Rahul Mulukanuri, P. B. Lavanya, Vara Lakshmi Thavva
Today's world is experiencing an increasing global emphasis on sustainable finance, which brings with it new solutions to enhance trust, adoption and accountability in the financial transaction systems.Most of the time, these traditional financial systems fail as they are mainly challenged by facts like data manipulations, lack of transparency, greenwashing and also lack of tracking about the sustainable investments.The decentralized and immutable nature of blockchain helps in enhancing ESG compliance, preventing fraud, and automating reporting through smart contracts.Blockchain technology can build an ecosystem of transparency, thus restoring investors' trust and compliance with regulations, making sustainable investments credible.This paper examines blockchain's role in promoting sustainability by improving financial integrity, regulatory compliance, and the credibility of ESG-driven investments.Amalgamation of blockchain will provide long-term economic and environmental advantages, resulting in a more responsible and transparent financial ecosystem.
Deploying smart contracts and invoking their functions on block-chains incur gas costs, which depend on the operations executed by those functions. This makes optimizing the gas cost of smart contract functions a rewarding goal. However, existing approaches to gas cost optimization of smart contracts mainly involve rule-based optimization or automatic optimization for specific types of patterns. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to automatically retrieving optimized versions of Solidity functions from a repository of smart contracts. The system identifies and suggests gas-efficient alternatives that maintain functional equivalence by comparing the opcode sequences of individual functions. We evaluate this approach on a dataset of 16,529 functions from real-world contracts, demonstrating substantial gas savings, as high as 34% on average when considering the most similar functions.
The study analyzes the global regulatory landscape for blockchain assets, particularly cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, focusing on the motivations behind policymaker actions, the diversity of regulatory approaches, the challenges posed by decentralized technologies and provide future regulatory pathways. The study uses a conceptual and mixed-method approach, combining qualitative and quantitative content analysis of 59 peer-reviewed articles selected through the PRISMA framework. Findings reveal that regulation is primarily driven by concerns over consumer protection, financial stability, anti-money laundering, taxation, and environmental sustainability. Regulatory responses vary widely, ranging from the harmonized MiCA framework in the EU to the fragmented enforcement model in the U.S., along with diverse strategies across Asia. Stablecoins, DeFi, and CBDCs emerge as major regulatory frontiers. The study recommends adopting regulatory sandboxes, promoting international coordination, enforcing environmental standards, and building regulatory capacity in emerging economies to balance innovation with risk mitigation. It also highlights the importance of industry self-regulation and technology-assisted compliance in decentralized finance. The limitation of this study is that it relies solely on secondary data sources, which may limit the accuracy of real-time policy impact assessments. Future research should focus on empirical validation and dynamic policy modeling to enhance global governance of digital assets.
In the modern era of digitalization, integration with blockchain and machine learning (ML) technologies is most important for improving applications in healthcare management and secure prediction analysis of health data. This research aims to develop a novel methodology for securely storing patient medical data and analyzing it for PCOS prediction. The main goals are to leverage Hyperledger Fabric for immutable, private data and to integrate Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques to enhance transparency in decision-making. The innovation of this study is the unique integration of blockchain technology with ML and XAI, solving critical issues of data security and model interpretability in healthcare. With the Caliper tool, the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain's performance is evaluated and enhanced. The suggested Explainable AI-based blockchain system for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome detection (EAIBS-PCOS) system demonstrates outstanding performance and records 98% accuracy, 100% precision, 98.04% recall, and a resultant F1-score of 99.01%. Such quantitative measures ensure the success of the proposed methodology in delivering dependable and intelligible predictions for PCOS diagnosis, therefore making a great addition to the literature while serving as a solid solution for healthcare applications in the near future.
Open access
Impact of AI and Big Data on Business and Society
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
A Smart Contract (SC) is a digital negotiation process between two or more anonymized participants without trusted middlemen. It is an autonomous SC manifested as software code. SC operates on the blockchain (BC). The program and the SC are immutable and preserved on a decentralized public registry. Many potential applications for SC exist within the digital economy, encompassing financial services, administration, medical care, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Ethereum and Hyperledger constitute the most prevalent open-source advanced cross-industry BC systems for cross-border collaboration. Significant technological concerns, including security, privacy, accuracy, and verifiability, remain unresolved and require further maturation in BC. This study thoroughly examines SC. The research provides a case study on a university test system characterized by a heterogeneous data structure. This implementation provides an in-depth comprehension of the SC architecture and has been utilized to identify and evaluate the deficiencies in the current state of SC technology.
