Purpose. The aim of the article is elaboration of theoretical and practical aspects of definition and functioning of cryptocurrencies as money. Methodology of research. The following methods were used in the study: statistical analysis and comparison – in the study of problematic aspects of the definition of cryptocurrency as a kind of money; logical assessment – in substantiating the principles of determining cryptocurrency as a kind of money; generalization – in the process of formulating conclusions based on the results of the analysis. Findings. It is established that money is a financial asset with high liquidity, which can be quickly converted into paper money or coins, serve as an intermediary in money circulation (i.e. play the role of equivalent in exchange) and can be used for savings and therefore anything that can function as money, are money (including cryptocurrency coins). It is substantiated that cryptocurrency coins, as a type of money, perform the following functions: there is a potential to perform the function of a measure of value after reducing the significant volatility of the value of cryptocurrencies; partly as a medium of exchange due to high volatility, regulatory resistance and low prevalence, but prevalence will increase as traditional payment systems begin to integrate cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrencies have high convenience and inclusiveness, have the potential to reduce transaction costs, increase settlement speeds, develop cryptocurrency markets and increasing their prevalence; due to opposition from ESG investors and regulators, low confidence from a significant number of citizens (especially over the age of forty) and a significant speculative component of cryptocurrency coins, only partially serve as a means of accumulation, however, the demand for cryptocurrencies from investors is constantly growing. Originality. The definition of cryptocurrency (cryptocurrency coin, cryptocoin) as a new digital type of money, which can measure the value of goods, services and other currencies, used for circulation, savings and investment, protected by cryptographic code with the inability to counterfeit or copy, and issue which everyone has the opportunity with the Internet and the necessary equipment with complete anonymity of the issuer (miner). Practical value. The main results of the conducted study will create favourable conditions for a better understanding of cryptocurrency as a new type of money, which will allow them to be more widely used in the economic activities of businesses and countries. Key words: money, cryptocurrency, cryptocoin, cryptocurrency coin, mining, cryptocurrency functions, Ethereum, Monero, monetary aggregate.
Pratyush Kumar Patro, Raja Wasim Ahmad, Ibrar Yaqoob, Khaled Salah · 5 authors
Product recall management in the automotive industry is a challenging problem that affects human lives and the safe operation of automobiles. Product recalls can assist in removing potentially unsafe products from the marketplace and minimizing a company’s responsibility for corporate negligence. Today’s systems and technologies leveraged for product recall management in the automotive supply chain fall short in providing transparency, traceability, reliability, audit, security, and trust features. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based approach to overcome the aforementioned problems related to product recall management. We employ the public Ethereum blockchain and integrate it with the decentralized storage of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to deal with the large-sized data problem. We present the system design and six algorithms explaining the working principles, information exchange flow, and stakeholders’ detail and their sequential interactions. We discuss the implementation details, generalization aspects, and cost and security analyses to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The proposed solution is cost-effective, secure, and enables automakers to have end-to-end visibility of information during product recalls. We make the smart contracts’ code publicly available on GitHub.
Diana Hawashin, Dunia J. Mahboobeh, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman · 7 authors
Today’s a large number of blood donation management systems fall short in providing traceability, immutability, transparency, audit, privacy, and security features. Also, they are vulnerable to the single point of failure problem due to centralization. In this paper, we propose a private Ethereum blockchain-based solution to automate blood donation management in a manner that is decentralized, transparent, traceable, auditable, private, secure, and trustworthy. The proposed solution stores non-critical and large data off-chain using the decentralized storage of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). We present the system architecture, sequence diagrams, entity-relationship diagram, and algorithms to briefly explain the working principles of our blood donation management solution. We evaluate the performance of our solution in terms of efficiency and effectiveness through performing security analysis. We make our smart contract code publicly available on Github1.
Під час виконання даної роботи було оцінено можливість використання технології для реалізації децентралізованого протоколу забезпечення ліквідності та обміну активів на Ethereum, та розроблені старт-контракти на мові Solidity.
