Blockchain Papers

Segun Kamoru Fakunmoju, Olawale Banmore, Abiodun Gbadamosi, Olajide Idowu Okunbanjo

Digital financial trading has brought a new dimension of financial technology transactions to the globe. Cryptocurrency trading is one of the new dimensions. However, cryptocurrency trading is plagued with unlawful and monetary corrupt practices, unregulated foreign currency markets, and unknown party participants. Thus, it creates the unpredicted challenge of instigating fear in the investors’ minds and scaring away economic agents, and in turn, it adversely affects economic activities. The research investigated the effects of cryptocurrency on the performance of the Nigerian economy. The specific objective was to examine the effect of cryptocurrency trading and monetary and monetary corrupt practices on Nigerian economic performance. The research used primary data through 98 copies of the questionnaire. Tobit regression method of analysis was applied to analyze the data. The finding reveals that cryptocurrency and monetary and monetary corrupt practices have a negative but significant effect on Nigerian economic performance with marginal effects of -0,172 and -0,734 with P < 0,05 as the significance level. The research concludes that cryptocurrency and monetary corrupt practices affect Nigerian economic performance. The research recommends that the government, through the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), should regulate and control cryptocurrency trading by using global digital financing system software. The software will monitor and control cryptocurrency trading in Nigeria to enhance cryptocurrency trading to contribute to and increase Nigerian economic activities.

Yang Jingxin

A global public health event with far-reaching and far-reaching consequences, the COVID-19 epidemic has not only disrupted the struggling global governance system and the world, but has also had a profound impact on international financial markets.In the post-corona era, the accumulation of financial risks and the escalation of risk crises can accelerate the rebuilding of the international financial system.On this basis, the development of the international reserve currency and institutional changes are indications.This article summarizes the development of the international financial system and its laws.Then, by analyzing the international financial situation resulting from the COVID-19 crisis, it concludes that it is impossible to balance the dollar's hegemony in the modern international financial system.Globalization has not led to decentralization of finance, but rather to concentration of finance, increased financial risk and an imperfect international financial governance structure.Finally, the development direction of the international financial administration system is proposed on the basis of three aspects: international monetary system, international financial markets and international financial supervision.

Sadah Anjum Shanto

With regards to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fast carry out of an antibody and the execution of an overall vaccination crusade is basic, yet its prosperity will rely upon the accessibility of a functional and straightforward circulation chain that can be evaluated by all applicable partners. In this paper, we examine how blockchain innovation can help in a few parts of COVID-19 inoculation conspire. We present a framework in which blockchain innovation is utilized to surety information honesty and permanence of recipient enlistment for immunization, keeping away from character burglaries and pantomimes. Smart contracts are characterized to screen and track the legitimate antibody dissemination conditions against the protected dealing with rules characterized by antibody makers empowering the familiarity with all organization peers. For immunization organizations, a straightforward and sealed answer for aftereffects self-detailing is given by thinking about the recipient, what's more, administrated antibody affiliation. A model was executed utilizing the Ethereum test organization, Ropsten, considering the COVID-19 immunization dissemination conditions. The outcomes acquired for each on-chain activity can be checked and approved on the Etherscan. Regarding throughput and versatility, the proposed blockchain framework shows promising outcomes while the assessed cost concerning gas for inoculation situation in view of genuine information stays inside sensible cutoff points.

Seungju Lee, Jaewook Lee, Yunyoung Lee

No abstract is available for this record.

