Blockchain is a decentralised and distributed ledger technology that enables multiple participants to collectively maintain a secure and tamper-resistant record of transactions without relying on trusted central authorities. It has several potential features, including decentralisation, immutability, transparency and security. Beyond its original use in cryptocurrencies, blockchain has facilitated a diverse range of applications, including decentralised finance, supply chain tracking, digital identity management, secure voting systems and decentralised autonomous organisations, where transparency, trustlessness and data integrity are critical. Structurally speaking, a blockchain consists of an ordered sequence of blocks, each containing a set of validated transactions. Every block incorporates a cryptographic hash of its previous block, linking them into an immutable chain that maintains chronological ordering and prevents tampering. At its foundation, a blockchain relies on the consensus mechanism that ensures all untrusted participants agree on a consistent ledger state, despite network latency or malicious behaviour. Up to now, widely adopted consensus algorithms include proof-of-work (PoW), which relies on computationally intensive puzzles, and proof-of-stake (PoS), which utilises economic incentives based on stake ownership. Unlike PoW, PoS consumes less energy, achieves faster block finalisation with lower latency and lowers participation barriers, enhancing efficiency, scalability and decentralisation without compromising security.Digital signatures are fundamental cryptographic primitives essential for establishing trust and ensuring security in digital communications. By using a secret key to generate signatures on given messages, anyone who knows the corresponding public key can check the validity of signature candidates. This cryptographic process provides critical guarantees such as authentication, data integrity and non-repudiation, making them integral to secure communication and a wide range of cryptographic protocols. In PoS blockchain protocols, digital signatures play a crucial role not only in authenticating transactions but also in validating the participation of stakeholders in consensus processes, such as block proposals and block attestations. Advanced signature schemes, including forwardsecure signatures or puncturable signatures, are often employed to prevent long-range attacks caused by secret key leakage, preserving the immutability of PoS blockchain protocols. Furthermore, threshold or weighted threshold signatures are frequently deployed in PoS-based protocols to aggregate multiple block attestations into a single compact one efficiently, enhancing scalability while maintaining robust security guarantees.This thesis focuses on advanced digital signature schemes deployed in proof-of-stake blockchain protocols, with particular emphasis on puncturable signatures and weighted threshold signatures. To be more specific, the main contributions of this thesis are outlined as follows.First, we focus on puncturable signatures and propose the first generic construction derived from identity-based signatures by treating identities as to-be-punctured prefixes. Based on this framework, we give concrete puncturable signature instantiations over bilinear maps, lattices and multivariate polynomials, respectively. More specifically, the pairing-based instantiation is proven secure based on the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption in the standard model. The lattice-based instantiation achieves provable security under the short integer solution (SIS) assumption in the random oracle model. The multivariate-based instantiation is analysed against some best-known attacks in multivariate public key cryptography. All of the proposed schemes support efficient puncture operations, while the lattice-based and multivariate-based ones additionally enjoy post-quantum security.Second, we adopt a different approach to constructing puncturable signatures supporting compact secret keys that serve as an effective mitigation against long-range attacks caused by secret key leakage in PoS blockchains. Specifically, we propose a new generic construction of puncturable signatures from delegated (key-policy) constrained signatures. Such a framework is inspired by an observation that matching between messages and constraints can be converted to equality tests between prefixes of to-be-signed messages and punctured prefixes. The key delegation property of (key-policy) constrained signatures enables repeated key puncture operations. Building on our framework, we give a concrete lattice-based instantiation that is proven secure based on the SIS assumption in the standard model. Our proposed scheme features small secret key sizes, particularly for the initial secret key, which is beneficial for users to join PoS blockchains without requiring a significant commitment in the initial phase.Third, we revisit the notion of puncturable signatures and find their vulnerability in mitigating long-range attacks caused by secret key leakage in PoS blockchains. Despite their key evolving property, compromising previous secret keys enable adversaries to forge branches in PoS blockchains, bypassing the security guarantees provided by puncturable signatures. It is essential to invalidate previous secret keys, regardless of whether they have been securely deleted. Therefore, we integrate key puncture and signing operations into a unified Sign-and-Pun algorithm. By publishing punctured prefixes and providing additional proofs, our strengthened puncturable signatures ensure that no malicious signers can generate valid signatures using previous secret keys. Furthermore, we propose a concrete lattice-based construction that is provably secure under the SIS assumption in the standard model.Finally, we focus on weighted threshold signatures for block attestations in PoS blockchain protocols, where validators are assigned different weights to reflect their varying impacts on consensus decisions. Specifically, we present the first weighted threshold signature scheme over lattices, which is a combination of multi-signature and non-interactive inner product arguments. In our proposed scheme, the weights of signers are public and work as a separate checking condition in threshold signature verification. We show that our scheme is provably secure under the module short integer solution (MSIS) assumption in the random oracle model. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to integrate our scheme into PoS blockchains for block attestation. Moreover, we implement our scheme in the C programming language and present an experimental evaluation of its practical efficiency.
