Blockchain Papers

Michael Davar, Ioana Bratu

No abstract is available for this record.

Mukul Pal

Crypto might be the most popular of the Web3 liquid alternatives [Alts] but as disintermediation picks up momentum, the new internet could lead to wealth redistribution by first taking away market share from the legacy world and then generating new opportunities in form of data assets. These assets could be bought and sold like stocks on the blockchain marketplace, creating an Alternative Assets revolution.

David Vidal-Tomás

No abstract is available for this record.

Henry Kim, Silviana Tana, Marek Laskowski, Cheng Zhong · 5 authors

Even though blockchain as a research topic incites broad academic interest, there is arguably a balkanization that occurred along the natural delineation between public-permissionless blockchains and private-permissioned blockchains. IS researchers, for instance, have been more inclined to investigate the latter as doing so entails building upon a research tradition in ERP, MIS, and organizational information systems. IS is not as inclined to investigate public-permissionless blockchains and their predominant application, cryptocurrencies, as their key underlying concepts of asset tokenization and protocol design are deemed within the domain of other academics, most notably economists and computer scientists. Web3 broadens applications of public-permissionless blockchains to encompass NFTs, DAOs, and metaverses and represents a shift beyond cryptocurrencies for both popular and academic discourse. In that spirit, we argue for broadening of IS research lens. There are four points to this argument. First, by the most authoritative definitions, web3 excludes private-permissioned blockchains. Second, developer and community interest in private-permissioned blockchains has flatlined relative to public-permissionless blockchains, which benefit from ever-new projects that provide vigor even if interest in older projects wanes. Third, there is a preponderance of open data of on-chain transactions, token price data from exchanges, Discord discussions, GitHub repositories and more for web3 that serves as fertile base for analyzing and theorizing, while adoption of enterprise blockchains is still speculated about in current papers. Fourth and most important, the established IS research tradition in online communities is a very relevant lens with which to study web3 even though IS has under-appreciated the relevance. We use the DeFi project Curve Finance to exemplify that web3 projects are data-rich and are as much about online communities as they are about tokens and computer protocols. We conclude by outlining some future work that will integrate quantitative and qualitative data from these three perspectives to theorize about web3.

Avinanta Tarigan

Surat Keterangan Pendamping Ijazah (SKPI) sangat berharga bagi para lulusan perguruan tinggi yang sedang mencari pekerjaan, oleh karena itu rentan terhadap pemalsuan dan manipulasi. Blockchain merupakan teknologi basis data terdistribusi yang mendukung integritas data, keterbukaan, dan ketelurusuran. Teknologi ini tepat digunakan untuk mencatat dan menyimpan surat berharga sebagai suatu aset digital yang bersifat terbuka dan interoperable. Untuk itu standard ERC721 digunakan untuk merepresentasikan SKPI sebagai Non Fungible Token. Penelitian ini membangun sistem penerbitan SKPI sebagai aset digital dalam standar NFT yang membutuhan ekosistem pengembangan teknologi Web3. Sistem berhasil dibangun, diimplementasikan, dan diujicobakan pada sebuah jaringan blockchain (Test-Net).

Matthieu Quiniou

Les promesses d’usage du web3 mobilisent de nombreux acteurs, des communautés se créent, notamment celle qui s’auto-définit comme DéGen. Génération émergente, contre-culture, mouvement artistique ou nouvelle forme d’identité numérique, les DéGens échappent encore aux discours et catégories socio-anthropologiques. Les sciences de l’information et de la communication, la sociologie des médias et l’ethnographie numérique fournissent des méthodes et outils d’analyse des usages et des codes de ces individus représentatifs de l’hypermodernité et du web3. S’il est difficile, à ce stade, de savoir si le mouvement DéGens n’est qu’un épiphénomène transitoire ou un marqueur emblématique d’une évolution sociétale de fond, les efforts déployés par les DéGens pour construire des modes d’organisation adaptés à leurs pratiques hypermodernes justifient une étude approfondie du fonctionnement de cette communauté d’un nouveau type. Cette recherche vise à documenter et éclairer de manière transdisciplinaire, à travers l’apparition de ces nouveaux acteurs, des questions centrales sur les mutations en cours liées au web3, les changements de paradigmes économiques, sociologiques, axiologiques, identitaires. Ces pratiques numériques actent le hic et nunc d’un monde hybride, le numérique n’est plus le double d’une réalité tangible, il ne reproduit pas le monde, il en devient la matrice, il ouvre sur une vision post schopenhauerienne : d’un « monde comme volonté et représentation », dont il convient de décrypter le mode de développement.

