Blockchain Papers

Douglas J. Cumming, Niclas Dombrowski, Wolfgang Drobetz, Paul P. Momtaz

No abstract is available for this record.

Tim Schloesser, Karsten Schulz

No abstract is available for this record.

Ilhami Akkum, N.Enver Ulger, Mustafa Kurt

Purpose-Cost considereations arising from risks specific to urban transformation make them difficult to be financed with conventional methods. Real estate investment funds structured in accordance with Turkish Capital Markets Board legislation cannot invest in private sector urban transformation projects. On the other hand, the Blockchain technology enables efficiently distributed trust systems when compared with the central ledger structures. The purpose of this study is to propose a crowdfunding and Blockchain-based, innovative but applicable real estate venture capital investment fund model through smart contracts, as a solution to conventional financing problems arising from the development risks of urban transformation projects. Methodology-The study employs desktop research, field observations and deductions methodology. Findings-The analysis reveals that there is a need for decentralized finance need for urban transformation projects. Conclusion-In this study, which examines the risks in urban transformation projects, risk management, financial support to be used in urban transformation projects and Blockchain-based tools, it was concluded that there are a lot of uncertainties, therefore there are risks. Accordingly, a financing model is proposed for solving valuation and financing problems faced by entrepreneurs in urban transformation projects.

Seyed Mojtaba Hosseini Bamakan, Nasim Nezhadsistani, Omid Bodaghi, Qiang Qu

<title>Abstract</title> With the explosive development of decentralized finance (DeFi), we witness a phenomenal growth in tokenization of all kinds of assets, including equity, funds, debt, and real estate. By taking advantage of blockchain technology, digital assets are broadly grouped into fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFT). Here non-fungible tokens refer to those with unique and non-substitutable properties. Although the application of NFT is currently limited to digital fantasy artwork, games, collectible, etc., due to its unique capabilities, protocols, and platforms, they could be utilized in more practical issues. The main objective of this paper is to examine the requirements of presenting intellectual property assets, specifically patents, as NFTs. Hence, we offer a layered conceptual NFT-based patent framework with a comprehensive discussion on each layer, including storage, decentralized authentication, decentralized verification, Blockchain, and application layer. Furthermore, a series of open challenges about NFT-based patents and the possible future directions are highlighted. The proposed framework provides fundamental elements and guidance for businesses in taking advantage of NFTs in real-world problems such as grant patents, funding, biotechnology, event ticketing, and so forth.

Isaac Kayode Oyegbade, Abbey Ngochindo Igwe, Onyeka Chrisanctus Ofodile, Chima Azubuike

Emerging markets face unique financial challenges, including economic volatility, regulatory gaps, and limited access to financial services. This review explores innovative financial planning and governance models tailored to address these issues, drawing insights from startups and banking audits. It highlights how fintech-driven startups leverage advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and big data analytics, to develop inclusive financial solutions. These technologies enable predictive modeling, decentralized finance (DeFi) frameworks, and smart contracts, enhancing transparency, scalability, and efficiency. The analysis also examines governance models influenced by banking audits, emphasizing the role of audits in identifying compliance gaps and strengthening risk management frameworks. Through detailed case studies, the review demonstrates how startups and established financial institutions collaborate to implement hybrid governance systems that balance agility with regulatory compliance. Key findings reveal that fintech innovations improve financial accessibility, while audits provide a foundation for refining governance practices to mitigate risks and ensure accountability. Policy and regulatory implications are discussed, focusing on the need for adaptive frameworks that support innovation while safeguarding financial systems. Recommendations include promoting regulatory sandboxes for testing new technologies, enhancing cross-border cooperation, and incorporating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles into financial strategies. The review concludes that emerging markets can achieve sustainable economic growth by integrating technology-driven financial planning with robust governance structures. It underscores the transformative potential of startups and banking audits in reshaping financial ecosystems, reducing inequality, and fostering long-term stability. Future research should explore the scalability of these models and the evolving role of decentralized finance in addressing global financial challenges.

Ron van der Meyden, Michael J. Maher

This paper proposes an architecture for implementing Y Combinator's Simple Agreements for Future Equity (SAFEs), a class of financial instruments used in funding startups, as smart contracts. We describe design patterns used and the way that aspects of the application motivate the structure of the architecture.

Brian L. Frye

Something is happening and we don’t know what it is. Suddenly last summer, the internet went nuts for “non-fungible tokens” or “NFTs.” In a matter of months, NFT sales swelled from a sleepy slough of the blockchain to a thundering cataract that shows no sign of slaking. Special NFTs sell for millions of dollars, and some are even securitized. It’s a big business that’s only getting bigger. But no one seems to know why. Objectively, NFTs are useless, meaningless, and worthless. So why are people willing to pay millions of dollars for them, even begging for the opportunity? Maybe it doesn’t matter. If themarket says NFTs are valuable, who are we to doubt it? Still, I’m curious. Why are people buying NFTs, and what accounts for their value?