Nancy Youssef

In this paper, we investigate the link between the well-known traditional finance and economic asset class and the digital currencies. The present study is undertaken to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 on the Financial Markets and the four major Cryptocurrencies from January 2020 to May 2021 in Egypt and USA. On the process of investigating the impact of the COVID-19 on the financial markets the study assumes the COVID-19 cumulative cases, Death cases, and the Fatality ratio to be the independent variables, and the Stock returns for the two indices (EGX30 and S&P 500), and the Returns for the four major cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Tether) to be the dependent variables of the study. The study findings revealed that there is a negative relationship between the COVID-19 cumulative cases, and daily S&P 500 stock returns, and there is a negative relationship between COVID-19 cumulative cases, fatality ratio, and daily EGX30 stock returns. There is a positive relationship between COVID-19 world death cases and daily Bitcoin prices, daily Ethereum prices, and daily Litecoin prices. There is a negative relationship between COVID-19 world death cases and daily Tether prices because tether is the only important stable coin on the crypto market with significant market capitalization.

Emmanuel Joel Aikins Abakah, Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil‐Alana

No abstract is available for this record.

B. Ruby Rich

Say the words out loud: alpha—delta—omicron. Add whatever variant(s) have emerged since this article's deadline. Greek-alphabet letters, recited like a chant, singsong, may sound like a nursery rhyme. "Ring around the Rosie," perhaps: the song about the London plague of 1665, or 1347, or perhaps earlier or later, or somewhere else, its words recorded, they say, in 1881.All fall down indeed. In the world of cinema in early 2022, it was the film festivals that were falling down. Rotterdam was the first to cancel. Then, Palm Springs. Sundance was still holding on, with determined signals of a physical presence along with an expanded online platform, until just two weeks before showtime when omicron exploded and the in-person Utah festival folded: online only it would have to be. The Berlinale moved its market online but confirmed its intention to hold in-person screenings (at press time anyway).Suddenly, the hopeful summer of live festivals (Telluride!) was a distant memory, the anxious autumn (New York!) a faraway treasure, though the Saudis managed to stage a cultural splash, the Red Sea International Festival, in December. Back home, grounded, film curators without live audiences, filmmakers with closed sets, distributors with few outlets, professors with no students in classrooms, grounded scholars without a conference bar, Oscar voters with home screens and laptops—and this editor, with a new digital projector—all sought a route out of despair. Often that was a screening, temporarily acceptable with the aid of vaccination proofs or rapid tests, but more likely it was online, with "content" that algorithms and menus offered. By January, movie theaters were still open, but I knew few people over the age of forty willing to enter them.Into this moment blasted . . . not a comet, but a movie about one (and yes, "comet" shares its first two letters with that other five-letter word dominating all life on earth). Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) is lucky, as "a new-school streaming entity, blessed with optimal COVID-surge timing. Millions who were interested a month ago to see something in a theater now, once again, find themselves back on the couch."1Based on a story McKay developed with journalist David Sirota, it was conceived before but shot during pandemic times, and released just in time for Christmas by Paramount and Netflix. Ah, if only good intentions were everything. This is a movie ostensibly about politics, science, and climate change that comes closer than most to communicating the full horrors of twenty-first century feudalism, corruption, greed, and ignorance (but not, incidentally, climate change) yet is undermined by its splashy multiplex-focused stylistic choices. Even Forbes took notice of the disparity between scientist appreciation and film-critic deprecation.2Any impulse to praise is canceled out by McKay's decision to script the sleazy corrupt president as a woman (Meryl Streep, no less). This colossal misstep throws the entire enterprise into the "ha ha, just kidding" wastebasket. Was it Bernie backer McKay's final revenge against Hillary or a botched attempt to imagine Ivanka there? Either way, to assign the classic misogynist and corrupt traits of Trumpian alpha males to a female character was an insulting misfire.Leonardo DiCaprio is convincing as a nerdy professor happy to sell out for celebrity and glamour (making me curious about the script changes he supposedly demanded). Jennifer Lawrence is spectacular as the whistleblower undone by her own discovery. Rob Morgan, however, is handed the thankless role of NASA's Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, a Black man so divorced from community and selfhood that he is never seen in the company of Black family