Cryptocurrency market infrastructure—public blockchains and cross-chain bridges supporting tens of billions in liquidity—is monitored as a systemic-risk surface by the Financial Stability Board and equivalent bodies, with defensive posture calibrated against human-level adversaries. Anthropic’s April 2026 release of Claude Mythos Preview has prompted institutional response across financial regulation but no blockchain-specific analytical framework. This paper develops one by defining Mythos-class as a vendor-neutral capability profile: a set of frontier autonomous offensive capabilities specified independently of any single model or vendor (defined by five constituent capability primitives). The central analytical claim is friction inversion: the patch primitives, segmentation, vendor-coordinated disclosure, and credential rotation that constrain Mythos-class capability in conventional IT environments are structurally absent on-chain. This makes blockchain exposure positioned differently in kind, not degree, from enterprise IT. The paper instantiates this finding against Bitcoin and Ethereum/L2 architectures through analysis of four major bridge exploits totaling over $1.74 billion in losses. Vendor-neutral defensive and governance frameworks defined against the capability profile rather than any specific model release are the correct unit of analysis. On this basis the paper offers general recommendations for protocol governance, audit and verification cadence, and regulatory posture, developed as an analytical framework rather than as empirically validated risk estimates.
У статті досліджено економічний потенціал блокчейн-технологій як інструменту протидії глобальним змінам клімату. Проаналізовано реальний екологічний вплив криптовалют, зокрема порівняно енергоспоживання мереж Bitcoin та Ethereum після переходу на Proof-of-Stake. Розглянуто механізми токенізації вуглецевих кредитів, роль децентралізованих фінансів (DeFi) та децентралізованих автономних організацій (DAO) у кліматичному фінансуванні. Висвітлено практичні кейси застосування блокчейну в секторі відновлюваної енергетики та ризики грінвошингу. Окремо проаналізовано внесок вітчизняних науковців у дослідження впливу блокчейну на екологічну стійкість та формування «зеленої» цифрової економіки в Україні. Визначено перспективи інтеграції штучного інтелекту та Web3-технологій у кліматичні ініціативи до 2030 року.
Prof. Narde S. A., Yadav N.S., Ghodake D.T., Patil S.J., Salunkhe S. S.
Abstract In recent years, the rapid growth of digital technologies in education has increased the importance of academic certificates for employment, higher studies, and professional validation. However, the issue of fake and forged certificates has become a serious challenge for institutions and organizations. Traditional certificate verification systems are manual, time-consuming, and often lack transparency and security. These systems are also vulnerable to data manipulation and unauthorized access due to centralized storage. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain-based academic certificate validation system. The system uses blockchain technology to securely store certificate data in the form of cryptographic hash values generated using the SHA-256 algorithm. Since blockchain is decentralized and immutable, once data is stored, it cannot be altered or deleted. The system allows administrators to upload student data and issue results, which are then stored on the blockchain. Each certificate is associated with a unique verification ID and can be validated using QR codes or direct input. The proposed system improves efficiency, enhances data security, and reduces the risk of fraud. The results demonstrate that the system is faster, more reliable, and more secure than traditional methods.
