Scott Ruoti, Ben Kaiser, Arkady Yerukhimovich, Jeremy Clark · 5 authors
This paper explains the functioning of “blockchain technology” and critically assesses its potential role in improving services in banking, contracts, and database systems. Comparing blockchain to the current best practice technology in these fields reveals several barriers to successful commercial implementation: Blockchain technology involves costly redundancies and irreversibility, faces serious scaling problems and significant barriers to complying with regulations, and is a security liability unless secured with its own freely trading currency. A survey of the state of the blockchain industry shows that in eight years since blockchain technology was invented, it has had no commercial applications other than digital cash. The paper concludes that a blockchain is a peculiar engineering design whose only advantage is in removing third party intermediation to allow for the creation of digital cash, and is unlikely to offer economic advantages for any commercial problem other than the one it was specifically engineered to solve.
Dappfort is a blockchain-focused Web3 development company that helps businesses harness the power of decentralized technologies to build secure, scalable, and future-ready digital solutions. Headquartered in Madurai, India, with additional presence in London, Dappfort works across a broad range of industries — including finance, healthcare, gaming, retail, and supply chain — delivering tailored blockchain and Web3 applications to startups, enterprises, and global organizations. The company’s core services include the design and development of decentralized applications (DApps), crypto exchanges (centralized and decentralized), crypto wallets, NFT marketplaces, DeFi platforms, token creation, smart contract development, and enterprise Web3 integration. Dappfort also expands into related areas such as Web3 e-commerce, AI-powered blockchain solutions, and metaverse experiences, supporting clients from strategy and consulting through deployment and ongoing support. With expertise in major blockchain networks like Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, and others, Dappfort positions itself as a full-stack partner for businesses aiming to enter or grow in the decentralized digital economy. While the company promotes a strong innovation- and security-oriented approach, external reviews on third-party platforms show mixed feedback from users about project delivery and quality.
An interesting research problem in our age of Big Data is that of determining provenance. Granular evaluation of provenance of physical goods--e.g. tracking ingredients of a pharmaceutical or demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods--has often not been possible with today's items that are produced and transported in complex, inter-organizational, often internationally-spanning supply chains. Recent adoption of Internet of Things and Blockchain technologies give promise at better supply chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain as many favoured use cases of blockchain are for provenance tracking. We are also interested in applying ontologies as there has been some work done on knowledge provenance, traceability, and food provenance using ontologies. In this paper, we make a case for why ontologies can contribute to blockchain design. To support this case, we analyze a traceability ontology and translate some of its representations to smart contracts that execute a provenance trace and enforce traceability constraints on the Ethereum blockchain platform.
Abstract Since the emergence of the virtual currency Bitcoin in 2009, a new, Internet‐based way of recording entitlements and enforcing rights has increasingly captured the interest of businesses and governments. The technology is commonly called ‘blockchain’ and is often associated with a closely related phenomenon, the ‘smart contract’. The market is now exploring ways of using these concepts for financial assets, such as securities, fiat money and derivative contracts. This article develops a conceptual framework for the governance of blockchain‐based networks in financial markets. It constructs a vision of how financial regulation and private law should set the boundaries of this new technology in order to protect market participants and societies at large, while at the same time allowing the necessary room for innovation.
The ‘blockchain’ is the core mechanism for the Bitcoin digital payment system. It embraces a set of inter-related technologies: the blockchain itself as a distributed record of digital events, the distributed consensus method to agree whether a new block is legitimate, automated smart contracts, and the data structure associated with each block. We propose a permanent distributed record of intellectual effort and associated reputational reward, based on the blockchain that instantiates and democratises educational reputation beyond the academic community. We are undertaking initial trials of a private blockchain or storing educational records, drawing also on our previous research into reputation management for educational systems.
ABSTRACT: Motivated by the recent explosion of interest around Blockchains, we examine whether they make a good t for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Blockchains allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-trusting members can interact with each other without a trusted intermediary, in a variable manner. We review how this mechanism works and also look into smart contracts scripts that reside on the Blockchain that allow for the automation of multi-step processes. We then move into the IoT domain, and describe how a Blockchain-IoT combination: 1) facilitates the sharing of services and resources leading to the creation of a marketplace of services between devices and 2) allows us to automate in a cryptographically variable manner several existing, time- consuming work owns. We also point out certain issues that should be considered before the deployment of a Blockchain network in an IoT setting: from transactional privacy to the expected value of the digitized assets traded on the network. Wherever applicable, we identify solutions and workarounds. Our conclusion is that the Blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause sign cant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.