or friends or partner, and chooses to see the world end cosseted in whiteness in Lansing, Michigan.3Don't Look Up is a film trapped between political ambitions and genre fidelity. McKay just can't help himself: given the choice, he opts for the easy laugh every time. With one exception. Mark Rylance's character, Peter Isherwell, the gazillionaire head of the tech company BASH, is one part Elon Musk, one part Mark Zuckerberg, one part Peter Thiel, with a dash of Jared Kushner thrown in for good measure. This fascist figure is a thoroughly chilling embodiment of today's technofuturist overlords and deserves to be reincarnated immediately in a future McKay script aimed squarely at technocrats' control of human lives. Watching the film in the midst of the Elizabeth Holmes trial (again, with a woman standing in for the unprosecuted but equally corrupt male royalty of Silicon Valley) lent it extra frisson.A CNN headline interrupted: "The COVID-19 Case Surge Is Altering Daily Life across the US. Things Will Likely Get Worse, Experts Warn." I was still trying to write this editorial. Back home in California, climate change continued to gain momentum. "Many Stinson Beach Homes Could Be Flooded amid Rising Seas within a Decade. Would Building Dunes Save Them?" read another headline.4 Dan Fruchtman, the owner of an A-frame on the beach, was quoted as saying, "The Earth is so fragile. It's a shame what we've done to it." McKay, though, never really addresses climate change; instead, his film is lodged squarely in the "disaster movie" genre of The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972) or the sci-fi hybrid Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981), with its villains updated and the whole world implicated.The theme of an uninhabitable earth, though, summons memories of another film: Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer (2013), about a world rendered uninhabitable by a botched climate experiment, leaving the remains of humanity to circle the globe in a perpetual-motion train divided by class. Based in part on the graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982), by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer was reborn as an ongoing episodic series (TNT, 2020–). I first saw the film in New York City at a private screening organized by Tilda Swinton. She was trying to drum up support for Bong Joon Ho's vision as the film was being held hostage by its distributor, the Weinstein Company, where Harvey was demanding cuts. Ah, history.It's worth remembering that in the movie theaters of yesteryear there was once Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), a chilling parable of infertility and global collapse—set, alarmingly, in 2027, now just five years away. And playing right now on a streaming platform near you is Station Eleven, the phenomenal new series based on Emily St. John Mandel's eponymous book that eerily imagined a world wiped out by a viral epidemic, its feral survivors roaming the earth years later. Yes, it could be a moment for dystopian viewing—for a public with a strong stomach and steady nerves. Soylent Green, anyone?In December 2021, Film Quarterly presented a webinar saluting the Pacific Film Archive on its fiftieth anniversary; it turned at one point to the question of in-person screenings for nontheatrical as well as first-run, after a year of streaming platforms custom-built for this sector. MoMA's Rajendra Roy reported on the museum's reopening of its theaters, acknowledging his surprise that the audience was substantially younger.5 He observed that older patrons were more reluctant to return to the risk of in-person gatherings. I wonder, too, whether younger cineastes have become more motivated to engage in communal activity—in classic establishment locations, no less—than they had been in prepandemic times. And if that summer/fall exuberance would survive omicron winter.Traditional distributors—that is, those without wholly owned production/streaming monopolies—greeted the new year with a seemingly contrarian decision.6 They decided to turn the clock back and restore the theatrical window (forty-five days, most often) and permit hopefully lucrative ticket sales to run their course in advance of online availability.7 Wonder how that will go. The studios' calculation was perhaps a reactive move following Scarlett Johansson's widely reported courtroom success (reportedly a $40 million settlement) after she sued Disney for releasing Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021) online on Disney+ on the same date it opened in theaters. And notice that it was the star who sued, not the director; presumably, it was her lucrative contract tied to theatrical revenues that was shredded by the day-and-date move. The studio calculations will undoubtedly shape-shift again over the course of 2022.As platforms evolve, it's always important to remember that the classic ones are still in existence and bear scrutiny. Public television, for instance. Way back in March 2021, the very month that lockdown started, fifteen filmmaker members of the Beyond Inclusion collective together with more than one hundred thirty cosignatories, including Stanley Nelson, Laura Poitras, Yance Ford, and other prominent figures