This replication package contains the data and scripts used in this empirical study, including the LLM-based semantic validation pipeline, the observed practice extraction process, and all figures from the research questions (RQ1–RQ5). ERC_Observed_Practicess.xlsx: workbook of observed practices ERC_Observed_Practices_Process_Review.xlsx: Phases to generate the workbook of observed practices Other supplementary materials: Essential data files (data/) results_semantic_validation.json: 11,559 issues classified by LLM (substantive, category, justification) sample_manual_review_updated.csv: ~400 manually reviewed entries for LLM quality validation eips_labels.csv / ercs_labels.csv: PR metadata from Ethereum repositories for status evolution analysis (RQ5) Scripts (scripts/) 01: scrapes the official ERC list from ethereum.org 02 : filters the dataset for ERC mentions via regex 03: classifies issues via Gemini (substantive + category) 03: removes duplicates from the validation JSON 03: merges LLM results with issue metadata 04: extracts observed practices per ERC via Gemini, cross-referenced with official specs 05: fetches GitHub labels and generates ERC status evolution figure (RQ5) 06: generates all quantitative figures (RQ1–RQ4)
While public blockchains provide transparent and auditable transaction histories, they inherently compromise user privacy. Existing privacy-enhancing protocols, such as those deployed on Ethereum, typically rely on succinct zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to obscure the transaction graph. However, implementing comparable cryptographic guarantees on high-throughput blockchains like Algorand is challenging due to strict per-call execution budgets and the state contention introduced by global Merkle accumulators. This paper presents Obscura, a decentralized, non-custodial privacy protocol tailored for constrained smart contract environments. Obscura achieves transaction anonymity using Linkable Spontaneous Anonymous Group (LSAG) signatures over the BN254 elliptic curve, verified entirely on-chain. To overcome limitations of the Algorand Virtual Machine (AVM), we introduce a novel state model that leverages Algorand's Box Storage for $O(1)$ commitment membership checks, eliminating the need for global Merkle accumulators, and a dynamic opcode-budget expansion mechanism via pooled inner application calls. Our implementation demonstrates that signer-ambiguous privacy is practical and efficient on Algorand without relying on trusted setups or succinct proofs. Obscura provides a robust privacy layer for transparent ledgers, bridging the gap between high-throughput blockchain architectures and the dual requirements of cryptographic privacy and selective auditability.
This paper presents Polyquity, a Web2.5 platform enabling decentralized Initial Public Offering (IPO) fundraising through a hybrid data architecture. The platform leverages the Avalanche C-Chain for high-speed settlement, while utilizing a custom WebSocket indexer and PostgreSQL database to bridge the gap between blockchain security and institutional-grade user interfaces. By implementing a strict Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model alongside modular architecture for auction mechanisms, fund escrow, and secondary market functions, Polyquity demonstrates how decentralized capital formation can achieve web2-equivalent performance while preserving core web3 security. The system utilizes the blockchain as the ultimate source of truth for state and funds, while the relational database serves as the source of speed for client-side rendering. Polyquity achieves sub-2-second transaction finality with 50% lower costs than Ethereum, supporting 10,000+ concurrent participants. This work establishes practical mechanisms for bridging traditional finance and decentralized ecosystems through a highly scalable, hybrid full-stack design.
Blockchain-based financial systems process billions in transactions but remain vulnerable to sophisticated fraud schemes. Current detection approaches analyze completed transactions, preventing neither fund loss nor protocol exploitation. We address this through an oracle-mediated prevention system integrating machine learning inference with smart contract execution. Training ensemble models on 12,847 Ethereum transactions with engineered features capturing gas anomalies and temporal patterns, we achieve 94.2\% fraud classification accuracy. Testnet deployment demonstrates 1.09-second response latency with 6.8\% computational overhead, contrasting favorably against prior on-chain implementations requiring 34\% overhead. Our working prototype validates practical viability for production environments where security requirements justify marginal transaction costs.
This paper develops a deep reinforcement learning framework for cryptocurrency portfolio management in which transaction costs are derived from the Riemannian geometry of the underlying volatility model rather than assumed constant. A Proximal Policy Optimisation agent is trained on a reward function grounded in non-equilibrium thermodynamics: we use the free-energy Bellman equation, in which transaction costs are the geodesic slippage on the Fisher information manifold of a maximum-entropy Markov-switching GARCH model, and regime-transition costs are the Wasserstein-2 distance between the calm and turbulent return distributions. A thermodynamic Carnot bound on portfolio efficiency is established and empirically validated. Five hypotheses are tested across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash over January 2017 to March 2026. The geometric-cost agent achieves statistically superior Sharpe ratios relative to flat-fee baselines on four of five assets; portfolio turnover is reduced by 56 to 83 percent relative to signal-following; the thermodynamic friction point at which the agent prefers no-trade is asset-specific and ordered by turbulent half-life; a joint topological and geometric circuit breaker reduces Maximum Drawdown by 28 to 38 percent; and ablation confirms that every component of the observation vector contributes a statistically significant performance gain. The framework requires liquid cryptocurrency markets with validated parametric volatility models; transferability to other asset classes requires upstream recalibration.
