Blockchain Papers

Alaa Abid Muslam Abid Ali, Mohamed Mabrouk

No abstract is available for this record.

Kamil Jarosz, Patryk Wojtyczek, Renata Słota

No abstract is available for this record.

Ilavendhan Anandaraj, Duane Chembakassery

No abstract is available for this record.

Yatipa Chaleenutthawut, Vyacheslav Davydov, Michael Evdokimov, Sudarut Kasemsuk · 7 authors

Decentralized finance (DeFi) offers a range of financial instruments and services that leverage the capabilities of web3 technology. Maker protocol, which enables users to obtain loans backed by cryptocurrencies, is one of them. Unlike traditional banks, Maker’s data is transparently recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. In this research paper, we focus on analyzing the lending aspect of Maker from a traditional finance perspective. To achieve this, we create a unique dataset with loan portfolios from the MakerDAO project, making it the first dataset of its kind in the DeFi field. This publicly available dataset contains essential financial characteristics related to borrowing, including balance, loss given default, annual equivalent rate, and probability of default. Additionally, we develop a specialized mathematical model tailored specifically to this project. This model allows us to estimate the probability of default by considering the presence of crypto-collateral and utilizing Brownian motion passage levels. The results of this study provide valuable insights into lending practices in DeFi projects. They also help bridge the gap between traditional finance and blockchain-based financial services.

CoinCraze Labs

No abstract is available for this record.

Yuting Deng, Junhao Chen, Xinyu Yang, Jiawen Chen · 5 authors

In recent years, blockchain technology has received attention because of its decentralized, immutable and other characteristics, but it faces storage and retrieval challenges. To address these challenges, this paper introduces IOTA distributed ledger technology, which solves the scalability and cost problems of traditional blockchains. By analyzing and experimenting the Tangle, the underlying consensus structure of IOTA, this paper reveals the main factors affecting its development, and proposes a segmented adaptive cutting-edge transaction selection algorithm to optimize the system performance. At the same time, based on IOTA distributed ledger, this paper proposes a data encryption storage and retrieval scheme, which speeds up the data link and retrieval speed, and ensures the integrity and security of data. Finally, this paper discusses the application of blockchain in accounting informatization, and puts forward the scheme of building a new generation of accounting informatization platform, which is of great value to the construction of accounting informatization.

Shruti Jadon, Karthikeya Bhat, Karthikeya R. Jenni, Krishna Vedantha · 6 authors

In the current digital landscape, almost everyone is on social media or various social media platforms. People use social media for a plethora of purposes, which include staying connected with friends and family, accessing information and updates about ongoing events, entertainment, networking with professionals, expressing themselves to a wide range of users, promoting businesses, joining online communities and engaging in various activities which has led to an increase in the consumption and usage of online social networks (OSN). One of the reasons for such a growth is their features such as ubiquitous access, on-demand service, friendship networks, user engagement strategies like recommendation engines, etc. However, there are various limitations to the current approach, such as the centralization of control, lack of data ownership, poor access control, fake news, bot accounts, censorship, digital rights management issues, etc. To address these limitations, a paradigm shift is necessary. This paper aims to develop a social media application where every post can be converted to a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and be sold to earn money. Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is used as the decentralized storage. Algorithms for all the functionalities of the applications are given along with an algorithm for a reputation score for every user and their posts in social media are also proposed.

Marios Touloupou, Klitos Christodoulou, Marinos Themistocleous

In the evolving domain of blockchain, a critical challenge lies in the performance analysis of blockchains under controlled test conditions. This paper focuses on validating the Blockchain Benchmarking Framework (BBF), developed for the evaluation of blockchain protocols in a controlled environment. The BBF’s robustness and versatility are demonstrated through its application to the official Docker clients of Ripple’s XRP Ledger (XRPL) and Ethereum, deployed in private, local and controlled environments. These deployments are utilized to simulate network dynamics, transaction throughput, and resilience in a variety of scenarios. Our methodology encompasses tests ranging from standard operational conditions to adverse scenarios, including node failures and simulated double-spend attacks. These controlled environments are essential for evaluating the BBF’s efficacy in stress testing blockchain protocols and assessing their stability and robustness. The BBF’s ability to accurately capture and analyze performance characteristics is highlighted, providing insights into the operational mechanics, scalability, and resilience of these blockchain clients. The findings emphasize the BBF’s adaptability and effectiveness in managing different blockchain protocols, reaffirming its potential for broader application in pre-launch testing and analysis of blockchain performance. This study contributes to the understanding of how blockchain clients can be preliminarily assessed before mainnet deployment as well as to validate all the design decisions made by the protocol under different settings and synthetic scenarios.

