Blockchain Papers

Kavya N. Naik, Arnica R. Patil, Kinnari N. Patil, Shraddha S. More

No abstract is available for this record.

Christos Karapapas, George Xylomenos, George C. Polyzos

No abstract is available for this record.

S. B. Indra, S. Harshini, R. Sabitha

No abstract is available for this record.

Nischal Aryal, Fariba Ghaffari, E. Bertin, Noël Crespi

No abstract is available for this record.

Jung Lee, Han Woo Park

This study provides a pioneering analysis of the features and topics of news websites in the Web 3.0 era through a comparison with non-news sites. We first classify over 4,600 Web3 sites into news and non-news types to investigate the feature characteristics of decentralized websites as well as semantic and subject categories. The most novel finding is that Web3 news sites have more features than non-news sites in terms of design systems and functions, interactivity, information quality, and hyperlinks. Furthermore, news web3 domains have more terms in semantic networks associated with information provision (e.g., “source”), whereas non-news domains have more terms associated with finance (e.g., “token”). The integration of the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a fundamental component of the Web3 ecosystem, began in the news industry and is at an early stage in terms of functionality and structure. The study’s results are discussed in the context of future Web3 domain development.

Alavieh Sadat Alavizadeh, Seyed Hossein Erfani, Meghdad Mirabi, Amir Sahafi

Summary IOTA is a distributed ledger technology with a new structure called Tangle, which offers high scalability, no fees, and near‐instant transfers for the internet‐of‐things (IoT) networks. The most important issue of IOTA is consensus achievement, which is handled by a single node acting as a coordinator. A single and default coordinator node exposes IOTA to the single point of failure and incomplete distribution issues. In this paper, a novel algorithm for selecting multiple coordinators to participate in the consensus process at milestones is proposed (i.e., MCS algorithm) to overcome the problem of a single coordinator in IOTA network. The MCS algorithm is applied in a two‐layered architecture including IoT devices (i.e., Layer 1) and fog nodes (i.e., Layer 2). We define and formulate four different properties as metrics to select multiple coordinators in this architecture. Moreover, a collusion list is defined to decrease the risk of collusion between fog nodes in the network. Experimental results show that using multiple fog nodes as coordinators in IOTA network can improve the average response time and average throughput while does not considerably sacrifice the total cost and system utilization in comparison with the use of a single default coordinator in IOTA network.

Amit Kumar, Neha Sharma, Rahul Chauhan, Manish Sharma

The advent of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has brought about a paradigm shift with profound implications in the digital domain. The prevalence of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has led to a notable increase in lively and impactful discussions pertaining to them on the social media platform, Twitter. This study explores the realm of discourse surrounding non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the social media platform Twitter, utilizing a comprehensive dataset obtained through the Twitter API. The scope of our research entails a thorough examination of the dissemination of tweets, levels of user interaction, geographical variation, and temporal patterns within this dynamic context. By employing rigorous techniques for data preparation, research, and visualization, we are able to reveal intricate patterns and trends. The examination of geographical patterns uncovers the extent of worldwide discussions surrounding non-fungible tokens (NFTs), whilst the analysis of time delves into the levels of interaction observed on an hourly, daily, and yearly basis. This study paper offers significant insights for stakeholders who aim to comprehend and leverage the influence of talks pertaining to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Twitter platform. It presents practical implications for content providers, marketers, and researchers as they navigate the complex NFT ecosystem. This study sets the foundation for future inquiries into sentiment analysis, event-driven interaction, and the dynamic nature of debate surrounding digital assets in the evolving NFT arena.

Hoon Ko, Juhee Oh, Sung Uk Kim

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital identifiers containing metadata, such as token number, title, content, and image URL, and are linked to digital assets, which are characterized by the fact that, unlike conventional virtual assets, they have their own unique value and cannot be replaced. NFTs cannot be deleted or forged; therefore, they can be used to authenticate the ownership of digital assets. The metadata of the NFTs are uploaded to the interplanetary file system (IPFS), which is a distributed file system, and converted into unique content identifiers (CIDs) that are stored on the blockchain. Digital content (DC) is divided into multiple pieces; it also has its own unique value and is distributed and stored using the IPFS. This study built an NFT-based IPFS testbed and experimented with the process of generating unique values for DC divided into three groups and sharing them. The results confirmed that each DC had a unique hash value and no duplicates existed.

