The emergence of Web 3.0, or the decentralized web, has the potential to transform the finance industry. Web 3.0 introduces new technologies such as blockchain, decentralized apps, and smart contracts that enable secure, transparent, and decentralized financial transactions. This can reduce the need for intermediaries, decrease transaction costs, and enhance the speed and efficiency of financial processes. Additionally, Web 3.0 allows for the creation of new financial products and services that were previously impossible, such as decentralized exchanges, NFTs, peer-to-peer lending platforms, and decentralized autonomous organizations. These innovations could democratize access to financial services and provide new opportunities for individuals and businesses alike. However, Web 3.0 also poses challenges for regulators and financial institutions in terms of risk management, compliance, and adapting to new business models.
This chapter delves into the core building blocks of Web3, the transformative phase of the internet characterized by decentralized and user-centric digital ecosystems. It explores the ethos of Web3, emphasizing openness, transparency, trustlessness, and user empowerment. The chapter examines blockchain technology for secure transactions, smart contracts revolutionizing agreements, and cryptocurrencies facilitating peer-to-peer value transfer. It discusses decentralized finance (DeFi) as a transformative building block and explores decentralized applications (DApps) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for creating user-centric platforms. The importance of interoperability along with governance mechanisms like decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) is highlighted. The chapter concludes by envisioning the interconnectedness between Web3 and the metaverse, where virtual and physical realities merge. Overall, it provides a comprehensive overview of Web3's emergence and its transformative impact on decentralization, transparency, and user empowerment.
eSource on digital trends and Society 5.0! OFS Portal on AS4 and the four corner e-business model. Topl’s permissionless proof-of-stake. Baker Hughes on PIDX adoption. PwC on Upstream G&A. PIDX partners with DocStudio.
As an agricultural country, Sri Lanka has the potential for cultivation which uses 30% of the total labor force directly or indirectly. Hence there is a vacuum for an appropriate platform to integrate the farmers with other concerned parties also arming them with essential information to establish an effective and efficient process demanded by agriculture 4.0, also facilitating the novel distributed database or ledger technologies. This paper focuses on developing the “Agri Sri” mobile application that connects farmers with retailers, creating a marketplace to enable convenient and more efficient transactions, and providing essential information to the farmers. This approach aims to create an online market to minimize the effect of intermediaries while connecting farmers and retailers with a profitable price for their agricultural products allowing direct transactions between the two. With the proposed platform the farmers could find the right buyers at competitive open bids incorporating the blockchain distributed ledger technology. The proposed platform also allows for smarter synchronized product supply chains by leveraging the experiences of its users and finding innovative ways to improve the way they interact. The proposed platform also facilitates features like an online marketplace facilitating buying, selling, renting, database, prediction and analyzing, calling center, updates, and notifications. The “Agri Sri” also facilitates connecting and collaborating with retailers on market trends, pricing, and distribution methods with local retailers, providing real-time price comparison and location tracking features to help the rural economy. It is expected that the proposed platform will create a conducive environment with well-distributed facilities to support the seamless integration demanded by precision agriculture, the Internet of Things, and the utilization of big data to achieve a greater efficiency level demanded by the challenges of the rising population and climatic change issues.
L. Schädler, Michael Lustenberger, Florian Spychiger
Blockchain systems are a novel technology that allow for innovative business models. However, due to the decentralized nature of blockchains, new organizational challenges arise. Blockchains require intricate governance mechanisms to align all interests of the involved stakeholders. A crucial part of blockchain governance is decision-making, i.e., the way how a community of a blockchain system can reach decisions. While blockchain governance has received considerable interest of academia, decision-making in blockchains has not yet been sufficiently addressed. Through an exploratory multiple case study, we establish a framework for analyzing decision-making in blockchain systems and identify two dimensions along which decision-making in blockchains can be classified—namely community-driven vs. institution-driven as well as off-chain vs. on-chain decision-making. Even though blockchains are decentralized systems, we can show that there are often highly centralized elements present. The degree of this centralization varies across blockchains and might be connected to the business cases and origins of the different systems. Furthermore, many factors of decision-making processes in blockchains are still off-chain and only some factors are truly on-chain. We arrived at these insights through a structured approach for decision-making in blockchains. Thus, we provide new tools for researcher and practitioners and pave the way to novel blockchain applications with sound decision-making mechanisms.
Decentralized applications (dApp) have proliferated in recent years, but their long-term viability is a topic of debate. However, for dApps to be sustainable, and suitable for integration into a larger service networks, they need to attract users and promise reliable availability. Therefore, assessing their longevity is crucial. Analyzing the utilization trajectory of a service is, however, challenging due to several factors, such as demand spikes, noise, autocorrelation, and non-stationarity. In this study, we employ robust statistical techniques to identify trends in currently popular dApps. Our findings demonstrate that a significant proportion of dApps, across a range of categories, exhibit statistically significant positive overall trends, indicating that success in decentralized computing can be sustainable and transcends specific fields. However, there is also a substantial number of dApps showing negative trends, with a disproportionately high number from the decentralized finance (DeFi) category. Furthermore, a more detailed inspection of time series segments shows a clearly diminishing proportion of positive trends from mid-2021 to the present. In summary, we conclude that the dApp economy might have lost some momentum, and that there is a strong element of uncertainty regarding its future significance.
