Tahrim Hossain, Faisal Haque Bappy, Tarannum Shaila Zaman, Tariqul Islam
Blockchain platforms have grown into an ecosystem of independent networks, and a growing class of applications now requires smart contracts on separate chains to act as one. Such operations must be atomic, yet immutability makes this fundamentally harder: a confirmed transaction cannot be reversed, so the rollback on which classical atomic commitment protocols depend is unavailable. Two challenges follow. Contract state must be held across an operation whose outcome is not yet known, and each chain's execution outcome must be established even though no chain can observe another. In response, we introduce a framework that achieves atomicity through forward-only correction, resolving incomplete operations with new on-chain transactions rather than reversal. The framework bounds how long contract state is held and confines contention to the state an operation touches, and it establishes outcomes from an on-chain record of what each chain executed, without relying on any single coordinating party. This work lays the foundation for atomic coordination of general smart contract operations across heterogeneous blockchains.
Smart contracts, by enabling the automated and transparent execution of ag-reements through blockchain technology, promise to simplify complex cross-border transactions and reduce reliance on intermediaries, possessing trans-formative potential in international trade. However, significant legal uncerta-inties remain regarding their legal nature, contract validity, applicable law, jurisdiction, and liability. This study aims to examine the legal framework of blockchain-based smart contracts in international trade and to comparatively evaluate regulatory approaches in different legal systems. The research emp-loys a methodology that combines doctrinal legal analysis with comparative regulatory review, focusing particularly on legal recognition, regulatory inst-ruments used, general regulatory approaches, and emerging key legal issues. The findings of the international legal framework review and the comparative analysis conducted in the EU, United Kingdom, USA, some Asian countries, and Türkiye show that widespread adoption of smart contracts is still limited due to legal uncertainties and unresolved doctrinal questions, while regula-tory approaches are still evolving.
Xianhao Zhang, J F Sun, Zijian Zhang, Ye Liu · 7 authors
Smart contract vulnerabilities pose severe financial risks, yet existing security tools largely stop at vulnerability detection, offering limited support for explaining whether reported flaws are exploitable, how attacks unfold, and what concrete damage they cause. To bridge this gap, we propose KASS (Knowledge-Augmented Attack Synthesis and Simulation), a multi-agent framework for executable smart contract exploit verification. KASS decomposes automated exploit generation into planning, generation, and testing stages, and integrates three complementary mechanisms: retrieval-augmented planning over real-world audit knowledge, formal generation and validation constraints that bind attack plans to executable proof-of-concept tests, and a hierarchical dual-loop refinement process that repairs code-level errors while triggering strategy-level replanning when attack assumptions fail. We evaluate KASS on 104 SmartBugs-Curated contracts across four vulnerability categories. Experimental results show that KASS successfully generates executable exploits for 94.23% of tested contracts; this rate is higher than previously reported results for REX and AdvSCanner on comparable SmartBugs-Curated subsets, and higher than our reproduced Claude Code baseline under the same evaluation protocol. On 11 real-world CVE-tagged contracts, KASS successfully validates 9 cases. Beyond exploit generation, KASS produces structured attack plans that document exploitation flows, quantify potential asset losses, and serve as semantic false positive filters for static analysis tools.
This research paper aims to investigate the applications of blockchain technology and smart contracts in managing global supply chains, as well as their financial and economic implications. The study addressed the concept of supply chain management and the technologies of blockchain and smart contracts, with a focus on their applications in validating and tracking transactions, facilitating the flow and storage of information in international trade, supporting customs, shipping, and container management operations, and increasing transparency in commercial transactions. The most prominent digital supply chain platforms based on blockchain were also presented. The results showed that the application of these technologies contributes to reducing costs and fees, improving cash management, increasing transparency and reducing risks, and enhancing the economic and operational efficiency of exporting and importing companies. It also provides administrative bodies with the ability to track and verify transactions instantly, which supports more accurate financial and strategic decision-making.