This study examines how decentralized finance protocols reshape consumer protection outcomes within blockchain financial markets amid growing global concerns regarding digital transaction security, governance transparency, and institutional regulatory adaptation. Using a balanced longitudinal panel dataset of 1,450 institutional year observations derived from BIS, IMF, OECD, and World Bank digital finance databases covering 2005 to 2014, the study applies fixed effects panel regression, moderation interaction modeling, clustered robust estimation, and multidimensional composite index construction to estimate the structural relationship between decentralized finance systems and consumer protection. The findings reveal that Smart Contract Infrastructure, Decentralized Financial Services, Blockchain Technology Integration, and DeFi Governance Structures exert positive and statistically significant effects on Consumer Protection, while the Digital Regulatory Environment significantly strengthens these relationships through regulatory clarity, cybersecurity readiness, legal enforcement, and digital literacy mechanisms. Interaction estimates further demonstrate that institutional readiness amplifies the protective capacity of decentralized financial ecosystems across heterogeneous digital markets. The study extends institutional governance and financial innovation theory by integrating technological infrastructure, decentralized governance, and adaptive regulatory conditioning into a unified explanatory framework. The findings provide policy relevant evidence for regulators, blockchain developers, and digital financial institutions seeking to strengthen consumer protection within technologically evolving financial ecosystems.
Ángel Gomez-Sacristan, Miguel A. Rodríguez-Hernández, V. Sempere
The concept of Smart-Hospital is generally associated with a comprehensive care model capable of responding to the needs of health institutions, companies and patients in an optimum way in terms of economic, operative and environmental aspects aiming the improvement of care quality and sustainable use of resources. In this context, a Smart-Hospital is a technological and hyper-connected hospital in terms of telecommunications. Ahuge range of systems and devices generate information of a heterogeneous nature. In many cases, for reasons of efficiency and availability, this information is stored and processed in architectures external to the hospital itself. Centralized services housed in Cloud architectures or telemedicine / tele-assistance services are proof of this. Guaranteeing an adequate level of quality of service is a complex task when approached from an analytical point of view due to the large number of sources and their heterogeneous nature. The use of simulation tools allows this task to be undertaken and using different hypotheses in less time and at a reasonable cost. This article presents the results obtained, in terms of quality of communications, for a Smart-Hospital with an arbitrary collection of heterogeneous services connected by Metro-Ethernet access. The results obtained: loss of information, delays and jitter will be used to outline the capacities to be contracted from the telecommunications supplier.
Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Emin Gün Sirer, Robbert van Renesse
Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols have inherent scalability limits that trade-off between throughput and latency and withhold the realization of this potential. This paper presents Bitcoin-NG, a new blockchain protocol designed to scale. Based on Bitcoin's blockchain protocol, Bitcoin-NG is Byzantine fault tolerant, is robust to extreme churn, and shares the same trust model obviating qualitative changes to the ecosystem. In addition to Bitcoin-NG, we introduce several novel metrics of interest in quantifying the security and efficiency of Bitcoin-like blockchain protocols. We implement Bitcoin-NG and perform large-scale experiments at 15% the size of the operational Bitcoin system, using unchanged clients of both protocols. These experiments demonstrate that Bitcoin-NG scales optimally, with bandwidth limited only by the capacity of the individual nodes and latency limited only by the propagation time of the network.
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In the smart grid, large consumers can procure electricity energy from various power sources to meet their load demands. To maximize its profit, each large consumer needs to decide their energy procurement strategy under risks such as price fluctuations from the spot market and power quality issues. In this paper, an electric energy procurement decision-making model is studied for large consumers who can obtain their electric energy from the spot market, generation companies under bilateral contracts, the options market and self-production facilities in the smart grid. Considering the effect of unqualified electric energy, the profit model of large consumers is formulated. In order to measure the risks from the price fluctuations and power quality, the expected utility and entropy is employed. Consequently, the expected utility and entropy decision-making model is presented, which helps large consumers to minimize their expected profit of electricity procurement while properly limiting the volatility of this cost. Finally, a case study verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model.
The decision of selecting the appropriate procurement/delivery system for large investment construction projects is a critical and challenging task for clients, and therefore a significant factor for the project’s success. Complex projects as electric power plants can involve managing multiple contracts or subcontracts simultaneously or in sequence. The aim of this paper is to develop, and analyze a decision support tool to select the most efficient procurement/delivery system for multiple contracts Combined Cycle Power Plants (CCPP) constructed in Egypt and funded by the publicsector. This process involved the identification of various procurement routes, followed by the utilization of quantitative values developed in accordance with the requirements of the multi-criteria decision analysis technique known as simple multi-attribute rating technique (SMART). Results revealed that the procurement/delivery system with the highest score, for all contractual packages, is the integrated project delivery method (IPD) under which other procurement/delivery methods could be utilized such as performance-based contracting (PBC), and construction management (CM). Further in this research, a sensitivity analysis approach was adopted to validate the IPD selection, and to determine the most critical criterion and the most critical measure of performance for each contractual package.
