Financial technology (FinTech) has emerged as a transformative force in the global financial landscape, integrating advanced digital technologies like Artificial Intelligence and distributed ledger systems into traditional services. Since the early 21st century, it has fundamentally reshaped how payments, credit, investments, and risk management are handled. At the vanguard of this revolution are blockchain and cryptocurrencies, which provide decentralized and borderless alternatives to conventional banking. This research explores the evolution of these technologies, examining how smart contracts and automated systems drive efficiency and foster global financial inclusion. However, alongside these advancements, the study highlights the emergence of significant risks, particularly in the realms of cybersecurity, consumer protection, and the complex challenges of cross-border regulatory compliance. The paper further analyzes the strategic responses of traditional financial institutions and central banks, specifically focusing on the rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as a stable counter-narrative to private digital assets. Through various global case studies, the research illustrates the diverse regional adoption patterns influenced by local economic and cultural factors. Looking toward the future, the study predicts a trend of increased interoperability, where decentralized finance (DeFi) and programmable money integrate into mainstream economic structures. Ultimately, the paper argues that while the digital transformation of money offers immense potential for efficiency, its long-term success is contingent upon robust international governance frameworks and collaborative regulatory efforts to ensure trust and stability in the evolving global market.
Blockchain technology has emerged as a pivotal and transformative force, establishing transparent, secure, and decentralized frameworks for transaction management. Its core strengths include immutability, data decentralization, and consensus validation, alongside the automation provided by self-executing smart contracts. This review examines its foundational technologies, diverse applications, and associated challenges. Blockchain demonstrates profound potential across sectors like finance (e.g., Anti-Money Laundering and fraud reduction), education (credential verification), healthcare (secure record management), and the Metaverse (verifiable digital asset ownership via non-fungible tokens). However, adoption is significantly hindered by critical issues, including scalability bottlenecks, the energy inefficiency of protocols like Proof of Work, and security risks stemming from smart contract flaws, with case-based testing revealing up to 40% of public contracts have exploitable vulnerabilities. Recent advancements in high-throughput rollups and formal verification mitigate these risks. This coincides with a 2025 shift toward structured legal mandates, such as the EU’s MiCA, India’s VDA policy, and the U.S. GENIUS and CLARITY Acts. Therefore, future research must prioritize enhancing smart contract verification, developing energy-efficient consensus mechanisms, cross-chain interoperability, and fostering the continued alignment of supportive legal and regulatory frameworks.
Purpose This study examines how entrepreneurial experience shapes perceptions of the ideal investor in the technology-based sector. While previous research has primarily focused on how investors evaluate entrepreneurs, this study shifts the lens to explore how entrepreneurs assess investor attributes. It investigates how experience in securing funding and building ventures influences expectations around value-added contributions beyond financial investment. Specifically, the study explores whether experience leads entrepreneurs to adopt a more strategic and values-driven approach, placing greater emphasis on ethical alignment, expertise, and relational quality, while placing less importance on operational involvement and financial oversight. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts a quantitative research design using survey data from 195 entrepreneurs in the technology-based sector. Participants were recruited through entrepreneurial and investor networks across multiple countries. The survey captured key aspects of entrepreneurial experience, including fundraising and venture development, alongside expectations of investor roles and attributes. Factor analysis identified dimensions of value-added investor support, and k-means clustering was used to group entrepreneurs based on preference profiles. Multinomial logistic regression and OLS regression analyses were conducted to examine how different types of experience influence entrepreneurs' preferences for specific investor attributes and types of support. Findings The results show that entrepreneurial experience plays a significant role in shaping expectations of investor involvement. Entrepreneurs with more experience in fundraising and venture development tend to prioritize ethical conduct, strategic input, and relational alignment over traditional factors like financial returns or past performance. They value investor support focused on strategy, networks, and governance, while placing less importance on operational or financial oversight. Cross-sector experience further reinforces a preference for strategic-driven supports. Overall, the findings suggest that experience increases entrepreneurs' confidence and selectivity, encouraging a more strategic approach to building investor relationships. Research limitations/implications This study has several limitations. First, the data were collected primarily from entrepreneurs