from across the documentary field, sent an open letter to PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) demanding diversity.8 The letter in particular called out the system's cozy funding relationship with Ken Burns, to whom PBS has funneled substantial sums of money (for more than two hundred hours of PBS programming over forty years) far beyond anything that has been awarded to projects by filmmakers of color, long consigned to far more modest levels of support.9 PBS defended Ken Burns, and Ken Burns defended PBS, and they all agreed they could do better.Not so simple, PBS! Data, please! Filmmaker Grace Lee, one of the Beyond Inclusion signatories, teamed up with reporter-filmmaker Akintunde Ahmad to launch a podcast with a purpose: Viewers Like Us, its title a riff on public television's own motto.10 In seven episodes that ran from September to the end of December 2021, with Lee as executive producer along with co–executive producers Ken Ikeda of the Association of Independents in Radio and Joaquin Alvarado of Studiotobe, the podcast offered up testimonies from a range of social actors with a stake in public television's future and a commitment to the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion.11 Their podcast question hung in the air, unanswered: "Why is PBS so white and how exactly did it designate Ken Burns as America's Storyteller?"12Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Paris, where this text was written, cinemas were still open. They flourished all through fall and early winter 2021, their marquees and posters providing a welcome sense of normalcy; with omicron rates rising by the day, though, it was becoming harder to see how that could continue. Posh screening invitations continued to pile up, restaurant reservations were still being made, but a dampening of spirits was undeniable, even out in the streets, as I tested the crowds like an anxious flâneuse who is out of practice.As cinema events began to feel risky, and with more in-person cancellations being announced, I found myself drawn instead to the presence of films in other spaces: exhibited in museums, installed in galleries, with lots of air and space, high ceilings, and (hopefully) less dense crowds. Major shows beckoned with their alternative modes of viewing and public display.13First up was the promising Enfin le cinéma! Arts, images et spectacles en France (1833–1907) (Cinema at last! Arts, pictures, and shows in France [1833–1907]) at the Musée d'Orsay, organized in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), France's National Center for Cinema and Moving Images (CNC), Gaumont, and Pathé, and curated by Dominique Païni, former Pompidou director and former head of the Cinémathèque française (who reportedly oversaw its move to the dismal Frank Gehry building in Bercy on his watch). With gallery after gallery in the immense Orsay filled with paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the didactic exhibition sought to retrace the origins of cinema and the mutuality of influence between painting, photography, and cinema. Infuriatingly, however, the fascination was entirely with the precinematic materials; the many screens hung throughout the galleries, stamped in the corner with the telltale "L" for Lumière, were left not only uncontextualized but entirely unidentified and bereft of texts.The public, absent any curatorial assistance, was presumably expected to make its own leap of imagination to link the images on the walls to those on the screens, or else to buy the giant catalogue when exiting through the gift shop to figure out the details ex post facto. True, anyone patient enough to stand in front of any one screen long enough for the digital loop to come full circle (not that long, of course, with those early Lumières) would be rewarded when finally the title appeared and a date flashed by, but that was it: no context, no history, no linkages to the images surrounding the screens. I was dismayed that an exhibition ostensibly dedicated to uncovering cinema's beginnings would turn the medium itself into mere decoration.Off, then, to the newly reopened Musée Carnavalet, dedicated to the history of the city of Paris, where a new exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Marcel Proust was under way. It was a natural location: the Carnavalet had long been a pilgrimage site for Proustians because of its gallery containing the furnishings of his actual bedroom, complete with the (posthumously revealed as gay) author's actual bed. Now, like Orsay's, its exhibition sought to re-create yesteryear—here, the times of Proust (1871–1922) by definition also a fabled era of Paris.Where the Orsay texts were promulgating a philosophy of visual influences, Carnavalet was content to offer up artifacts and facts, photographs and maps, filling in the one extraordinary life. For cinephiles, Proust is a sort of origin text, his writing having inspired Volker Schlöndorff's Un amour de Swann (Swann in Love, 1984), Raúl Ruiz's Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained, 1999), and Chantal Akerman's La captive (The Captive, 2000).14 Madeleines, indeed. And, freed of any purity impulses, the exhibition included archival footage, again on hanging screens, along