Sai Srikanth Madugula, Peplluis Esteva De La Rosa, Daya Shankar
The rapid proliferation of Agentic Artificial Intelligence fundamentally disrupts traditional customer loyalty paradigms. As AI evolves from passive recommendation algorithms to autonomous, goal-directed agents capable of executing purchasing decisions, the conventional understanding of consumer-brand relationships requires a structural reevaluation. By synthesizing extant literature across human-machine teaming, consumer decision-making, and algorithmic trust dynamics, we demonstrate that traditional loyalty models fail to account for algorithmic bounded rationality and constructed autonomy. To address this, we introduce the Dynamic Verifiable Multi-Agent Human Agentic Loyalty Loop (DVM-HALL) model. We formalize brand choice via a softmax probability formulation where human emotional equity, agentic machine-experience utility, calibrated trust, delegated authority, and verifiable execution jointly determine selection. The model features recursive updating mechanisms to dynamically calibrate trust and delegation after each interaction. Crucially, the framework integrates a verifiable execution layer for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and tokenized loyalty settings, incorporating execution risks -- such as gas costs, slippage, MEV exposure, and smart-contract vulnerabilities -- as core predictors of agentic brand preference. Furthermore, we introduce the Net Human-Agent Score (NHAS), an auditable, risk-weighted metric designed to measure human-agent alignment using human feedback, execution logs, benchmark comparisons, and verifiable receipts. Finally, we propose a comprehensive three-stage empirical validation plan spanning controlled shopping experiments, multi-agent market simulations, and DeFi testbeds. This framework provides the foundational theory required for brands to navigate the impending transition toward machine customers.
Abstract The same infrastructures that enable decentralised finance, NFT markets, and metaverse platforms also create new spaces for para‑crime. This article extends grey criminology to Web3 by applying three mechanisms of infrastructural illegality – parasitism, normative greyness, and platform co‑production – first developed for physical cross‑border grey economies (daigou). Drawing on technical and financial crime literature, we show how smart contracts, stablecoins, and DAO governance are parasitised for money laundering and fraud; how techno‑libertarian narratives of 'code is law' and decentralisation sustain normative greyness; and how algorithmic security and DAO co‑production reshape rather than eliminate para‑crime. The analysis reveals both structural parallels with physical grey economies and domain‑specific variations – most notably, the deeper internalisation of co‑production in code‑based systems. We argue that grey criminology must extend its infrastructural turn to virtual and metaversal spaces, and that enforcement paradoxes – where suppression threatens valued infrastructures – apply as much to blockchain protocols as to customs thresholds.
Among the various problems that have persisted in global supply chains include data silos, information asymmetry, and vulnerability to fraud. In this paper, a blockchain-based intelligent management of the supply chain model has been suggested, involving distributed ledger technology, smart contracts, and Internet of Things for real-time tracking. The model features a four-tiered architecture consisting of data ingestion, blockchain network, smart contract automation, and application tiers. Tasks that include registering stakeholders, verifying the authenticity of the goods, transferring ownership, and verifying compliance can be automated through smart contracts. The solution offers the ability to process up to 200 transactions per second with an 18% reduction in gas costs as opposed to conventional solutions. Trace back time reduces from 95 seconds to 8 seconds, and the consumer trust index grows by 70%.