This comprehensive study examines the integration of smart contracts into civil law systems and analyzes the associated regulatory challenges. The research investigates the fundamental nature of smart contracts as technological tools and legal instruments, their compatibility with existing civil law frameworks, and the emerging regulatory approaches across different jurisdictions. Through systematic analysis of legislative developments, case law, and scholarly discourse, this study identifies key legal issues including contract formation, performance, enforcement, and dispute resolution in the context of smart contracts. The findings reveal significant gaps in current regulatory frameworks and propose solutions for harmonizing smart contract implementation with established civil law principles. This research contributes to the ongoing academic discourse on legal technology integration and provides practical recommendations for legislators, legal practitioners, and technology developers.
Since the introduction of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, virtual currencies have become a topic of increasing public concern. Bitcoin trading is highly speculative and involves significant risks, as its value can fluctuate dramatically over time, with no single party held accountable for these changes. This study focuses on the protection of investors engaged in Bitcoin transactions on exchange platforms in Indonesia under positive law. The research employs a normative juridical approach, with both primary and secondary data sourced from legal texts, regulations, and relevant literature. The findings indicate that Bitcoin transactions in Indonesia primarily involve the sale of commodity assets through exchange platforms, which function as physical traders of crypto assets. Regulatory frameworks established by futures regulatory bodies play a crucial role in preventing fraud and safeguarding legal rights. According to Indonesian Contract Law, as outlined in the Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek, BW), Bitcoin transactions are considered “legal” when they fulfill the contractual conditions specified in Article 1320. Consequently, investors are legally protected from both criminal and civil liabilities due to the validity of these transactions.
While traditional behavioral finance theories such as the TRA, TPB, and TAM have provided substantial insights, their application to the rapidly evolving digital finance sector, particularly cryptocurrency markets , has been limited. Addressing this gap, our study integrates Digital Trust Theory (DTT) with these frameworks to examine the role of government support in Crypto Adoption (CA) within Vietnam's dynamic but unregulated market, a prominent emerging market in global crypto trading. Utilizing Structural Equation Modeling , we processed data collected from 255 participants using SmartPLS 4.0 to explore complex relationships among User Characteristics (UC), Technology Characteristics (TC), External Environment (EX), and their impacts on Crypto Trust (CT) and Crypto Adoption CA. This dataset, comprising responses from a diverse array of participants including tech-savvy youths, business professionals, and financial experts across various regions of Vietnam, provides a robust basis for understanding the nuanced influences on cryptocurrency behaviors. Our findings underscore the significant mediating roles of Crypto Trust and governmental regulation, highlighting the crucial influence of External Environment factors on trust dynamics. These insights not only contribute to academic discourse by refining traditional behavioral finance theories for the digital era but also offer practical guidance for fostering a sustainable cryptocurrency market, thereby supporting economic development and financial security in Vietnam.
The emerging markets are fast gaining relevance in the revolution of digital finance. With the continued growth of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi) technologies, governments in these jurisdictions are confronted by a reality crisis, namely, how they can implement tax regimes that are both revenue-generating and innovation-friendly without toxicizing the regulatory landscape. In the paper, the complex issues of taxation of crypto assets and DeFi activity in emerging economies are discussed, structural, technological, and institutional barriers to the conventional tax framework are presented and complicate the taxation of cryptocurrency and related activities. A mixed methods strategy (applying qualitative stakeholder information to quantitative modelling and comparative policy research) helps to reveal how current tax regimes, in most cases, fall behind market development, which results in loss of revenue, enforcement gaps as well as non-intended incentives to informal economic responses. We suggest that effective policy frameworks should strike the right balance between revenue collection and fairness, enforceability and respect of decentralized spirit of DeFi. We identify practical solutions, including adaptive regulatory sandboxes, blockchain-based reporting solutions, and collaborative international standards that can all help build a resilient but adaptable tax regime by reviewing country case studies and the best practices of other countries. The results of our findings indicate that the emerging markets can use technology and cross sector partnership to make their tax systems engines of compliance and innovation. Finally, the study offers a roadmap to policymakers in an attempt to have fair, efficient, and progressive cryptocurrency taxation of crypto assets and decentralized finance.