We introduce a formal semantic Bell inequality for multi-agent validation systems and show that the MetaBell operator Ψ, deployed in the PoISV consensus protocol, functions as a rigorous Bell witness for genuine independent understanding. We derive Ψ ≈ 1 − |S̃|/(2√2), connecting Ψ to the Tsirelson bound and replacing the ad-hoc threshold with a data-driven calibrated threshold Ψ*. We further define a Bell-augmented SPVU goal state, an Immutable Incident Log satisfying EU AI Act Art. 12/17/19, a zero-knowledge proof of MetaBell compliance via Nexus zkVM, a Svetlichny-type k≥3 group extension, and the Semantic Bell Test Corpus (SBTC) for empirical validation. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19656679
DilithiumBar Architecture DilithiumBar is a high-performance, post-quantum (PQ) blockchain protocol engineered to withstand the cryptographic threats posed by future quantum computing. By replacing standard ECDSA signatures with the CRYSTALS-Dilithium5 lattice-based scheme, the system ensures long-term security without compromising operational efficiency. The protocol integrates a sophisticated suite of modern blockchain innovations: Post-Quantum Security: Native implementation of NIST-standardized lattice cryptography to secure transactions and state transitions. High-Finality Consensus: A Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) mechanism that provides deterministic 10-second finality, significantly faster than traditional Proof-of-Work systems. Advanced State Management: Utilizes a Merkle-Patricia Trie for verifiable state tracking and atomic database operations to ensure data integrity. Dynamic Economics: An EIP-1559 inspired fee market that stabilizes transaction costs and optimizes network throughput. While the protocol acknowledges the increased bandwidth and storage requirements typical of post-quantum primitives, it balances these trade-offs through an optimized architecture designed for the next era of decentralized finance.
Digital enterprises operating across multiple regions require an architecture that ensures high availability, low latency, and seamless multi-currency support. In this paper, we propose a cloud-native distributed system design that leverages microservices, geo-replication, and fault-tolerant patterns to meet these requirements. We detail the system architecture - including a multi-region deployment, microservices for currency conversion and transaction processing, and a replicated ledger - and present our methodology for performance evaluation. Our experiments compare the proposed design to a traditional monolithic baseline, showing significant improvements: for example, currency conversion latency falls from ~220 ms to ~50 ms and throughput increases sixfold under load (p<0.01). We also demonstrate 99.99% availability via automated failover and load balancing across regions. Key contributions include a detailed description of the architecture (with figures of component interactions and data flow), an analytical model of system performance, and statistical validation of results. We conclude by discussing limitations, strengths, and directions for future work. The results validate that our design substantially enhances availability and performance for global multi-currency platforms.