Sowelu Avanzo, Teodoro Criscione, Julio Linares, Claudio Schifanella
Recent advancements of blockchain technologies ensure security and trustability of Community Currency Systems (CCSs), enabling their increasingly widespread adoption. These systems aim at empowering the local economies by virtue of a medium of exchange whose governance and circulation are local. Smart contracts enable the enforcement of token economy policies, which facilitate the experimentation of radically new economic models. Recent studies investigated blockchain-based CCSs. Still, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study analyzing a CCS providing a token-based Universal Basic Income (UBI). We evaluate the Circles UBI decentralised application utility in delivering an unconditional income to its users, focusing on its main pilot project running in Berlin. We analyse the structural changes in the network, especially in relation to a subsidy program, involving local businesses. We also identify prominent users based on centrality measures, and investigate how the UBI was effectively spent. We adopt a method agnostic to the economic context to identify optimal aggregation windows for the temporal network of CCS transactions based on the Causal Fidelity (CF) index. This aims to provide static representations as accurate as possible in terms of sequential order of edges, which aspect was not considered in previous research on CCSs. Our findings suggest that the pilot project sustained the expansion of the economic network and the system facilitated trade in urban communities in Berlin. Future research is needed to identify methods to ensure sustainability of self-organised CCSs adopting a UBI issuance scheme and to further decentralise their governance.
Mayank Raikwar, Nikita Polyanskii, Sebastian Müller
This paper investigates the issue of fairness in Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), specifically focusing on the shortcomings observed in current blockchain systems due to Miner Extractable Value (MEV) phenomena and systemic centralization. We explore the potential of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) as a solution to address or mitigate these fairness concerns. Our objective is to gain a comprehensive understanding of fairness in DAG-based DLTs by examining its different aspects and measurement metrics. We aim to establish a shared knowledge base that facilitates accurate fairness assessment and allows for an evaluation of whether DAG-based DLTs offer a more equitable design. We describe the various dimensions of fairness and conduct a comparative analysis to examine how they relate to different components of DLTs. This analysis serves as a catalyst for further research, encouraging the development of cryptographic systems that promote fairness.
Sergio Luis Náñez Alonso, Javier Jorge-Vázquez, Pablo Arroyo Rodríguez, Beatriz María Sastre-Hernández
Over the last few years, the holding and use of cryptocurrencies, as well as the entire ecosystem of decentralised finance (DeFi), has become popular worldwide. However, their acceptance and use are not equal for various reasons; and it is important to know these limiting reasons. There is a gender gap in the acceptance and use of so-called decentralised finance (DeFi), where females have much lower acceptance and usage rates than men. Our study has focused on analysing why this situation occurs. A structured questionnaire was used, including age, level of education and gender, as well as closed-ended questions and questions with respondent ratings (Likert scale). Replicating the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) model, applied in this case to the study on the use and acceptance of cryptocurrencies by females. This has allowed us to generate a sample of 326 people living in Spain, 168 of whom are females. We obtained as a result that the barriers that limit the acceptance and use of cryptocurrencies by females are several: The lack of investment experience in traditional assets, the general lack of knowledge on the part of females about cryptocurrencies; as well as concepts such as blockchain, how to carry out transactions or what an exchange is and how it works. Also, the fact that cryptocurrencies do not inspire any security in females and risk aversion. In contrast, we found no evidence that females do not accept or use cryptocurrencies due to a lack of trust in traditional money, pressure from social media and influencers, fear of not doing the same as the next guy or speculation, which are mostly present in the motivation of males. Nor do we find that income or lack of digital skills among females are barriers to entry.
Non-fungible tokens(NFTs) are on the rise. They can represent artworks exhibited for marketing purposes on webpages of companies or online stores -- analogously to physical artworks. Lending of NFTs is an attractive form of passive income for owners but comes with risks (e.g., items are not returned) and costs for escrow agents. Similarly, renters have difficulties in anticipating the impact of artworks, e.g., how spectators of NFTs perceive them. To address these challenges, we introduce an NFT rental solution based on a pay-per-like pricing model using blockchain technology, i.e., smart contracts based on the Ethereum chain. We find that blockchain solutions enjoy many advantages also reported for other applications, but interestingly, we also observe dark sides of (large) blockchain fees. Blockchain solutions appear unfair to niche artists and potentially hamper cultural diversity. Furthermore, a trust-cost tradeoff arises to handle fraud caused by manipulation from parties outside the blockchain. All code for the solution is publicly available at: https://github.com/asopi/rental-project
Bruno Medeiros de Oliveira, Pedro Antonino, Augusto Sampaio
Transaction costs are a barrier to the wide adoption of decentralized applications. To address this issue, this paper proposes a framework to optimize transaction fees by carrying out a conflict-avoiding packaging of multiple smart-contract calls into a single transaction. It relies on two main concepts: a way to optimize the bundling of transactions with a conflict-avoiding packaging strategy and a way to execute such bundles with a package-processing methodology. We illustrate our framework and the gas economy it can bring with a case study where we analyze a popular Ethereum smart contract.
