The rapid expansion of institutional repositories (IRs) has heightened concerns about digital rights management (DRM), copyright protection, content authenticity, and long-term digital preservation, particularly in developing countries where institutional and technological capacities remain constrained. This study examines the feasibility of adopting blockchain technology as a DRM solution for Ghanaian institutional repositories and evaluates whether its application is transformative or largely aspirational. Guided by the TechnologyâOrganizationâEnvironment (TOE) framework and Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) theory, the study employed a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design that integrated quantitative survey data with qualitative interviews with ICT directors, repository managers, academic librarians, systems librarians, and faculty members from eight Ghanaian universities. The findings reveal low DRM maturity across institutional repositories. 40% of participating institutions lacked formal DRM mechanisms. Although awareness of blockchain technology was moderately high among respondents, substantial disparities existed across stakeholder groups, with ICT personnel demonstrating higher levels of understanding than faculty members and academic librarians. Institutional readiness for blockchain adoption remained generally poor, constrained by inadequate infrastructure, funding limitations, insufficient technical expertise, weak policy frameworks, and low organizational preparedness. Despite these limitations, stakeholders expressed strong support for blockchainâs potential to strengthen tamper-proof authorship verification, enhance content authenticity and integrity, improve transparency through immutable audit trails, and automate copyright management through smart contracts. The study further suggests that capacity building, phased implementation strategies, open-source platforms, interdisciplinary collaboration, and institutional policy alignment are critical pathways for integrating blockchain into institutional repositories. The study concludes that blockchain-enabled DRM in Ghanaian IRs is a promising, emerging innovation and that its successful implementation depends on sustained investment in digital infrastructure, institutional reforms, technical training, and supportive regulatory frameworks.
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.
Smart contracts manage high-value digital assets, making their security a critical priority. In this work, we present a preliminary ecosystem analysis of how smart contract vulnerabilities are currently classified, disclosed, and managed across academia and industry. Our findings reveal the fragmented nature of Web3 security, characterized by a history of attempted classification schemes and a lack of proper vulnerability disclosure. We propose several hypotheses for this divergence from traditional software standards, including ideological decentralization, reputation management, and misaligned financial incentives. A case study of Uniswap illustrates these challenges, revealing inconsistent reporting and the difficulty of verifying vulnerability data. Ultimately, this work serves as a foundational step toward establishing unified methodologies for the detection, management, and disclosure of smart contract vulnerabilities.
This study presents the design and implementation of a blockchain-based decentralized portfolio management system that enables secure, immutable, and transparent storage of user records. The system is developed using Ethereum smart contracts and evaluated within a testing environment consisting of Remix IDE, Ganache, and MetaMask. The proposed architecture allows authorized actors to create records while enabling users to access and verify their data through blockchain-based identity mechanisms. Experimental results, based on gas consumption and insertion-time measurements, demonstrate that although smart contract deployment incurs relatively high initial costs, routine operations such as record insertion and retrieval remain efficient and predictable. The findings highlight the practical feasibility of the proposed system, while also revealing challenges related to scalability, cost variability, and system usability.
Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric are architecturally heterogeneousâ with Ethereum using the Ethereum Virtual Machine to execute Solidity contracts with order-execute transactions and pseudonymous ECDSA-based identity†As Fabric runs Go chaincode under an execute-order-validate enforcement modelâ with MVCC conflict detectionâ Xâ€509 certificate-based identity managementâ and an explicit key-value state APIâ smart contracts cannot be written to run on both Ethereum and Fabric without major duplication of effortâ namelyâ maintaining two separate codebasesâ conducting two separate security auditsâ and manually re-implementing complex code†This thesis aims to both design and test a Universal Intermediate Representation (UIR) for the migration of smart contract logic from Ethereum to Hyperledger Fabric in a structured, auditable and repeatable way. In the spirit of Design Science Research (DSR) (Peffers et al., 2007), this study investigates five portability barriers to the extent that they can be identified (PB-1 to PB-5) and relates them to six design requirements (R1 to R6). Based on this, two-stage prototype pipeline is created in Python, a front-end based on Solidity contracts and a back-end which generates Hyperledger Fabric Go chaincode. In three canonical case studiesâ SimpleStorageâ Escrow and SimpleTokenâ we evaluated the translation with respect to four dimensions: feature translation rateâ semantic approximation accuracyâ barrier coverage and compilation success†Out of the 14 categories of Solidity featuresâ 6 (43%) are completely abstractableâ 4 (29%) can be approximated with semantic gaps SG-1 to SG-2â and 4 (29%) are architecturally non-portable at the contract level†All three Hyperledger Fabric Go chaincodes built using the UIR approach compiled successfully with go buildâ using Go version 1â€22â€5â showing the feasibility of the approach with Go†The thesis is not about the fact that UIR is a production ready tool. The pipeline has no total automation; in the 3 case studies, the processing of function bodies was done manually in Stage 1. Also, the prototype currently only approximates 256-bit integers. The actual contribution is conceptual: It suggests a structured, auditable way to detect and overcome portability issues from Ethereum to Hyperledger Fabric. The master thesis consists of 94 pages; it contains 9 figures, 28 tables, 2 appendices, and 42 references.