in developed countries with well-established venture capital markets, which may limit the generalization of the findings to emerging or less mature ecosystems. Second, the target population is difficult to define precisely, given the informal and decentralized nature of entrepreneurial networks. Third, the reliance on self-reported survey data introduces the possibility of response bias. Additionally, the cross-sectional design limits the ability to draw causal inferences. Future research could benefit from longitudinal data and broader geographic representation to better capture variation across different entrepreneurial contexts. Practical implications The findings provide actionable insights for both entrepreneurs and investors. As entrepreneurs gain experience, they become more selective, favouring investors who offer strategic guidance, ethical alignment, and relational support over purely financial backing. For investors, this highlights the importance of articulating non-financial value, such as expertise, governance input, and network access, to appeal to more experienced founders. Investors who position themselves as collaborative partners rather than controllers may build stronger, longer-lasting relationships. Entrepreneurial support programs, including accelerators and incubators, can also use these insights to prepare founders to identify and engage with strategically aligned investors. Social implications This study highlights the growing importance of trust, ethical conduct, and shared values in shaping effective entrepreneurial ecosystems. As entrepreneurs gain experience, they increasingly prioritize relational quality and strategic alignment in their investor relationships. This signals a broader shift toward more collaborative, purpose-driven engagement between founders and investors. Such a shift has the potential to foster healthier power dynamics, reduce misalignment and conflict, and support the formation of long-term partnerships grounded in mutual respect and shared vision. These findings contribute to ongoing discussions around responsible entrepreneurship and the sustainability of venture growth. Originality/value This study offers a novel contribution by shifting the focus from how investors assess entrepreneurs to how entrepreneurs evaluate potential investors. It addresses an under explored area in entrepreneurial finance, particularly highlighting the role of ethical behaviour and strategic alignment in investor selection. By examining how experience shapes these expectations, the study adds to the limited literature comparing novice and experienced entrepreneurs in their interactions with external stakeholders. It advances understanding of founder–investor dynamics and offers fresh insights into how entrepreneurial learning influences decision-making in the context of venture growth and funding relationships.
The financial sector is experiencing rapid transformation due to emerging technologies. Blockchain offers a decentralized, transparent, and immutable framework for secure transactions, while Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables advanced data analytics, predictive modeling, and intelligent automation. When combined, these technologies create a powerful synergy that is reshaping finance by enhancing fraud detection, improving credit evaluation, optimizing decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, and automating compliance processes. This paper explores the combined benefits of blockchain and AI, highlighting practical applications such as AI-enabled fraud detection within blockchain networks, adaptive smart contracts, and blockchain-secured digital identity verification. It also addresses challenges in merging these technologies, including scalability limitations, regulatory ambiguity, interoperability concerns, and ethical considerations. The study underscores the potential future of autonomous financial systems, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and AI-driven sustainable finance solutions. Ultimately, the integration of blockchain and AI is seen as a transformative force capable of significantly improving transparency, efficiency, and inclusiveness in global financial systems.
The rise of blockchain and the metaverse has promoted the arrival of Web 3.0, a new era in which users can generate and trade valuable digital content like artworks and game items on decentralized platforms in the form of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and how to trade NFTs across different metaverses is receiving more and more attention. Existing third-party solutions compromise decentralization and anonymity, contradicting the core principles of Web 3.0. To solve this challenge, we propose the Universal Metaverse Trading Platform (UMTP), a cross-metaverse virtual asset trading platform designed around Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Unlike traditional notary schemes that rely on centralized identity management, UMTP pioneers integrating SSI into notarization protocols to enable SSI-based anonymous credential–protected election, enabling committee members to operate using DIDs while maintaining accountability. In simulations, UMTP’s final cleanup rate is 13 percentage points higher than PageRank’s. Against the Long-History Prediction Attack and the Recent-Driven Prediction Attack, UMTP improved security by \(63.7\%\) and \(64.8\%\) . Second, some user-oriented secure trading functions are introduced to better meet the diversified needs of users; finally, the Identity Restoration System provides additional insurance for users’ virtual assets. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed scheme through simulations.