Both cryptocurrency researchers and early adopters of cryptocurrencies agree that they possess a special kind of materiality, based on the laborious productive process of digital ‘mining’ [1]. This idea first appears in the Bitcoin White Paper [2] that encourages Bitcoin adopters to construct and justify its value in metaphoric comparison to gold mining. In this paper, I explore three material aspects of blockchain: physical infrastructure, human language and computer code. I apply the concept of 'continuous materiality' [3] to show how these three aspects interact in practical implementations of blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I start from the concept of ‘digital metallism’ that stands for ‘fundamental value’ of cryptocurrencies, and end with the move of Ethereum to ‘proof-of-stake’, partially as a countermeasure against ‘evil miners’. I conclude that ignoring material aspects of blockchain technology can only further problematize complicated relations between their technical, semiotic and social materiality.
With the development of Internet of things, more and more objects are connected to the Internet. It will lead to data leakage caused by arbitrary access easily. Thus, an effective method to prevent data leakage is needed. Traditional access control schemes include role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), and capability-based access control (CapBAC) are all using a central or a third trusted party to manage user information, which is prone to single failure. In order to solve the problems, in this paper, a fine-grained access control scheme based on blockchain technology named SFAC is proposed. In recent years, blockchain technology has been widely studied and applied in various fields. It has the advantages of decentralization, imitation tampering, and traceability, and is a distributed public ledger. Therefore, combined with blockchain, SFAC can not only solve the problem of centralization, but also allow users to request resources in batches, and uses token mechanism to facilitate users’ requests. After the user gets a token, it can directly use the token to revoke resources. Besides, we use a smart contract to implement our proposed scheme and carrying out a series of experiments on the test network of Ethereum. The experimental results show that our SAFC is feasible.
Chika A. Anisiuba, Obiamaka P. Egbo, Felix C. Alio, Chuka Uzoma Ifediora · 7 authors
We analyzed cryptocurrency dynamics in the global U.S. dollar–denominated market and the emerging market economies (EMEs) with a view to ascertaining whether activities in these markets are predominantly shaped by reinforcement or substitution effect. Cryptocurrencies analyzed include the Bitcoins, Ethereum, Litecoin, Steller, Bitcoin Cash, and USD Tether. The results suggest that, on average, correlation between digital assets in the cryptocurrencies’ ecosystem is positive. However, there is evidence of an outlier with respect to the USD Tether (USDT) in the global market, revealing that the USDT is negatively associated with all other cryptocurrencies. This is supported by the dynamic regression results that provided evidence of reinforcement effect in favor of the USDT in the global crypto market, thus confirming the status of the USDT as “Stablecoin” as it is pegged 1:1 to USD. In the global market context, the results also revealed that USDT/USD returns had identical outliers that could portend lesser chances of extreme gains or losses compared with suggestions of extreme gains or losses in the EMEs. Furthermore, USDT did not seem to have similar evolution in the EMEs where it had relatively marginal influence in the markets. The vector error correction (VEC) estimate showed mixed results between Altcoins in all the markets; moreover, our finding showed that reinforcement effects hold in favor of Steller (XLM) both in the Russian ruble and Indian rupee crypto markets, whereas the Chinese yuan crypto market was predominantly characterized by substitution effect in favor of Bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency market recently gained a lot of attention from investors. But, its volatility has been acting as a disincentive to investment. Volatility plays an important role in shaping market riskiness and investment behavior. We study the volatility of the Ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency from the following perspectives. The first goal of this study is to identify risk-seeking behavior in the ETH cryptocurrency market. We examine this propensity by measuring the effect of the volatility of Ethereum on the total ETH assets. This investigation also takes the form of a case-study of an unexpected ETH fund-stolen event, DAO Hack, and the hard fork treatment. We also forecast a downward volatility trend in the near future based on Autoregressive models. This is the first study to analyze DAO Hack with empirical methods and marks the starting point for more rigorous models to predict the volatility of Ethereum.