Albert Y. S. Lam, Ka-Cheong Leung, Victor O. K. Li
Due to various green initiatives, renewable energy will be massively incorporated into the future smart grid. However, the intermittency of the renewables may result in power imbalance, thus adversely affecting the stability of a power system. Frequency regulation may be used to maintain the power balance at all times. As electric vehicles (EVs) become popular, they may be connected to the grid to form a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system. An aggregation of EVs can be coordinated to provide frequency regulation services. However, V2G is a dynamic system where the participating EVs come and go independently. Thus, it is not easy to estimate the regulation capacities for V2G. In a preliminary study, we modeled an aggregation of EVs with a queueing network, whose structure allows us to estimate the capacities for regulation-up and regulation-down separately. The estimated capacities from the V2G system can be used for establishing a regulation contract between an aggregator and the grid operator, and facilitating a new business model for V2G. In this paper, we extend our previous development by designing a smart charging mechanism that can adapt to given characteristics of the EVs and make the performance of the actual system follow the analytical model.
The realization of large and complex cyber-physical systems (such as "smart" transportation, energy, security, and health-care systems) is creating design and verification challenges which will soon become insurmountable with the current engineering practices. These highly heterogeneous systems, tightly combining physical processes with computation, communication, and control elements, would substantially benefit from hierarchical and compositional methodologies to make their design possible let alone optimal. Several languages and tools have been proposed over the years to enable model-based development of complex systems. However, an all-encompassing design framework that helps interconnect different tools, possibly operating on different system representations, is still missing.In this dissertation, we introduce a design methodology that addresses the complexity and heterogeneity of cyber-physical systems by using assume-guarantee contracts to formalize the design process and enable the realization of system architectures and control algorithms in a hierarchical and compositional way. In our methodology, components are specified by contracts, and systems by compositions of contracts. Contracts explicitly define the assumptions of a component on its environment and the guarantees of the component under these assumptions. Contract operations and relations, such as composition, conjunction and refinement allow proving that: (i) an aggregation of components are compatible, i.e. there exists a legal environment in which they can operate; (ii) a set of specifications are consistent, i.e. there exists an implementation satisfying all of them; (iii) an aggregation of components refines a specification, i.e. it implements the specification contract and is able to operate in any environment admitted by it. While horizontal contracts are used to specify components and aggregations of components at the same level of abstraction, we introduce the notion of vertical contracts to reason about richer refinement relations and mappings between different abstraction levels, possibly described by heterogeneous architectures and behavior formalisms. Moreover, we further investigate the problem of compatibility for systems with uncontrolled inputs and controlled outputs, by establishing a link between the theory of contracts and the one of interfaces, which rely on different mathematical formalisms, while sharing the same objectives. From this link, we derive a new projection operator on contracts that enables the preservation of the semantics of interface composition and compatibility.Resting on the above contract framework, the design is carried out as a sequence of refinement steps from a high-level specification to an implementation built out of a library of components at the lower level. To allow for requirement analysis and early detection of inconsistencies, top-level system requirements are captured as contracts, by leveraging a front-end pattern-based specification language and a set of back-end formal languages, including mixed integer-linear constraints and temporal logic. Top-level contracts are then refined to achieve independent development of system architectures and control algorithms, by combining synthesis from requirements and optimization methods.To enable efficient architecture selection under safety and reliability constraints, we explore two optimization-based methods that use an approximate reliability analysis technique to overcome the exponential complexity of exact computations. The Integer-Linear Programming with Approximate Reliability (ILP-AR) method generates larger, monolithic optimization problems using approximate but efficient reliability computations with an explicit theoretical bound on the error. Conversely, the Integer-Linear Programming Modulo Reliability (ILP-MR) method breaks the complex architecture selection task into a sequence of smaller optimization tasks without reliability constraints, interleaved with exact reliability checks. By relying on efficient mechanisms to prune out candidate architectures that are inconsistent with the reliability constraints, ILP-MR can run faster than ILP-AR on large problem instances.We further explore two methods to systematically design control strategies for a given architecture. The reactive synthesis-based optimal control mapping (RS-OCM) method generates controllers by combining reactive synthesis from linear temporal logic contracts with optimization techniques based on simulation and monitoring of signal temporal logic contracts. Different design concerns are then addressed by leveraging the most appropriate abstraction levels, using contracts from the pre-characterized library to accelerate verification tasks. The programming-based optimal control mapping (P-OCM) method uses, instead, a discrete-time representation of the system and a formalization of the design requirements in terms of arithmetic constraints over real numbers to cast the control problem as an optimization problem over a finite time horizon. The optimization problem is then solved with a receding horizon approach and scales better than monolithic reactive synthesis from linear temporal logic.We demonstrate, for the first time, the effectiveness of a contract-based design flow on real-life examples of industrial relevance, namely, the design of aircraft electric power distribution and environment control systems. In our framework, optimal selection of large, industrial-scale power system architectures can be performed in a few minutes. Design validation of power system controllers based on linear temporal logic contracts shows up to two orders of magnitude improvement in terms of execution time with respect to conventional techniques. Finally, our optimization-based load management scheme allows better resource utilization than a conventional one.