Ugur Halden, Ümit Cali, Marthe Fogstad Dynge, Joseph Stekli · 5 authors

Advancements in material science and production technologies of solar photovoltaics (PV) system components, have obvious impacts in terms of Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) reductions over time. Beside such technologies in physical sciences, digitalization technologies have increasingly positive impacts on the cost efficient operation and investment planning of the solar energy investments and keep the current cost decline trajectory for the PV industry. One option to achieve this may be through digital financial innovations such as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) based crowdfunding for project finance. This option would enable multiple small investors to offer loans with lower interest rates and longer debt tenors than traditional financiers, such as banks, while increasing the acceptable debt fraction for a project due to the higher risk tolerance of individual investors coupled with the risk reduction that this innovation could allow. This new aspect of the digital partial ownership of the energy projects is demonstrated using a functional DLT-based crowdfunding mechanism. Furthermore, impacts of the proposed approach is demonstrated by calculating the LCOE values for the European countries by comparing with the traditional investment options. According to the findings of this study digitalization technologies especially DLT has positive impact in terms of reducing the financial costs and also LCOE values of solar energy projects. Additionally, these estimated cost values are used for analyzing the grid parity of PV systems in each assessed country. This article presents a digitization based methodology that has a high potential to accelerate the Digital Green Shift in future.

Ryan Clements

Canadian securities regulators recently advanced a novel jurisdictional claim over crypto-asset trading platforms (CTPs) that trade Bitcoin and other decentralized commodity crypto-assets (DCAs) which are not securities or derivatives on their own. The regulator asserted that a platform user’s “contractual right” to delayed delivery of a DCA creates either a security or a derivative - a position that no other international securities regulator has yet taken. This jurisdictional claim is a positive development in the evolution of crypto-asset regulation in Canada, but it is also incomplete. Third-party intermediaries, and custodial services, are a centralized point of risk transmission and investor transaction volume. As such, the regulator’s measures will bring certainty, stability, and credibility to a historically vulnerable segment of an industry surging in investor interest. Nevertheless, jurisdictional uncertainties, regulatory gaps and standards deficits remain in crypto assets, which could lead to investor harm and financial system instability. This article illustrates numerous crypto regulatory uncertainties including intermediated blockchain proof of stake validation rewards (crypto staking); decentralized finance (DeFi) passive income “yield farming” and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Also, user controlled DCA and stablecoin wallets, and non-custodial DCA investment advice are currently unregulated with no standards, certifications, or safeguards. Nascent DeFi applications like peer-to-peer exchanges, lending protocols, smart contract-based prediction and derivatives markets, synthetic investments and lotteries also currently operate outside of meaningful supervision or standards, and in many cases without an intermediary due to automated smart contracts on a decentralized programmable blockchain. Ultimately, a legislative solution which brings DeFi under the supervision of the securities regulator for applications that resemble capital markets regulated products and services, aligned with consistent international standards and coordination with other financial market agencies, is necessary to fully support innovation in crypto assets while ensuring financial system stability and investor protection.

Alfred Taudes, Jakob Hackel, Wolfgang Haunold, Hannes Hermanky

With a view to developing the Eurosystem’s TARGET2-Securities (T2S) system further, we propose a system based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) that covers all major T2S settlement functionalities and investigate it with regard to regulatory compliance, performance, cost efficiency and risk. The system we propose is a federated system comprising European central banks and central securities depositories (CSDs) as node operators. The role of the central banks is to maintain the cash accounts; provide regulatory-approved “smart contract factories” defining workflows for securities issuance, lifecycle management and matching, settlement, auto-collateralization and corporate actions; and perform the oversight function. The CSDs maintain securities accounts, offer notary services for issuers, perform corporate actions, and carry out settlement. CSD nodes collect settlement requests from external trading and clearing systems, forward them to other CSDs for cross-border settlement, bundle them into transaction blocks and prepare the blocks for settlement. The ensuing ledger updates occur via a fully automated consensus process between the central banks. In T2S on DLT, specialized smart contracts provide the flexibility to settle a range of digitally represented assets, define novel workflows – and allow for variable settlement times. Rather than having to conform to a uniform settlement time of T+2, participants can choose among smart contracts that settle within seconds or longer periods of time. This feature is expected to reduce capital costs and, given the DLT-based enforcement of settlement discipline, settlement failures. Apart from conforming to the current regulatory requirements, the DLT framework also enables the central banks and authorized actors to conduct status checks at a granular level and in real time.