Manaswini Piduguralla, Souvik Sarkar, Arunmoezhi Ramachandran, Sathya Peri
Blockchain technology enhances transparency by maintaining a distributed ledger among mutually untrusting parties. Despite its advantages, scalability and availability remain critical bottlenecks that hinder widespread adoption. The increasing complexity of blockchain nodes further necessitates robust fault tolerance and high throughput to ensure seamless operations. We present BlockRaFT, a crash-tolerant distributed framework designed to improve both the scalability and reliability of blockchain node operations. BlockRaFT framework utilizes RAFT consensus protocol to elect a leader within a cluster of systems. The elected leader coordinates and distributes workloads across follower nodes, thereby optimizing resource utilization and work load balancing. We analyzed the tasks performed by blockchain nodes and partition them according to their stateful and stateless characteristics. Stateless operations are centralized at the leader, while stateful operations are replicated and coordinated across the cluster to ensure consistency and fault tolerance. We evaluate whether this distributed intra-node architecture provides measurable benefits over traditional single-node execution models in terms of scalability, availability, and performance. Additionally, we introduce a concurrent Merkle tree optimization that decouples smart contract execution from tree updates, significantly reducing one of the significant performance overheads in blockchain systems. Our design philosophy is rooted in utilizing the well-established principles of distributed computing and customizing them for the blockchain domain rather than reinventing them.
The frozen SUPT-CA phase-coherence probe (α = 0.01, zero free parameters) was applied to live blockchain data from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, and Polkadot. Consensus mechanism design directly determines geometric regime: deterministic hardware clocking (Solana, Polkadot) produces deep-lock distributions; regulated proof-of-stake with fee targeting (Ethereum, Cardano) produces coherence-zone distributions; probabilistic proof-of-work (Bitcoin) produces clutch-band timing with sub-floor transaction variability. A validated congestion oracle signal is identified for Ethereum: transaction count d_ij crossing 1.0 in a rolling 150-block window marks network congestion onset, confirmed against the May 2024 memecoin congestion event. All data from live public RPC endpoints, April 15, 2026. No parameters adjusted.
DeFree is a unified Web3-enabled platform designed to integrate freelancing, event management, and real-time community communication into a single decentralised ecosystem. Traditional platforms often suffer from high commission fees, a lack of transparency, and centralised control over transactions. DeFree addresses these limitations by leveraging Ethereum-based smart contracts for trustless escrow payments, ERC-721 NFTs for secure event ticketing, and Socket.IO for real-time communication. The platform is built using React, TypeScript, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, and Solidity-based smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet. Experimental evaluation demonstrates efficient system performance with API response times under 250 ms and real-time messaging latency below 200 ms. The proposed system enhances transparency, reduces dependency on intermediaries, and provides a scalable solution for decentralised collaboration.
Jiahao Qi, Dian Ding, Jie Li, Jiannong Cao · 7 authors
Account migration in sharded blockchains presents a critical trade-off between optimization effectiveness and system availability. While dynamically reallocating accounts across shards can significantly reduce cross-shard transaction overhead, existing migration mechanisms cause service disruptions that intensify as state data volumes grow. To address this challenge, we propose BIND, a batch-wise account migration protocol that eliminates service interruptions by enabling continuous transaction processing throughout migration. BIND introduces a dual transaction pool architecture that isolates transactions involving migrating accounts while allowing non-migrating accounts to operate uninterrupted. To optimize migration efficiency, we design a reverse greedy heuristic algorithm that partitions accounts into batches based on community cohesion, maximizing intra-batch connectivity to front-load cross-shard communication reduction. We evaluate BIND using real Ethereum transactions, demonstrating superior performance over existing mechanisms. BIND achieves 12% higher overall throughput, reduces migration time to 23.6%-39.3% of the one-shot baseline (across 1-10Gbps bandwidth), and lowers cross-shard transaction rates by 24.1% compared to random batching. These results confirm BIND as a practical solution for large-scale, non-disruptive account migration in production sharded blockchains.
