralized management or shareholders, enabling worldwide token holders the option of participating in their governance through self-executing smart contracts. With approximately fifty thousand DAOs controlling over $30 billion in assets, these organizations offer unprecedented efficiency and global collaboration, enabling stakeholders to participate and contribute to the operation of DAOs regardless of their jurisdiction or physical presence. DAOs, however, also present significant legal and regulatory challenges, particularly concerning liability, contractual enforcement, tax obligations, and oversight. Their decentralized and fluid structure makes it substantively difficult for any single country—including powerful actors such as the United States and the European Union—to assert jurisdiction or exercise regulatory authority over such organizations. In addition to governance considerations, the decentralized, pseudonymous, and borderless structure of DAOs may be exploited for unlawful purposes, most notably money laundering. This Article examines how DAOs, particularly within the decentralized finance sector, facilitate anonymous cross-border transactions that pose novel and significant money laundering risks. By analyzing existing regulatory responses in major jurisdictions including the United States and the European Union, as well as efforts by key international organizations such as the Financial Action Task Force, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations, the Article demonstrates that prevailing regulatory frameworks and enforcement models cannot adequately respond to the distinct challenges presented by DAOs. This regulatory vacuum poses significant risks to global financial stability, the integrity of the financial systems, and core national-security interests, including the prevention of sanctions evasion, counterterrorism and proliferation financing, and the deduction and disruption of state-sponsored, cyber-enabled illicit finance. Accordingly, the Article proposes a novel, modular, risk-based, global anti-money laundering framework tailored to DAOs’ unique operational realities. The proposed framework aligns with principles of functional equivalence, technological neutrality, and transnational cooperation, offering a more effective means of addressing DAO-related, anti-money laundering risks while preserving space for innovation.