Benjamin M. Blau, Shardul Vikram

With blockchain technology as its foundation, the rise of Web3 and associated token economics promises unprecedented and fundamental changes in areas of ownership, governance, finance and engagement. The power of true ownership of digital assets, immutability and portability across worlds, platforms, and communities is changing how individuals and companies engage. Smart contracts enable new programmable commercial constructs which provide coded guarantees without the notion of a human guarantor. These powerful concepts of immutable record-keeping, true ownership, guaranteed transaction execution lay the foundation of the future of a Decentralized Customer Experience (DCX). This paradigm shift opens-up untapped opportunities and addressable markets in the CX space such as the empowerment of consumers in decentralized autonomous organizations, new business and commercial models, brand managemet & lifetime loyalty (aka. ‘super fan’), community-intrinsic marketing, and enablement & certification. This leads to industry-specific value cases and their monetization in healthcare, insurance, retail, consumer goods, and high-tech and the software industry. This article proposes the definition of a new market category called DCX unlocked by the impact of Web3 and blockchain technology onto the customer experience space and assesses new addressable markets spanning across almost any industry.

Shah Nawaz Jelil

NFTs have boomed in the recent past and have implications in several fields of science. In this article, I delve into the implications and potential advantage and challenges in the use of NFTs in the field of conservation science.

Authors unavailable

No abstract is available for this record.

Authors unavailable

No abstract is available for this record.

Darcy W E Allen, Jason Potts

The development of Web3 — a stack of decentralised technologies underpinned by blockchains — isn’t simply a technical or financing challenge, it is also a problem of innovation and entrepreneurial discovery. In this paper we apply the lens of user innovation toolkit theory to the development of Web3. Toolkits are an organizational design solution to an innovation problem with sticky and local information. Our aim is to explore how toolkits theory applies to Web3 innovation, proposing that Web3 innovation is being organized through toolkits (e.g., blockchains, token standards, DAO frameworks) that enable efficient organization of sticky information to facilitate innovation. The contribution of this paper is the first application of toolkits theory to Web3, reframing its development as a problem of entrepreneurship and innovation in the context of distributed information. We provide implications for the role of developers as user innovators, the economic problem of emergent toolkit stacking, and the design of toolkit business models.

Avni Patel Thompson, Ethan Winn, George Oates, Jad Esber · 13 authors

A group of researchers, builders and activists came together to discuss platform cooperativism and the intersection with the web3 movement. We touched on some of the key takeaways from the history of cooperatives that can be applied to developing new internet platforms and protocols, as well as the challenges platform cooperatives face scaling alternative models of ownership and control. Consequently, we investigated how developers and emerging internet companies might learn from the shared history of cooperatives and how, in practice, they can construct systems that respect cooperative ideals.

Alexander Grasser, Alexandra Parger

This paper explores the potential of blockchain technology and the Web3 for a decentralized participatory architecture. In this context, the polyvalent capacity of a block in a blockchain is at the center of this investigation. Blockchain innovations in cryptography and efficient block validation and creation systems have led to autonomous blocks that act as decentralized, transparent, and secure Web3 assets. Following our previous research on collaborative objects that enable real-time participatory design activities, a case study project H=N BLOCK+A is developed that implements blockchain principles at both the conceptual and infrastructural levels. At the conceptual level, architectural blocks are speculated and applied as autonomous and decentralized Web3 assets, i.e., a decentralized kit of parts/blocks/NFTs/applications that can form a crazy patchwork of heterogeneous compatible blocks. At the infrastructural level, an existing sustainable blockchain is facilitated to embed a decentralized design methodology that enables real-time participatory co-creation of a collective architectural form.

Jason Potts, Darcy W E Allen, Chris Berg, Aaron M. Lane · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Pranav Behal

Web3’s current applications mostly revolve around financial systems; yield farming, lending and borrowing, token swaps, bridges, and many more. Applications with social features in mind have started to take light, as well as more incentives for creators to join Web3. This paper aims to explain an idea involving listen-to-earn mechanics, the concept that users could be compensated for their time listening to music. I explain how artists could benefit significantly from this mechanic if implemented correctly. I also analyze how a platform like this can change the music industry and bring more mainstream attention to Web3, thus increasing users. I detail some paths to success and sustainability for a project such as this, as well as some potential issues I see. Benefits and incentives for artists and content creators using Web3’s technologies, such as DAOs and NFTs, are also explained in this paper. I explain the potential implications that Web3 could bring to the music industry and how artists and content creators can have better, more engaging communities while also being paid much more than they were using Web2’s platforms. These findings alleviate the misconceptions that Web3’s technologies will hurt content creators and show a path towards sustainability in the music industry.

Mark Fenwick, Paulius Jurčys

No abstract is available for this record.

Quinten Stokkink, Can Umut Ileri, Dick Epema, Johan Pouwelse

Web3 is emerging as the new Internet-interaction model that facilitates direct collaboration between strangers without a need for prior trust between network participants and without central authorities. However, one of its shortcomings is the lack of a defense mechanism against the ability of a single user to generate a surplus of identities, known as the Sybil attack. Web3 has a Sybil attack problem because it uses peer sampling to establish connections between users. We evaluate the promising but underexplored direction of Sybil avoidance using network latency measurements, according to which two identities with equal latencies are suspected to be operated from the same node, and thus are likely Sybils. Network latency measurements have two desirable properties: they are only malleable by attackers by adding latency, and they do not require any trust between network participants. Our basic SybilSys mechanism avoids Sybil attackers using only network latency measurements if attackers do not actively exploit their malleability. We present an enhanced version of SybilSys that protects against targeted attacks using a variant of the flow correlation attack, which we name TrafficJamTrigger. We show how the message flows of Round-Trip Time measurements can be used to expose attack patterns and we propose and evaluate six classifiers to recognize these patterns. Our experiments show, through both emulation and real-world deployment, that enhanced SybilSys can serve a fundamental role for Web3, effectively establishing connections to real users even in the face of networks consisting of 99% Sybils.