The correct and resilient operation of distributed systems—spanning global financial ledgers, decentralized autonomous organizations, and peer-to-peer energy microgrids—depends fundamentally on the correctness of their underlying consensus mechanisms. These protocols must guarantee agreement on shared state among a collection of potentially faulty or adversarial nodes, upholding the dual properties of safety and liveness even under hostile conditions. Despite the growing diversity of consensus algorithms, from classical crash-fault tolerant approaches such as Paxos and Raft to modern Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) variants and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based structures, the research community lacks a unified architecture for their systematic, cross-platform evaluation. This paper proposes a modular, extensible framework called the Consensus Evaluation and Resilience Framework (CERF) to fill this gap. CERF integrates five core components: a high-fidelity network emulation layer, a pluggable system-under-test (SUT) adapter, a fault injection engine (FIE) capable of simulating both benign and Byzantine failure modes, a multi-dimensional performance monitoring unit (PMU), and a formal consistency checker. By decoupling the testing infrastructure from protocol implementation, CERF enables fair comparisons of throughput, latency, energy efficiency, and scalability. The proposed architecture draws on insights from seminal benchmarking works including BlockBench, Jepsen, and ByzzBench, and extends evaluation criteria to address modern challenges in IoT environments, post-quantum security, and DAG-based ledgers. Graph-theoretical principles are incorporated at the topology design stage to model network vulnerabilities and guide adversarial scenario construction.
Blockchain technology has revolutionized various industries by offering transparency, security, and decentralization. The critical aspect of blockchain technology is the consensus protocol, which plays a pivotal role in ensuring the integrity and reliability of distributed ledger systems. The selection of an appropriate consensus protocol for a given blockchain application is a complex and multifaceted decision-making process, influenced by various technical, environmental, and operational factors. This paper presents an integrated multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach to facilitate the selection of an optimal blockchain consensus protocol. Through a comprehensive evaluation of criteria, including performance, sustainability, incentives, security, and decentralization, our approach provides a robust decision-making framework for consensus protocol assessment. The results prioritize the importance of performance and security factors in blockchain consensus protocol evaluation. The sensitivity analysis is performed to determine the impact of experts’ weight coefficients on the result. The results prioritize the importance of performance and security in blockchain consensus protocol selection.
Highlights • Identifying threats that cannot be countered by theoretical security based on STRIDE threat analysis of an existing provable data possession (PDP) system • Designing a PDP system with practical security features to counter threats that cannot be addressed with theoretical security alone • Presenting the implementation of the proposed PDP system, PRISM, which is also provided as an open-source software • Validating security properties through property-based fuzz testing with 10,000 randomized test runs per security property • Demonstrating PRISM’s key strengths through comprehensive experiments, including basic performance, trade-offs between processing time and data auditing efficiency, and capabilities for detecting data anomalies Digital platforms are increasingly recognized as a cornerstone for advanced virtual spaces such as smart cities and the metaverse, where vast amounts of data are aggregated, analyzed, and utilized to make critical decisions. These platforms rely on data fusion to integrate diverse sources of information, encompassing individual behavior, urban dynamics, and system states. Through auditing against data tampering, loss, and substitution, enabling the detection of such threats is critical to building a highly reliable system. This paper introduces PRISM (Provable and Immutable Storage Mechanism), an Ethereum-based Provable Data Possession (PDP) system designed to integrate data reliability and security with decentralized auditing. PDP, a cryptographic protocol that enables data integrity in untrusted cloud storage, has seen extensive research focusing on theoretical security and computational efficiency. PRISM extends this foundation by addressing practical security concerns, including the integration of authentication and authorization, data immutability, data uniqueness, data freshness, and state management, to ensure a robust system implementation. Experiments on processing costs and parameter analysis reveal a trade-off between the costs and detection accuracy and demonstrate that PRISM provides efficient data auditing.
Traditional digital card games rely on centralized servers, introducing catastrophic single points of failure, while decentralized Web3 alternatives fail to achieve real-time viability due to prohibitive block latency. This paper introduces Panoptes, an optimized, hybrid cryptographic engine that enforces low-latency decentralized consensus for peer-to-peer state channels. Assuming a highly hostile user-space environment, Panoptes treats the host application space and its underlying managed runtime as fundamentally compromised.A bifurcated architecture is detailed utilizing a hardened native airgap and direct OS-level memory mapping to process ciphertexts, bypassing standard and predictable libc allocators. To mitigate automated memory scrapers and frustrate asynchronous Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks, Panoptes implements a multiplexed decoy memory topology (The Vault). This architecture relies on strict virtual page guarding, offline decryption, and temporal starvation via millisecond-scale execution windows. The protocol replaces commutative encryption with a deterministic Hand Commitment Payload, utilizing X25519 KEM, XOR- based Secret Sharing, and ChaCha20-Poly1305 to enforce Strict Zero-Trust Consensus.