The rapid proliferation of digital media necessitates resilient paradigms for managing, authenticating, and preserving static and dynamic 2D data. Since centralized repositories are vulnerable to tampering and pure blockchain storage remains economically prohibitive for high-fidelity multimedia, this comprehensive review demonstrates that a hybrid on-chain/off-chain architecture constitutes the most viable solution. By anchoring immutable metadata on robust ledgers while offloading heavy graphical payloads to distributed networks like IPFS and Arweave, this paradigm optimizes both security and cost. For static 2D formats, current research emphasizes cryptographic provenance, digital rights management, and tamper detection via perceptual hashing. Conversely, dynamic 2D formats require advanced architectural optimizations, including decentralized streaming protocols, progressive rendering, and complex temporal metadata indexing. Despite these technological advancements, widespread adoption is severely impeded by critical bottlenecks such as network scalability limits, fragmented cross-chain interoperability, and the absence of universal benchmarking datasets. To bridge the gap between experimental frameworks and enterprise integration, future research must prioritize developing interoperable metadata schemas, Layer-2 performance optimizations for high-bandwidth streaming and integrating privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives like Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Ultimately, this paper provides a foundational roadmap for architecting scalable, decentralized digital asset management ecosystems.
Context: The growing adoption of distributed and industrial-grade applications built on blockchain infrastructures has intensified the need for systematic approaches to manage the lifecycle of long-running systems, where governance, auditability, and performance constraints must coexist. Objectives: This paper presents TRUST , a lifecycle-oriented system architecture for the governed evolution and integration of smart contract based components. Methods: The architecture incorporates on-chain governance, version traceability, rollback support, and code provenance to enable accountability and observability across successive deployments in multi-stakeholder systems. A full 2 4 factorial evaluation was conducted by treating governance, versioning, provenance, and ABI handling as independent system factors and measuring their effects on latency, throughput, and gas consumption. Results: The results show that governance and provenance introduce controlled and predictable overheads, while compact ABI handling improves throughput and reduces gas consumption by more than 20%. Conclusion: These findings indicate that a lifecycle-oriented architecture can balance accountability and efficiency in governed smart contract applications.
Samukeliso Mabarani, Mohammad Saidur Rahman, Iqbal Gondal, H. M. N. Dilum Bandara
The tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has introduced new opportunities for liquidity, enabling fractional ownership of traditionally illiquid assets. Yet, current NFT fractionalization models remain static, lacking adaptive governance and real-time responsiveness required for managing the dynamic nature of RWAs. This paper presents an Adaptive NFT Fractionalization Framework with Rights Segregation that integrates modular smart contracts, oracle data, and machine learning (ML) insights to enable dynamic rights management. The framework segregates and defines distinct rights, governed through cross-layer decision-making and adaptive rights management that updates allocations based on market data and predictive analytics. Experimental results demonstrate accurate, real-time adjustments of fractional rights, consistent governance execution, and efficient gas utilization across stress and concurrency tests. The findings validate the framework's scalability, responsiveness, and cost-effectiveness, establishing it as a viable approach for adaptive, data-driven management of fractionalized RWAs.