Shuang Yu, Zhinong Wei, Guoqiang Sun, Yizhou Zhou · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Penglin Dai, Yaorong Huang, Xiao Wu, Ke Li · 6 authors

Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) integrated with blockchain technology holds great promise for delivering secure temporal data services. However, ensuring data freshness in edge nodes remains a difficult task due to the temporal nature, heterogeneity, and privacy concerns associated with the data. Secondly, the dynamic VEC environment degrades blockchain performance, resulting in low transaction throughput or excessive energy consumption. As a result, we formulate the problem of Blockchain-based Edge Cache Update (BECU), which aims at maximizing both edge cache benefit and blockchain performance by optimizing cache decisions and critical blockchain parameters, including primary node, block size, and block interval. Furthermore, we develop the Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit for Caching Update (CMAB-CU) algorithm for online cache decision-making, which evaluates rewards by training a linear function based on mobility features and temporal data characteristics. Additionally, we design the Deep Q-learning Network for Blockchain Parameter Optimization (DQN-BPO), which dynamically determines blockchain parameters to strike the balance between transaction throughput and energy consumption. Finally, we conduct simulations using realistic vehicular traces, demonstrating that the proposed algorithms outperform the UCB and FBI algorithms in terms of edge cache benefit and blockchain performance by 95.56% and 144.93%, respectively.

Simon Brown

Ethereum is undergoing significant changes to its architecture as it evolves. These changes include its switch to PoS consensus and the introduction of significant infrastructural changes that do not require a change to the core protocol, but that fundamentally affect the way users interact with the network. These changes represent an evolution toward a more modular architecture, in which there exists new exogenous vectors for centralization. This paper builds on previous studies of decentralization of Ethereum to reflect these recent significant changes, and Ethereum's new modular paradigm.

Yijing Lin, Zhipeng Gao, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato · 8 authors

Web 3.0 is a promising next-generation Internet paradigm that is driven by multiple technologies, e.g., semantic communications, besides blockchain to enable transparent and traceable data sharing. Specifically, semantic communication can provide Web 3.0 services with a promising and lightweight paradigm for semantic information transmission. However, a unified integration framework has not been studied. Moreover, how to achieve efficient semantic sharing and pricing challenges the traditional centralized communication paradigm. Therefore, this paper integrates blockchain and semantic communication to share valuable semantic information for Web 3.0 services. The Proof of Semantic mechanism is designed to reduce the garbage-in garbage-out challenge of Web 3.0 services. Moreover, we utilize the state channel and the information bottleneck to construct a task-relevant semantic sharing mechanism to exchange information efficiently in Web 3.0 services. To maximize semantic information's utility, we propose a semantic pricing mechanism based multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game to circulate information in Web 3.0 services. Simulation results indicate that the proposed mechanisms are both verifiable and efficient, achieving reduced communication overheads while maintaining test accuracy comparable to benchmark methods.

Sarah A. Flanery, Kamalesh Mohanasundar, Christiana Chamon, Srujan Kotikela · 5 authors

With the natural evolution of the web, the need for decentralization has rendered the current centralized education system out of date. The student does not "own" their credentials, as the only way their accomplishments are directly linked to their person and considered valuable is by verification through a stamp of an expensive, prestigious institution. However, going to a university is no longer the only way to acquire an education; open-source learning material is widely available and accessible through the internet. However, our society does not deem these methods of education as verifiable if they do not include a degree or certificate. Additionally, a valid certificate for the vast majority of open-source courses costs a few hundred dollars to obtain. The centralized nature of education inadvertently places students in underprivileged communities at a disadvantage in comparison to students in economically advantaged communities, thus a decentralized approach to education would eliminate the vast majority of such discrepancies. In the present paper, we integrate Decentralized Identity (DID) with Web 3.0 to upload credentials linked directly to the user. Each credential is appended to an Ethereum blockchain that, by design, cannot be altered once uploaded. We include DID document based access controls to display the candidate's upload and verification history. Finally, we utilize TLS protocols to provide a secure connection to the internet for ensuring non-fungibility of credentials and authentication of users.