with monitors that intrigued with period interviews, such as one of Jean Cocteau talking about Proust, clips from films, and a wealth of information and reflection. I was happier, and just as edified.Ten blocks away, the Marian Goodman Gallery was completely given over to installations by Chantal Akerman. The multiple-screen From the Other Side—an epic installation adapted from her film De l'autre côté (From the Other Side, 2002), her look at the Mexican border and the harsh life of migrants, filmed two decades before their lives and crossings got significantly worse—filled two rooms with monitors, then extended into another room with a single and singular projection: A Voice in the Desert, an excerpt which Akerman had refilmed during the shoot in a desert projection. Upstairs, more modestly in terms of scope, Je, tu, il, elle, l'installation (2007) presented a three-screen redeployment of her film made more than thirty years earlier, when she was in her early twenties, Je tu il elle (1974). With its three sequential chapters now lined up simultaneously, the impossible innocence and youth of the young Chantal filled the screen.Free of the didacticism and explanations of the two museums, the visitor here could wander, immersed in the multiplicity of images and shifts of scale, like a flâneuse in the gallery space itself. Later in January, there was a conference on Akerman: "The Affective Interiors of Chantal Akerman: Aesthetic Passages - Films and Installations," organized by the Cinema and Audiovisual Studies Research Institute (IRCAV, at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3). Just over six years since Akerman's death, her work is more alive than ever.At press time, a wonderful volume arrived in the post. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's delirious fever dream of a film, Memoria (2021), starring Tilda Swinton, has been commemorated with a gorgeous art book of the same name, edited by Giovanni Machini Camia and Annabel Brady-Brown, published by Berlin's Fireflies Press. A compendium of photographs and documents related to the film's production, from early sketchbooks and notes to the shooting script and an interview with Swinton, its editors describe it as "a work of curation." I would call it an archive. A remarkable record of Weerasethakul's working methods over the two years of the film's development and through its production, it reveals (among hundreds of other details) that Swinton's character Jessica, a woman adrift in Bogotá and the was conceived as a character out of Jacques I With A to the year the of the to an Film Quarterly sought to at a December The of the month of year and first of this one the and words have this time, a of to and the one of all for Jean knew in New York City in the when she was out and on the and and she up all the of the that never one to in the corner and And she to engage with film, a at the and the films of the moment in a New York where cinema and where the new young cinema was to life. was else like there never will the of filmmaker a and of the of through the of cultural his of to an of vision and conceived in conjunction with its own shows how on a collective that and with the establishment of the even at in the work and at her own to that are by into the a he the of film history to their and earlier in of a to the of even a the of today's he instead a for the through of It's and The a of and of for a of the of influence and the into to bear on the over the years to the of his films with the political history of itself. The era of La that is always as the of but it out that has never been all that far away. the into the and that has open to a space for the of the the of the two with filmmakers at very of their one in the and one in as they on their early the anniversary of the film Is (1982), a with the from to he to not only the of for an but also a of the of itself. It was there that the young filmmaker at the as his students for the he was is drawn into memories long a time for an early cinema and a city still full of from Paris, as a on the of the film director in the for (2006), her of the Lawrence but with films to her before and up the for a sort of an online platform that she to With she her her at the film La and the it her early with the and her into the episodic world with Le to of as to films and filmmakers in at a time of in film and at the of against and the of to that run to With he that move beyond to the of the out and to call for the of a more for in 2021) a from to it a moment in documentary that more of its audience than and . . . more of than just their that such as de and for beyond as a documentary up from a film and new to the of the and the history of in a range of from to to she the of genre and the of And that may well have made a in the first the with about his new around the In the that of global and the of and that its around the not on screens but in physical the movie as to communicating not incidentally, book with a by on and for up a of edited that a new era in cinema The Cinema and the of Cinema and and A to Cinema The that are for their of David and David the and in Film up The of and with and also a book of with this look at in this same though, that she be far away.