This study examines the joint influence of environmental factors and U.S. financial markets on the returns of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), shedding light on sustainability-driven crypto valuation. The analysis integrates CO₂ emissions, green innovations, ESG scores and financial indicators, including the S&P 500, NASDAQ, Dow Jones, gold and oil prices, using monthly data from January 2019 to February 2025. A robust econometric framework is employed to assess both the long-term cointegration and the short-term sensitivities of BTC and ETH returns. The findings suggest that BTC exhibits a strong positive correlation with environmental innovations and ESG scores, indicating an alignment with investors focused on sustainability. In contrast, ETH exhibits weaker sensitivity to environmental factors despite its adoption of a more energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake mechanism. Both cryptocurrencies respond positively to gold and oil prices, reinforcing their potential as alternative hedging assets. By jointly evaluating environmental and financial drivers, this study contributes to the fields of sustainable finance and digital asset research, bridging the gap between ESG studies and cryptocurrency market analysis.
Blockchain technology has emerged as a transformative model in tourism and hospitality, offering innovative solutions to challenges in transparency, trust, and efficiency. This chapter examines the theoretical foundations and practical applications of blockchain, emphasizing its alignment with frameworks such as social exchange theory, transaction cost economics, and sustainability principles. Key applications include blockchain-based loyalty programs, supply chain management, decentralized booking platforms, and secure payment systems. This chapter also highlights future opportunities, such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and artificial intelligence (AI) integration, showcasing their potential to redefine the industry. Despite challenges such as scalability and regulatory uncertainties, blockchain offers significant promise for creating a transparent, efficient, and sustainable future in tourism and hospitality. By bridging theoretical constructs with practical insights, this chapter provides a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners aiming to harness blockchain’s capabilities.
ABSTRACT The paper examines the relationship between financial technologies (FIN), institutional quality (GOV), fiscal decentralization, and natural resource management in influencing sustainable development and environmental efficiency among OECD economies between 1990 and 2022. The analysis is conducted using advanced panel diagnostic techniques and the Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) framework. The empirical results indicate that the positive impact of fiscal decentralization and effective systems of governance on the production of green products will be counted, whereas financial technologies and reliance on mineral resources will lead to adverse consequences for sustainability. These outcomes underscore the paradoxical nature of fintech, which, while enhancing financial accessibility, simultaneously reinforces unsustainable practices in the energy and resource sectors. The study emphasizes the need for OECD economies to harmonize their strategies by advancing green finance innovation, strengthening institutional frameworks, and reducing resource dependence. These economies should reorient fintech development toward sustainability goals through targeted regulation, energy‐efficient digital infrastructure, and alignment with low‐carbon transition strategies.
This study explores the impact of Bitcoin on the Indonesian banking sector, emphasizing both the innovative opportunities and the challenges it presents. The research highlights Bitcoin's potential to enhance financial inclusion and drive technological growth while also identifying significant hurdles such as regulatory issues, security risks, and market volatility. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, the study provides a nuanced analysis of Bitcoin's dual role as both a beneficial and threatening force within the financial landscape. It categorizes research variables into dependent, independent, and control groups to better understand their interactions and influence on traditional banking systems. The paper identifies a critical gap in existing literature regarding Bitcoin's specific effects on Indonesian banking operations, offering an empirical foundation for future research. The findings underscore the evolving regulatory frameworks and Bitcoin's complex role in the banking sector, highlighting the need for strategic management and careful regulation to harness its potential benefits while mitigating associated risks.