Intellectual Property (IP) transactions play a vital role in the contemporary global economy, encompassing the exchange of intangible assets such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. These assets are fundamental drivers of innovation and economic development across diverse industries. However, conventional methods of managing IP transactions are often characterized by inefficiency, high transaction costs, lack of transparency, and frequent disputes arising from ambiguities in enforcement and contractual obligations. This study examines the potential of blockchain-based smart contracts to address these challenges by enhancing efficiency, fairness, and transparency in IP transactions. Smart contracts, which are self-executing agreements encoded in computer-readable protocols, facilitate automated execution of predetermined contractual terms without requiring intermediary intervention. The integration of blockchain technology with decentralized and secure ledger systems minimizes errors, reduces dependency on intermediaries, and mitigates disputes resulting from cumbersome and unclear procedural mechanisms in conventional IP transactions. Additionally, smart contracts streamline licensing, royalty distribution, and contract enforcement, thereby accelerating transaction processes while ensuring improved security and accountability. Blockchain decentralization further strengthens the protection of intellectual property transactions against unauthorized alterations. Smart contracts also support automated royalty allocation, enabling equitable payment distribution among creators, rights holders, and intellectual property owners. Transparency is enhanced through shared access to accurate transactional information, fostering trust among stakeholders and reducing the likelihood of legal conflicts. Despite these advantages, the adoption of smart contracts in IP transactions faces several practical and legal challenges, including regulatory recognition, enforceability across jurisdictions, compatibility with existing intellectual property frameworks, and privacy concerns associated with confidential transactional data. This article investigates how blockchain-integrated smart contracts can transform intellectual property transactions, with particular focus on improving efficiency, strengthening security, ensuring fair compensation, and promoting transparency. By examining relevant theoretical perspectives, case studies, and practical applications, the study offers insights into the broader implications of adopting blockchain technology for intellectual property management.
Syed Abrar Ahmed, Ricardo Correia Bezerra, Simon Lewerenz, Henrique Martins
The EHDS Regulation establishes patient opt-out rights for data use, yet current implementations face fragmented registries and limited tamper-proof mechanisms. In this context, opt-out refers to a patient's proactive right to object to the reuse of their health data for purposes beyond direct clinical care. We propose a distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based architecture to enhance opt-out management. Using design research and regulatory analysis of EHDS and TEHDAS, we developed a proof-of-concept leveraging permissioned DLT, smart contracts, and decentralised identifiers for an immutable registry. This architecture aligns with EHDS requirements for tamper-evident audit trails and cross-border verification. This work bridges regulatory mandates with patient-centric governance across the EU.
This paper presents a Web3-based healthcare system integrated with the Republic of Korea's MyHealthWay platform for secure and user-controlled management of personal health data. The system combines decentralized identifiers, smart contracts, distributed storage, and the HL7 FHIR standard to support decentralized authentication, access control, and interoperability. A conceptual demonstrator, HealthCube, validates feasibility by enabling privacy-preserving health data processing through computation on encrypted data without exposing original information.
Yusuf Tojiri, Maulana Arif Komara, Alfri Adiwijaya, Nasrul Hidayat · 6 authors
This study proposes an IPFS-based system for automatic digital intellectual property registration within Web3 platform environments. The rapid development of digital technology has encouraged the transformation of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection from manual systems to more secure and efficient digital mechanisms. However, current IPR registration processes remain centralized, slow, and vulnerable to data tampering. Based on this issue, this study aims to design and test an automatic IPR registration system using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as a decentralized storage solution. This research employs a software engineering method with a prototyping approach that includes the design of a user interface, integration of the IPFS API, implementation of an automatic hash-generation system, metadata storage in a database, and issuance of digital certificates. Testing results show that the system can automatically register digital works, generate unique and consistent file hashes, upload files to IPFS with an average upload time of less than two seconds, and provide global accessibility through a distributed network. In addition, the system is capable of validating the authenticity of a work by matching the hash and metadata listed in the digital certificate. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the use of IPFS in digital IPR registration systems is effective in enhancing security, efficiency, and transparency, although further development is required in relation to integration with national legal frameworks and formal legal recognition.
Dr. Soumya M Anakal, Sharanabasava, Vinayak S Chakki
The global creator economy exceeds $100 billion but remains dominated by platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, and Patreon. These platforms control distribution and monetization, charging high fees, delaying payments, and exercising censorship. To address these issues, a decentralized Web3 Music and Content Monetization Platform is proposed. The system uses blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized storage, and crypto wallets to enable creators to upload, mint, and sell their digital content directly to audiences. Each asset is stored on the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) and represented on the Polygon blockchain as an ERC-721 token. Consumers purchase NFTs via MetaMask, and smart contracts automatically transfer payments to creators, enforcing royalties without intermediaries. A prototype demonstrates NFT minting, wallet-based payments, and content access control, validating the technical feasibility of the approach. Compared with centralized systems, the proposed platform offers instant payments, transparent ownership, and censorship resistance, aligning with similar advancements in decentralized music and publishing platforms. Future work includes exploring multi-chain support, decentralized governance through DAOs, and integrating metaverse applications.
