Blockchain Papers

Liang Xue, Xiaodong Lin, Xuemin Sherman Shen

No abstract is available for this record.

Kiat Sen Jaron Lim

This project explores the Groth16 zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK) protocol, with an emphasis on accessibility and practical understanding. It begins with a review of zero-knowledge proofs, non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs, and zk-SNARKs, followed by a structured explanation of the Groth16 construction, from Rank-1 Constraint System (R1CS) and Quadratic Arithmetic Program (QAP) representations, to the full formulation incorporating trapdoor elements and zero-knowledge randomness that is supported with a working Python implementation over the BN254 elliptic curve. These theoretical concepts are then applied in SudoZKu, a browser-based Sudoku game that demonstrates a complete end-to-end zk-SNARK real-world implementation pipeline. This system uses Circom for circuit design and snarkjs for Groth16 proof generation and verification, illustrating how high-level computations can be translated into succinct, verifiable proofs within a practical setting. Experimental evaluation then compares Groth16 and another zk-SNARK known as Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Non-interactive arguments of Knowledge (PLONK). Results show that Groth16 achieves approximately 1.9x smaller proofs and up to 16x faster proof generation than PLONK, while both are able to complete verification under 65 milliseconds. The project then concludes by analysing the key trade-offs for Groth16, including trusted setup requirements and a lack of post-quantum security, and outlines future research directions such as on-chain verification and privacy-preserving uses of Groth16.

Steven Paul Nohr

Oracles have become a foundational component of decentralized finance and cross-chain systems by enabling smart contracts to consume external data such as price feeds, timestamps, and event confirmations. However, oracles are fundamentally limited to validating facts and cannot determine whether a transaction or state transition is legally, contractually, or behaviorally permitted. As regulatory regimes such as the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) impose enforceable obligations on token issuers, service providers, and infrastructure operators, this limitation creates a critical enforcement gap. This paper introduces a Logic Validation Layer (LVL), implemented via the Crystal Validator™, which enforces jurisdictional, behavioral, and policy-based constraints directly within token execution paths. By separating factual data delivery, cross-chain transport, and logic enforcement into distinct architectural layers, the proposed model enables deterministic compliance without sacrificing interoperability, composability, or performance. The paper argues that while oracles remain necessary, logic-level validation has become unavoidable for regulated cross-chain finance.

Goshgar Ismayilov

Zero-knowledge proof is a special cryptographic technique that allows a prover to convince a verifier about the correctness of a claim without explicitly disclosing the claim itself. With the advancements of blockchain technologies, zero-knowledge proof has been successfully integrated into many decentralized applications over the years. ZoKrates, with its ease-of-use and direct integration to blockchain platforms, has emerged as a leading framework for developing, generating and verifying zero-knowledge proofs. This survey compiles a corpus of 347 documents that cite the original research work of ZoKrates by considering the period ranging from 2018 to 2025. Out of this corpus, this survey systematically selects and analyzes a total of 87 different documents including only peer-reviewed publications and excluding the gray literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey in the literature to follow a systematic approach to analyze the privacy- preserving applications in blockchain from the perspective of ZoKrates. This survey presents three different classifications over the documents with respect to (i) the applications they develop, (ii) the challenges they frequently encounter and (iii) the metrics they often use to measure performance of their techniques. Based on the challenges identified, this survey finally discusses numerous future research directions to promote potential advancements in the field and attract the attention of scientific and industrial communities. Feedback from readers regarding any inaccuracies or misinformation in this survey is welcome.