Teodora Cristina Barbu, Iustina Alina Boitan, Cosmin-Octavian Cepoi

The paper employs a threshold regression framework conditioned by two COVID-19 related proxies, to investigate whether Bitcoin and Ether exhibit short-term safe haven or diversifier features for stock and bond markets. Both cryptocurrencies fulfil a diversifier role for the responsible investments represented by sustainable stock market indices, a safe haven role for major bond markets and a mixed role for a selection of representative stock market indices. Furthermore, in times characterized by an increasing number of COVID-19 daily cases or deaths the statistical relationship between both cryptocurrencies and the main financial market determinants weakens.

Xunfa Lu, Nan Huang, Zhitao Ye, Kin Keung Lai · 5 authors

The COVID-19 causes strong spillover effects between financial markets. This paper explores the dynamic spillover effects among cryptocurrency, clean energy and oil during the COVID-19 by employing TVP-VAR extended joint connectedness approach. The empirical results show that clean energy and oil markets appear to be the net receivers of spillovers, whereas cryptocurrency market appears to be a net transmitter of spillovers. The dynamic total connectedness experiences a rapid increase in March 2020 when the COVID-19 spreads around the world.

Varun Kumar, Vineeta Kumari

Employing the standard event study methodology and the OLS market model to examine how the global pandemic announcement impacted cryptocurrencies, we test the null hypotheses that "the global pandemic declaration did not significantly impact the abnormal returns of the cryptocurrencies", and "during the global pandemic declaration, the cryptocurrencies did not experience any significant abnormal volatilities". The average abnormal return on t-2 was nearly minus 40 percent, which is the highest negative value during the 61-day event window. The cumulative average returns are significantly negative during the event window. The global pandemic news has significantly impacted cryptocurrencies and are more volatile during the outbreak. The study's findings will empower the investors to implement proper investment strategies during emergencies.

Amit Kumar Yadav, Shweta Shweta, Dinesh Kumar

No abstract is available for this record.

José Manuel Guaita Martínez, Patricia Carracedo, Dolores Gorgues Comas, Carlos H. Siemens

The scientific community has become concerned about the impact of blockchain technology as a motivational tool in the COVID-19 era. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of scientific articles published in this field has been increasing, making it highly desirable to carry out a bibliometric study to identify research efforts. Therefore, the aim of this work was to conduct a literature review of blockchain and COVID-19 technology in the field of Business Management to identify recent lines of research. To do so, we used a text mining technique on a corpus composed of 37 articles in the Web of Science database. The results obtained clearly show 3 distinct clusters. The first represents the blockchain technology framework in organizations and stakeholders in which the research methodology in artificial intelligence is very important. The second shows the need to take into account business sustainability caused by COVID-19. The third indicates the impact of the pandemic on the supply chain industry.

Xin Sui, Guifen Shi, Guanchong Hou, Shaohan Huang · 5 authors

The impacts of COVID‐19 have spread rapidly to global financial markets. In this context, combining the spillover index method introduced by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) and the complex network analysis framework, we examined the volatility connectedness and the topological structure among the top ten cryptocurrencies before and during the COVID‐19 crisis. The results revealed that the total volatility connectedness of the cryptocurrency market markedly increased following the outbreak of COVID‐19; statically, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, and Bitcoin Cash were the net transmitters before COVID‐19, while Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Cardano, and Stellar became the major net transmitters in the market after COVID‐19. Dynamically, the dynamic performance of different cryptocurrencies during the COVID‐19 pandemic was heterogeneous, and the possible driving factors are diverse. Moreover, from network analysis, we further found that the COVID‐19 crisis has significantly changed the topological structure of the cryptocurrency market. Our findings may help understand the typical dynamics in the cryptocurrency market and provide significant implications for portfolio managers, investors, and government agencies in times of highly stressful events like the COVID‐19 crisis.