Dan Zhang, Simon Chadwick, Lingling Liu

No abstract is available for this record.

Authors unavailable

No abstract is available for this record.

Ahto Buldas, Dirk Draheim, Mike Gault, Märt Saarepera

Abstract The Web3 vision takes blockchain disintermediation to a next level by making it ubiquitous, encompassing not only payments and financial services but also digital identities, data and business models. Recently, Web3 has gained massive attention by major analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, Forbes Technology Council and the Harvard Business Review. Albeit the current enthusiasm about Web3, we are lost in a state of confusion about what Web3 actually is – or could be. In this paper, we take an engineering approach. We discuss a potential foundation of Web3 in terms of fundamental components, architectural principles and a Web3 design space. We conclude that, from an engineering viewpoint, the Web3 can be characterized as the integration of digital rights exchange into the (application layer) internet protocols. Finally, on the basis of these findings, we discuss the Alphabill platform as a Web3 enabling technology.

Jon M. Garon

The metaverse is understood to be an immersive virtual world serving as the locus for all forms of work, education, and entertainment experiences. Depicted in books, movies, and games, the metaverse has the potential not just to supplement real-world experiences but to substantially supplant them. This article explores the rapid emergence and evolution of the Web3 technologies at the heart of the metaverse movement. Web3 itself is a paradigmatic shift in internet commerce. The article begins by exploring the competing economic and philosophical approaches to the future of the internet, which is being driven on one hand by the most successful internet advertising firms (Facebook and Google) as well as their videogame competitors (Roblox, Microsoft’s Minecraft, Epic Games, and Valve) and on the other hand by Web3 advocates focusing on cryptocurrencies, nonfungible tokens, decentralized finance (“DeFi”) and distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs). Limiting the focus on U.S. law, the article reviews three core areas for the development of the metaverse: the regulatory environment; the transactional essentials; and the limits on governmental intrusion into the metaverse. The review of the regulatory environment includes state and federal gambling laws, money transfer laws, securities laws, and regulation of unfair and deceptive trade practices used to enforce privacy and cybersecurity obligations. The section on transactional essentials focuses on contracts between metaverse enterprises and their customers, antitrust and competition restraints, copyright protections, protections of biometric data and rights of publicity, and protections of customer speech in metaverse environments. Finally, the article addresses the need for the continuing evolution of the Fourth Amendment protection from search and seizures, the third party doctrine limitations on reasonable expectations of privacy, and the statutory protections under the Stored Communications Act. The article highlights that although these doctrinal issues are not new, the scope of the metaverse and its potential social importance will reshape these doctrine in sometimes unpredictable ways. Technologists, practitioners, and regulators must be open to these shifts to appropriately develop the correct mix of user control, industry practice, and regulatory oversight.

E. Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, Vitalik Buterin

No abstract is available for this record.

Darcy W E Allen, Chris Berg, Aaron M. Lane

A cryptocurrency token airdrop is a novel means of distributing rights over a blockchain project to a community of users and owners for free. The market value of these airdrop giveaways is often upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars. This paper considers why projects might choose this unusual and costly means of token distribution. It considers a diverse selection of high-profile airdrops as case studies between 2014 and 2022. This is the first comprehensive analysis of the rationales and mechanisms of Web3 token airdrops. We find that two primary rationales for airdrops are marketing (to attract new users and to maintain a community) and decentralisation of ownership and control of a project (building community, providing regulatory protection, and enhancing security). Additional rationales include creating liquid public markets and taxation treatment of token distribution. The paper contributes to an understanding of business practice and strategy in the emerging cryptocurrency and blockchain industry.

Lin William Cong, Ke Tang, Yanxin Wang, Zhao Xi

Web3 and DeFi are widely advocated as innovations for greater financial inclusion and democratization. We assemble the most comprehensive dataset to date on the largest Web3 ecosystem and use large-scale computing to investigate the claim. We discuss Ethereum's network structure, time trends, and distributions of transactions, mining, and ownership. Mining income and Ether ownership are concentrated in a few nodes, even after excluding exchange and mining pool wallets, with inequalities more exacerbated than observed in the real economy. Network activities are dominated by large transactions, shifting from peer-to-peer to user-DApps/DeFi interactions, and from Ether-based to ERC-20-token-based. High percentage transaction fees, congestion-induced gas-price fluctuation, suboptimal reserve setting, and large return volatility of tokens disproportionally harm small, unsophisticated, and new nodes, with high failure rates hurting all users. Finally, we present causal evidence that base-fee burning mechanisms (e.g., EIP-1559) and airdrop programs (e.g., OmiseGo Airdrop) promote inclusion and equality through monetary redistribution.