Traditional digital card games rely on centralized servers, introducing catastrophic single points of failure, while decentralized Web3 alternatives fail to achieve real-time viability due to prohibitive block latency. This paper introduces Panoptes, a highly optimized, hybrid Zero-Trust cryptographic engine that enforces microsecond-latency decentralized consensus for the CoronaPoker peer-to-peer network. Assuming a strict Ring-0 adversary model, Panoptes treats the host operating system and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as fundamentally compromised. We detail a bifurcated architecture utilizing a hardened native airgap that leverages OS-level stealth allocators to process ciphertexts without leaving plaintext residue in the managed heap. To mitigate OS-level memory scrapers and hardware-based Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks, Panoptes implements a multiplexed decoy memory topology (The Vault). It is secured by strict virtual page guarding against software introspection, and heavily relies on offline decryption with immediate sub-millisecond zeroization to temporally starve asynchronous hardware-level carving. The protocol entirely replaces traditional commutative encryption with the deterministic Hand Commitment Megapacket, a flat-buffer payload leveraging X25519 KEM, Additive Secret Sharing, and ChaCha20-Poly1305 to ensure Byzantine fault tolerance without majority voting. We present formal implementations of our micro-architectural defenses, including Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic (MBA) for constant-time execution, direct cross-platform syscalls bypassing libc, OS-level DACL lockdowns, PEB cloaking, and asynchronous SipHash-2-4 binary attestation. Furthermore, we introduce a multithreaded Deadman Switch to detect CPU cycle drift via RDTSC. Evaluated under an exhaustive 42-point "Total Siege" adversarial framework, the engine demonstrates unparalleled resilience against hardware breakpoints, kernel introspection, inline hooking, and temporal drift attacks.
The article presents an analysis of concurrent execution issues and delivered performance in large-scale distributed applications deployed in cloud-native environments. The relevance of this direction is driven by the accelerated diffusion of the microservice paradigm and container-orchestration practices, within which classical synchronization and coordination approaches often become the dominant factor behind throughput degradation and latency growth. The text identifies baseline patterns of state management and state processing and then examines–at a detailed level–the causes and enabling conditions of data races in asynchronous execution loops. A separate emphasis is placed on the specificity of Kubernetes operators and on the requirement of idempotent reconciliation cycles as a key prerequisite for predictable system behavior under repeated triggers, partial failures, and mismatches between the observed and desired state. The research goal is formulated as the development of recommendations aimed at reducing latency and increasing reliability under concurrent access to shared resources and shared entities. To achieve this goal, methods of systems analysis are applied, architectural-pattern modeling is performed, and retrospective reflection on recurring failure patterns observed in production systems. The theoretical foundation relies on works devoted to distributed ledgers, while the applied part is supported by operational guidelines and engineering practices for running NoSQL solutions. The outcome is a description of the distinctive properties of a model for handling concurrent requests, designed to improve the resilience and controllability of distributed-component behavior. The findings presented in this work are expected to be of practical interest to system architects, DevOps engineers, and researchers working in the field of distributed computing.
Traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithms effectively tolerate node behavioral faults but lack the ability to verify the quality of input data. This makes them vulnerable to security risks from low-quality or “compliant yet malicious” data in data-driven applications. To address this gap, we propose a Data-Quality-Driven Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm based on Zero-Knowledge Proofs, called Q-BFT. The algorithm introduces a “quality gate” prior to classic BFT consensus—an on-chain verification phase that uses zk-SNARKs and is automated by smart contracts. This allows nodes to prove in zero-knowledge that their data meets predefined thresholds for accuracy, completeness, and consistency without exposing raw data. Passing the verification becomes a prerequisite for joining consensus voting. We design a two-layer smart contract architecture that efficiently orchestrates off-chain proof generation and on-chain automated verification. Experiments show that in a 100-node network with 30% malicious nodes, Q-BFT improves the consensus success rate from 41.5% (with PBFT) to 96.4%, while maintaining federated learning global model accuracy above 88%, in contrast to the model collapse (< 20% accuracy) observed under a traditional BFT protocol. The system achieves an average verification latency below 0.65 s and a throughput of 735 TPS(Transactions Per Second), striking an effective balance among security, privacy preservation, and operational efficiency. By enforcing privacy-preserving data quality verification as a mandatory gate before consensus, Q-BFT thus provides a high-assurance foundation for data-sensitive and privacy-critical applications. It addresses the core vulnerability of traditional consensus in scenarios like federated learning, where model integrity depends on participant data quality, and trustworthy data markets, where transaction validity requires assured data authenticity without exposing the data itself.
The rapid development of quantum computing poses severe threats to traditional blockchain security mechanisms, while existing full-quantum blockchains face challenges regarding high hardware costs and limited scalability. To address these issues, this paper proposes a secure and practical semi-quantum blockchain system. Specifically, a Semi-Quantum Delegated Proof of Stake consensus mechanism is constructed by integrating an adapted semi-quantum voting protocol with the Borda count method and a malicious behavior penalty model. Furthermore, a lightweight transaction verification framework is designed based on semi-quantum key distribution, enabling classical users with limited quantum capabilities to participate securely. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the system achieves unconditional security against quantum attacks while maintaining high throughput. These results indicate that the proposed asymmetric resource design significantly lowers hardware barriers compared to full-quantum schemes, effectively balancing security, practicality, and cost-effectiveness for post-quantum blockchain networks.
Bitcoin already faces a quantum threat through Shor attacks on elliptic-curve signatures. This paper isolates the other component that public discussion often conflates with it: mining. Grover's algorithm halves the exponent of brute-force search, promising a quadratic edge to any quantum miner of Bitcoin. Exactly how large that edge grows depends on fault-tolerant hardware. No prior study has costed that hardware end to end. We build an open-source estimator that sweeps the full attack surface: reversible oracles for double-SHA-256 mining and RIPEMD-based address preimages, surface-code factory sizing, fleet logistics under Nakamoto-consensus timing, and Kardashev-scale energy accounting. A parametric sweep over difficulty bits b, runtime caps, and target success probabilities reveals a sharp transition. At the most favourable partial-preimage setting (b = 32, 2^224 marked states), a superconducting surface-code fleet still requires about 10^8 physical qubits and about 10^4 MW. That load is comparable to a large national grid. Tightening to Bitcoin's January 2025 mainnet difficulty (b about 79) explodes the bill to about 10^23 qubits and about 10^25 W, approaching the Kardashev Type II threshold. These numbers settle a narrower question than "Is Bitcoin quantum-secure?" Once Grover mining is lifted from asymptotic query counts to fault-tolerant physical cost, practical quantum mining collapses under oracle, distillation, and fleet overhead. To push mining into non-trivial consensus effects, one must invoke astronomical quantum fleets operating at energy scales that lie far above present-day civilization.
