The proliferation of cryptocurrencies and the remarkable expansion of novel economic practices associated with them pose an unprecedented challenge to established norms of taxation and market regulation. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, surveys, as well as big data analysis of the most valuable 100 cryptocurrencies’ white papers and the terms of service agreements of all cryptocurrency exchange platforms, this paper proposes an evidence-based framework to design a novel regulation and taxation approach to cryptocurrencies and their markets by using the US as case study. This new framework calls for approaching cryptocurrencies as data money. Drawing on the material political economy of new digital financial practices, the paper locates the universe of taxable events and invisible/vague regulation areas by approaching exchange platforms as stacked economization processes. We need to make sense of these new economic spaces in order to imagine more effective regulative instruments addressing questions of economic actor protection and efficiency. The paper concludes by proposing a new instrument of taxation (Data Money Tax) and a dynamic regulative approach to cryptocurrency exchange platforms (Stack Regulation).
Blockchain technology has been used to build next-generation applications taking advantage of its decentralised nature. Nevertheless, there are some serious concerns about the trustworthiness of blockchain due to the vulnerabilities in on-chain algorithmic mechanisms, and tedious disputes and debates in off-chain communities. Accordingly, blockchain governance has received great attention for improving the trustworthiness of all decisions that direct a blockchain platform. However, there is a lack of systematic knowledge to guide practitioners to perform blockchain governance. We have performed a systematic literature review to understand the state-of-the-art of blockchain governance. We identify the lifecycle stages of a blockchain platform, and present 14 architectural patterns for blockchain governance in this study. This pattern language can provide guidance for the effective use of patterns for blockchain governance in practice, and support the architecture design of governance-driven blockchain systems.
Abstract This study is an attempt to evaluate the compliance problem regarding the current status of the establishment of agreed‐upon interfaces for tokens, which are the most important type of applications of the Ethereum blockchain. The authors analysed the existing application programming interface standard interface called Ethereum Request for Comment 20 (ERC‐20), proposed functional ERC‐20 specifications, and evaluated the real‐world token smart contracts that have been deployed and used for transactions on a blockchain. For the evaluation, the authors developed an automatic tool with a test suite based on the proposed functional specifications. The authors' experiment revealed that no top‐100 market capitalization token smart contracts turned out to agree perfectly based on the functional specifications. In addition, the authors found the de facto standard behaviour deduced through testing with the functional specifications and suggested a possible countermeasure for the compliance problem in dealing with multiple tokens together.
César Soto-Valero, Martin Monperrus, Benoît Baudry
The rise of blockchain technologies has triggered tremendous research interest, coding efforts, and monetary investments in the last decade. Ethereum is the single largest programmable blockchain platform today. It features cryptocurrency trading, digital art, and decentralized finance through smart contracts. So-called Ethereum nodes operate the blockchain, relying on a vast supply chain of third-party software dependencies maintained by diverse organizations. These software suppliers have a direct impact on the reliability and the security of Ethereum. In this article, we perform an analysis of the software supply chain of Java Ethereum nodes and distill the challenges of maintaining and securing this blockchain technology.
Kripto para, mal ve hizmet satın almada çevrimiçi işlemleri güvence altına alan güçlü bir kriptografiye sahip hesap defteri kullanan dijital bir para birimidir Kripto para birimlerinin küresel sınırları yoktur ve kullanımları kolaydır. İşlemleri kaydetmek için bir cüzdan oluşturulur ve hemen kullanılır. Kripto para birimleri özellikle son yıllarda ön plana çıksa da tarihsel bir süreçleri bulunmaktadır. Kripto para birimleri özellikle Coronavirus (COVID-19) salgınında popülaritesini artırmıştır. Artan hacim ve güçlü piyasa kazancına rağmen Kripto para birimlerine şüphe ile yaklaşan ünlü ekonomistler de bulunmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın amacı 11 Aralık 2017 - 31 Mart 2021 döneminde Bitcoin fiyatını etkileyen ekonomik ve finansal göstergelerin belirlenmesidir. Değişkenler düzey seviyede birim kök taşıdığından ve ilk farklarında durağan olduklarından duruma uygun olan eşbütünleşme testi tercih edilmiştir. Johansen eşbütünleşme testi sonuçlarına göre değişkenler arasında uzun dönemde 1 eş bütünleşme denkleminin var olduğu görülmüştür. Vektör Hata Düzeltme Modeli ise Bitcoin fiyatının kısa dönemde belirlenen ekonomik ve finansal değişkenlerden etkilenmediğini göstermektedir. Bitcoin fiyatı spekülasyona açık bir digila varlıktır.