Eric Alston, Wilson Law, Ilia Murtazashvili, Martin B. H. Weiss
Abstract Institutional economists have analyzed permissionless blockchains as a novel institutional building block for voluntary economic exchange and distributed governance, with their unique protocol features such as automated contract execution, high levels of network and process transparency, and uniquely distributed governance. But such institutional analysis needs to be complemented by polycentric analysis of how blockchains change. We characterize such change as resulting from internal sources and external sources. Internal sources include constitutional (protocol) design and collective-choice processes for updating protocols, which help coordinate network participants and users. External sources include competitive pressure from other cryptocurrency networks. By studying two leading networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum, we illustrate how conceptualizing blockchains as competing and constitutional polycentric enterprises clarifies their processes of change.
For long, different e-voting systems have been provided with the goal of increasing security and minimizing cost. Blockchain is a major breakthrough in the technological industry that provide immense secured platform. With the launch of Ethereum, a decentralized platform which runs decentralized applications (DApps) on it, a secured voting system now seems possible. Many organizations have now shifted their focus on voting through blockchain platforms. There’s a very high chance that a normal voting method won’t lead to a clear majority. There can be many ways to deal with this issue which includes another voting process to take place which can be quite expensive in terms of time and resources. In our paper, we introduce the vote-trading concept where the votes can be redistributed to other candidates in case if there is no clear majority and also this ‘ majority’ factor can be set by the organization according to their requirement. We discuss the design for the blockchain based preferential e-voting system using the Solidity programming language where instead of one vote per candidate, we provide the concept of giving preference to the candidates.
This paper implements the analysis of volatility behaviour of the eight major cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Monero, Stellar, Dash and Tether) for the period starting from October 13th 2015 to November 18th 2019. The GARCH-type models with heavy-tailed distributions are fitted to filter the conditional volatility exhibited by cryptocurrencies. Extreme value analysis based on the peak over threshold approach is then used to model the extreme tail behaviour of the cryptocurrencies. The predictive performance of the GARCH-EVT model in forecasting Value-at-Risk is evaluated at both 5% and 1% levels of significance. The backtesting results demonstrate the superiority of the GARCH-EVT model in both out-of-sample forecasts and goodness-of-fit properties to cryptocurrency returns and forecasting Value-at-Risk. Overall, the empirical results of this study recommend the heavy-tailed GARCH-EVT based model for modelling and forecasting the volatility of cryptocurrencies.
With the increasing use of smart devices and sensors, enormous amounts of data are being generated continuously. The data is commonly stored in centralized cloud platforms and consumed by different services. The data is indeed a valuable resource for many service providers who provide advanced features and utilities to their subscribers. However, user data include personal and sensitive information which can be misused in many ways. There is no way for a subscriber to confirm that their service provider is compliant with data privacy regulations. The existing privacy enhancing techniques such as anonymization and differential privacy substantially reduce data usability while ensuring privacy. Therefore, it remains essential to provide a feasible solution that allows service providers to take advantage of user data while guaranteeing their privacy. In this paper, we present PETchain: a novel privacy enhancing technology using blockchain and smartcontract. In PETchain, data is stored securely in a distributed manner and processed in a user-selected trusted execution environment. Users deploy the smartcontract that allows them to decide whether and how their data can be exploited by service providers. The feasibility and performance of PETchain are presented by implementing PETchain over a consortium Ethereum blockchain.
A large number of shipments are moved everyday domestically and internationally. A considerable number of items such as food, commodities, and pharmaceutical drugs are prone to damage in transit. This can be caused due to various reasons such as improper storage conditions and exposure to air or sunlight. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been used to enhance fundamental shipment tracking by improving transparency and visibility to such transport systems. This paper introduces a blockchain-powered smart container system (CryptoCargo) that monitors the conditions of the shipment and detects any violations that may damage its contents. These violations are recorded on the blockchain via smart contracts, which provides a secure and immutable storage thereby improving its trustworthiness in an inherently trustless environment comprising of multiple stakeholders. We present the design and implementation of CryptoCargo including architectural concerns and implementation details using a test Ethereum blockchain platform and cloud services. Moreover, we present details of thorough evaluation of the system to validate its function as well as to assess its effectiveness with respect to performance efficiency and real-time operation. We have made our smart contract code publicly available on Github.