Mina Sami, Wael Abdallah

This paper aimed to assess the effect of the cryptocurrency market on firms’ market value, especially on the sectoral level, in Africa. To reach the study’s main goal, the authors adopted the Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSEs) and Panel Double-Clustered Standard Errors (PDCSEs). Using firm-level data, the results of this study can be summarized as follows: (a) The cryptocurrency market hurts the firm market value in Africa. (b) The firms operating across different sectors respond disproportionally to the cryptocurrency market. For instance, the sectors that offer low returns in Africa (industrial, energy, financial) negatively respond to the cryptocurrency market, while the sectors that offer high returns (real estate and information technology) are not significantly affected. (c) The cryptocurrency market has a perverse effect on less experienced and highly indebted firms. (d) The consistent policies of governments to ban cryptocurrency do not work efficiently.

David Mhlanga

There is a lot of hope that blockchain technology may be used to standardize money transactions and increase access to banking. It is believed that regulators and industry professionals have looked into the possibility of using blockchain technology to modernize and even replace the infrastructure that currently supports international payments and remittances, such as correspondent banking, in order to ensure that transactions can be verified and recorded using blockchain technology in a distributed ledger. The purpose of this study was to analyze how blockchain technology has helped to include previously underserved populations in the mainstream financial system, and to remark on the best practices and lessons learned from sustainable development. Using a systematic literature review, the study discovered the many ways in which blockchain technology can facilitate digital financial inclusion, including its application in financial transactions, its utility as a tool for increasing financial savings, its use in the provision of credit, and its application in the provision of insurance. According to the findings, even though the global goals do not specifically target financial inclusion, providing access to financial services for the majority of the population is a critical enabler for several of the global goals. Therefore, the study concluded that sustainable development can be ensured on many fronts if the technology behind blockchains can be successfully used to improve financial inclusion. If governments, especially in developing countries, are serious about increasing citizens’ access to financial services, they must prioritize blockchain investment.

Zaghum Umar, Afsheen Abrar, Adam Zaremba, Тамара Теплова · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Nicholas Apergis

No abstract is available for this record.

Ahmet ŞERBETÇİ, Yaşar ALPTÜRK, Turgay Ceyhan

Coronavirus (COVID-19), which emerged as an epidemic in China in December 2019, has been recognized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization as of March 2020. Events regarding the coronavirus shocked the markets and were seen as a threat to the markets. In this context, this study aims to examine the effect of the COVID-19 on Bitcoin prices and precious metals which are seen as low-risk assets in global markets. In the study, the causality relationship between the daily number of COVID-19 cases approved by the WHO and Google trends, and the price series of Bitcoin, Gold, Silver, Platinum, Palladium was investigated to determine the effects of the developments in the course of the epidemic on the prices of Bitcoin and precious metals. Toda-Yamamoto causality test was performed in the study where daily data were used between 19.01.2020-31.03.2021. According to the findings, a causality relationship could not be determined between the number of COVID-19 cases with Bitcoin and precious metals while it was observed that the recognition of COVID-19 has a very strong causal effect on Bitcoin prices and the prices of other precious metals except silver. In addition, a reciprocal causality relationship has been identified between the confirmed COVID-19 cases and the recognition of COVID-19.

