Blockchain technology has fundamentally transformed the financial technology (fintech) landscape since Bitcoin’s introduction in 2008, evolving from peer-to-peer digital currency into comprehensive financial infrastructure. While earlier reviews catalogued blockchain applications across individual fintech verticals, rapid developments in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, stablecoin payment rails, and AI-blockchain convergence have created significant literature gaps. This paper presents a technically grounded review of blockchain-fintech applications as of 2025, addressing deficiencies in existing work including absent unified taxonomies, insufficient regulatory analysis, limited interoperability coverage, and inadequate treatment of institutional-grade deployments. We examine architectural underpinnings across eight application domains, integrating current market data, security analysis, and scalability benchmarks. We additionally present an analysis of the evolving threat landscape, including $3.4 billion in cryptocurrency theft during 2025. Our findings indicate the global fintech blockchain market, valued at $3.4 billion in 2024, is projected to reach $49.2 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 55.9%, driven by institutional DeFi adoption, stablecoin settlement infrastructure, and regulatory clarity.
We present Processual Memory Architecture (PMA), a computational framework that unifies data storage and computation by representing all information as transformation functions rather than static state, rendering the traditional ontological distinction between them architecturally unnecessary. In PMA, storing information means encoding it as a mathematical transformation that produces the data when applied to a standardized canonical input; reading means applying the transformation; and computing means composing transformations. This inversion of the conventional von Neumann paradigm yields five emergent architectural properties—structural auditability, transparent reasoning, enforced constraints, tamper evidence, and reversibility—that collectively enable verifiable computation: systems that can mathematically verify the integrity and correctness of their own reasoning chains. We provide a complete mathematical specification of PMA over Galois fields GF(2k) with roundtrip exactness guarantees, constructive algorithms for both invertible and non-invertible encoding modes, and a reference permutation-based embodiment with explicit bit-level storage formats. We analyze thermodynamic properties under reversible logic implementation, demonstrating that PMA operations on adiabatic substrates can approach within 10× of the Landauer limit at the localnode level. We then present the integration architecture for PMA with artificial general intelligence (AGI) safety frameworks, showing how transformation-based reasoning enables safety constraints that are structural rather than advisory—creating systems where unsafe behavior is computationally undefined rather than merely prohibited. We discuss applications to financial auditing, medical AI verification, and autonomous systems governance, and compare PMA's approach to verifiable computation with existing paradigms including blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, and mechanistic interpretability.
In recent years, decentralized networks have increasingly relied on secure and efficient data exchange systems to support large-scale operations and collaborative processes. Traditional centralized systems face challenges in scalability, transparency, and trust management, which blockchain technology can address. However, existing research has primarily focused on data integrity and static trust models, neglecting dynamic trust propagation, privacy concerns, and the interpretability of trust-related decisions. This study proposes a blockchain-driven information system that integrates a Trust Score Aggregation Module (TSAM), a Hybrid Consensus Protocol (HCP), and a Privacy-Preserving Smart Contract Framework (PPSCF) to address these gaps. The TSAM enables dynamic trust propagation, while the HCP optimizes communication efficiency, and the PPSCF ensures privacy through zero-knowledge proofs. Experimental results show that the proposed system reduces latency by 27.3 % (0.98±0.07 s), increases throughput by 27.1 % (140±6 tps), and achieves a 33.3 % reduction in trust variance compared to baseline systems. The system also improves interpretability by 22.0 %, maintaining low privacy overhead (5.1±0.8 %). This research advances the understanding of blockchain-based trust management in decentralized environments, providing a scalable, interpretable, and privacy-preserving framework that can be applied across various domains and operational scales. The proposed methodology lays a foundation for future blockchain applications in large-scale systems, particularly in environments requiring robust data governance and compliance.