Social media has become an indispensable part of modern life, promoting information dissemination, interpersonal communication, brand promotion, and profoundly influencing people’s social habits and ways of obtaining information. In the rapidly developing technology field, social network platforms have gradually evolved into an important part of the social structure. On the other hand, with the rise and expansion of-blockchain technology from decentralized and distributed ledger technology to many fields, its inherent advantages have also begun to be valued. This study deeply analyzes the current situation and problems encountered in the integration process of social network and block chain and puts forward corresponding solutions. Through detailed case investigation, this paper shows the specific obstacles of the integration link and discusses the potential solutions. The research aims to promote the perfect integration of social media and blockchain technology and aims to provide valuable references for these two rapidly growing areas to support their future development.
Smart contracts are programs that permanently store and automatically execute on the blockchain system such as Ethereum. Due to the non-tamperable nature of the underlying blockchain, smart contracts are difficult to update once deployed, which requires redeploying the contracts and migrating the data. It means that the observation of smart contract evolution in the real world makes more sense. Hence, in this paper, we conducted the first large-scale empirical study to characterize the evolution of smart contracts in Ethereum. For evolution identification, we presented a contract similarity-based search algorithm, digEvolution, and evaluated its effectiveness with five different search strategies. Then we applied this algorithm to 80,152 on-chain contracts we collected from Ethereum, to dig out the evolution among these contracts. We then explored three research questions. We first studied whether the evolution of smart contracts is common (RQ1), then we studied how do the Gas consumption (RQ2) and the vulnerability (RQ3) of smart contracts vary during the evolution. Our research results show that the evolution of smart contracts is not very common. There are some contract components that have vulnerability but still be called by users. The Gas consumption of most smart contracts doesn’t vary during the evolution, contract is Gas-efficient before and after the evolution. The vulnerability of most smart contracts doesn’t vary during the evolution, both are secure before and after the evolution.
In the context of growing threats in the digital space, cyber security has established itself as a critical component for protecting information systems. With the increasing reliance on digital technology and the Internet, the risks of cyber-attacks and unauthorized access to sensitive data have greatly increased. This highlights the need to develop advanced security mechanisms that ensure the overall safety of systems. Traditional security methods often fail to cope with the complexity of modern threats. Organizations are therefore exploring new technologies, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, that offer higher levels of security. Blockchain provides innovative solutions that decentralize identity management and reduce dependence on centralized servers. This paper aims to present a methodology combining two blockchain authentication methods – MetaMask Authentication and Smart Contract-Based Authentication, for implementation and analysis, ensuring overcoming challenges in real applications.
The non-fungible tokens (NFTs) market has evolved over the past decade, with NFTs serving as unique digital iden-tifiers on a blockchain that certify ownership and authenticity. The trading attributes of NFTs have drawn many users and investors. However, their high value also attracts attackers who exploit vulnerabilities in NFT smart contracts for illegal profits, thereby harming the NFT ecosystem. One notable vulnerability in NFT smart contracts is sleep minting, which allows attackers to illegally transfer others' tokens. Although some research has been conducted on sleepminting, these studies are basically qualitative analyses or based on historical transaction data. There is a lack of understanding from the contract code perspective, which is crucial for identifying such issues and preventing attacks before they occur. To address this gap, in this paper, we categorize the sleep-minting issue and find four distinct types of sleepminting in NFT smart contracts. Each type is accompanied by a comprehensive definition and illustrative code examples to provide a clear understanding of how these vulnerabilities manifest within the contract code. Furthermore, to help detect the defined defects before the sleepminting problem occurrence, we propose a tool named WakeMint, which is built on a symbolic execution framework. WakeMint is designed to be compatible with both high and low versions of Solidity, ensuring broad applicability across various smart contracts. The tool also employs a pruning strategy to shorten the detection period. Additionally, WakeMint gathers some key information, such as the owner of an NFT and emissions of events related to the transfer of the NFT's ownership during symbolic execution. Then, it analyzes the features of the transfer function based on this information so that it can judge the existence of sleepminting. We ran WakeMint on 11,161 real-world NFT smart contracts and evaluated the results. We found 115 instances of sleep minting issues in total, and the precision of our tool is 87.8 %.