Blockchain and decentralized finance have revolutionized the financial ecosystem while simultaneously exposing it to cryptocurrency phishing attacks. Existing phishing detection methods primarily rely on graph learning, but they face significant limitations. Static graph learning approaches fail to account for the temporal evolution of phishing patterns, while semi-dynamic methods, such as those combining static GNNs with LSTM, struggle to capture the irregular and bursty nature of blockchain transactions. Moreover, these methods overlook the diversity of Ethereum transactions, treating them as homogeneous graphs, and heavily rely on supervised learning, which requires extensive labeled data that is not readily available. These limitations reduce their adaptability to emerging phishing threats. In this paper, we present PhishEye, a fully dynamic self-supervised system that monitors on-chain transactions to detect phishing activities. PhishEye formulates Ethereum transactions as a heterogeneous temporal attributed multi-graph and incorporates a novel temporal graph contrastive learning model, which captures both temporal patterns and heterogeneous transaction types. The evaluation on a dataset of 161,658 addresses and 416,541 transactions shows that PhishEye outperforms existing methods, achieving an F1 score of 87.23% and an AUC of 98.43% for phishing transaction detection, and an F1 score of 94.19% and an AUC of 98.03% for phishing account detection. In real-world deployment from May 1, 2023 to July 31, 2024, PhishEye identified 1,803 previously unknown phishing addresses, providing early alerts that helped prevent losses exceeding 2 billion USD.
Mohammad Y. Allaho, Mehmet H. Karaata, Israa A. Elgemiei
The distributed ledger systems rely heavily on miners, who are a vital component of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Most cryptocurrencies cease to exist within five years of operation [1] due to churning. Most current cryptocurrency analyses in the literature focus on mining pools and ignore the individual miners’ perspective and in-depth analysis of the churning phenomenon and its possible reasons. In this study, we conducted a longitudinal and overall study on two of the most growing cryptocurrency networks, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Bitcoin dataset used spans over 12 years (2009-2021). Whereas the Ethereum dataset spans over 8 years (2015-2023), including the two versions of Ethereum (before and after the merge). Our goal is to uncover the factors that drive miners’ churning and reveal essential characteristics of cryptocurrency mining, such as network fairness and centrality. Generally, both networks experience a decline in active miners over time. Our results confirm the centrality of the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, whereas Bitcoin is found to be more distributed and fairer than Ethereum in both versions. Also, in Bitcoin, solo miners are less centralized and experience a fairer distribution of blocks formation than pool miners, however, pool miners have more mining rewards on average. Also, pools are found to decrease churning for pool miners compared to solo miners. Moreover, it is found that miners’ waiting time is a significant factor in miners’ churning. The existing protocols used require improvements to increase network decentralization and fairness, as well as reduce miners’ churn.
Shereen Ismail, Bashar Othman, Hassan Reza, Eden Teshome Hunde
Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities have become one of the most critical challenges facing the global fish industry, particularly in developing countries, with the economic impact of fish fraud reaching billions of dollars annually. A major contributor to this problem is the limitation of conventional fish supply chain systems, which lack secure data sharing among stakeholders, fail to provide trusted product information to consumers, and offer insufficient transparency for regulatory authorities. These shortcomings facilitate fraud and weaken trust and oversight across the supply chain. Blockchain technology has demonstrated strong capability to address key cybersecurity challenges by enhancing traceability, transparency, and tamper-resistant data integrity across distributed supply chain stakeholders. In this paper, we present an enterprise-oriented prototype of a secure, permissioned blockchain-based fish supply chain system designed to enable trusted data sharing and end-to-end traceability across multi-stakeholder environments. Building upon our prior work in Ethereum-based seafood quality monitoring, this study contributes: (1) a modular, consortium-grade architecture implemented using Hyperledger Fabric and containerized via Docker, supporting scalable organizational participation; (2) formal UML-based system modeling of supply chain actors, assets, and lifecycle transitions; and (3) custom chaincode logic that enforces ownership transfer workflows and regulatory compliance policies. In addition, the architecture is designed as agent-ready, exposing standardized APIs that enable future integration of autonomous AI-driven client applications for proactive supply chain orchestration. By leveraging a private, permissioned network model, the functional prototype demonstrates the feasibility of improving data veracity and providing a practical foundation for mitigating fraud and enhancing regulatory oversight in the global fish industry.