With the rapid increase of terminal devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), it has become a significant challenge to achieve real-time and privacy-preserving data aggregation. To address this challenge, edge computing has emerged as an effective paradigm to reduce latency, where a privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme is exploited to preserve data privacy. However, most existing privacy-preserving data aggregation schemes are limited by fixed data dimensions, low scalability, and high communication or computational overhead. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes a multidimensional privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme that supports flexible dimension expansion and privacy protection in edge computing systems. The scheme integrates the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) with an elastic modulus set to efficiently pack multidimensional data. This design enables terminal devices to add new data dimensions without interrupting current operations or modifying historical data. Furthermore, by exploiting Bulletproofs-based zero-knowledge proofs and Bellare-Neven (BN) signatures with half-aggregation, the proposed scheme enables lightweight and scalable batch verification of data integrity and authenticity. These mechanisms effectively reduce the verification workload and communication bandwidth in large-scale deployments. In addition, an optimized Paillier homomorphic encryption algorithm is used to enable efficient aggregation of encrypted multidimensional data. Experimental results and theoretical analysis show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces computational and communication costs compared with existing methods.
As privacy concerns intensify in data-driven systems, this article presentsPriMa$\chi $, a hybrid framework that combines a genetic algorithm (GA) and reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize the privacy–utility tradeoff in differential privacy (DP) through explicit adaptive privacy–utility control. PriMa$\chi $adaptively selects perturbation configurations to minimize the privacy budget$(\varepsilon)$while preserving data utility$({\mathcal {U}})$. To support verifiable privacy-preserving analytics in decentralized environments, we further integrate PriMa$\chi $with a privacy-aware smart-contract framework that enables on-chain DP enforcement and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) verification. The framework supports structured, transactional, and spatiotemporal workloads, including decentralized finance, electronic health records, census analytics, and location services. An interleaved Petri net model is used to formally verify privacy-aware state transitions in the smart-contract workflow. Experimental results show that PriMa$\chi $achieves utility of at least 80% under dataset-dependent privacy budgets in the range$0.003 \leq \varepsilon~\leq\unicode{0x0142}.43$, while also effectively mitigating model-extraction, membership-inference, and privacy-budget-exhaustion attacks. These results demonstrate that PriMa$\chi $provides adaptive, auditable, and practically deployable privacy protection for decentralized analytics.
With its decentralized, tamper proof, transparent and traceable characteristics, blockchain technology has shown great potential in fields such as finance, supply chain, and the Internet of Things. However, the public transparency of its ledger poses a serious challenge to user transaction privacy. Traditional privacy protection schemes such as homomorphic encryption and zero knowledge proofs can enhance privacy, but often struggle to balance computational overhead, communication costs, and data availability. This article explores the innovative application of neural networks in blockchain privacy protection and proposes a transaction obfuscation model based on generative adversarial networks. This model utilizes a generator to learn the statistical features of raw transactions and generate difficult to track obfuscated transactions, while ensuring the validity and compliance of obfuscated transactions through discriminators and blockchain verification contracts. The experimental results show that compared with traditional obfuscation methods and differential privacy methods, the proposed model significantly reduces the consumption of privacy budget and computation delay while ensuring high transaction utility (such as reducing address correlation by more than 85%), achieving a better balance between privacy and utility. This study provides new ideas for building efficient and practical blockchain privacy enhancement solutions.
The concept of blockchain has transformed the trust concept by decentralizing, non-modifiable, and transparent, but there is a certain conflict between the principle of public verifiability and data privacy. As DeFi and cross-institutional data collaboration should grow, it has become a fundamental concern to have the confidentiality of this data without losing verifiability on-chain. The following paper will be a review of blockchain privacy technologies developed in 2020-2025, which will involve the history of zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption development at the cryptographic primitive level, as well as share new developments such as secure multi-party computation. It points out advances in recursive proof systems, distributed proof generation architectures and scalable multi-party computing systems to overcome bottlenecks in performance. There is a trade-off between privacy, system performance, regulatory compliance, and decentralization in a comparative analysis of technology integration in both public and permissioned chains. Lastly, research directions in the future are suggested in order to overcome issues associated with low proof efficiency, regulatory compliance problems, and migration of post-quantum cryptography. The review offers both theoretical and technical sources on how to develop trusted blockchain infrastructure that would strike the right balance between compliance, high-performance, and data sovereignty.