Michael Lustenberger, Florian Spychiger, Lukas Küng, Jens Martignoni
Abstract The development of Bitcoin and its underlying technology blockchain has enabled a new phenomenon called decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). DAOs can be perceived as self-governing organizations whose management is based on programmed and encoded rules on a decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer network. These DAOs typically manage and allocate funds, often in the form of cryptocurrencies. However, in recent years, a variety of DAOs have been established to provide services (e.g., currency exchange, project financing), curate collections (e.g., art collections), or own and manage real assets (e.g., land). Currently, DAO literature focuses mainly on online communities managing digital assets; however, DAOs owning physical properties differ from them in localized communities, asset indivisibility, and additional complexity in collective acquisition, ownership, limited physical capacity, and decentralized governance . Such property-owning DAOs are interesting, because they fuel the transition from purely online organizations into organizations integrating with the physical world. From an organizational system theory perspective this article explores how a DAO owning properties could be designed by exploring three DAO projects that own properties. Applying a conceptual research design , we first identify DAO Design Principles obtained by traditional organizational system theory, followed by examining and describing the core organizational principles for property-owning DAOs. Based on a comprehensive discussion of the conceptual findings, we present a research agenda for further studies on DAOs owning properties.
In traditional stock market, the global processing framework shares the data to various mediators like financial and government institutions. The institutional firms needs to handle with large number of data in the system and cooperates with others to provide the trades on the stock exchange platform, and consistently buy-sell orders pass through various parties before settlement. It involves a complex chain of intermediaries, has several drawbacks like weak transparency, long lead times for financial settlements, and a single point of failure. Blockchain (BC) computer node network securely shares the common ledger without intermediaries. This paper uses a deep learning-based Smart contract in the private ethereum consortium blockchain (PEC-BC) to provide financial security. First, the data is collected. Then it is given to the next stage. The Dynamic Butterfly-Billiards Optimization Algorithm (DB-BOA) is used to choose the leader block. Further, the selected new leader block is used in the Adaptive Deep Temporal Context Networks (ADTCN) with a consensus algorithm to make secured smart contracts. Here, the parameters are optimized by DB-BOA. The developed ADTCN-based financial security system was compared with other conventional methods, and algorithms performed well.
This study aims to see the development of research on the topic of "Islamic Finance & Cryptocurrency" and research plans that can be carried out based on journals published on the theme. This research uses a qualitative method with a bibliometric analysis approach. The data used is secondary data with the theme "Islamic Finance & Cryptocurrency" which comes from the Scopus database with a total of 40 journal articles. Then, the data is processed and analyzed using the R-Biblioshiny and VosViewer applications with the aim of knowing the bibliometric map of "Islamic Finance & Cryptocurrency" research development in the world. The results of the study found that there are 4 clusters with the most used words are cryptocurrencey, islamic finance, blockchain technology, money, bitcoin, fintech, digital currency, and islamic crypto assets. Then, the research path topics related to Islamic Finance & Cryptocurrency are (1)Blockchain Adoption in Islamic Finance, (2)Digital Currency Transactions in Islam, (3)Potential and Challenges of Islamic Crypto, and (4)Islamic Law Implications on Cryptocurrency.
In this era, significant transformations in industries and tool utilization are driven by AI/Large Language Models (LLMs) and advancements in Machine Learning. There's a growing emphasis on Machine Learning Operations(MLOps) for managing and deploying these AI models. Concurrently, the imperative for richer smart contracts and on-chain computation is escalating. Our paper introduces an innovative framework that integrates blockchain technology, particularly the Cosmos SDK, to facilitate on-chain AI inferences. This system, built on WebAssembly (WASM), enables interchain communication and deployment of WASM modules executing AI inferences across multiple blockchain nodes. We critically assess the framework from feasibility, scalability, and model security, with a special focus on its portability and engine-model agnostic deployment. The capability to support AI on-chain may enhance and expand the scope of smart contracts, and as a result enable new use cases and applications.