Abstract: Remote electronic voting systems require tamper-evident records of ballot submissions, yet the ledger integrity problem - ensuring that the record cannot be silently altered after the fact - has received less formal treatment than ballot-phase cryptography. Existing approaches rely on distributed blockchain consensus, digital signatures on bulletin boards, or external hash-tree timestamping services, each introducing dependencies on specialized infrastructure, continuously trusted parties, or computationally intensive proof systems. This paper provides a formal security analysis of a hash-chained append-only ledger instantiated in a standard relational database with quorum replication, establishing that equivalent tamper-evidence guarantees are achievable under the sole assumption of collision resistance of the instantiated hash function. We define five security properties in the Bellare-Rogaway game-based framework. Tamper-evidence (Proposition 1) bounds any PPT adversary's advantage at 2q(λ) · Adv^CR_H, with a tight reduction to collision resistance. Fork-resistance (Proposition 2) establishes that an adversary corrupting fewer than a quorum threshold of replicas cannot cause divergent chain histories at honest replicas. Retrospective modification resistance (Proposition 3) establishes that post-close modifications are detectable by any auditor holding a real-time replica copy. Cross-ledger binding security (Proposition 4) extends these results to the dual-ledger construction of the Arcaunt architecture, in which a public ballot ledger and a temporal credential ledger are cryptographically bound at insert time, making modifications to either detectable through the other with advantage bounded by 4q(λ) · Adv^CR_H. Selector integrity (Proposition 5) establishes that the last-valid-vote rule - operating on insertion sequence rather than timestamps, making it immune to clock manipulation - is integrity-secure conditional on credential security, formally delineating the boundary between ledger and credential security domains. We apply an eight-metric comparative framework to seven e-voting integrity architectures - hash-chaining, bulletin boards, homomorphic tallying, mixnet-based systems, blockchain, KSI timestamping, and VVPAT hybrids - establishing three findings: tamper-evidence basis is universal but mechanism-specific; fork-resistance is architecturally necessary specifically for revoting-based systems; and auditability complexity is inversely correlated with cryptographic sophistication. The hash-chained relational ledger achieves collision-resistance-based tamper-evidence with O(n) verification accessible to any SQL-capable auditor - a design point unoccupied by existing systems under the same combination of properties. Prototype validation on a Firebird 5.0 implementation confirms that each proposition is instantiated by a specific database trigger mechanism, with 6ms mean ballot submission latency and O(n) verification complexity empirically confirmed.
Abstract Smart contract upgradeability is widely used in Ethereum to enable postdeployment fixes and feature evolution. However, upgrades can unintentionally violate safety assumptions, leading to storage corruption, interface inconsistencies, access-control regressions, and unsafe execution behavior. Existing analysis tools primarily focus on single-version vulnerabilities and offer limited support for reasoning about correctness across contract upgrades. This paper presents an invariant-based verification approach for smart contract upgrade safety on Ethereum. We formalize the upgrade safety using a set of cross-version invariants and define a global safe-state model that characterizes valid upgrade transitions. Based on this model, we design an automated verification framework that statically analyzes proxy-based upgrade patterns and detects violations related to storage layout evolution, ABI compatibility, initialization safety, delegatecall usage, and access-control preservation. The framework compares compiler-level artifacts from successive contract versions and supports modular, extensible detectors.
The projected arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) between 2030 and 2035 poses a structural threat to blockchain infrastructure built on classical elliptic-curve cryptography. Shor's algorithm reduces the security of ECDSA-256, the signature scheme underpinning the majority of production blockchains, from approximately $2^{128}$ classical operations to $O(2^{24})$ quantum operations, rendering it categorically broken in the post-quantum era. The "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" attack vector compounds this risk: adversaries collecting signed transactions today can retroactively extract private keys once quantum hardware matures, exposing all assets whose public keys have been revealed on-chain. This paper presents QoreChain, a Layer~1 blockchain platform designed from first principles to operate in a post-quantum world. QoreChain integrates three foundational capabilities into a single protocol stack: (1)~full-stack post-quantum cryptography implementing NIST-standardised algorithms (ML-DSA-87 per FIPS~204, ML-KEM-1024 per FIPS~203, SLH-DSA per FIPS~205, and SHAKE-256) at FIPS Security Level~5 across every protocol layer, from transaction signing and consensus messaging to cross-chain bridge attestations; (2)~an