Piyoosh Rai

Insurance operations generate continuous streams of regulated state transitions-policy issuance, claim adjudication, premium collection, broker remittance-that must be auditable for years and verifiable on demand by regulators, reinsurance counterparties, and litigation adversaries. The prevailing industry practice protects these audit trails through database access controls and policy-based logging in mutable relational stores. This approach is insufficient: it requires regulators to trust the platform vendor, exposes Personally Identifiable Information (PII) during inspection, and provides no mathematical defense against retrospective tampering by privileged insiders or attackers with database access. This paper introduces the Regure Immutable Audit (RIA) Protocol, a cryptographic statetransition anchoring system that organizes insurance operational events into per-tenant Merkle trees, signs each daily root with a tenant-specific hardware-backed key via AWS Key Management Service, and anchors the signed root to two independent immutable witnesses: AWS S3 Object Lock and the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps. Verification is implemented as a zero-knowledge protocol: an external auditor can verify the cryptographic integrity of any specific event in any specific claim using a Merkle proof of length 𝑂(log 𝑛)against a publicly anchored root, without ever observing the underlying claim data. We provide formal definitions of the State-to-Hash Mapping, the Hash-Linked Lifecycle property, and the Dual-Witness Anchoring Construction. We prove that the system is tamper-evident under standard cryptographic assumptions, that verification has logarithmic complexity in the number of events per tenant per day, and that the Zero-Knowledge Audit property holds against both honest-but-curious regulators and an actively malicious platform vendor. We describe the production implementation deployed in Cryptographic State-Transition Anchoring Piyoosh Rai P a g e | 2 Regure, including the integration with AWS KMS for tenant-isolated signing keys and the dual anchoring path through Object Lock storage and Bitcoin transaction confirmation. We discuss the implications for Continuous Assurance under DORA Article 12, the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP), the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) Cyber Security Framework, and Lloyd's market reporting requirements for delegated authority operations. The RIA Protocol moves the insurance industry's audit trust model from "trusting the vendor" to "trusting the math"-a structural shift that resolves the long-standing conflict between the regulatory Right to Audit and the data subject's right to privacy.

Gboraloo A. W., Eke B., Onuodu F. E.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) have emerged as a foundational component of blockchain-based financial systems, enabling trustless asset trading without centralized intermediaries. However, the transparency of public mempools introduces significant vulnerabilities, including front-running, sandwich attacks, transaction reordering, and broader information asymmetry. In response, Cryptographic mechanisms such as Zero Knowledge (ZK) based architectures and commit reveal schemes are increasingly proposed as a solution to these vulnerabilities. This research systematically reviews the structural transparency paradox and cryptographic architectures in Decentralized Exchange based Automated Market Makers (DEX-AMM), evaluate their effectiveness in mitigating Maximal Extractable Values (MEVs), analyze computational complexity trade-offs including proof generation/verification costs, gas overhead, latency, and throughput, and identify why commit-reveal may offer superior practical viability despite zk-proofs' stronger theoretical privacy guarantees. A comprehensive search was conducted across arXiv, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar including grey literatures for studies published between 2021 to 2026. Findings indicate that ZK-based approaches provide strong cryptographic privacy guarantees but often incur computational overhead and integration complexity, zk-rollups provide strong validity guarantees through cryptographic proofs, but their practical security depends heavily on the sequencer layer used by ( zkSync, StarkEx, and Loopring) which is responsible for transaction ordering, which can censor, delay, reorder transactions or cause failure of execution, while Commit-reveal schemes may be superior for real-world DEXs due to their constant time hash-based complexity (O(1)), lower gas costs, sub-second latency, and simpler implementation, despite requiring two-transaction UX friction, which can be mitigated through wallet automation. The computational efficiency advantage of commit-reveal becomes critical as DEX transaction complexity increases, where zk-circuit depth grows exponentially. Future research should prioritize optimizing zk-circuit efficiency, developing zk-commit-reveal hybrids system that balance cryptographic strength with computational practicality, and advancing hash-based commit-reveal schemes with UX improvements. DEX developers should prioritize commit-reveal for latency-sensitive applications and zk-proofs only when strongest cryptographic privacy is mandatory.

Haodi Wang, Danyang Zhang, Tangyu Jiang, D. Wang · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Min Zhang, Yuehua Chen, Xiyuan Fu

No abstract is available for this record.

Steven Paul Nohr

<b><i>Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) systems</i></b> such as<b><i> zk-SNARKs</i></b> and<b><i> zk-STARKs</i></b> are increasingly promoted as comprehensive solutions for privacy, scalability, and selective disclosure in blockchain-based systems. While these cryptographic primitives provide strong guarantees regarding computational correctness and data confidentiality, they are frequently mischaracterized as substitutes for regulatory compliance, legal enforceability, or supervisory control mechanisms. This paper presents a structural and functional comparison between zero-knowledge proof systems and the Crystal Validator™ (CV), a logic-layer enforcement architecture designed to encode and enforce jurisdiction?aware regulatory requirements. We demonstrate that cryptographic validity proofs are orthogonal to—and insufficient for—legal compliance, accountability, and regulatory supervision as required under frameworks such as the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). We argue that regulatory enforcement logic must exist above cryptographic proof layers and cannot be replaced by them without introducing systemic compliance risk.