This article analyses the impact of smart contracts on family law, specifically examining how these digital contracts can simplify and improve the drafting, implementation and enforcement of family agreements. The analysis examines the advantages, examples of application, challenges and limitations of smart contracts in family law, explains their ability to enhance efficiency and transparency in relevant cases, and considers ethical aspects and potential risks. The article notes that most legal systems have not yet adapted to blockchain technology. The legal validity of smart contracts, particularly in the context of personal relationships, is the subject of lively debate in practice. Family law is complex and often requires human judgement, which smart contracts currently lack. Family law varies significantly across different jurisdictions, making it difficult to create a universally recognised marriage contract on the blockchain. Both parties to the marriage contract must understand the functionality of smart contracts, including potential risks such as coding errors. Despite the transparency, storing highly sensitive data on a public blockchain may raise privacy concerns for some couples. Ultimately, smart contracts have the potential to transform family law by offering families a more efficient and secure way to manage legal transactions in today’s world. The transparent nature of blockchain records poses risks to the confidentiality of spouses’ property and financial information. The immutable characteristics of smart contracts hinder their adaptability to changing circumstances, such as the birth of children or fluctuations in income, whilst judicial oversight of their enforcement is largely absent. From a pragmatic point of view, smart contracts can be effectively used in various aspects of regulating property relations within marriage. A marriage contract utilising a smart contract can clearly define the procedure for the distribution of digital assets – in particular cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens or tokenised real estate – in the event of divorce, ensuring the automatic execution of this distribution following the legally recognised event of divorce, thereby eliminating protracted legal disputes over these assets. Furthermore, a smart contract can be integrated with the couple’s joint digital wallet, ensuring the automatic deduction of a set share from each partner’s income and the subsequent automatic payment of joint obligations – such as rent, utility bills, etc. – thereby minimising the risk of conflicts regarding the management of joint finances. Smart contracts currently function most effectively in the field of decentralised finance and digital assets, serving as a complement to traditional legal instruments rather than a complete replacement for them.
This article analyses the impact of smart contracts on family law, specifically examining how these digital contracts can simplify and improve the drafting, implementation and enforcement of family agreements. The analysis examines the advantages, examples of application, challenges and limitations of smart contracts in family law, explains their ability to enhance efficiency and transparency in relevant cases, and considers ethical aspects and potential risks. The article notes that most legal systems have not yet adapted to blockchain technology. The legal validity of smart contracts, particularly in the context of personal relationships, is the subject of lively debate in practice. Family law is complex and often requires human judgement, which smart contracts currently lack. Family law varies significantly across different jurisdictions, making it difficult to create a universally recognised marriage contract on the blockchain. Both parties to the marriage contract must understand the functionality of smart contracts, including potential risks such as coding errors. Despite the transparency, storing highly sensitive data on a public blockchain may raise privacy concerns for some couples. Ultimately, smart contracts have the potential to transform family law by offering families a more efficient and secure way to manage legal transactions in today’s world. The transparent nature of blockchain records poses risks to the confidentiality of spouses’ property and financial information. The immutable characteristics of smart contracts hinder their adaptability to changing circumstances, such as the birth of children or fluctuations in income, whilst judicial oversight of their enforcement is largely absent. From a pragmatic point of view, smart contracts can be effectively used in various aspects of regulating property relations within marriage. A marriage contract utilising a smart contract can clearly define the procedure for the distribution of digital assets – in particular cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens or tokenised real estate – in the event of divorce, ensuring the automatic execution of this distribution following the legally recognised event of divorce, thereby eliminating protracted legal disputes over these assets. Furthermore, a smart contract can be integrated with the couple’s joint digital wallet, ensuring the automatic deduction of a set share from each partner’s income and the subsequent automatic payment of joint obligations – such as rent, utility bills, etc. – thereby minimising the risk of conflicts regarding the management of joint finances. Smart contracts currently function most effectively in the field of decentralised finance and digital assets, serving as a complement to traditional legal instruments rather than a complete replacement for them.
Abstract A smart contract fundamentally consists of code deployed on the blockchain, noted for its transparent and unchangeable execution. These characteristics, however, also expose it to attackers once any weaknesses are present. In recent years, attacks targeting smart contracts have caused substantial financial losses, highlighting the importance of robust vulnerability detection approaches. Conventional detection techniques, which rely on contextual semantics or symbolic execution, often face limitations in efficiency. Although neural network-based approaches have enhanced detection speed, they frequently compromise accuracy. This study introduces a framework for identifying and repairing vulnerabilities in smart contracts by utilizing multi-relational graphs combined with a pre-trained model. Initially, a Multi-Relational Graph (MRG) is constructed to represent the multi-dimensional aspects of execution logic and data dependencies by integrating multiple program feature graphs. To reduce interference from extraneous code, contract slices are then generated according to node and edge types defined within the MRG. These vectorized slices are subsequently processed by a pre-trained model called SCCodeBERT for both detection and repair of potential vulnerabilities. Experiments show that SCCodeBERT achieves an average accuracy of 96.06% and an F1-score of 90.90% on mainstream vulnerability datasets. Moreover, it reaches an average repair effectiveness of 86.42%, significantly outperforming current baseline approaches. This work presents a highly effective automated solution for enhancing smart contract security, offering notable theoretical and practical contributions.