Ou Wu, Zhongxing Wang, Zhongjin Li

Hyperledger Fabric (shortened to Fabric) is an open-source, enterprise-level, permissioned distributed ledger technology platform with a highly modular, configurable architecture. It supports writing smart contracts in general-purpose programing languages and has become the preferred choice for enterprise-level blockchain applications. However, the transaction throughput of the Fabric system remains a critical factor that restricts the further application of this technology in various fields. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate and optimize the performance of the Fabric blockchain platform. Existing performance modeling methods need to be improved in terms of compatibility and effectiveness. To address this, we propose a performance-compatible modeling method for Fabric using queuing theory, which considers the limited transaction pool and the situation where node groups are attacked. Using the Fabric 2.0 version as an example, we have established a model of the transaction process in the Fabric network. By analyzing the model’s continuous 3D time Markov process, we solved the system stationary equation and obtained analytical expressions for performance indicators such as system throughput, system steady-state queue length, and system average response time. We conducted extensive analyses and simulations to verify the models’ and formulations’ accuracy and validity. We believe this approach can be extended to various scenarios in other blockchain systems.

Mark Philip M. Sy, Rufo I. Marasigan, Enrique D. Festijo

The attractiveness of distributed ledger technology as a platform for the implementation of digitalized inter-organizational business processes stems from its inherent ability to handle the lack of trust and transparency between organizations. A blockchain is a classification of distributed ledgers that contains blocks, involving list of data connected by cryptography. Every block has a timestamp, a cryptographic hash of the previous block, and a few transaction details. It is commonly used for financial transactions in the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, popularly known as cryptocurrencies. However, other than this use-case, implementing it in traditional information systems is explored in this paper. The study used Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) to create a permissioned network that supports a distributed ledger, smart contracts (chaincode) and various participants who invoke the transactions on the ledger. Several functions is embedded in the chaincode design as deemed necessary in the analysis of educational verification process of higher educational institutions (HEI). For this scenario, blockchain was believed to be appropriate to address trust, security, privacy, and transparency concerns because this technology prevents data or transactions from being altered once they are saved in a blockchain database. Since it creates an irreversible record, it practically becomes impossible to alter. Any changes to the database provide consistency and completeness by requiring new data blocks to be added to the current chain of blocks in chronological sequence. The blockchain network was interacted upon through Application Programming Interfaces (API). The performance assessment confirmed that the chaincode is working and the functions work as expected. Numerous readings of the response time and the payload size were recorded and kept as results for the endpoint testing of the chaincode. It can be assumed that using blockchain to improve the drawbacks of centralized and/or traditional information systems is viable.

T. R. Saravanan, Anantha Raman Rathinam, J. Lenin, A. Komathi · 6 authors

Combining Proof of Space (PoSpace) and Proof of Replication (PoRep) with interoperability protocols and distributed file systems in cloud computing may change the game. This combination has the potential to usher in a paradigm change in cloud infrastructures, bringing with it new heights of safety, scalability, and efficacy. Both PoSpace and PoRep provide new ways of storing information on blockchain networks. The energy consumption of PoSpace is much lower than that of conventional Proof of Work (PoW) algorithms because it uses unused storage space as a resource for consensus. In contrast, PoRep strengthens the robustness of the cloud system by evaluating the storage replication between nodes to guarantee data integrity. Protocols for interoperability across blockchains are crucial to their capacity to communicate with one another. They make it easier to trade information and assets, leading to a more cohesive ecosystem that goes beyond the boundaries of different blockchains. Increased connectivity and productivity in the cloud are both benefits of interoperability. By distributing data storage over a network, distributed file systems usher in a new era of administration efficiency.

Yi-Jen Su, Chao-Ho Chen, Tsong-Yi Chen, Chun-Wei Yeah

The main causes for the risks of used-car trading lie in the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers and the absence of a trust mechanism. This study proposed applying the Ethereum blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to construct a used-car trading and management information system that supports decentralized data storage services. This mechanism could support the permanent storage, immutability, and traceability of car maintenance data through the operation of smart contracts. Furthermore, car information is stored and managed by IPFS. Slither monitors the security of this system by detecting security bugs in the operation of smart contracts.