A transaction fee mechanism (TFM) is an essential component of a blockchain protocol. However, a systematic evaluation of the real-world impact of TFMs is still absent. Using rich data from the Ethereum blockchain, the mempool, and exchanges, we study the effect of EIP-1559, one of the earliest-deployed TFMs that depart from the traditional first-price auction paradigm. We conduct a rigorous and comprehensive empirical study to examine its causal effect on blockchain transaction fee dynamics, transaction waiting times, and consensus security. Our results show that EIP-1559 improves the user experience by mitigating intrablock differences in the gas price paid and reducing users' waiting times. However, EIP-1559 has only a small effect on gas fee levels and consensus security. In addition, we find that when Ether's price is more volatile, the waiting time is significantly higher. We also verify that a larger block size increases the presence of siblings. These findings suggest new directions for improving TFMs.
Volkan Temizkan, Muhammed Ali Yetgin, Kasım Yılmaz
The level of technology use of humanity has increased, while the interest in digital assets has increased with the effect of the pandemic period. This increasing interest has led to curiosity about what kind of consumer experience cryptocurrencies will offer when used in retail shopping. This study aims to reveal the advantages and disadvantages of using cryptocurrencies in shopping based on the experiences of businesses that accept payments with cryptocurrencies. Interviews were conducted with 9 businesses in Turkey that accept payments with crypto money using the in-depth interview technique in this study. As a result of the content analysis carried out with the NVivo analysis program for the findings, a research model was proposed. The results of this research point out that crypto currencies are preferred by consumers and retailers due to the fact that they are a fast, safe and cheap global payment tool. However, it has been found that there are also consumers who are totally unaware of the existence of payments with crypto currencies. Some consumers do not prefer payments with crypto currencies either because of low technology usage level or lack of trust to the system. However, when necessary legal sub-regulations are made and everything is digitized, money will also become digital in the common opinion. Unlike the studies in the literature, as a result of this study, it is predicted that payments with crypto money will be one of the alternative payment tools of the future, after the cryptocurrencies are positioned on a legal platform by the official authorities.
Péter Garamvölgyi, Yuxi Liu, Dong Zhou, Fan Long · 5 authors
Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted, typically to thousands of transactions per second. With this, transaction execution has become a new performance bottleneck. Exploiting parallelism in transaction execution is a clear and direct way to address this and to further increase transaction throughput. Although some recent literature introduced concurrency control mechanisms to execute smart contract transactions in parallel, the reported speedup that they can achieve is far from ideal. The main reason is that the proposed parallel execution mechanisms cannot effectively deal with the conflicts inherent in many blockchain applications. In this work, we thoroughly study the historical transaction execution traces in Ethereum. We observe that application-inherent conflicts are the major factors that limit the exploitable parallelism during execution. We propose to use partitioned counters and special commutative instructions to break up the application conflict chains in order to maximize the potential speedup. When we evaluated the maximum parallel speedup achievable, these techniques doubled this limit to an 18x overall speedup compared to serial execution, thus approaching the optimum. We also propose OCC-DA, an optimistic concurrency control scheduler with deterministic aborts, which makes it possible to use OCC scheduling in public blockchain settings.
A software pattern is a reusable solution to address a commonly occurring problem within a given context when designing software. Using patterns is a common practice for software architects to ensure software quality. Many pattern collections have been proposed for a large number of application domains. However, because of the technology's recentness, there are only a few available collections with a lack of extensive testing in industrial blockchain applications. It is also difficult for software architects to adequately apply blockchain patterns in their applications, as it requires deep knowledge of blockchain technology. Through a systematic literature review, this paper has identified 120 unique blockchain-related patterns and proposes a pattern taxonomy composed of multiple categories, built from the extracted pattern collection. The purpose of this collection is to map, classify, and describe all the available patterns across the literature to help readers make adequate decisions regarding blockchain pattern selection. This study also shows potential applications of those patterns and identifies the relationships between blockchain patterns and other non-blockchain software patterns.
The emergence of Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain technology have enabled novel solutions for creating, transacting, and validating digital assets. In this vein, inspired by Bitcoin, a variety of projects has been building blockchain-based “decentralized” business models (BDBM), market places, and organizations. However, there has been ambiguity and confusion around the meaning of “decentralized” in the context of blockchain technology-based business models in both research and practice. Moreover, the implications for mainstream adoption of BDBM from a mass customers’ perspective are insufficiently understood. This article discusses the notion of decentralization in BDBM and develops a two-dimensional framework explaining the decentralization focus of BDBM. Based on this typology, the article analyzes the implications, prerequisites, and desirability of decentralization for BDBMs’ mainstream adoption.