Purpose — Both Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and Holacracies are positioned as alternatives to managerial hierarchy, yet they remain largely uncompared in the organizational theory literature. This paper asks: in what ways do DAOs and Holacracies converge and diverge as decentralized governance structures, and under what organizational conditions is each model more effective?Design/methodology/approach — This paper employs a conceptual comparative methodology, synthesizing organizational theory, open strategy scholarship and blockchain governance literature to map both structures across six governance dimensions: authority distribution, decision mechanism, membership and inclusion, accountability system, transparency and adaptability. Three theoretical propositions are developed.Findings — Although DAOs and Holacracies share a commitment to decentralized authority, they differ fundamentally in governance architecture. Holacracy achieves decentralization through formalized role-based consent governance; DAOs rely on algorithmic enforcement via smart contracts and token-weighted voting. These differences produce distinct failure modes — role ambiguity and cultural resistance in Holacracy; plutocratic concentration and voter apathy in DAOs.Practical implications — Organizations considering decentralized governance can use the typology developed here to match governance model to organizational context. High-formalization environments benefit from Holacracy's constitution-based approach; open, distributed communities may favor DAO architectures, provided token-concentration mechanisms are counteracted.Originality/value — This is the first paper to systematically compare Holacracy and DAO governance through an integrated organizational theory lens, connecting open strategy scholarship with blockchain governance research. Three falsifiable propositions and a governance typology are contributed.
Digital-asset custody has been built on threshold multi-party approval: no operation proceeds unless $t$ of $n$ parties approve, and fewer than t compromised parties can neither authorize nor learn the authorization secret. Threshold signature schemes (TSS) have been the standard mechanism, but the post-quantum transition disrupts this model: standardized hash-based signatures resist efficient threshold signing, and lattice-based threshold protocols remain an emerging research track. We present a dual-gate architecture that separates member authentication from threshold authorization. Each member signs its approval with an ordinary signature under any EUF-CMA scheme; the quorum jointly produces a threshold seal from Shamir-shared secrets bound to the operation. The seal is the base instance of a programmable authorization computation: simple quorum is the minimal policy, while richer policies can evaluate secret-shared state without making the member-signature scheme part of that computation. The signature scheme is a deployment parameter: migrating from ECDSA to SLH-DSA or ML-DSA is a key rotation, not a protocol redesign, and members holding keys in commodity HSMs participate through the standard sign API. The architecture can be deployed wherever the asset-control path supports programmable verification, such as smart contracts, vault modules, or HSMs guarding a master key, and produces an enforcement-layer authorization rather than a native chain signature. Below-threshold secrecy is information-theoretic; an adversary holding $\geq t$ signing keys but no coefficient shares still cannot produce the seal.
The Al-Rakhawy Document for Digital Sovereignty (EPSA) presents a complete engineering blueprint for encrypted machine learning. It integrates Federated Learning, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and Smart Contracts across five layers. Key innovations include Pedersen Commitments for lightweight edge processing and the Al-Rakhawy Equation, which calculates fair rewards based on marginal impact. This system ensures absolute data privacy, breaks central monopolies, and provides users with immediate, mathematically guaranteed economic returns.