This study has been undertaken in the burgeoning intersection of financial technology (Fintech) and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) paradigms, a domain that serves the purpose of redefining capital allocation in the 21st century. The research investigates the "Digital-Sustainability Convergence" theory, which posits that digital innovations serve the purpose of democratizing green finance and enhancing transparency. However, a critical review of the literature reveals a phenomenon termed the "Green Mirage," where the digital representation of sustainability obscures a lack of tangible ecological impact. Utilizing a bibliometric analysis based on VOS viewer logic, this paper examines a dataset of academic literature from 2015 to 2025. The findings indicate that while publication volume is on a rise, particularly in China and the United Kingdom, the intellectual structure is fragmented. The analysis identifies a significant gap between technological implementation—such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI)—and genuine sustainability outcomes. It is important to note that concepts like "token washing" and "digital greenwashing" have emerged as pivotal retention factors for critical scholarship, suggesting that the sector faces an important challenge in aligning "proof of stake" with "proof of impact." The study concludes that while Fintech serves the purpose of mobilizing retail capital, with 81.5% of investors considering ESG factors, the prevalence of managerial myopia and data asymmetry poses a challenge for the integrity of the ecosystem. Thus, it is important that regulators and practitioners move beyond symbolic compliance to address the structural disconnects identified.
Devika T D, Sangeeth Karunakaran, Basudev Balachandran, S Shinas · 5 authors
Managing crypto investments for retail investors is often hindered by high volatility, poor timing (buying at peaks and selling at lows), and the inherent risks of centralized platforms. This project introduces a decentralized, automated SIP model for crypto investments, offering a non-custodial and multi-asset investment protocol to limit these challenges. The system automates crypto investing like a Systematic Investment Plan (SIP). All SIP rules (amount, frequency, maturity) are enforced automatically by smart contracts, ensuring trustless and transparent execution. Users maintain full custody of their funds in non-custodial wallets like MetaMask, and investments are made directly using stablecoins (USDT/USDC) into crypto pools (BTC, ETH, SOL, BNB). The purchased assets are stored in a smart contract vault until maturity, promoting structured long-term investing and verifiable on-chain transparency. By leveraging smart contracts and dynamic frequency validation, the system provides a consistent, reliable, and non-custodial solution for long-term wealth building in the decentralized Web3 space.
ABSTRACT Block chain technology has rapidly evolved from a crypto currency backbone to a transformative infrastructure for financial services. Coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI), it promises to revolutionize how financial institutions operate—enhancing transparency, security, efficiency, and compliance. We employ a mixed-method approach using qualitative interviews, quantitative performance analysis, and case studies to explore the scope of this technological convergence. Our results highlight significant operational gains and outline challenges that must be navigated for successful adoption. KEYWORDS Blockchain Technology, Artificial Intelligence,Fraud Detection,Decentralized Finance, Smart Contracts
Abstract This study empirically assesses the viability of Bitcoin as an alternative investment asset within the Egyptian context from 2011 to 2023. We conduct a comparative analysis of Bitcoin’s risk-return characteristics against traditional Egyptian investment vehicles: the EGX30 stock index, physical Gold, and the USD/EGP exchange rate. Utilizing historical daily data sourced from Coinbase, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, and the Central Bank of Egypt, we employ standard financial metrics including annualized returns, volatility (standard deviation), and Sharpe ratios. Correlation analysis is performed to evaluate Bitcoin’s diversification potential. Furthermore, we examine asset performance during significant periods of socio-economic stress: the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the COVID-19 pandemic (2019-2020), and the EGP devaluation period (2022-2023). Our findings reveal Bitcoin’s exceptionally high volatility ( $$\sigma \approx 3.6\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>σ</mml:mi> <mml:mo>≈</mml:mo> <mml:mn>3.6</mml:mn> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> daily) and potential for substantial returns, yet yielding a surprisingly negative cumulative return over the entire sample period. Gold demonstrated characteristic stability ( $$\sigma \approx 1.0\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>σ</mml:mi> <mml:mo>≈</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1.0</mml:mn> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> daily), while the EGX30 offered moderate growth amidst volatility ( $$\sigma \approx 1.6\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>σ</mml:mi> <mml:mo>≈</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1.6</mml:mn> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> daily). Correlation analysis suggests limited diversification benefits between Bitcoin and traditional assets during certain periods. Event analysis highlights varying asset reactions, with Gold often acting as a safe haven, while Bitcoin exhibited mixed behavior. While Bitcoin presents diversification potential, its extreme volatility, negative long-term cumulative return within this sample period, and the prevailing regulatory uncertainty in Egypt necessitate careful consideration for investors seeking alternative assets in a challenging macroeconomic environment characterized by inflation and currency depreciation.