A novel blockchain-based smart contract framework is proposed and designed to mitigate financial product fraud by enhancing transparency, auditability, and trust in advisory processes. The framework introduces a unique dual-contract architecture that combines product and authorization smart contracts, along with a challenge-response verification protocol that ensures both product authenticity and advisor legitimacy. The system is implemented and tested on the Ethereum blockchain, demonstrating operational feasibility through real-world transaction simulations and a corresponding gas cost analysis. By leveraging immutability, the framework preserves data integrity, while cryptographic signatures enable privacy protection without exposing sensitive data on-chain. It is designed to support multi-institutional environments, allowing various financial institutions to issue products and authorize advisors under a unified, fraud-resistant platform. Experimental results confirm the systemâs effectiveness in preventing common fraud scenarios, while maintaining low transaction costs and high security.
Sahri Ramadan, Sawali Wahyu, Budi Tjahjono, Riya Widayanti
The increasing adoption of electronic certificates in academic and professional environments raises critical challenges related to authenticity, data integrity, and verification reliability. Conventional certificate management systems commonly rely on centralized architectures and manual validation procedures, which are vulnerable to manipulation, duplication, and single points of failure (SPoF). This study proposes a blockchain-based electronic certificate verification system implemented on a private Hyperledger Fabric network using smart contracts. The system records certificate verification metadata on a distributed ledger to ensure integrity and traceability while maintaining storage efficiency. Smart contracts automate the issuance and validation lifecycle, enabling transparent and tamper-resistant certificate management. The verification process is conducted by comparing document authentication data with records stored on the blockchain. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed system can accurately identify document alterations and consistently distinguish between valid and invalid certificates. The results indicate that the integration of blockchain and smart contracts as an active validation mechanism enhances transparency, reduces dependence on centralized authorities, and improves trust in mobile-based digital credential systems. Therefore, the proposed approach provides a secure and reliable framework for electronic certificate verification in academic environments.
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and IoT environment require decentralized platforms that can support a high number of transactions and provide high security and privacy assurance. This study suggests a reputation-aware, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) based, dynamically sharded smart contract system that is able to process scalable and privacy-preserving transactions. The suggested architecture highly incorporates dynamic sharding, ZKP-based verification, decentralized smart contracts and reputation-based selection of leaders to jump over the scalability, trusting and performance limitations of traditional blockchain systems. There are also extensive experimental assessments that occur within 100-1000 transactions per second (tps) and batch sizes of 10, 30, 50, and 100. Findings indicate that the given framework demonstrates the ability to scale throughput linearly to about 1000 tps, and Enhanced Fabric and Ethereum reach throughput saturation at 140-150 and 15-20 tps, respectively. The proposed system has an average latency of less than 500 ms at an arrival rate of 1000 tps whereas at the same rate, baseline approaches have a latency of over 8000 ms with larger batch sizes. The success rate of the transaction is always above 97, which is due to the isolation of reputation and adaptive scheduling of shards. Moreover, the framework decreases 40-50% and 45-50% the computation overhead and the cost of communication respectively, over heavyweight baseline schemes. These results show that the synergistic implementation of ZKP, dynamic sharding, decentralized smart contracts, and reputation-aware control are a scalable solution with high throughput IoT and IoV applications that is efficient and secure.
Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm in modern software engineering, combining the reach of the web with the capabilities of native applications. Simulta- neously, decentralized systemsâanchored by blockchain technology, distributed ledger frameworks, and peer-to-peer networking protocolsâare reshaping trust architectures across industries ranging from finance and healthcare to supply chain and digital identity. Despite the clear synergies between these two technological pillars, the intersection of PWAs and decentralized systems remains relatively underexplored in the academic literature. This survey addresses that gap by systematically reviewing and analyzing the convergence of PWA design principles with decentralized infrastructure paradigms. We examine how service workers, Web App Manifests, push notifications, and IndexedDB offline storage can be effectively integrated with blockchain nodes, smart contracts, IPFS-based content stor- age, and decentralized identity (DID) frameworks to produce resilient, censorship-resistant, and user- centric applications. We survey thirteen seminal works spanning cross-platform application devel- opment, blockchain architecture, decentralized identity management, IoT integration, and distributed application (DApp) design. Our analysis reveals recurring challenges including transaction latency, key management complexity, offline consistency under Byzantine fault conditions, and the tension between decentralization purity and user experience expectations. We further synthesize findings through a structured comparative analysis across six dimensions: focus area, PWA feature utilization, blockchain integration depth, reported performance metrics, and identified limitations. Based on this synthesis, we identify open research directions and propose guidelines for practitioners seeking to build production-grade PWA-based DApp frontends. This survey contributes a consolidated reference for researchers and engineers working at the intersection of web engineering and decentralized computing.