Carlos Domingo, Elizabeth m Mathew

The tokenisation of securities using distributed ledger technology (DLT) is blurring the traditional distinction found in the level of automation in capital market services in the public and private markets. In the last three years, security tokens have helped dozens of issuers and both individual and institutional investors based in dozens of countries manage their private securities in a compliant and fully digital way. We take a long-term view in that all assets will ultimately be tokenised and that this will reduce frictions in asset issuance, servicing and ownership transfers, and remove barriers to accessing capital markets and financial innovation. The authors are in a unique position to witness the transformation in the way business-to-business (B2B) consensus is established in traditional capital markets, as well as to be a pivotal part of the buildout of the nascent decentralised capital markets infrastructure. The authors share their thoughts based on the initiatives they have undertaken so far, in the hope that this invites thoughtful discussion from experienced industry participants.

Ying He, Kun Tian, Jiangyang Fu

Purpose Preprint has become an important vehicle for academic communications and discussions. However, in preprint, there is a lack of a sufficient quality control mechanism such as peer review, which is a proven quality assurance practice that is used in traditional academic publishing services. To address the problem leveraging on the power of this practice, the authors introduce into preprint a self-organizing peer review method by applying the concept of token economy and the blockchain technology. Design/methodology/approach Specifically, this paper proposes an idea that applies the token economy concept to the design of the incentive and penalty mechanisms for peer reviewers in preprint to assure the qualities of its publications. Steemit has been studied to demonstrate the characteristics of the mechanisms. Findings A token economy-enhanced framework for self-organizing peer review in preprint is also proposed. The resulting preprint system is an academic community-oriented, self-organizing and blockchain-based content publishing system that is designed to run on both permissioned and permissionless blockchains. Research limitations/implications First, since peer review is on a voluntary basis and not profits oriented, the “monetary” incentive and penalty mechanisms borrowed from Steemit may conflict with academic ethics. Second, the authors proposed to deploy the authors’ token economy on blockchain, but the current mainstream decentralized blockchain services are too few to warrant a foreseeable successful future for the authors’ application. In fact, as the flagship of blockchain 2.0, the Ethereum blockchain suffers from the problem of scalability, which leads to its applications' lower performances, longer response times and eventually more negative user experiences as time goes by. Finally, the authors’ proposed version of preprint has not been implemented, and hence, its practical effectiveness and acceptance by academia are yet to be evaluated. Practical implications In this paper, the authors proposed a token economy-based framework for self-organizing peer review in preprint leveraging on blockchain technology. This framework encourages positive interactions between authors and reviewers, which helps to establish a healthy academic ecology that produces more contents with better qualities. Application of a solution based on the authors’ framework should impact the current academic communities by offering a new academic peer reviewing tool that has a built-in mechanism for self-behavior correction and quality assurance. Social implications Through adaption, the framework can be applied to other domains as well. In such domains, a large amount of feedbacks from partakers are needed and there exists a tremendous amount of work to filter noises in feedbacks so as to ensure that as many the quality ones as possible are delivered for a variety of purposes. The authors’ framework essentially impacts almost all domains where there exists a need to collect and filter large amount of feedbacks, and using the authors’ framework-based solution is cost-saving, which can be seen as a major potential contribution of the research. Originality/value The incentive and penalty mechanisms encourage positive interactions between authors and reviewers, and it helps to establish a healthy academic ecology that produces high-volume contents with good qualities.

Elisabeta Pana, Vikas Gangal

Blockchain bonds are digital securities designed to address inefficiencies in the bond market. With global interest and recognition, digital securities represent a revolutionary phase in entrepreneurial and corporate finance. Blockchain applications in security issuance mark the beginning of a broad shift in public capital markets by significantly increasing efficiency and establishing relationships of trust between issuers and investors. In this paper we document the evolution of blockchain bond applications leading to recent bonds projected to have their full lifecycle on blockchain. We discuss the remaining challenges and risks associated with blockchain technology adoption.

Pierre Schammo

For enthusiasts, distributed ledger technology (DLT) and smart contract technology (SCT) promise a future of frictionless interactions and decentralisation. In practice, however, it is widely acknowledged that this vision faces significant challenges. These include legal challenges, technological challenges, but also implementation challenges. The latter arise because delivering the DLT/SCT vision does not take place in a vacuum, but in a setting populated by existing market actors that operate on the basis of pre-existing technologies and absent an industry-wide layer of standards to support technological change and the vision of frictionless interactions. This article seeks to contribute to the literature interested in implementation challenges. Its aim is two-fold: to examine implementation challenges and to take stock of current market efforts to overcome them. In particular, this article focusses on the efforts of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and its initiatives to ‘standardise to digitise’. It will show that these initiatives can usefully be examined as an attempt to help the industry coordinate on a common foundational standards layer. However, this article also finds that the success of ISDA’s efforts is by no means certain. Nor are its efforts without raising some concerns.