Edmund Kofi Yeboah, Daniel Yaw Addai Duah, Joseph Kobi, Benjamin Yaw Kokroko
Multinational companies have been struggling with unprecedented difficulties in treasury activities in different jurisdictions, such as liquidity management, cross-border payment, and regulatory compliance, and financial transparency. Conventional treasury management systems are usually characterized by fragmentation, manual handling, and the inability to have real time visibility of cash positions and financial flows. The current paper examines how blockchain technology is being employed in the corporate treasury management systems of multi-nationals. We discuss the application of the distributed ledger technology to revolutionize the treasury processes via real-time settlement and automated compliance checks, improved transparency, and minimized organizational expenses through in-depth review of the available literature and industry experiences. The study examines blockchain-based treasury systems technical architecture, implementation issues, regulatory aspects, and multinational strategic advantages. Our suggestion to the blockchain implementation in treasury management is a system covering interoperability needs, integration of smart contracts, security measures, and governance. Based on the findings, the blockchain technology has high potentials of enhancing the efficiency of the treasury and mitigating the counterparty risk, as well as making the cash management in the global operation more effective. Nevertheless, the implementation should be done with specific attention to the maturity of technologies, governmental alignment, organizational preparedness, and collaboration in the ecosystem. The study can be an addition to the literature on the use of blockchain in corporate finance and can offer effective advice to treasury practitioners who might be considering an adoption of distributed ledger technology.
Abstract Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) use blockchain-based smart contracts to pool capital and execute votes without intermediaries, dramatically lowering costs and widening access to early-stage investment. Unlike traditional venture capital or even regulated crowdfunding portals, anyone with a compatible wallet can buy governance tokens, propose projects, and share upside—creating a global, retail-friendly investor commons that may surface ideas conventional funds ignore. Yet that very openness runs head-long into legal gray zones: Are DAO tokens unregistered securities? Who is liable when code malfunctions or a majority votes to break a rule? Lacking the corporate personhood, disclosure duties, and Know Your Customer checks that anchor crowdfunding platforms, DAOs drift between patchwork state LLC statutes and sporadic enforcement actions. Clear statutory definitions, retrofit governance standards, and tailored investor protection rules are now essential if policymakers hope to harness DAOs’ democratizing promise while containing systemic, consumer, and cyber-fraud risks.
Financial Generative Pre-trained Transformers (FinGPT) with multimodal capabilities are now being increasingly adopted in various financial applications. However, due to the intellectual property of model weights and the copyright of training corpus and benchmarking questions, verifying the legitimacy of GPT's model weights and the credibility of model outputs is a pressing challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel zkFinGPT scheme that applies zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to high-value financial use cases, enabling verification while protecting data privacy. We describe how zkFinGPT will be applied to three financial use cases. Our experiments on two existing packages reveal that zkFinGPT introduces substantial computational overhead that hinders its real-world adoption. E.g., for LLama3-8B model, it generates a commitment file of $7.97$MB using $531$ seconds, and takes $620$ seconds to prove and $2.36$ seconds to verify.