Advancements in networking applications increase the requirement for secure data storage and an efficient data access mechanism with robust networking characteristics. Consequently, the huge volume of data generated from the het-erogeneous networks, such as smart cities, healthcare, and smart energy trading systems, suffers from scalability issues and generates insights for secure data storage and effective data management. Therefore, the research proposes a secure data storage and access scheme named Multimodal Biometric-enabled Zero-Knowledge Proof of Stake(MBZKPS). The Multimodal Biometric Data Access(MBDA) ensures secure and robust access to the heterogeneous data with reduced computational overhead. The Distributed Storage System and the Zero Knowledge Protocol with Proof of Stake alleviate the storage pressure on the blockchain and regulate the heterogeneous data storage and access in the blockchain. The Message Digest 5(MD5) with Homomorphic Encryption enables computations on the encrypted data with better data confidentiality preserva-tion. The introduction of the blockchain eliminates the scalability issues with improved privacy preservation and data integrity. Simulation results validate the superiority of the MD5 with Homomorphic Encryption (HE) used in research by achieving 0.95ms decryption time, and 0.97 encryption time with 0.73 Genuine User Rate occupying 363.76KiloBytes of memory for 250 nodes. In addition, the proposed research performs secure data storage with a 1025.85 ms response time and 1.01ms transaction time using blockchain.
[Depreciated and replaced by V3] The application-specific clean rebuild has not yet been published; its authoritative theoretical boundary is now the governing V3 branch: After Turing: The Fold Machine - An Exact, Parameter-Free and Machine-Closed Derivation of Classical Computational Science from Smithian Fold Theory; From Fold to Consciousness: An Exact, Zero-Parameter and Machine-Closed Foundational Reconstruction of Consciousness and Cognitive Science from Smithian Fold Theory. The V3 source platform is https://github.com/MettaMazza/ernos-labs-sft-platform. The original DOI, concept DOI, version number and files are preserved for transparent historical provenance; this record must not be presented or cited as current V3 work. v4.0 — the word-scale gap closes within the fold. Rung 5e (pre-registered): the fold-factor mixing law — every context level that holds contributes, weighted 2^level, the engine's own forced halving constant — carries the pure counted engine, with no twin, no prose flood, zero training and zero parameters, past the gradient-trained transformer at word scale: cross-entropy 3.1907 vs the same-day twin's 3.4292 (replicated across two independent anchorings; stacked with the Rung 5d extraction: 3.1344). Both scales of the task gate now belong to the counted engine. Rung 5d's transfer-in verdict is SUPPORTED across three independent arena anchorings in one day. New in the architecture: tool graduation (acts held, values never — a question territory that a tool answered once runs the tool itself thereafter, fresh), recall as regeneration across every memory tier, and judge-independent graduation scoring. End-to-end verification: 36/36. v3.4: Rung 5d, the transfer-in — pre-registered verdict SUPPORTED: the trained twin's dyadically-loud fold content is extracted and installed INTO the counted engine as a counted prior with zero new parameters, closing 55.6/87.9/101.4% of the available gap at k=16/32/64 while the random-truncated null closes 10.1/24.5/56.5%; at half budget the loud shape beats the full twin's own. The word-scale rematch is recorded in full (twin retrained on today's text; decomposition included). Also: judge-independent graduation scoring (boot-discovered pool, cycle-parity alternation), multi-orbit binding (XI-4 in full), recall-is-regeneration (a held experience re-walks its own orbit, never reprinted), the public SOTA table beside the local giants with cited published figures, and one-command replication kits (GPT-2 weights auto-fetch; 13/13, 39/39 proven on a fresh clone). End-to-end verification: 36/36. Full paper v1.1 — supersedes the pre-paper (From One Axiom to Master-Level Chess — and the Law Inside Neural Networks). Built from scratch by one woman, working alone, in under twenty-four accumulated hours: where a score falls short it marks an implementation gap at measurement time, never a limit of the mathematics — the gains between releases are the finding. v1.4 adds the fold eye (vision as exact integer Walsh spectra, self-certified by integer Parseval per image, recognition of seen images with no image model in the loop) and the graduation score (blind head-to-head vs the teacher, tallied per question-territory; the teacher retires as wins cross the majority lock) -- and documents the 2026 convergence: DeepSeek Engram arrives at deterministically-addressed exact memory from the