Iraq Ahmad Reshi, Sahil Sholla

Summary The accelerated development of information and communication technologies has generated a demand for data storage that is effective, transparent, immutable, and secure. Distributed ledger technology and encryption techniques such as hashing and blockchain technology revolutionised the landscape by meeting these requirements. However, blockchain must overcome obstacles such as low latency, throughput, and scalability for its full potential. Investigating blockchain's structure, types, challenges, promises, and variants is necessary to understand blockchain and its capabilities comprehensively. This paper overviews various aspects, such as emergent blockchain protocols, models, concepts, and trends. We classify blockchain variants into five essential categories, DAG, TDAG, Sharding, Consensus, and Combining methods, based on the structure each follows, and conduct a comparative analysis. In addition, we explore current research tendencies. As technology progresses, it is essential to comprehend the fundamental requirements for blockchain development.

Weiquan Ni, Alia Asheralieva, Jiawen Kang, Zehui Xiong · 6 authors

Consortium blockchains have attracted considerable interest from academia and industry due to their low-cost installation and maintenance. However, typical consortium blockchains can be easily attacked by colluding block validators because of the limited number of miners in the systems. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel block validation framework to enhance blockchain security. In the framework, the block validations are assisted and implemented by various lightweight nodes, e.g., edge devices, in addition to the typical blockchain miners. This improves the blockchain security but can cause an increased block validation delay and, thereby, reduced blockchain throughput. To tackle this challenge, we propose an effective method to select lightweight nodes based on their computing powers to maximize the blockchain throughput, and prove the uniqueness of the optimal nodes selection strategy. Security analysis and simulation results from the deployed consortium blockchain platform show that the proposed framework achieves higher throughput and security than the existing consortium blockchain models.

K. Ogata, Satoshi Fujita

The e-book services we use today have a serious drawback in that we will no longer be able to read the books we have purchased when the service is terminated. One way to solve this problem is to build a decentralized system that does not depend on a specific company or organization by combining smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain and distributed storage such as an IPFS. However, a simple combination of existing technologies does not make the stored e-book data persistent, so the risk of purchased e-books becoming unreadable remains. In this paper, we propose a decentralized distributed storage called d-book-repository, which has both access management function and data durability for purchased e-books. This system uses NFTs as access rights to realize strict access control by preventing clients who do not have NFTs from downloading e-book data. In addition, e-book data stored on storage nodes in the distributed storage is divided into shards using Reed–Solomon codes, and each storage node stores only a single shard, thereby preventing the creation of nodes that can restore the entire content from locally stored data. The storage of each shard is not handled by a single node but by a group of nodes, and the shard is propagated to all nodes in the group using the gossip protocol, where erasure codes are utilized to increase the resilience against node departure. Furthermore, an incentive mechanism to encourage participation as a storage node is implemented using smart contracts. We built a prototype of the proposed system on AWS and evaluated its performance. The results showed that both downloading and uploading 100 MB of e-book data (equivalent to one comic book) were completed within 10 s using an instance type of m5.xlarge. This value is only 1.3 s longer for downloading and 2.2 s longer for uploading than the time required for a simple download/upload without access control, confirming that the overhead associated with the proposed method is sufficiently small.