This White Paper introduces and contributes the first implementation of the Decentralized Voting Algorithm. First, Part I provides an overview for the software structures relevant to this work. Second, Part II introduces a decentralized voting algorithm for transferring value on blockchain networks. Third, Part III explains the voting algorithm’s implementation in reach, including the backend architecture, web deployment, and quantum integration. Perhaps most significantly, this paper solves the Decentralized Voting Problem with a new quantum consensus system.
Fairness is an important trait of open, free markets. Ethereum is a platform meant to enable digital, decentralized markets. Though many researchers debate the market's fairness, there are few discussions around the fairness of automated markets, such as those hosted on Ethereum. In this paper, using pilot studies, we consider unfair factors caused by adding the program. Because CryptoKitties is one of the major blockchain-based games and has been in operation for an extended period of time, we focus on its market to examine fairness. As a result, we concluded that a gene determination algorithm in this game has little randomness, and a significant advantage to gain profit is given to players who know its bias over those who do not. We state incompleteness and impact of the algorithm and other factors. Besides, we suppose countermeasures to reduce CryptoKitties' unfairness as a market.
Yizhou Cao, Min Dai, Steven Kou, Lewei Li · 5 authors
Abstract Existing cryptocurrencies are too volatile to be used as currencies for daily payments. Stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to other stable financial assets such as the US dollar, are desirable for payments within blockchain networks, whereby being often called the “Holy Grail of cryptocurrency.” By using the option pricing theory and the Ethereum platform that allows running smart contracts, we design several dual‐class structures that are written on the ETH cryptocurrency and offer a fixed‐income crypto asset (Class A coin), a stablecoin (Class A′ coin) pegged to a traditional currency, and leveraged investment instruments (Class B and B′ coins). Our investigation of the values of stablecoins in the presence of jump risk and black swan‐type events shows the robustness of the design. The design has been implemented on the Ethereum platform.
In der Anfangszeit der Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) waren die hauptsächlichen Betrachtungswinkel die der Disruption des Bank- und Finanzwesens. Mit dem Aufkommen des Systems Ethereum im Jahr 2015, hat die Auseinandersetzung mit der Anwendung von Blockchain in weiteren Branchen, an Bedeutung gewonnen. Eine davon ist die Logistik und das Supply Chain Management (SCM). Gerade in Deutschland spielt der Logistiksektor eine große Rolle, nach der Beschäftigtenzahl ist er die drittgrößte Branche und erzielt einen Umsatz von rund 258 Milliarden Euro. Im Beitrag werden konkrete Anwendungsfelder identifiziert und gezeigt welche potentiellen Vorteile sich dort, durch den Einsatz von DLT, erzielen lassen. Ein Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Einschätzung der Technologie hinsichtlich ihrer Sicherheitseigenschaften. Im Beitrag wird den Fragen nachgegangen, ob Datensicherheit mithilfe von DLT verbessert werden kann und auf welchem Wege.
With the advancing technologies become tools for illicit activities and avoid detection, digital forensics is necessary for law enforcement in modern criminal investigations. In order to maintain the integrity and authenticity of the evidence, a chain of custody is essential for the successful prosecution of criminals in court. However, it is a great challenge to manage the preservation and collection of digital evidence because of its fragile and volatile in nature. Blockchain has been proposed as a promising and reliable technology to provide immutability and traceability of digital content, however, the applications of blockchain to the law enforcement agencies (LEAs) requires special attention to the security issue. In this research, we proposed a blockchain of custody framework to facilitate the security and transparency of digital evidence in criminal investigation process. The framework is implement on Ethereum smart contract to support authenticity and integrity of digital evidence in preliminary investigation, case management and court phases. We also propose the role of investigator to leverage access control in evidence creation, transferring and modification. The corresponding actions with judicial process is simulated using private ethereum blockchain. The experimental results indicate that the proposed framework can prevent digital evidence been tampered or contaminated and assure its legal defensibility with rigorous privilege management. Moreover, by successfully synchronizing digital evidence transactions to multiple nodes ensures the accountability of evidence data for every involved law enforcement agency.