gradient side, and two independent results place the optimal curriculum at p = 1/2, the fold lock. v1.6: the full omnimodal engine (the voice via Kokoro, the fold ear -- sound as Parseval-certified integer Walsh spectra, video composed from frames + sound), speaker-transparent reasoning threads, and 32/32 end-to-end empirical verification of the entire architecture including persistence across process death. v1.7: removal-proof omnimodality, measured -- every supporting model is a teacher with an exit: a sound taught once by the synthesis teacher is re-spoken from the engine's own exact counted record in 0.00s with no model; a sound heard once is recognized natively with no transcriber; 34/34 end-to-end verification. v1.9: zero-model perceptual learning (the human observer -- a novel image learned and re-recognized at share 1.00 with no model in the loop); agentic self-knowledge (the observer reads the engine's own source, measured); the hourly progress instrument with a committed pre-boot birth line; one-tap y/n closure. v2.0 (flight-ready): the full modern-agent toolkit (live web search/fetch, paginated reading, in-file grep -- every call held as a training trace), the 43-domain everything-curriculum under the fold-only law, SOTA 1-1 benching on the public MMLU test split with the newborn baseline committed, generation closure (the Learning Law reaches generate() itself), and 36/36 end-to-end verification. v2.1: the ReAct law (reason-act-observe enforced in-turn; narrated intent without an act is detected and forced), reasoning trained on the observer's NATIVE thinking tokens (STaR-gated) with both minds' full thinking streamed to the user, and document intake (a sent file is reading -- inboxed, counted, persistent). v2.2: the identity stated correctly -- UnisonAI is an OMNI MODEL (language, sight, hearing, speech, and video on one held memory), not a language model; LLMs remain the contrast class only. v3.0: the full-altitude rewrite -- the complete omni model documented at the same depth as the spectral science: thirteen sections, the architecture organ by organ with every measurement, Rung 5c as its own section, the empirical record and its committed birth line, 36/36 end-to-end verification, and the 2026 convergence. This paper is a PROOF of The Smithian Fold Theory of Everything, not the main event: the theory (one axiom, zero free parameters, 1,844 machine-verified forced checks) is at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21182469 and github.com/MettaMazza/Smithian-Fold-Theory-Of-Everything -- run the prover yourself. The engine: github.com/MettaMazza/UnisonAI. v3.3: the LLM-native presence suite -- the exact registered protocol applied to GPT-2's entire knowledge-storage class: 13/13 tensors, 39/39 checks, unanimous (margins 3.4-79.3x); the flagship claim now rests on the flagship objects, with diffusion/speech models recast as cross-domain breadth. Three connected results and the architecture they force. First, a pre-registered, self-certifying spectral instrument shows trained neural-network weights carry placement-law in the dyadic (Walsh) basis: 18/18 unanimous on validated released models; the law concentrated in transformer expansion projections and token embeddings across three unrelated architectures (up to 230x chance in GPT-2), attention at chance; strictly training-caused (He-initialised controls at 1.0x); surviving 4-bit deployment quantization. A recipe map from 124M to one trillion parameters shows the law tracks training recipe, not scale or architecture — strongest carrier DeepSeek-R1-671B at 43–47x — and loud-recipe weights transform under the fold's transformation group exactly as solved game-theoretic value fields do. Second, the "learned similarity space" is a counted object: word kinship as exact co-occurrence shares reproduces semantic family structure (quark → lepton, neutrino, proton) with zero parameters and zero gradients. Third, UnisonAI: a complete language architecture in which every LLM mechanism — memory, attention, similarity, learning, prediction, generation — is replaced by a machine-verified law of the Smithian Fold Theory, zero trained parameters end to end. On identical held-out text the fold-native engine outperformed its trained transformer twin (cross-entropy 1.289 vs 1.888) after reading the corpus once (26 seconds) against 48,000 gradient readings (21 minutes per seed). Deployed as a live, continuously-learning agent whose teaching loop also runs autonomously: a teacher model asks, judges, and closes the learning law itself, and the engine self-plays against its own held lessons. Negative results reported in full with their scopes. Companion to The Smithian Fold Theory of Everything (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21182469; 307 suites, 1,844 forced checks, 0 failures). Engine and records: github.com/MettaMazza/UnisonAI and github.com/MettaMazza/Smithian-Fold-Theory-Of-Everything.