D. V. Boguslavsky, Н. П. Шарова, Konstantin S. Sharov

In comparison with other respiratory viruses, the current COVID-19 pandemic’s rapid seizing the world can be attributed to indirect (contact) way of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus in addition to the regular airborne way. A significant part of indirect transmission is made through cash bank notes. SARS-CoV-2 remains on cash paper money for period around four times larger than influenza A virus and is absorbed by cash notes two and a half times more effectively than influenza A (our model). During the pandemic, cryptocurrencies have gained attractiveness as an “epidemiologically safe” means of transactions. On the basis of the authors’ gallop polls performed online with social networks users in 44 countries in 2020–2021 (the total number of clear responses after the set repair 32,115), around 14.7% of surveyed participants engaged in cryptocurrency-based transactions during the pandemic. This may be one of the reasons of significant rise of cryptocurrencies rates since mid-March 2020 till the end of 2021. The paper discusses the reasons for cryptocurrency attractiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among them, there are fear of SARS-CoV-2 spread via cash contacts and the ability of the general population to mine cryptocurrencies. The article also provides a breakdown of the polled audience profile to determine the nationalities that have maximal level of trust to saving and transacting money as cryptocurrencies.

Hongwei Zhang, Huojun Hong, Yaoqi Guo, Cai Yang

No abstract is available for this record.

Souhir Amri Amamou

Pandemics are not new and have occurred at different stages in human history (Ferguson et al. 2020). However, their impacts on financial markets are different and sometimes divergent. The market's sensitivity to these crises can provoke unexpected responses and sometimes disclose the precariousness of a market considered a riskless or safe haven. Covid-19 crises are still one of the most disturbing health crises of this decade. Starting in china, this pandemic spread rapidly to threaten the whole globe, which explains the global interest in studying its impact on economic and financial stability around the world, especially that, Goodell and Goutte (2020) highlights that this virus is inflicting unprecedented global destructive economic damage.The research focuses on cryptocurrency's market sensitivity to the pandemic framework. This market arouses the researcher's interest in their apparition. This interest arises with the emergence of Covid-19 since the end of 2019. Moreover, the analysis of the cryptocurrency market's sensitivity in a health crisis is a first since the emergence of this market whose could challenge its performance. Empirically, the research adopts an econometric approach based on the DCC-EGarch model to analyze the dynamic relationship between the Covid-19 and the cryptocurrency market volume of transaction evolution. It presents, to the best of our knowledge, an unprecedented empirical investigation of the pandemic second wave's impact on the dynamic relationship between Covid-19 cases and cryptocurrencies transaction volume. The remainder of the paper is as follows. We start with a literature review. We pass them to the data and the applied methodology. Finally, we describe the empirical results and conclude.

Syed Ali Raza, Nida Shah, Khaled Guesmi, Badreddine Msolli

No abstract is available for this record.

Irfan Haider Shakri, Jaime Yong, Erwei Xiang

This paper investigates the relationship between the COVID-19 crisis and the two leading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, from 31 December 2019 to 18 August 2020. We also use an economic news sentiment index and financial market sentiment index to explore the possible mechanisms through which COVID-19 impacts cryptocurrency. We employ a VAR Granger Causality framework and Wavelet Coherence Analysis and find the cryptocurrency market was impacted in the early phase of the sample period through economic news and financial market sentiments, but this effect diminished after June 2020.

Srirath Goi Gohwong

The objective in this study were to study the state of the art of Non-government-based cryptocurrency public policy in Thailand, to study the state of the art of Non-government-based cryptocurrency public policy in Argentina, to compare non-government-based cryptocurrency public policy between Thailand and Argentina, and to discuss implications for both Thailand and Argentina. Documentary research was employed in this study. The findings showed that Thailand and Argentina used a set of policy instruments and blockchain as a financial innovation in order to promote their political equilibriums. The comparison of non-government-based cryptocurrency public policy between Thailand and Argentina was conducted in four issues – scope, policy instrument, distribution, and restraints and innovation. In addition, both countries used both active and passive measures in order to maintain the stability of their political systems.