The growth of digital music streaming platforms has changed the way music is distributed and accessed across the world. These platforms make music easily available to listeners the royalty distribution process still faces several challenges. Limited transparency, delayed payments, and the involvement of multiple intermediaries often reduce efficiency and affect the earnings received by artists. This work shows a blockchain-based framework for music royalty distribution. The given system combines Ethereum smart contracts, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) to support secure ownership management and automated royalty payments. Smart contracts execute royalty transactions based on predefined conditions, while NFTs represent ownership of digital music files. IPFS is used for decentralized storage to maintain secure and tamper resistant media files. By reducing dependency on central authorities, the framework makes royalty transactions easier to track and supports fair revenue distribution for artists. The obtained results show fast royalty processing and improved revenue sharing compared with old royalty management systems [18].
The task of access control in distributed information systems utilizing smart contracts is considered. A concise review of the main access control approaches â mandatory, role-based, and discretionary â is presented, along with their key features and limitations. Particular attention is paid to the access control approach based on mandatory access control (MAC). Known access control approaches applied in both traditional non-distributed and distributed information systems utilizing smart contracts are analyzed. The peculiarities of these distributed information systems that influence access control decisions are identified. Based on these peculiarities, the drawbacks of the discretionary and role-based approaches are determined, and the mandatory approach is proposed. To formalize the approach, a mathematical description of MAC for smart contracts is provided. To demonstrate the concept, several examples of implementing this mathematical description are presented in the form of Solidity code fragments: a direct naive implementation, an implementation using modifiers, and an implementation based on a dedicated access manager contract. The code is described, its main idea is explained, and possible directions for further scaling of these code fragments are outlined. Based on the analysis of the proposed applications, the modifier-based implementation of MAC is identified as the most efficient in terms of computational resources, while the access manager approach is considered the most scalable. The latter approach is proposed for complex distributed systems involving multiple smart contracts. The results of the experimental study are presented to compare the performance indicators of the proposed access control implementations with known implementations. Prospects for further research aimed at improving access control in distributed information systems utilizing smart contracts are identified.
NFTs, kurz fĂŒr Non-Fungible Tokens, sind digitale Zertifikate auf einer Blockchain, einer unverĂ€nderlichen Datenbank. Sie zeigen, wem ein digitales Objekt gehört, beispielsweise eine Grafik, Audio-Dateien, In-Game-Items oder Tweets. Anders als klassische Dateien, die beliebig kopiert werden können, dienen NFTs als Eigentumsnachweis. Die eigentliche Datei liegt meist auf externen Servern. NFTs sind Teil der Vision des Web3, eines dezentralen Internets, in dem Nutzer*innen ĂŒber Inhalte, Besitz und digitale IdentitĂ€ten selbst bestimmen sollen. Das Konzept eröffnet neue Möglichkeiten in virtuellen Welten, Spielen und Community-Projekten, stöĂt aber an Grenzen, weil Plattformen, Wallets und Anbieter letztlich entscheiden, wer teilnehmen darf. Bekannt wurden NFTs ab 2020 im Kunst- und Sammlermarkt, beispielsweise Beeples EveryÂdays oder Sammlungen wie CryptoPunks. In Games und virtuellen Welten wie Axie Infinity oder Decentraland lassen sich Besitzrechte, Handelsmechanismen und Community-Dynamiken praktisch nachvollziehen. Nach dem anfĂ€nglichen Boom sank ab 2023 der Wert vieler NFTs, Plattformen verschwanden und technische wie rechtliche Fragen blieben offen. FĂŒr die MedienpĂ€dagogik bieten NFTs zahlreiche Ansatzpunkte: FachkrĂ€fte können mit Lernenden ĂŒber digitale Besitzformen, Wertzuschreibung, Marktmechanismen und soziale Dynamiken diskutieren. Eigene Experimente â Tokens erstellen, Sammlungen aufbauen, Spielobjekte gestalten â machen Logik, FOMO-Effekte und Machtstrukturen erfahrbar. Gleichzeitig lassen sich Nachhaltigkeit, langfristige VerfĂŒgbarkeit von Daten und ZugangshĂŒrden kritisch reflektieren. NFTs bieten so einen Einstieg, um digitale Wertlogiken, Teilhabe und Verantwortung im Web3 zu hinterfragen.