Lukas Aumayr, Zeta Avarikioti, Matteo Maffei, Giulia Scaffino · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Hanyu Mao, Tiezheng Nie, Minghe Yu, Xiaomei Dong · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Sayan Bairagi

This paper presents a zero-knowledge credential framework for secure and privacy-preserving attribute verification across multiple independent systems. The framework enables users to prove statements about their attributes without revealing the underlying values, while preventing cross-domain tracking by eliminating globally stable identifiers. The construction combines commitment schemes, digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, scoped pseudonyms, and accumulator-based revocation into a unified and modular design. Scoped identifiers ensure that user activity cannot be linked across different verification domains, while predicate proofs allow verification of conditions such as threshold checks without disclosing sensitive data. Revocation is supported through an efficient accumulator mechanism that enables verification without revealing credential identities and without increasing cost with the size of the revoked set. The system follows a complete lifecycle including credential issuance, proof generation, verification, and revocation checking. All proofs are non-interactive and bound to verifier-specific challenges, ensuring resistance to replay attacks. Security is based on standard cryptographic assumptions, providing guarantees for attribute privacy, proof soundness, unlinkability, and resistance to collusion. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the framework achieves practical performance, with low verification latency, compact proof size, and stable scalability. The results show that strong privacy, verifiable authenticity, and efficient revocation can be achieved simultaneously without relying on trusted setup or pairing-based cryptography. The modular structure further supports integration with decentralized identity systems and real-world deployment scenarios.

Mykola Khranovskyi, Andriy Kernytskyy

The growing use of biometric authentication systems has raised serious concerns about the privacy and security of sensitive user data. Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) provide a cryptographic solution that allows authentication without revealing the actual biometric templates. However, applying them in practice is often difficult due to the computational complexity of the circuits involved. It is commonly assumed that only simple metrics, such as Hamming distance, are suitable for these limited environments, while arithmetic metrics like Euclidean distance are considered too "heavy" or slow. This research challenges that assumption by comparing the performance of both metrics within a Groth16 Zero-Knowledge framework. For our methodology, we used a ResNet18 neural network to generate fixed-length biometric data (embeddings). To make this data compatible with the cryptographic system, we used a quantization strategy for the Euclidean metric and a binarization strategy for the Hamming metric. The experiments, conducted using the Circom compiler and snarkjs library, show very little difference in performance between the two approaches. The Euclidean circuit required 577 constraints, which is only 9% more than the 529 constraints of the Hamming circuit. Furthermore, both methods had an average proof generation time of approximately 0.5 seconds on standard hardware. These findings empirically prove that high-accuracy Euclidean comparisons can be used efficiently in Zero-Knowledge protocols. This allows developers to focus on biometric precision without sacrificing cryptographic performance.

Jin Zhou, Hongzhi Lu, Jianxin Xiong

The integration of continuous Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) into Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) networks introduces severe performance bottlenecks and physical constraints of the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU). Specifically, naively embedding massive Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) for per-packet authentication inevitably triggers catastrophic fragmentation and disrupts stateless forwarding. To address these fundamental limitations, this paper proposes a novel session-bound zero-knowledge authorization framework tailored for SRv6 programmable data planes. Our architecture explicitly decouples heavyweight cryptographic validations from the active forwarding path. Massive ZKP payloads are processed asynchronously via payload transmission in the control plane, while the data plane enforces line-rate access control using lightweight 32-byte capability tokens encapsulated in customized SRv6 extension headers. Furthermore, to mathematically balance robust security with forwarding efficiency, we formulate the dynamic verification process as a risk-aware Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Using in-band network telemetry, we derive an Adaptive Threshold Verification (ATV) algorithm that yields a closed-form <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(1)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> complexity optimal scheduling policy. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the decoupled mechanism seamlessly resolves the MTU bottleneck, maintaining stable baseline throughput under massive concurrent sessions. Concurrently, the ATV algorithm intelligently adapts to real-time threat intensities, conserving control-plane resources during safe periods while instantaneously triggering precise re-verifications against covert and volumetric cyberattacks.