Lihua Zhang, Qingyu Lu, Rui Huang, Shihong Chen · 6 authors

With the increasing popularization and application of the smart grid, the harm of the data silo issue in the smart grid is more and more prominent. Therefore, it is especially critical to promote data interoperability and sharing in the smart grid. Existing data-sharing schemes generally lack effective incentive mechanisms, and data holders are reluctant to share data due to privacy and security issues. Because of the above issues, a dynamic incentive mechanism for smart grid data sharing based on evolutionary game theory is proposed. Firstly, several basic assumptions about the evolutionary game model are given, and the evolutionary game payoff matrix is established. Then, we analyze the stabilization strategy of the evolutionary game based on the payoff matrix, and propose a dynamic incentive mechanism for smart grid data sharing based on evolutionary game theory according to the analysis results, aiming to encourage user participation in data sharing. We further write the above evolutionary game model into a smart contract that can be invoked by the two parties involved in data sharing. Finally, several factors affecting the sharing of data between two users are simulated, and the impact of different factors on the evolutionary stabilization strategy is discussed. The simulation results verify the positive or negative incentives of these parameters in the data-sharing game process, and several factors influencing the users’ data sharing are specifically analyzed. This dynamic incentive mechanism scheme for smart grid data sharing based on evolutionary game theory provides new insights into effective incentives for current smart grid data sharing.

Mahen Mandal, Mohd Sameen Chishti, Amit Banerjee

Scalability is one of the trilemma of blockchain technology that hinders its adoption for large-scale decentralized applications (dApps). Researchers have proposed several layer-1 and layer-2 solutions to address the issue. This paper focuses on layer-2 solutions or protocols operating on top of the primary blockchain to enhance scalability. Previous works surveying these solutions mainly focused on a particular layer-2 solution, like rollup, or a specific application, such as smart manufacturing. However, in this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of layer-2 scalability solutions, such as state channels, side-chain, and rollup, from the perspectives of various functional requirements of block chain applications. More precisely, the goal is to evaluate the applicability of the layer-2 scalability solutions in terms of the application patterns that depict the transactional dependencies, interoperability, decentralization, and security. To further illustrate these features, the paper evaluates the applicability of the layer-2 solutions on the case studies of major blockchain applications, including supply chain management and healthcare. Our analysis suggests that in terms of throughput, application pattern is the most crucial aspect in selecting the scaling solutions, in conjecture with other features as per the application demand.

Feng Zhao, Hui Li, Shaoliang Peng, Xiyu Wang · 13 authors

The decentralized nature of blockchain technology has received increasing attention in recent years. Several researchers have explored improving legacy Domain Name System (DNS) via blockchain to address security vulnerabilities and trust risks due to its centralized management. However, these DNS alternatives mainly focus on managing and resolving specific types of resources with predefined identifiers, such as domain names in the TCP/IP architecture. As a result, they are not suitable for the future Internet with diverse identifiers. To address this issue, we propose an Ethereum-based Multi-Identifier System named EMIS to uniformly manage and resolve multiple types of identifiers such as identity, content, and geographical coordinate. It consists of four modules, namely, identifier contracts, an EMIS contract, an index system, and off-chain storage, each of which can be evolved and upgraded independently. In particular, identifier contracts are designed based on our classification of existing identifier types associated with off-chain resource data. Each identifier contract enables different functionality and is aggregated by a uniform EMIS contract. Finally, we deploy the proposed EMIS on Ganache, and the experimental results demonstrate our advantage in terms of write performance with low Gas fees.

Vince Biró, Wei-Yang Chiu, Weizhi Meng

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have become a prevalent part of everyday life, making the need for IoT firmware security greater than ever. Firmware dispatch systems play a crucial role in maintaining the secure operations of IoT devices, where a compromise on the integrity of dispatches may simply ruin an IoT device. Hence it is essential to have robust solutions to safeguard such systems. With the advent of blockchain and Web3 technologies, there are new options for tackling security-related challenges. Blockchain provides a tamper-proof, secure, and fully distributed protocol, making it an excellent choice for a firmware dispatch system. In this work, we explore the existing blockchain-based solutions for distributing IoT firmware updates, and then propose a secure firmware dispatch system for IoT devices using Ethereum. Our system employs Web3.Storage, with a hosted implementation of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol. In the evaluation, we demonstrate that our designed architecture is fast, reliable, and scalable by offering a firmware integrity validation. It can benefit a wide range of manufacturers who intend to increase the security of their IoT devices.