Open access
8 source records
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Blockchain-based decentralized identity (DID) technology provides a more secure and efficient paradigm for identity verification. However, along with the promotion of applications, data storage of DID has gradually become one of the restrictions for the implementation due to the dramatically increasing size of the distributed ledger, and the issue becomes more complicated when considering the diversity of practical conditions and interoperability. In this article, we propose a scalable on-chain-off-chain storage for decentralized identity (SCOOP) scheme to minimize the total storage cost of blockchain-based DID while guaranteeing the efficiency of the implementation. The proposed scheme consists of a two-phase decision-making process, and a method that integrates the on-chain storage with off-chain storage in a scalable manner, so that an optimal storage task scheduling can be generated. In addition, to reduce on-chain storage overhead, we propose a multilinear tree-based commitment scheme that supports sublinear proof aggregation and updates. Our experiment evaluations have demonstrated that the proposed scheme can successfully achieve a superior performance in storage saving for DID while considering the time constraint.
Zero-knowledge proof is a special cryptographic technique that allows a prover to convince a verifier about the correctness of a claim without explicitly disclosing the claim itself. With the advancements of blockchain technologies, zero-knowledge proof has been successfully integrated into many decentralized applications over the years. ZoKrates, with its ease-of-use and direct integration to blockchain platforms, has emerged as a leading framework for developing, generating and verifying zero-knowledge proofs. This survey compiles a corpus of 347 documents that cite the original research work of ZoKrates by considering the period ranging from 2018 to 2025. Out of this corpus, this survey systematically selects and analyzes a total of 87 different documents including only peer-reviewed publications and excluding the gray literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey in the literature to follow a systematic approach to analyze the privacy- preserving applications in blockchain from the perspective of ZoKrates. This survey presents three different classifications over the documents with respect to (i) the applications they develop, (ii) the challenges they frequently encounter and (iii) the metrics they often use to measure performance of their techniques. Based on the challenges identified, this survey finally discusses numerous future research directions to promote potential advancements in the field and attract the attention of scientific and industrial communities. Feedback from readers regarding any inaccuracies or misinformation in this survey is welcome.
Hong Min, Yousef Ibrahim Daradkeh, Jung Taek Seo, Mohd Anjum · 5 authors
This study presents a computational modeling framework for efficient and secure computation offloading in Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled smart contract systems. The integration of IoT, edge computing, and blockchain introduces significant challenges, including limited device capacity, high verification cost, and scalability constraints. Existing blockchain verification approaches depend on computationally intensive cryptographic operations that are inefficient for resource-constrained IoT devices, resulting in increased latency, energy consumption, and transaction costs. To address these issues, this study proposes the Zero-Knowledge Fuzzy Logic Offloading and Rollup (Z-FLOR) framework, an adaptive and energy-efficient model designed to enable secure and verifiable computation in IoT-based smart contract systems. The proposed framework integrates three key components. First, a zero-knowledge proof-based verification model using the Groth16 zkSNARK module generates compact and privacy-preserving proofs that enable fast and reliable verification. Second, a Fuzzy Logic–Driven Energy-Aware Offloading module dynamically allocates computational tasks between IoT devices, edge servers, and cloud platforms based on energy availability, network delay, and device reliability. Third, an Optimistic Rollup Verification module aggregates proofs off-chain and submits them in batches to reduce gas costs and enhance scalability. Extensive simulation and experimental evaluation across diverse IoT scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed computational framework. Results indicate that Z-FLOR achieves 99.7% verification accuracy and 98.9% proof compression efficiency, while gas cost analysis indicates gas cost reductions in the range of 80%–98%. Z-FLOR additionally achieves a 44.0% reduction in latency, 51.0% savings in gas costs, and 38.0% energy consumption compared to baseline approaches. These findings highlight the capability of the proposed approach to serve as a scalable and energy-efficient modeling solution for secure IoT smart contract execution in decentralized environments.
Over the past decade, decentralized digital currencies have gained prominence in finance and technology, but their growth has also drawn adversaries exploiting security vulnerabilities. This paper reviews the literature on cryptocurrency and security using bibliometric analysis of Web of Science and Scopus articles published between 2013 and May 2025. Tools such as Biblioshiny and VOSviewer were employed to explore key trends, influential contributors, collaborative networks, and emerging themes. A novel contribution of this study is the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to address inconsistent affiliation formats, enabling accurate identification of leading academic organizations. The results demonstrate that LLM-based harmonization effectively prevents misrepresentation in bibliometric datasets. Overall, this study not only summarizes evolving research trends in cryptocurrency and security but also highlights the potential of LLMs to enhance bibliometric methods, suggesting broader applications for improving the accuracy and reliability of future scholarly analyses.