This comprehensive technical article explores the evolution and architectural landscape of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), examining its transformation from initial implementations to the more sophisticated DeFi 2.0 ecosystem. It investigates the fundamental technical components, including smart contract infrastructure, consensus mechanisms, and cross-chain interoperability solutions that form the backbone of modern DeFi systems. Through a detailed examination of Layer-2 scaling solutions, risk management protocols, and AI-driven analytics, the article highlights how DeFi aggregators are revolutionizing user interactions with decentralized protocols. It further delves into emerging technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and quantum-resistant cryptography, while addressing critical challenges in security, scalability, and mainstream adoption. By examining both technical innovations and integration challenges, this article provides insights into how DeFi is reshaping traditional financial systems through decentralized protocols and smart contracts while emphasizing the importance of balancing innovation with security and regulatory compliance in the evolving blockchain landscape.
The rapid development of digital currency is driving profound changes in the global financial system. This paper analyzes the impact of digital currency on the traditional financial system across several areas, including payment and settlement, monetary policy, financial intermediation, and the international financial landscape. Firstly, digital currency enhances the efficiency of payment and settlement through decentralized technology, challenging the dominant role of traditional banks within the payment systems. Secondly, the introduction of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) has far-reaching implications for monetary policy tools and may strengthen central banks’ control over the economy. Meanwhile, the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) weakens the intermediation role of traditional financial institutions, transforming patterns of capital flow. At an international level, the widespread adoption of digital currency may reshape the global financial order, reduce the influence of reserve currencies such as the U.S. dollar, and promote the liberalization of capital flows.
This study investigates the underlying motivations of lenders in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending, using the Theory of Planned Behavior as its framework. Based on qualitative interviews, findings reveal that lenders exhibit a positive attitude toward P2P lending, driven by opportunistic investment decisions, the perception of relatively low-risk investments, and the availability of disposable income. This attitude is further reinforced by the accessibility of investment-related information on digital platforms. Beyond individual motivations, social influence plays a crucial role, as family members and digital influencers significantly impact lenders' investment choices. Additionally, perceived behavioral control in digital investment environments is shaped not only by regulatory structures and platform transparency but also by decentralized information sources, investment flexibility, and experiential learning. These findings emphasize the transformative role of digital finance in shaping investor autonomy and risk perception. The study offers practical insights for P2P lending platforms to develop more effective communication and engagement strategies tailored to digitally savvy investors.
This paper presents method for transforming education funding through a blockchain-powered crowdfunding platform. This platform aims to empower students, educators, and educational institutions. Our goal is to create a decentralized environment where creative educational projects can receive financial support, providing assistance to students facing financial barriers and enabling small schools to request funding for infrastructure and program improvements. In response to the increasing demand for transparency and accountability in crowdfunding, our platform encourages collaboration among developers to enhance features and functionalities, all while offering a user-friendly interface through Web3 technology. The central focus is on fostering community involvement and attracting backing for educational initiatives, while also allowing the platform to evolve and scale efficiently with the benefits of Polygon's scalability
Cryptocurrency exchange in Asian emerging countries has grown rapidly in the past few years while there’s still inconsistency in the supervision of the official agency such as Central Bank and the Securities and Exchange Commission which made it unclear about the future direction of cryptocurrency exchange. This paper analyses herding behavior in 4 cryptocurrency exchanges which located in 4 emerging countries in Asian, using total of 18,313,994 trading data both daily and 4 types of high frequency data (240-min, 60-min, 30-min, and 15-min) for the period from 1st January 2019 to 30th November 2024 by the Cross-sectional absolute deviations (CSAD) approach. The result suggests that herding behavior always evident when apply the daily data but undetected with high-frequency data which is more appropriate data. This finding cast light on the efficiency of cryptocurrency exchange in Asian emerging countries and leads to a guideline for official authorities to regulate the market appropriately.
Blockchain technology transforms banking by solving issues in international money transfers. The decentralized blockchain system prevents tampering and removes intermediaries to speed up transactions and lower costs while protecting data integrity. Our investigation focuses on how blockchain prevents financial fraud while allowing users to see transaction data in real-time and making international financial systems work better. This research analyzes how blockchain works in financial transactions and shows its effects on payment times, cost savings, and protection against fraud through data studies. Despite demonstrating powerful disruption blockchain struggles with processing delays and lacks defined standards while integrating technology proves challenging. This research explores why organizations find it difficult to use blockchain technology and suggests methods that can help to use blockchain effectively in daily operations. This research examines how blockchain technology affects global finance operations and shows its benefits for international payments while explaining its potential to transform worldwide financial systems.