Jishu Wang, Yaowei Wang, Xuan Zhang, Zhi Jin · 8 authors

Blockchain is a trans-generational technology that is gradually introduced and applied in many fields because of its characteristics such as tamper-proof, traceability, and decentralization. However, the performance bottlenecks of blockchain have been one factor that hinders its practical application. This paper proposes a blockchain performance optimization framework (called LearningChain). We use a temporal convolution network to predict the transaction arrival rate of the blockchain and propose an ensemble learning-based method and a meta-learning-based method to train a blockchain performance prediction model, respectively. We design a performance scoring mechanism to dynamically tune the configuration parameters of the blockchain to optimize the blockchain performance. In addition, we collect and contribute a blockchain performance dataset (called HFBTP) for other researchers to research. The sufficient experimental results and analysis show that LearningChain can effectively optimize blockchain performance. The quantitative and qualitative comparisons with related work demonstrate the superiority and innovation of our work, LearningChain reaches state-of-the-art, is highly applicable, scalable, and can be applied to many practical blockchain-based application scenarios and different blockchain platforms. LearningChain can be complemented with other existing blockchain performance optimization tools and methods to further enhance the effectiveness of blockchain performance optimization.

Manfred Baldauf, Erik Sonnleitner, Marc Kurz

Ethereum is a rapidly evolving blockchain with new features as well as new vulnerabilities being introduced regularly. Interaction with the network is costly compared to other blockchains or traditional software systems. When starting to develop on Ethereum, a supported smart contract programming language needs to be learned, most notably Solidity. Having various pitfalls raises the question of what the best practices for the safe and efficient usage of Ethereum are. This study primarily aims to combine knowledge from existing research resources, while also introducing new approaches learned from practical smart contract development analysis and inquiry, which are subsequently compiled into lists of best practices. The most important findings are that code quality and security should be prioritized. Moreover, some simple gas-saving strategies can help to decrease interaction costs with little effort.

Puwei Wang, Haoran Li, Hang Fu, Zhouxing Sun · 6 authors

In edge computing, applications are usually delivered as services, each of which runs independently and cooperates to construct complicated applications. QoS (Quality of Service) monitoring is an important way to detect and locate faulty services. In a decentralized environment, QoS monitoring will face trust problem because it is difficult to guarantee the trustworthiness of monitoring results. This article builds a blockchain system for QoS monitoring. However, there are two challenges. First, although the blockchain consensus ensures the consistency of on-chain data among nodes, there is no guarantee that the monitoring data collected in the decentralized environment are authentic, because malicious nodes may report falsified data. Second, in order to handle service faults in time, the real-time query is usually required for obtaining monitoring data. But, blockchains suffer from inefficient querying, because the sequential data storage of blockchain is designed for write intensive applications at the expense of some read performance. To address these challenges, this article proposes a clustering-based algorithm for validating the authenticity of monitoring data collected in the decentralized environment, and proposes a probabilistic threshold query over blockchain, which supports efficient querying and guarantees the probability that the query results are correct is not less than a given threshold. This article implements the proposed blockchain system based on the blockchain platformHyperledger Fabricand the edge computing platformKubeEdge. The experiment results demonstrate the proposed blockchain system provides high-throughput and low-latency monitoring ability, and can efficiently obtain monitoring results close to real QoS data.

Dipankar Sarkar

Ethereum has emerged as a leading platform for decentralized applications (dApps) due to its robust smart contract capabilities. One of the critical issues in the Ethereum ecosystem is Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), a concept that has gained significant attention in the blockchain community. However, MEV has remained a major challenge with significant implications for the platform's operation and integrity. This paper introduces the FairFlow protocol, a novel framework designed to mitigate the effects of MEV within Ethereum's existing infrastructure. The protocol aims to provide a more equitable environment, preventing exploitation by miners or validators, and protecting user data. The combined approach of auction-based block space allocation and randomized transaction ordering significantly reduces the potential for MEV exploitation.

Shino Iwami, Yoshiyasu Takefuji

Recently, blockchain technologies seem to have emerged from a period of disillusionment named in the hype cycle, and development has become active again. In this research, substitute and complementary repositories were identified from GitHub records in order to grasp the state of representative blockchain platforms: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, Ripple, and Corda. Within many blockchain platforms, it is common to have complementary relationships. Ethereum and Hyperledger also have a complementary relationship across platforms. The results showed that Ethereum is reactivating Hyperledger, whose development is stabilizing. This research proposes a methodology to find next-step software development from the network based on developers' skills via their movements between repositories.

Gholamreza Ramezan, Manvir Schneider, Mel McCann

In this paper, we propose MACS - a new coin selection algorithm for multi-asset UTXO-based blockchains. MACS addresses the primary coin selection requirements regarding transaction fee, transaction size, UTXO pool size, transaction age, and privacy. We compare the performance of MACS with other coin selection algorithms. The performance evaluation shows that MACS achieves the mentioned requirements while outperforming other coin selection algorithms in terms of having a wider distribution of their number of UTXO inputs. Moreover, UTXOs will not remain in the UTXO pool forever when the MACS algorithm is used since MACS keeps the fraction of old UTXOs oscillating between $0 \%$ and $20 \%$.