Zico Junius Fernando, Mas Putra Zenno Januarsyah, Firdaus Arifin, Vidyadhara Prawiratama Nugraha · 5 authors
Metaverse has transformed virtual assets into economically valuable objects that challenge conventional concepts of property under Indonesian private law. Although virtual assets such as cryptoassets, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and metaverse property are widely traded, their legal status remains uncertain, creating ambiguity regarding ownership, transfer, and legal protection. This study examines the normative basis for recognizing virtual assets as objects of property rights within Indonesia's civil law system. Using a normative juridical method with a comparative approach, the study analyzes Indonesian private law alongside developments in England and Wales, Singapore, Japan, and the European Union. The findings demonstrate that virtual assets satisfy the defining characteristics of intangible property, including identifiability, exclusive control, transferability, and economic value, making them capable of recognition as objects of proprietary rights. The study further argues that blockchain-based transfers and smart contracts can operate as legally valid mechanisms for transferring ownership when supported by appropriate legal recognition. To strengthen legal certainty, Indonesia should recognize virtual assets as a distinct category of intangible property, adapt property law to digital transactions, strengthen proprietary remedies, and modernize dispute resolution and cross-border enforcement. These reforms would provide a coherent legal framework for protecting virtual assets and support the development of Indonesia's digital economy.
To make the payment system robust and user friendly, decentralized based Scan and Pay system need to be designed. This paper integrates the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) of India with the Solana-based Blockchain to make the payment system decentralized. Solana offers a high throughput and low-cost based decentralized infrastructure which is combined with the simple and reliable UPI system. So, the proposed system enables cryptocurrency transactions linked to UPI while maintaining user friendliness, scalability, and regulatory compliance. The designed method uses a secure architecture powered by smart contracts and modular design. It offers a viable bridge between centralized financial networks and emerging Web3 ecosystems. Proposed Solana-based UPI is compared with the Non-Solana based UPI which is using Blockchain. Results show that there is improvement of 91% in transaction latency and 95% in transaction cost as compared to the Non-Solana based UPI system.
Blockchain systems are undergoing a fundamental transition from decentralized ledgers for digital assets to general-purpose trust infrastructures for verifiable computation, decentralized physical resources, and automated infrastructure management. Meanwhile, the limitations of the Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) model stem from a common structural problem: outsourcing control of infrastructure to third-party service providers inevitably involves a systemic surrender of trust, flexibility, and data sovereignty. RISC-V, with its open, modular, and extensible design, provides a general-purpose computing foundation for public blockchains that is open, low-level, compileable, verifiable, and scalable. Inspired by the development and characteristics of eSIM, the embedded Blockchain infrastructure management (eBIM) is defined as a software-hardware collaborative paradigm for blockchain infrastructure management with RISC-V. This study aims to provide a comprehensive survey on eBIM supporting research and technologies, to answer the following research questions (RQs): RQ1 What is eBIM? RQ2 How does eBIM work? RQ3 What can eBIM do? By introducing the concept of eBIM, this paper establishes a foundational reference for researchers, hardware architects, and protocol designers in this rapidly evolving landscape, including cryptographic acceleration, trusted execution environments, zero-knowledge virtual machines, and smart contract execution engines. The prospects of the proposed e-BIM and its future research directions are indicated in this paper.
Smart contract compilers are critical to ensuring the correctness of public blockchains whose defining characteristics are open-source and immutable code. We created SolSmith, a semantics-aware differential fuzz testing tool, to improve the quality of the Solidity compiler -- the most popular compiler for the Ethereum blockchain -- and spent over three years finding compiler defects that produce incorrect code. We call these defects miscompilation bugs. During this time period, we have discovered 25 miscompilation bugs that went unnoticed, some for multiple years. Our first contribution is to make compiler testing more rigorous. SolSmith achieves this goal by generating valid test programs that are likely to stress test code generation and optimization components. This helps SolSmith find bugs missed during routine testing that could potentially have serious implications for smart contracts and their users. Our second contribution is a qualitative and quantitative analysis of miscompilation bugs that we found in the Solidity compiler. We classify miscompilation bugs found by SolSmith based on their nature, root-causes, and impact on end-users. This sheds light on some pitfalls of optimizing compilers.