Abstract Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are communities of participants usually in permissionless blockchains or applications hosted on permissionless blockchains. Although they purport to be alegal organizations that do not conform to the legal and regulatory norms for legal organizations such as companies, these communities are experimenting with developing governance frameworks and norms that are innovative and not derived from traditional organizational and legal principles. However, their governance endeavors are often in response to problems and crises. This incremental development is also likely to be contrary to regulatory expectations, as financial regulation is increasingly extended to crypto finance. In the EU for example, where the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation has come into force for a range of crypto-asset activities that have financial implications, it remains uncertain if decentralized finance (DeFi) is caught within its scope. This chapter argues that regulatory provisions, whether or not they apply to DeFi for certain, can shed light on the expectations for governance development that DAOs that govern DeFi applications need to meet.
Arus Reka Prasetia, Primanola Perdananti, Ikaputera Waspada, Maya Macia Sari
Agency conflicts remain a persistent challenge in corporate governance because information asymmetry and misaligned incentives can weaken monitoring and accountability. This systematic literature review synthesizes international empirical evidence on how blockchain and smart contracts relate to agency conflict mitigation and governance outcomes, and it clarifies boundary conditions and implications for Agency Theory. We followed PRISMA reporting guidance and searched Scopus for English journal articles published between 2018 and 2025. After title, abstract, and full-text screening, 13 empirical studies were included for quality appraisal and thematic narrative synthesis. Across contexts, blockchain adoption or innovation intensity is most consistently associated with improved information environments, including higher transparency and reporting quality and lower opportunism related proxies, and it is also associated with improved investment efficiency and selected compliance and risk outcomes. Evidence on smart contracts is substantially thinner. Smart contracts are explicitly analysed in one case study and they are discussed secondarily in one additional study, while none of the large sample quantitative studies operationalises smart contract use as a distinct construct. The synthesis indicates that governance benefits depend on data integrity supported by internal controls, external monitoring and assurance capacity, and regulatory and legal alignment that enables auditability and enforceability. Overall, blockchain-enabled corporate governance is best interpreted as governance by system design that complements conventional mechanisms and motivates future research on measurable smart contract use cases and stronger causal identification.
R. Kaladevi, V. UmaRani, Modafar Ati, Shanmugasundaram Hariharan · 6 authors
Crowdfunding is a revolutionary finance business model and creative initiative in fundraising, but traditional finance models are facing problems such as high intermediary costs, insecurity, lack of transparency, and mishandling of money. This research paper proposes a decentralized crowdfunding mechanism based on blockchain technology, which ensures the fundraising process with automation, trust, and transparency. The self-triggered Ethereum smart contracts written in Solidity object-oriented programming language are used to develop the crowdfunding system, which is deployed and tested in the Remix IDE environment. Remix is linked to the Ganache local blockchain for checking fund transfers. This process automates the main crowdfunding operations like goal verification, fund collection, withdrawal, and donor refunds. The smart contract eliminates the need for middlemen in the centralized system. Also, each transaction is permanently available on the blockchain, guaranteeing traceability, auditability, and guarding against financial fraud via immutability. The results show that a decentralized crowdfunding mechanism with cheap operating costs, transparent execution, and safe fund transfers is feasible. The potential use of decentralized crowdfunding to improve stakeholder trust and operational effectiveness in digital fundraising ecosystems is exhibited in this work. Future research can expand this architecture to public testnets and incorporate sophisticated features like decentralized identity verification and token-based rewards.