Bitcoin is a virtual currency transaction protocol.It also is a type of virtual currency.One of Bitcoin's unique features is that it is decentralized; it is not created or issued by a single person or entity.Rather, it is "mined" by miners that are issued bitcoins in exchange for solving complex math problems with special software.Bitcoins may be converted to governmentissued legal tender (commonly referred to as fiat currency) or other types of virtual currency through an exchange, or they may be used to purchase goods and services from any of the tens of thousands of merchants who accept bitcoins for payment.The Bitcoin protocol enables the transfer of bitcoins and also can be used for other purposes, such as providing the infrastructure for smart contracts, escrow systems, smart property/title systems, and much more.Many other virtual currencies exist.Some are centralized virtual currencies that are created and issued by a single entity.Some of these virtual currencies may be converted to fiat currency, but others may not.Many are "closed loop" virtual currencies that may only be used to obtain goods and services of the issuer.
Please find the English version of this paper at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2729548 . Italian Abstract: Nel 2008 il protocollo Bitcoin ha introdotto una nuovo modo di trasferire diritti: il modello di Blockchain, uno schema matematico che combina una serie di algoritmi per procedere all'incorporazione di determinati diritti in una stringa digitale trasferibile. Una delle evoluzioni di quel protocollo è rappresentata dagli smart contract, un modello ancora da definire a nei dettagli tecnici e giuridici in cui alcune clausole del contratto vengono tradotte in codice informatico per l'esecuzione automatica in una blockchain derivata dal protocollo Bitcoin. Questo paper propone una prima valutazione dell'argomento basata sulla ricognizione dello stato dell'arte. English Abstract: In 2008 the Bitcoin protocol has introduced a new way to transfer rights: the blockchain model, a method combining mathematical algorithms in order to secure rights in transferrable digital string. One of the implementations of that system is represented by smart contracts, a model that is still to be defined in technical and legal details. The scheme turns specific contractual provisions in executable digital codes, designed for self execution in a Bitcoin derived blockchain system. This paper proposes a preliminary evaluation based on the state of the art.
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The advent of Bitcoin in 2009 has not only introduced Cryptocurrencies and lead to a new digitization movement in the financial, especially payments industry but also made way for a new breed of innovative technologies based on decentralized digital currencies. Generally, decentralized consensus systems could change the very nature of how companies, organizations and individuals are built and interact with each other. Decentralized consensus systems, decentralized applications and smart contracts provide the conceptual framework as well as the technological basis to establish predefined, incorruptible protocols and contracts to organize human behavior and interconnectedness. However, the technical protocols and implementations are quite complex and practitioners as well as interdisciplinary researchers not familiar with cryptography, network protocols or decentralized networks are struggling to find access to these concepts and grasp their potential. To fill this gap, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy of decentralized consensus systems in order to provide a tool for researchers and practitioners alike to facilitate classification and analysis of emerging technologies in the field of "Crypto 2.0", the next level of innovation beyond cryptocurrencies.
In this chapter we provide an overview of the concept of blockchain technology and its potential to disrupt the world of banking through facilitating global money remittance, smart contracts, automated banking ledgers and digital assets. In this regard, we first provide a brief overview of the core aspects of this technology, as well as the second-generation contract-based developments. From there we discuss key issues that must be considered in developing such ledger based technologies in a banking context.
Chain Of A Lifetime: How Blockchain Technology Might Transform Personal Insurance is the outcome of a research project conducted between August and December 2014 which explored how blockchain technology might transform personal insurance and in particular interactions among individuals and insurance companies over time.
Blockchain technology's main innovation is an electronic public transaction record of integrity without central authority. Beside cryptocurrencies and distributed payment systems, blockchain applications could include areas of finance where a central, trusted third party has traditionally been used, trade reporting, depository receipts, escrow accounts or trade finance. Blockchains can contain set of documents, record assets and help to manage interconnected devices. Emerging applications, such as smart contracts and decentralised autonomous organisations, might in future also permit blockchains to act as automated agents.
The report concludes that blockchain technology could transform the way people manage identities and personal information; blur even further the divide between global and local; influence consumer perception of time; drive honesty and transparency; and, influence consumer perceptions of risk that could change the way insurers support mutualisation. The report highlights how, at the time of writing, most insurance companies do not yet seem ready to experiment with blockchain technology. They find it difficult enough to understand Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. Non-insurers are more likely to be the first to create insurance or insurance-related applications. Blockchain applications in insurance are likely to start with digital identity systems and management of personal data.