AI-native intelligence layer (QCAI) that applies reinforcement learning to consensus parameter optimisation, graph neural networks to anomaly detection, and multi-objective optimisation to transaction routing; and (3)~a triple virtual machine execution environment supporting EVM, CosmWasm, and SVM within a unified state model with atomic cross-VM call semantics and full rollback guarantees. The consensus mechanism, Combined Proof of Stake (CPoS), merges Reputation PoS, Delegated PoS, and classical PoS with BFT finality. A five-way fee distribution (37\% validators, 30\% burned, 20\% treasury, 10\% stakers, 3\% light nodes) aligns incentives across all participant classes. Governance employs Quadratic Delegation with Reputation Weighting (QDRW), for which we present formal game-theoretic analysis demonstrating bounded resistance to plutocratic capture (voting power scales sub-linearly with stake) and flash-loan manipulation (reputation updates lag delegation by one block finality cycle). Cross-chain interoperability is provided by the QoreChain Bridge (QCB), connecting directly to 25 Layer~1 blockchains with over 120 additional networks reachable via IBC. All bridge operations are secured by ML-DSA-87 multi-attestation with QCAI anomaly detection and circuit breaker mechanisms. A multi-layer scaling architecture incorporating sidechains, paychains, and a Rollup Development Kit (RDK) enables horizontal throughput expansion while inheriting the main chain's quantum-safe settlement guarantees. The QOR token has a fixed supply of 4,500,000,000 with epoch-based emissions following a halving schedule. The architecture is designed for 5,000+ transactions per second with sub-second finality; multi-node testnet benchmarks are pending. QoreChain Association is incorporated under the Swiss DLT Act (CHE-484.963.998, Rolle) with formal FINMA utility token classification (January 2026). Testnet is operational (chain ID: \texttt{qorechain-diana}) with 47 genesis modules. Mainnet launch is targeted for Q4~2026. The full specification spans 16 chapters and 351 pages, presenting 530 formal equations, 78 data tables, and 9 architectural diagrams covering cryptographic foundations, AI integration, smart contract execution, consensus, tokenomics, governance, interoperability, and regulatory compliance.
Abstract One of the key implications of the rapid development of agentic AI systems is an increased demand for data transactions that are transparent, auditable, and trustworthy. The biggest liability within autonomous agents is their lack of a collective framework of accountability, particularly because autonomous agents are increasingly sharing information, making decisions, and coordinating their actions in distributed systems. This article introduces the Cognitive Ledger Protocol (CLP), a trust fabric architecture that facilitates immutable traceability and verifiable reasoning in agent-to-agent data transactions. CLP is the first technology that goes beyond the record of the data exchanges to provide an account of the cognitive steps the agents made to reach the action. The protocol was designed to enable various functionalities including tamperproof recording of transactions, secure storage of data and the ability to perform real-time analytics using out-of-the box technologies such as Azure Confidential Ledger, Copilot Agent Telemetry, and Fabric Event Streams. The resulting platform becomes a single transparency layer that can simultaneously be employed for explaining the automated processes, raising the level of a multi-agent ecosystem's accountability, and enabling the ethical use of autonomous AI. The paper elaborates on the fundamental framework of CLP, the essential design principles, the deployment aspects, and the use cases in the sector.
Ethereum Inscriptions (Ethscriptions) repurpose Ethereum calldata into a persistent inscription channel by embedding \texttt{data:}~URI payloads. These transactions typically target externally owned accounts, allowing the payload to bypass EVM execution while remaining permanently replicated across full nodes. Although calldata was originally designed for compact smart-contract parameters, this repurposing enables structured data embedding with long-term storage consequences. We present the first large-scale empirical study of Ethscriptions, treating them as a distinct \emph{calldata-resident workload} rather than merely a subset of general calldata usage. Our analysis focuses on the \textit{Ethscription} operational subset, which consists of payloads that decode to JSON and conform to a token-operation grammar (e.g., \texttt{p}, \texttt{op}, \texttt{tick}, \texttt{amt}). From $6.27$ million Ethscription candidates (\Uone), we extract $4.75$ million Ethscription operations (\Utwo, $75.8\%$ of \Uone). This result shows that structured token-like activity dominates the ecosystem. Our measurements further reveal (i) a complete workload lifecycle compressed into nine months (bootstrap, expansion, saturation), (ii) proliferation of $30$+ competing protocols without convergence toward a dominant standard, (iii) a lifecycle funnel exhibiting $201\times$ deploy-to-mint amplification and a $57.6{:}1$ mint-to-transfer collapse indicative of speculative minting, (iv) extreme participation inequality (Gini~$0.86$), and (v) a measurable permanent data footprint imposed on the Ethereum network.