Cryptocurrencies and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) currently represent a fast growing trend in finance, which enables financial services on public blockchains. In contrast to traditional financial markets, ruled by well established corporations, DeFi is completely transparent, as it keeps publicly available records of all transactions that occur in the network. This availability of the data represents an opportunity to analyze and understand the market from the point of view of the complexity that emerges from the interactions among actors (users, bots, and companies) operating in the embedded market. In this paper, we focus on Ethereum to show that the underlying transaction network bears further and useful information to forecast the evolution of the market. We aim to separate the non-redundant effects of the blockchain transaction network from technical analysis and social media trends in the future price of the Ethereum native cryptocurrency. To this end, we build two machine learning models to predict the future trend of the price time series. The first model, serving as a base, considers the set of most relevant features according to the current scientific literature-including technical analysis and social media trends. The second model considers the features of the base model, incorporating the network properties computed from the transaction network. We find that the second model outperforms the base model and can anticipate 46% more rises in the price than the base model and 19% more falls. Thus, we conclude that new indicators based on network properties provide valuable information to forecast the future direction of the market that cannot be explained neither by technical analysis nor by social media trends alone. Hence, our results represent an important first step toward the definition of a new family of DeFi market indicators based on the complexity of the underlying transaction network.
Crowdfunding is an important mechanism for supporting innovative projects by connecting creators with distributed contributors. Prior research has identified persistent limitations in both traditional and blockchain-based crowdfunding platforms, including limited transparency, centralized control, passive contributor roles, and inflexible fund management processes. These limitations hinder accountability, equitable participation, and effective decision-making throughout the campaign lifecycle. This paper presents a blockchain-enabled crowdfunding framework designed as a decision-support artifact for adaptive fund allocation and participatory governance. The framework enables contributors to engage in spending-request governance through Quadratic Voting, which balances influence across heterogeneous financial stakes and mitigates dominance by large contributors. To support adaptive campaign management, the framework further integrates Ethereum smart contracts with a Markov Decision Process (MDP), enabling campaign-level decisions to respond to evolving contribution patterns and campaign states. The framework is implemented and evaluated through controlled experiments on the Sepolia Ethereum test network. The evaluation includes both an internal ablation of Quadratic Voting and MDP-based adaptive support and an external comparison against representative blockchain-based baselines. The results show that the combined Quadratic Voting and MDP design achieves lower approval latency and higher throughput than partial or static variants of the framework, and that the full proposed platform outperforms the compared baseline systems under increasing campaign workload. Overall, the study demonstrates how participatory governance, adaptive decision support, and transparent smart-contract execution can be systematically integrated into crowdfunding platforms, providing practical guidance for the design of scalable, efficient, and accountable decentralized crowdfunding systems.
To address the challenges of topological obscurity and extreme label sparsity in large-scale Ethereum transaction networks, a novel self-supervised phishing detection framework named Eth-GBAV is proposed, integrating graph attention, broad learning, and adversarial variational inference. The framework initiates with a biased random walk strategy guided by transaction intensity and temporal dynamics to capture the initial behavioral semantics of nodes. To distill discriminative features from noisy backgrounds, a “Generative-Attention” encoding architecture is constructed, where a graph attention network aggregates weighted structural neighborhoods and a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) characterizes the underlying probability distribution of legitimate transaction patterns. By maximizing the evidence lower bound, anomalous accounts are effectively isolated through reconstruction residuals. Furthermore, the broad learning system is introduced as an efficient analytical decision layer. By mapping VAE-derived latent embeddings and reconstruction errors into an expanded high-dimensional feature space, the framework captures intricate behavioral correlations via mapping and enhancement neurons. Extensive experimental verification on two large-scale datasets demonstrates the superior performance of Eth-GBAV. On the XBlock dataset, it achieves a leading F1-score of 0.9847 and a recall of 0.9839, outperforming the most competitive state-of-the-art model by significant margins. On the Kaggle dataset, the framework maintains high robustness with an accuracy of 0.9592 and an F1-score of 0.9069.