Recent literature has addressed initial coin offering (ICO) projects, which are an innovative form of venture financing through cryptocurrencies using blockchain technology. Many features of ICOs remain unexplored, leaving much room for additional research, including the success factors of ICO projects. We investigate the success of ICO projects, with our main purpose being to identify factors that influence a project's outcome. Following a literature review, from which several potential variables were collected, we used a database comprising 428 ICO projects in the banking/financial sector to regress several econometric models. We confirmed the impacts of several variables and obtained particularly valuable results concerning project and campaign variables. We confirmed the importance of a well-structured and informative whitepaper. The proximity to certain markets with high availability of financial and human capital is also an important determinant of the success of an ICO. We also confirm the strong dependency on cryptocurrency and the impact of cryptocurrency valuations on the success of a project. Furthermore, we confirm the importance of social media in ICO projects, as well as the importance of human capital characteristics. Our research contributes to the ICO literature by capturing most of the success factors previously identified and testing their impacts based on a large database. The current research contributes to the building of systems theory and signaling theory by adapting their frameworks to the ICO environment. Our results are also important for regulators, as ICOs are mainly unregulated and have vast future potential, and for investors, who can benefit from our analysis and use it in their due diligence.
This is a capstone project summary of an in-depth market analysis titled how DeFi transforms the Banking Industry. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an open and global financial system built for the internet age. There are limitations on the existing banking system, and DeFi has potential to solve those pain points. Various fintech companies in Asia have leveraged permissioned blockchain for financial services solutions with enhanced security and efficiency. The future DeFi will continue to shape the banking system for better service, and for a wider population.
Initial coin offerings (ICOs)-commonly referred to as token sales or token offeringsare assisted by blockchain technology. This financing tool helps entrepreneurs finance early-stage ventures on a decentralized, global scale. Researchers have previously called for more research to be carried out vis--vis the role of information intermediaries in the ICO ecosystem. The main goal of this study was to analyze the correlation between ICO ratings and the financing success of ICOs. As a result, secondary microdata on 5,581 ICOs were collected from the ICObench website. The results reveal that ICO ratings issued by third parties have a positive influence on the fundraising campaign of these offerings. ICO ratings thus appear to function as an effective signal to buyers and to reduce information asymmetry between sellers and investors.
Yingli Wang, Jean-Paul Skeete, John Barker, Maxim Filimonov
This paper reports the main findings from a design science research project that sets out to explore and understand the need for a more scientific and democratised process for preselecting, vetting, and engaging start-up and SME suppliers in a manufacturing environment. The project, using aerospace manufacturing as a test case will investigate the feasibility of using artificially intelligent web-scraping, third-party APIs, and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) to provide a localised and highly automated manufacturing marketplace. This paper's findings lend insight into emerging digital platform engagements between participating supply chain actors in open innovation environments.
Wahome E. Wangui, Thomas Ogoro Ombati, Robert Oboko
In the last decade, research and development around distributed ledger technology (DLT) has grown exponentially. The financial services industry has been revolutionized by the explosion of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Researchers have taken the principles used in these cryptocurrencies and are using them to develop other DLTs in various fields. This study explores how blockchain can be used to provide traceability, visibility, and transparency in the Kenyan informal distributed manufacturing industry. SOKO, an aggregator of artisans spread all over Nairobi, was the case study used. Purposive and convenience-based were the sampling methods used. 48 SOKO supply chain employees and active artisans were the sample population. Interviews and observations were data collection methods used. Content analysis, a qualitative data analysis method, was used to capture emerging and predetermined themes. Google sheets and Dovetail were the tools used for this study. This paper finds that the use of the immutability and proof of origin features of blockchain greatly enhances traceability within a supply chain. It is imperative that the granular information collected should be intuitive and accessible to all parties to enhance visibility. Amplified traceability and visibility greatly improved transparency and accountability within the SOKO ecosystem. A pivotal recommendation for future research is the usage of unit-based tagging technologies e.g. barcodes, QR codes, or RFID. The combined use of such technologies and blockchain would achieve the highest level of traceability, especially when working with diverse producers who produce similar products.
Jan 1, 2022·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Leonardo Maria De Rossi, Michel Avital, Rob Gleasure
Over the last decade, numerous studies have examined the remarkable appreciation of cryptocurrencies and have typically focused on their price and the factors that predict them. In contrast, this paper argues that the success of a cryptocurrency is determined not only by its monetary value but also by the proliferation of its end users. Specifically, we hypothesize that changes in developers’ and miners’ activities drive the growing proliferation of a cryptocurrency’s end users. Building on the Bitcoin case, we use a time-series model based on 4,285 Bitcoin daily observations to suggest that changes in the number of end users are anticipated by surges or drops in activity by the developers and miners who develop and maintain the network. We further find a limited relationship between these variables and the price of Bitcoin. These results support an alternative view of cryptocurrencies’ success and highlight further research avenues in this nascent domain.