Y.Y.N. Li

We introduce behavior-bound signatures (BBS), a signature framework in which each signature attests not only to signer authenticity but also to the satisfaction of a prescribed behavioral policy. Unlike traditional digital signatures—whose acceptance is determined by identity validity alone—BBS enforces compliance at the level of the verification predicate: a signature is accepted if and only if a zero-knowledge proof establishes that a residual function value δ(x)=∣ϕ(x)−τ∣\delta(x)=|\phi(x)-\tau|δ(x)=∣ϕ(x)−τ∣ lies below a threshold ε\varepsilonε. Thus, compliance safety is reduced to zero-knowledge soundness rather than to external monitoring or honest-majority assumptions. We formalize policy-soundness under chosen-message attacks (PS-CMA), extending EUF-CMA by requiring that no adversary can produce a valid signature for any message whose induced action violates the policy predicate. We prove that BBS achieves PS-CMA security under standard assumptions: binding of Pedersen commitments, collision resistance of Poseidon, and soundness of the underlying zero-knowledge proof system (e.g., Bulletproofs or PLONK). Our construction instantiates the policy predicate via a private structure function ϕ(x)\phi(x)ϕ(x) and enforces δ(x)<ε\delta(x)<\varepsilonδ(x)<ε through a zero-knowledge range constraint, while revealing no information about the private parameters. Sequential signatures compose into a hash-linked trajectory, enabling verifiable ordering and completeness of action sequences. We additionally define the Function Approximation Inversion Problem (FAIP) as a conjectured hardness property of the structure function, and emphasize that the security of BBS does not rely on this conjecture.

Thomas den Hollander, M G Mula, Daniel Slamanig, Sebastian Spindler

No abstract is available for this record.

Sophia Shim, Caleb Lee

We introduce the ω-Protocol, a zero-knowledge proof framework for the verification of elliptic curve–based homomorphic digital signatures. The protocol is constructed on top of the Elliptic Curve Homomorphic Digital Signature Algorithm (EHDSA) and enables zero-knowledge verification of signature validity while preserving signer privacy. The core contribution of the ω-Protocol is a signature-integrated zero-knowledge construction that combines homomorphic properties of EHDSA with algebraic commitment mechanisms over elliptic curve groups. We formalize the protocol model and define security notions capturing zero-knowledge, soundness, and unlinkability of signature verification. Under standard cryptographic assumptions over elliptic curve groups, we prove that the ω-Protocol achieves zero-knowledge and unforgeability-preserving verification without revealing signature components or ephemeral key material. We further analyze the computational complexity of the protocol and show that it incurs only minimal overhead compared to standard EHDSA verification. Our results establish a principled cryptographic framework for zero-knowledge verification of homomorphic digital signatures and provide a foundation applicable to privacy-preserving authentication and verification protocols.

Vinay Kumar Kasula, Santosh Reddy Addula, Supraja Ayyamgari, Chaitanya Tumma

No abstract is available for this record.

Sourav Kayal, Amit Kumar Rana, Sanjib Kundu

No abstract is available for this record.

Kyriaki Tsantikidou, Nicolas Sklavos, Iraklis Symeonidis

No abstract is available for this record.

Chris Brzuska, Michael Klooß, Ivy K. Y. Woo

No abstract is available for this record.

Dr.M.Sukesh Dr.M.Sukesh, BILLA VINEEL, MANCHIKATLA SRI VYSHNAVI, CHILUKA NARESH · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Kunal Tailor

Centralized document authentication infrastructures are inherently susceptible to insider manipulation, single-point-of-failure outages, and operationally slow manual verification workflows. This paper introduces OrioChain, a production-deployed, decentralized verification framework that addresses these architectural weaknesses by combining Ethereum smart contracts, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage, and SHA-256 cryptographic fingerprinting. The system enforces a three-tier rolebased access control (RBAC) hierarchy-comprising Admin, Exporter, and Public roles-exclusively through on-chain Solidity logic, with no reliance on off-chain middleware. Document content is hashed locally within the client browser prior to any network transmission; only the resulting 32-byte fingerprint is persisted to the Ethereum Sepolia blockchain, while the source file is stored on IPFS via Infura and Pinata. This hybrid architecture reduces on-chain gas expenditure by roughly 80 percent relative to storing full document content on-chain. Public verification requires neither a cryptocurrency wallet nor any gas expenditure, and consistently completes in under two seconds with 100 percent hash-match accuracy across all experimental trials. QR code generation at the point of registration enables smartphone-based instant verification for non-technical end users. A structured comparison against nine contemporaneous systems confirms that OrioChain is the sole evaluated implementation that simultaneously delivers gasless public verification, three-tier on-chain RBAC, QR-driven access, and soft-deletion with a preserved immutable audit trail. The architecture supports future migration to Layer-2 networks and is designed for eventual conformance with W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credential (VC) standards.

Rayhan Abbrar

No abstract is available for this record.