Smart contracts are a core component of blockchain-based systems, enabling decentralized applications to autonomously manage assets and enforce program logic. However, vulnerabilities in smart contracts can cause severe financial losses because of their immutability and public accessibility. As a result, analyzing common attack vectors and evaluating static detection techniques before deployment remain critical challenges in blockchain security. This thesis presents an analytical study of high-impact smart contract attack classes and evaluates the effectiveness of AST-based static detection approaches for Ethereum smart contracts. Building on the Aderyn static analysis framework, custom detectors are implemented to analyze structural code patterns that enable reentrancy attacks, authorization bypass vulnerabilities, and unsafe proxy delegation and storage collision risks. Rather than proposing new defensive mechanisms, this work systematically analyzes how known attacks arise from insecure smart contract programming practices and examines how defensive coding patterns can be identified at the source-code level through static analysis. The effectiveness of the analysis is evaluated using vulnerable smart contract implementations and corresponding exploit scenarios developed with the Foundry testing framework. Experimental results show that the implemented detectors successfully identify exploitable vulnerabilities and demonstrate a strong correspondence between attack-enabling code structures and statically detectable patterns, confirming alignment between static analysis findings and real-world attack behavior. This work demonstrates that extensible AST-based static analysis provides a practical foundation for analyzing both smart contract attacks and the defensive patterns intended to mitigate them before deployment.
For communication scenarios demanding extremely high information security and facing significant risks of data leakage, a covert communication scheme based on Ethereum virtual machine bytecode was proposed. By strategically allocating the storage space of smart contract variables, the scheme embedded covert data into contract bytecode and utilized the inherent characteristics of bytecode to set positioning markers, enabling efficient extraction by the receiver. Additionally, three ciphertext parsing modes were designed to accommodate transmissions of different data scales, further enhancing the security of encoded data. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results demonstrate that the scheme can effectively hide up to 170 bit of information per transaction. The structural similarity of opcode frequency distributions between the embedded contract and the original contract reaches up to 99.78%. The Pearson correlation coefficient of the high-frequency 3-gram opcode patterns between the normal and embedded contracts is 0.999 7 (<italic>p </italic>= 6.42×10⁻¹⁴), indicating that the embedding process does not introduce statistically significant differences in the local instruction sequence distribution. These results fully validate the strong concealment capability, transmission efficiency, and security of the proposed scheme.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional risks that are not captured by standard PoS economic security arguments. Through an empirical study of Ethereum data, we find that the operational performance of liquid staking pools is positively associated with subsequent normalized liquid staking token (LST) returns. Motivated by this, we present a cross-layer attack: a low-stake adversary can manipulate the consensus protocol to degrade a target pool's performance and take application-layer positions that profit if the market reprices the corresponding \gls{LST} in-line with the historically observed association. To make the consensus layer manipulation concrete, we develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to automatically discover attack strategies. Our evaluation shows that the learned strategies can recover near-optimal theoretical attacks and uncover new manipulation behaviors that significantly degrade target pool performance. We further characterize feasible application-layer monetization channels and analyze leveraged shorting in detail using Monte Carlo simulations, showing that such attacks can be profitable with over one-half probability for LSTs of major staking pools. Our findings reveal a previously overlooked attack surface in PoS systems with liquid staking and expose a gap between consensus and economic security.