Araz Zirar, Abdul Jabbar, Hannan Amoozad Mahdiraji
Smart contracts (SCs), appended to a blockchain, protect digital environments and their resources, processes, and structures, reducing mismatches between legal and actual rights and ownership. They enhance digital resilience by improving transparency, traceability, and trust in digital transactions. Utilising SCs requires businesses to adapt their models, revenue streams, and customer relationships. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), SCs present challenges, requiring proactive decision-making for their effective utilisation and the trade-offs involved. By employing the integrated multi-layer ISM-MICMAC-SWARA framework (Interpretive Structural Modelling, Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification, and Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis), we explain the complex interrelationships among the challenges and propose mitigating risk management strategies. We identify technical limitations and human errors as key drivers, confidentiality and manipulation as linkage challenges, and fraud and hacking as dependence challenges. These findings highlight the interconnected nature of the challenges and their impact on SMEs, and we emphasise the need for targeted resilience strategies. Our research highlights the global dimension of SC adoption. When deploying SCs, SMEs must navigate international regulations, cross-border transactions, and cultural diversity. This global perspective informs smart contracts’ strategic, business, and organisational aspects. Our findings offer insights for academics, industry leaders, managers, and policymakers seeking to understand the potential and risks of adopting SCs in SMEs.
Perpetual futures account for approximately 93% of cryptocurrency futures trading volume, yet funding rate dynamics across fragmented markets remain understudied. We construct a high-frequency panel dataset comprising 35.7 million one-minute observations across 26 cryptocurrency exchanges (11 centralized, 15 decentralized) spanning 749 symbols over eight consecutive days. Using time-series econometrics, correlation analysis, and Granger causality tests, we characterize funding rate dynamics, market integration, and information flow. We find evidence of a two-tiered market structure: centralized exchanges (CEX) dominate price discovery with 61% higher integration than decentralized exchanges (DEX), and all significant information flow runs CEX-to-DEX with zero reverse causality. While 17% of observations exhibit economically significant arbitrage spreads (≥20 basis points), only 40% of top opportunities generate positive returns after transaction costs and spread reversals. Delta-neutral portfolio simulations reveal that successful arbitrage requires both high spreads and sufficient duration before inevitable reversals, with forced exits occurring in 95% of opportunities. The findings show that cryptocurrency derivatives markets exhibit a persistent two-tiered structure in which centralized platforms dominate price discovery while transaction costs and spread reversal risks prevent arbitrage from eliminating large mispricings between platforms, resolving the apparent paradox of substantial price fragmentation coexisting with market efficiency.
We develop a mathematical framework to optimize leveraged staking ("loopy") strategies in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), in which a staked asset is supplied as collateral, the underlying is borrowed and re-staked, and the loop can be repeated across multiple lending markets. Exploiting the fact that DeFi borrow rates are deterministic functions of pool utilization, we reduce the multi-market problem to a convex allocation over market exposures and obtain closed-form solutions under three interest-rate models: linear, kinked, and adaptive (Morpho's AdaptiveCurveIRM). The framework incorporates market-specific leverage limits, utilization-dependent borrowing costs, and transaction fees. Backtests on the Ethereum and Base blockchains using the largest Morpho wstETH/WETH markets (from January 1 to April 1, 2025) show that rebalanced leveraged positions can reach up to 6.2% APY versus 3.1% for unleveraged staking, with strong dependence on position size and rebalancing frequency. Our results provide a mathematical basis for transparent, automated DeFi portfolio optimization.
Abstract: The non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace has rapidly evolved into a transformative space, experiencing remarkable growth in recent years. NFTs serve as digital ownership certificates linked to unique assets such as art, collectibles, and digital media, exemplifying blockchain innovation. This paper employs an exploratory, systematic literature review of Scopus-indexed sources to examine the fraud-prone dimensions of the NFT ecosystem. Using the fraud triangle framework—pressure, opportunity, and rationalization—it investigates individual and organizational drivers of deceit. The study identifies major fraud types including rug pulls, wash trading, Ponzi schemes, whitelisting, and phishing, offering insights to guide policymakers and participants in mitigating NFT-related risks. Keywords: Non-Fungible Tokens, Blockchain, Digital Fraud Vulnerabilities, Three-Factor Fraud Framework, Risk Mitigation JEL Classification Number: G32, G18, K83, K24, O33