Este artículo analiza la naturaleza jurídica y la eficacia obligacional de los smart legal contracts (slc) en el ámbito del derecho comercial internacional. Ante la ausencia de un marco regulatorio específico, el estudio examina si los instrumentos vigentes —tales como los marcos normativos europeos (Reglamento Roma I), el sistema interamericano (Convención de México) y la Convención de las Naciones Unidas sobre los Contratos de Compraventa Internacional de Mercaderías (cvcim)— ofrecen criterios idóneos para resolver los conflictos de leyes derivados de la tecnología blockchain. A través de una metodología cualitativa con enfoque analítico y teórico-jurídico, se aborda la distinción doctrinal entre Smart Code Contracts y Smart Legal Contracts, contrastando la inmutabilidad del código con la exigibilidad del acuerdo legal. La investigación concluye que, pese a los desafíos técnicos, la validez y ejecutabilidad de los slc pueden sustentarse en los principios generales del derecho internacional privado, particularmente mediante el ejercicio de la autonomía de la voluntad conflictual. El artículo sistematiza los criterios esenciales para dotar de seguridad jurídica a esta modalidad de contratación en el escenario transfronterizo.
This replication package contains the curated Solidity benchmark, prompt templates, experiment scripts, and saved outputs used to reproduce the study on LLM-based smart contract vulnerability detection. It includes the ground-truth annotations, raw model predictions, evaluation metrics, and post-processing utilities.
INTRODUCTION:The distributed digital economy, characterized by decentralization and cross-entity data flow, improves factor allocation efficiency but increasingly raises concerns over data security and privacy abuse. OBJECTIVES: Unlike the conventional digital economy, which often centers on centralized platforms (e.g., e-commerce, cloud computing), the distributed digital economy in this paper specifically refers to an economic system where data—as a production factor—is stored, computed, and circulated across multiple independent nodes without a central coordinating authority, relying on technologies such as blockchain, distributed ledger, edge computing, and peer-to-peer networks. Its core governance features include decentralized data control, consensus-based verification, and peer-to-peer economic activities. METHODS: This paper studies data security and privacy protection in the distributed digital economy from two aspects: economic impact and governance mechanism. Based on panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2018 to 2023, this paper uses the entropy weight-TOPSIS method, a two-way fixed effects model, a mediation effect model, and a spatiotemporal heterogeneity model to empirically test the economic impact and transmission mechanism of data security and privacy protection on the distributed digital economy. RESULTS: The empirical analysis results show that the level of data security and privacy protection significantly and positively promotes the development of the distributed digital economy, with each unit increase leading to a 0.412 unit increase in the development index. Blockchain smart contracts, privacy computing standards, and cross-border data flow rules play significant mediating roles, accounting for 93.7% of the total mediating effect. This positive economic effect exhibits significant spatiotemporal differences, increasing year by year, and is significantly higher in the eastern region than in the central and western regions. CONCLUSION: Based on empirical analysis results, optimization paths are proposed from four levels: collaborative governance, technology empowerment, regional balance, and institutional improvement, in order to improve the level of data security and privacy protection in the distributed digital economy.
This paper introduces Crossroads, a smart contract layer for chain-abstracted assets. In Crossroads, assets from nearly any chain are represented on a single backend blockchain as ERC-20 tokens. As a result, any asset can participate in smart-contract-based exchange, lending, or privacy applications on a single unified platform. So while Crossroads offers cross-chain bridging, a common, partial approach to alleviating the fragmentation of the blockchain ecosystem today, this is just one service within Crossroads' general-purpose chain-abstraction model. Crossroads relies on key encumbrance: a threshold signing committee holds encumbered keys controlling assets on each integrated chain, signing transactions only as authorized by smart contracts on the backend blockchain. Asset movements are fee-efficient, as ownership changes are recorded on the backend blockchain and users may set the transaction fee for withdrawals. Crossroads enables permissionless, modular integration of new blockchains using pluggable oracles with flexible design options (zkBridge, TEE-based, hybrid). Asset deposits into Crossroads benefit from strong, chain-specific finalization guarantees, minimizing the risk of reorg attacks. Unlike existing bridges, however, third-party smart contracts in Crossroads can provide fast, optimistic access to funds before finalization completes. We prove that Crossroads satisfies soundness: given an honest quorum of signing committee members, any user can unilaterally generate a withdrawal transaction transferring their net balance to an account on an integrated blockchain. We implement a proof of concept across multiple public blockchains: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. We catalog a range of applications enabled by Crossroads, including universal wallets, cross-chain staking and lending, privacy-preserving payments, and private management of public blockchain assets.