Blockchain technologies are making it possible to develop crypto-currencies and programmable smart contracts that can work in worldwide trustless and decentralized environments. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that can coordinate the works of crowds of users, developers, and researchers can be built using smart contracts on blockchains. We contribute a decentralized autonomous software organization model and an Ethereum blockchain-based smart contract named AutonomousSoftwareOrg that provides a continuously operating virtual organization for open-source software development communities and users. AutonomousSoftwareOrg provides a project funding mechanism based on crypto-currencies, a decision-making mechanism based on voting, and recordkeeping for software usage citations and executions. Furthermore, software executions, along with their input and output data files, can also be transactionally recorded in AutonomousSoftwareOrg. This enables software execution graphs to be constructed for analysis. An AND/OR graph model of input/output data and software executions is presented, along with analysis algorithms for execution traceability and reproducibility assessment. AutonomousSoftwareOrg is deployed and tested on the Ethereum-based Bloxberg blockchain network which is operated by academic and research institutions, demonstrating its practical viability for sustainable open-source software development.
Mohd Saleem, Sohrab, Matloob Ullah Khan, Faizan Khan Sherwani
Key components of blockchain technology, DeFi represent a revolutionary advance in digital contracts and automated trades, and they are integrated into decentralized networks such as Ethereum. These self-executing contracts eliminate the need for middlemen by autonomously enforcing specified terms. This paper offers a thorough analysis of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), smart contracts, covering their underlying theories, technological foundations, wide range of applications, and ramifications in context of financial inclusion and investment. In order to clarify the workings and practical applications of such innovations, the research technique comprises a methodical evaluation of the literature, an examination of case studies, and an amalgamation of empirical data. This study evaluates their effects on efficiency, transparency, and trust in international transactions by looking at how they are revolutionizing industries like finance, and decentralized governance. It also thoroughly examines security considerations, including best practices and vulnerabilities, as well as regulatory issues and new developments.
The Landauer principle motivates the definition of economic temperature as the monetary price of processing a bit irreversibly. No empirical test of this definition exists in transparent fee markets. This paper fills that gap using daily Bitcoin and Ethereum data, constructing canonical thermodynamic state variables and evaluating five diagnostic layers: state variable behavior, Maxwell-type integrability, Carnot-style efficiency bounds, nonlinear regime separation, and structural break sensitivity to protocol events. Bitcoin's log-temperature behaves as a persistent mean-reverting process with an AR(1) coefficient of 0.97 and a half-life of 21 days; Ethereum is highly persistent, with weaker formal evidence of stationarity than Bitcoin. Maxwell integrability is frequency-dependent: Bitcoin passes all four relations at monthly frequency, whereas Ethereum passes two of four. Carnot-style evidence is the strongest: realized fee extraction efficiency stays well below the implied bound, with daily compliance exceeding 97% on both chains. Structural breaks around Bitcoin ordinals, EIP-1559, the merge, and Shanghai confirm that protocol changes reorganize the temperature relation. The thermodynamic framework provides structure that standard fee market analysis does not, including a first principles efficiency bound and a state space coherence test. The findings provide partial, frequency-dependent, and chain-specific empirical support for a Landauer-based thermodynamic description of blockspace markets.
Mohd Sameen Chishti, Damilare Peter Oyinloye, Jingyue Li
Cross-chain NFT migration refers to the process of transferring digital assets along with their associated functionalities and guarantees between distinct blockchain platforms. However, architectural divergences among these platforms introduce critical challenges, often resulting in features that fail to behave as intended. While protocol-level mechanisms can coordinate data transfer, they are insufficient to resolve deeper compatibility issues arising from fundamental differences in state organization, transaction execution, and ownership representation. Thus, the critical challenge lies in predicting which NFT features can be preserved, which require redesign, and which are fundamentally incompatible, prior to undertaking costly migration attempts. To address this challenge, we first derive a tailored four-layer NFT architecture based on standard blockchain stacks, distinguishing cryptographic, state-management, transaction-processing, and ownership primitives, with explicit upward dependencies. Building on this architecture, we conceptualize an NFT as a bundle of features and define successful cross-chain NFT migration as the preservation of these features. Grounded in this model, we propose a four-phase migration analysis methodology comprising source feature specification, primitive-level dependency mapping, target platform profiling, and compatibility assessment, which classifies each feature as natively preserved, partially mismatched, or completely mismatched. We evaluate this methodology through a proof-of-concept analysis of Ethereum-to-Solana NFT migration, identifying several incompatibility issues that hinder seamless NFT migration.