Mazin Debe, Haya R. Hasan, Khaled Salah, Ibrar Yaqoob · 5 authors
The massive adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) has caused an increasing demand for electric energy to charge the vehicles. Efficiently managing energy trading between energy providers and energy consumers can lead to meet the high demand for charging EVs while reducing its cost compared to traditional power provided by the utility company. However, a large portion of the existing systems leveraged for trading energy between EVs are centralized and fall short in providing transparency, reliability, audit, security, and trustworthy features. In this paper, we propose blockchain-based energy trading using an auctioning and reputation scheme. We develop Ethereum smart contracts which enable owners of EVs to automatically request electricity to charge their vehicles in a reliable, cost-effective, secure, and trustworthy manner. The proposed approach ensures the lowest rate available by implementing a reverse auctioning scheme for fair competition between providers to provide the requested service at the lowest cost. The proposed solution enforces high quality of service through a reputation-based approach that quantifies the performance of the service providers and gives an advantage to more reputable providers. We present the implementation details of the deployed system on a test Ethereum blockchain platform. We perform system testing and evaluation to validate and assess the functionality and performance of the proposed solution. Furthermore, we present security and cost analyses to show the affordability, robustness, and practicality of the proposed approach.
Diabetes is a metabolic disorder caused by high blood sugar levels, which can harm the kidneys, the heart, the eyes, and blood vessels. During the Covid-19 pandemic, diabetes patients were most affected. In the existing healthcare system, medical data is available in paper form or through a central server. Accessing the data from the central system and sharing it with all stakeholders would be a critical task during the pandemic. This research work deals with the design and implementation of a diabetes blockchain consortium. It can help all healthcare stakeholders to efficiently prioritize the needs of diabetes patients during a pandemic, such as oxygen beds, vaccinations, diabetes compensation, telemedicine, 5G-integrated remote location support, and other related records. The Ethereum sandbox simulation design is utilized to secure diabetes patients’ healthcare records. The Interplanetary file system (IPFS) encrypts health data and sends it to the blockchain to ensure the privacy of personal healthcare information. The NEM symbol blockchain is used to develop this consortium as a proof-of-concept (PoC) model. Each stakeholder in a consortium is assigned NEM generated QR code to track records as a distributed ledger. A smart contract designed to run the diabetes blockchain application. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) authenticates users and restricts malicious nodes. Certainly, this research suggests aggregation of transactions and blocks in the blockchain, which would increase transaction speed, minimize transaction fees, and consume less power in a future blockchain design.
Rahul Ganpatrao Sonkamble, Shraddha Phansalkar, Vidyasagar Potdar, Anupkumar M. Bongale
Interoperability in Electronic Health Records (EHR) is significant for the seamless sharing of information amongst different healthcare stakeholders. Interoperability in EHR aims to devise agreements in its interpretation, access, and storage with security, privacy, and trust. A study and survey of state-of-the-art literature, prototypes, and projects in standardization of the EHR structure, privacy-preservation, and EHR sharing are very essential. The presented work conducts a systematic literature review to address four research questions. 1) What are the different standards for common interpretation, representation, and modeling of EHR to achieve semantic interoperability? 2) What are the different privacy-preservation techniques and security standards for EHR data storage? 3) How mature is blockchain technology for building interoperable, privacy-preserving solutions for EHR storage and sharing? 4) What is the state-of-the-art for cross-chain interoperability for EHR sharing? An exhaustive study of these questions establishes the potential of a blockchain-based EHR management framework in privacy preservation, access control and efficient storage. The study also unveils challenges in the adoption of blockchain in EHR management with the state-of-the-art maturity of cross-chain interoperable solutions for sharing EHR amongst stakeholders on different blockchain platforms. The research gaps culminate in proposing a blockchain-based EHR framework with privacy preservation and access control design. The proposed framework employs partitioning of EHR to on-chain and off-chain storages for performance guarantees with the retrieval of valid off-chain data. The framework is deployed on the Ethereum test network with Solidity smart contracts. It is observed that different test cases on the partitioning of the EHR data, yielded better read-write throughput and effective gas price than fully on-chain storage.