Qi Lyu, Hui Li, Xinnan Lin, Han Wang · 15 authors

With its wide range of applications, the Internet shows a future trend towards abundant and diverse data resources with multiple types of identifiers (multi-identifiers). However, the legacy Domain Name System (DNS) in the current TCP/IP network architecture has failed to manage these identifiers due to the centralized security issue. While some decentralized DNS alternatives have been proposed, they also face scalability issues. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based Hierarchical Multi-Identifier System, named H-MIS, as a DNS alternative. Specially, it realizes optimal decentralization and scalability by introducing the Zero-Knowledge rollup (ZK-rollup) solution to synchronize the upper and lower on-chain identifier data, as well as off-chain associated resource data. Finally, we implement H-MIS on Ethereum and evaluate its performance. The experimental results indicate that compared to the original MIS and Ethereum Name Service (ENS), H-MIS has advantages in such aspects as efficiency, data consumption, and Gas fees.

Dongkun Hou, Jie Zhang

Federated recommendation systems (FRecSys) alleviate the privacy issues of recommendation systems (RecSys) by distributing model training tasks onto users’ local devices. However, they still need a single global server to aggregate training results from users and, thereby are vulnerable to server malfunctioning. Besides, they assume all users voluntarily use their data and computing resources to train recommendation model gradients, which is usually impractical. This paper aims to address the aforementioned problems of FRecSys using blockchain. A blockchain-based federated matrix factorization is designed and realized for RecSys, named BFRecSys. It eliminates the need for a single central server by storing the items and user matrices of the matrix factorization in a blockchain. An incentive mechanism is designed and implemented via smart contracts to record participants’ contributions. Besides, to further enhance the fairness of the incentive mechanism, a fake gradients detection mechanism based on an unsupervised cluster is designed to evict fake gradients in each iteration. The prototype of BFRecSys is realized, and experiments are carried out on public MovieLens datasets and private Ethereum blockchain. The results show that BFRecSys can significantly improve recommendation performance in terms of training accuracy.

Mohammad Masoud, Yousef Jaradat, Ahmad Manasrah, Mohammad Alia · 6 authors

This work carried out a measurement study of the Ethereum Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network to gain a better understanding of the underlying nodes. Ethereum was applied because it pioneered distributed applications, smart contracts, and Web3. Moreover, its application layer language “Solidity” is widely used in smart contracts across different public and private blockchains. To this end, we wrote a new Ethereum client based on Geth to collect Ethereum node information. Moreover, various web scrapers have been written to collect nodes’ historical data from the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine project. The collected data has been compared with two other services that harvest the number of Ethereum nodes. Our method has collected more than 30% more than the other services. The data trained a neural network model regarding time series to predict the number of online nodes in the future. Our findings show that there are less than 20% of the same nodes daily, indicating that most nodes in the network change frequently. It poses a question of the stability of the network. Furthermore, historical data shows that the top ten countries with Ethereum clients have not changed since 2016. The popular operating system of the underlying nodes has shifted from Windows to Linux over time, increasing node security. The results have also shown that the number of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Ethereum nodes is neglected compared with nodes recorded from other regions. It opens the door for developing new mechanisms to encourage users from these regions to contribute to this technology. Finally, the model has been trained and demonstrated an accuracy of 92% in predicting the future number of nodes in the Ethereum network.

Yaroslav Plishan, Yash Madhwal, Yury Yanovich

The social network Twitter possesses a key characteristic: it is centralized, allowing Twitter Corporation to control data substitution and set moderation rules. However, this issue can only be resolved through the complete decentralization of the platform. To achieve this, blockchain technology is crucial as it enables the operation of decentralized applications with smart contracts serving as the foundation for system-user interaction. In this paper, we propose the minimum viable implementation of a similar social network called Brain Logger, which stores all necessary data in the NEAR blockchain network. Introducing a small fee for modifying data on the network ensures a solution to the aforementioned problems. The implementation includes a smart contract for blockchain networks and a web application frontend. The smart contract was developed using the NEAR software development kit in Rust, while the frontend was created in JavaScript using the React framework and Redux for local data storage. The code can be accessed on Github.