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.

Changyu Duan, Rong Jiang, Yi Zhang, Bin Wu · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Zhaoxian Wang, К.Н.А. ФАН, Lingwei Chao, Ruini Xue

Blockchains have been widely adopted to track critical data in complicated applications recently, thus it is necessary to provide efficient infrastructure to analyze large-scale chain data. However, the current blockchain clients are mostly designed for a single node with limited storage space and the separated data analysis systems are not suitable for huge chains due to redundant data transformation and scalability. To address these challenges, we propose BigChain, a distributed blockchain client with built-in bigdata processing capability. BigChain is designed on top of HBase by mapping blockchain entities to HBase’s KV storage to guarantee the rapid growth of on-chain data. By integrating the MapReduce framework, BigChain could leverage the Hadoop big data ecosystem directly to analyze blockchain data in a scalable manner. Additionally, an indexing service is devised accordingly to speed up BigChain. Finally, comprehensive experiments were conducted against Ethereum, and the results indicate that BigChain can outperform typical clients by 10 times in terms of comprehensive scenarios.

Mohsin Kamal, Muhammad Tariq, Mian Ahmad Jan, Houbing Song

Blockchain technology has found applications across diverse domains owing to its ability to establish trust in a decentralized manner. Nevertheless, the integration of blockchain into critical infrastructure domains encounters significant challenges posed by the computational demands and storage requirements associated with the proof-of-work puzzle during the mining process. This scenario becomes particularly complex in the context of applications within the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), where stringent timeliness constraints are inherent, notably in functions such as intrusion detection and control. This paper presents a novel solution that takes into account the time-sensitive nature of application constraints within the IIoT. Specifically, we focus on online functions involving intrusion detection and control. By doing so, we address the imperative need for timely and secure data delivery, crucial in maintaining the integrity of hard-to-tamper ledger blocks. These blocks encapsulate measurements that are seamlessly utilized by various system functions and components. The proposed approach optimizes the utilization of heterogeneous resources governing blockchain computations. This optimization ensures that the desired properties for logging within the blockchain are met, enabling the prompt delivery of measurements. The novel collaborative mining technique entails the sharing of nonce ranges among miners, which effectively reduces the overall mining time and enhances the efficiency of the process.

Selwyn Paul J, R Suchithra

The primary objective of this research is to investigate the seamless fusion of RDH-EI and blockchain, capitalizing on the inherent strengths of both paradigms. By integrating blockchain into the RDH-EI framework, a distributed ledger system is established, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and traceability of embedded data. The integration also introduces a decentralized governance structure through smart contracts, empowering fine-grained control over data access within the decentralized cloud storage environment. Innovatively, this research introduces dynamic parameter adaptation within the RDH-EI process, leveraging blockchain consensus mechanisms to optimize embedding parameters in real-time. This dynamic adjustment accommodates variations in network conditions and evolving security requirements, enhancing the adaptability of the embedding process. The envisioned contributions of this research include a fortified security posture for RDH-EI applications in decentralized cloud storage, dynamic adaptability of embedding parameters, a decentralized key management system, and cross-dataset generalization through extensive evaluations. As the research unfolds, it not only addresses the contemporary challenges of secure multimedia data embedding but also provides a forward-looking perspective, offering a robust and adaptable solution for the evolving landscape of decentralized cloud storage ecosystems. The outcome of this research is anticipated to shape the future of secure and efficient data embedding in the rapidly advancing domain of decentralized cloud storage.

David Melo, Saúl E. Pomares Hernández, Lil Rodríguez, Julio César Pérez-Sansalvador

As a decentralized system, Bitcoin has earned its reputation as a reliable and secure method for online payments, eliminating the need for a trusted third party. It supports a range of transaction types, such as Multisig, Pay-to-PubKey (P2PK), Pay-to-Script-Hash (P2SH), Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH), SegWit, and Coinbase. These transactions are designed to meet specific user needs, such as throughput and security. For example, the SegWit method modifies the transaction structure and increases the block size to enhance throughput. Similarly, P2PKH reinforces the security of transactions by covering the public key until the funds are used. However, these changes directly affect the growth of blockchain storage, which is one of the main challenges for Bitcoin's adoption. To the authors' knowledge, we found no comparative studies on storage costs between transaction types. To bridge this gap, this paper presents an exhaustive analysis of the storage used by these Bitcoin transaction types. We analyzed 845 million transactions and found that transaction types such as P2SH and SegWit have reduced storage efficiency. This study paves the way for future research to achieve scalable storage solutions in Bitcoin.