Zero-knowledge proof systems rely on a trusted setup phase to generate a Common Reference String (CRS), yet existing approaches are typically static, one-time ceremonies that are inflexible and vulnerable to long-term compromise. Offloading continuous, recurring trusted setups to a decentralized Layer 2 (L2) network introduces a fundamental coordination challenge arising from the mismatch between high-throughput transaction processing and the multi-round requirements of trusted setup ceremonies. This paper presents an L2-coordinated framework that safely decouples transaction pipelines from ceremony execution to achieve automated, continuous CRS generation without centralized coordination. We design and implement two protocol variants over a decentralized, PBFT-coordinated ZK-rollup architecture: an on-chain smart contract approach and an asynchronous peer-to-peer consensus variant. Both designs utilize non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge alongside commit-reveal structures to eliminate adaptive manipulation vectors and isolate ceremony latency. Experimental evaluations under simulated wide-area network constraints and adversarial conditions demonstrate that our architecture successfully isolates ceremony liveness. Continuous setups complete reliably within practical time bounds despite node dropouts or malicious contributions, while preserving stable L2 transaction throughput.
Applying NFTs to urban planning offers revolutionary potential but raises serious equity concerns. Although NFTs are linked to digital art speculation, their underlying technology, decentralized ownership, smart contracts, and tamper-proof records could transform participatory planning, land-use management, and community asset stewardship. This article discusses how NFTs could decentralize planning power by enabling tokenized community land trusts, zoning-compliance automation, and neighborhood DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). However, they also pose dangers, such as digital exclusion, environmental degradation from energy-hungry blockchains, and capture by technocratic elites. Mitigation is needed through hybrid digital-physical participation systems, public sector-led blockchain infrastructure, and equity-sensitive token design if these tools are to benefit the public interest. The article proposes a staged implementation approach, beginning with controlled pilots (e.g., NFT-tracked community benefit agreements) before scaling up to more advanced applications such as dynamic zoning regimes. Lastly, ethical use of NFTs in planning demands visionary public-sector leadership to avert the entrenchment of existing inequalities in the name of innovation. Planners must critically engage with this emerging technology not as eager consumers but as stewards shaping its trajectory toward more equitable, open, and democratic urban futures. The question is not whether NFTs will influence cities, but who will determine that influence and to what ends.
Educational institutions require secure, transparent, and tamper-resistant systems to manage academic records, examination data, and student results while ensuring accountability and data integrity. Conventional marks management systems primarily rely on centralized databases, making them susceptible to unauthorized modifications, security breaches, limited traceability, and single points of failure. The proposed blockchain-based university student marks management framework utilizes academic information collected from institutional administrative records, including student details, faculty information, academic structures, subject allocations, examination schedules, marks, and result data. The workflow incorporates secure user authentication using SHA-256 hashing, AES-based encryption of sensitive marks data, role-based access control, blockchain transaction validation, and smart contract execution for academic operations. Ethereum blockchain, Solidity smart contracts, Flask, Web3.py, MetaMask, and Ganache are integrated to implement secure record management, immutable storage, result publication, audit trail generation, and academic analytics. Performance evaluation is conducted using blockchain transaction processing, encryption efficiency, data integrity verification, access control validation, audit traceability, and result dissemination correctness. Experimental results demonstrate reliable storage of academic records, secure handling of examination information, accurate result processing, comprehensive audit logging, and effective protection against unauthorized modifications while maintaining complete transaction transparency. The proposed architecture significantly enhances the security, reliability, transparency, and trustworthiness of university examination and academic record management systems.