Farid Sartipi

Growth as an inevitable human nature roots even in our business operation. Private entities, similarly, in seek of expansion and maybe more influence over their area of expertise, decide to go public in a certain point of time. The timing to move from private to public, indeed, is a critical factor in the future success of the business. In the traditional capitalist structure of this move, small private companies, which are defined by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission as those entities with consolidated revenue of less than $50 million per year, choose between sellout to a parent firm or Initial Public Offering (IPO). Both options have their own advantages and disadvantages. Yet, they are both complex, highly regulated, costly, and frustrating which are truly major drawbacks for small entities. Failure to go public caused by these drawbacks results in death of small businesses and loss of jobs which is followed by terrible socio-economic consequences. To avoid the conventional frustrating publicity of the private firms, in this article, utilization of cryptocurrency as the modern financial instrument is discussed. Digital currencies enable fast transition, globalization, grassroot economy, and social justice.

Viktorija Stepanova, Ingars Eriņš

Currently, in the world there is a growing interest in the digital economy including the blockchain technology. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is one of the leading current blockchain technology-related trends. The paper aims to provide an overview of the opportunities, advantages and shortcomings of this technology, as well as to summarize information on 12 most popular DeFi applications, using Total Value Locked indicators for the period of 34 months.

Christian Hackober, Carolin Bock

Abstract Initial coin offerings have recently become one of the most important funding resources for ventures in the blockchain area. However, often ventures do not rely solely on initial coin offerings as funding source but receive also investments from more established investors prior or during their initial coin offering. In particular, blockchain related ventures have drawn the attention of (corporate) venture capitalists but only less is known on the interplay of these different funding sources and their influence on initial coin offerings as well as on ventures’ further development. Based on the signaling theory as well as the resource-based-view our empirical study find that venture capital investors as well as corporate venture capital investors have a significantly positive effect on initial coin offerings. Further, we find that the reputation, the time of treatment as well as the specialization of investors have a positive influence on the initial coin offering. Finally, our results indicate that the positive effect of venture capital investors as well as the specialization of an investor continues to influence blockchain based ventures’ success in the mid-term.

Imtiaz Khan, Ali Shahaab

In the past few decades, there has been a sharp rise of research irreproducibility and retraction, to a point that now is deemed as a crisis. Addressing this crisis, we present a peer-to-peer (P2P) publication model that utilizes blockchain and smart contract technologies. Focusing primarily on researchers and reviewers, the conceptual P2P publication model addresses the sociocultural and incentivization aspects of the irreproducibility crisis. In the P2P publication model, instead of a complete publication, a preapproved experimental design will be published on an incremental basis (unit-by-unit) and authorship will be shared with reviewers. The concept of the P2P publication model was inspired by the transformational journey the music publishing industry has undertaken as it traverses through vinyl age (complete albums) to the Spotify age (single-by-single), where there is a growing inclination among artists toward building an incremental album, taking account of feedback from fans and utilizing automated revenue collection and sharing systems. The ability to publish incrementally through the P2P publication model will relieve researchers from the burden of publishing complete and “good results” while simultaneously incentivizing reviewers to undertake rigorous review work to gain authorship credit in the research. The proposed P2P publication model aims to transform the century-old publication model and incentivization structure in alignment with open access publication ethos of the 21st century.

Qing Zhang, Jian Gao, Qiqiang Qin, Keting Yin

No abstract is available for this record.

Christian Chamorro-Courtland

No abstract is available for this record.

Paul P. Momtaz

No abstract is available for this record.

Maria Lucas-Rhimbassen

No abstract is available for this record.

Mark Schaub

On January 4, 2021 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a major regulator of financial institutions in the United States, announced that federally chartered banks and thrifts were now allowed to utilize stablecoins as payment instruments. Much research and many discussions have revolved around policies of governments worldwide in how to handle the new cryptocurrency phenomenon. The purpose of this short study was to observe the valuation impact of that announcement on the three largest cryptocurrencies and two others. Research findings show the altcoins with valuations not tied to the dollar had substantial increases in value while the stablecoins, which the announcement specified are now allowed to be used by banks, changed very little. Specifically, Bitcoin and Etherium increased over 20% in value within 5 days of the announcement while the stablecoins Tether and USDCoin changed in value by no more than 0.10% for the same event window. This shows that stablecoins lived up to their name even though they were promoted as an acceptable payment system in the US.

Randy Priem

No abstract is available for this record.