Typically, users can pay higher transaction fee to reduce confirmation time while submitting a transaction in Ethereum. However, the rising transaction fee becomes a major issue. Therefore, a fine-grained gas price suggestion tool is expected to various decentralized applications (dApps) with different Quality of Services (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we proposed a machine learning based gas price prediction approach for optimizing transaction fee in Ethereum. The proposed approach takes features of dApps into consideration. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can provide fine-grained transaction fee estimation for dApps with various QoS requirements.
Lin Chen, Lei Xu, Zhimin Gao, Ahmed Sunny · 6 authors
Recent advances in blockchain research have been made in two important directions. One is refined resilience analysis utilizing game theory to study the consequences of selfish behavior of users (miners), and the other is the extension from a linear (chain) structure to a non-linear (graphical) structure for performance improvements, such as IOTA and Graphcoin. The first question that comes to mind is what improvements a blockchain system would see by leveraging these new advances. In this article, we consider three major properties for a blockchain system: α-partial verification, scalability, and finality-duration. We establish a formal framework and prove that no blockchain system can achieve α-partial verification for any fixed constant α, high scalability, and low finality-duration simultaneously. We observe that classical blockchain systems like Bitcoin achieve full verification (α =1) and low finality-duration, Ethereum 2.0 Sharding achieves low finality-duration and high scalability. We are interested in whether it is possible to partially satisfy the three properties.
Through a bibliometric analysis, this article researches the central topics that link blockchain to public policy design and investigates the key policy priorities for the use of blockchain technology in the public sector. The analysis points out six thematic foci in the current literature: (1) business and strategic management, (2) technology adoption, (3) system infrastructure, (4) cryptocurrency and decentralized economy, (5) regulations and geopolitics, and (6) governance. The analysis demonstrates a high degree of co-occurrence between “barriers” and “blockchain adoption” confirming that blockchain adoption in the public sector domain is perceived as challenging. The association of the term “barrier” with other key terms suggests theoretical, technological, resource-based, and managerial challenges as the main showstoppers. The bibliometric analysis also reveals the underrepresentation of social and political sciences in our knowledge base, despite the thematic relevance of these disciplines to understand the underlying challenges. More research from these disciplines is warranted to understand better how this technology can be best integrated into the public policy processes.
Despite the reported disruptive nature of blockchain technology in the extant literature, its adoption is slower than its potential. This difference between the technology’s promises and its current adoption has sparked interest in understanding the factors impeding widespread adoption. This systematic literature review (SLR), drawn from 1786 studies published between 2008 and May 2023, seeks to address this gap. Specifically, our research explores the influence of factors and their differences and commonalities on blockchain adoption. The SLR, examining individual and organisational perspectives, identifies 152 unique factors influencing 25 industries across 21 countries. This review also highlights distinct commonalities and variations in these factors across industries and countries. For instance, while regulatory issues and costs were universal concerns, the importance of technical understanding diverged between industries. Furthermore, country-specific factors, including local regulations and cultural aspects, emerged as significantly influenced insights that provide a comprehensive perspective on the dynamics of blockchain adoption, offering valuable guidance to industry practitioners and researchers striving to navigate the complexities of blockchain integration.
U ovom diplomskom radu analiziran je ekosustav zamjene tokena na Ethereumovoj mreži uz primjer implementacije agregatora mjenjačnica. Opisani su pojmovi blok-lanca, kriptovaluta, Ethereuma, decentraliziranih aplikacija, pametnih ugovora, centraliziranih i decentraliziranih mjenjačnica, arbitraže i agregatora mjenjačnica. Objašnjene su prednosti i nedostatci centraliziranih i decentraliziranih mjenjačnica. Uspoređena je instanca decentralizirane mjenjačnice i agregatora mjenjačnica te je posebno objašnjeno kako različite mjenjačnice funkcioniraju. Opisana je i objašnjena trgovina različitim valutama s komponentom pronalaska najpovoljnije zamjene s mogućnošću korištenja valuta koje se ne nalaze direktno u zamjeni. Na kraju je opisan primjer agregatora mjenjačnica koji je implementiran pomoću pametnih ugovora na mreži Ethereum s funkcionalnošću pronalaska najpovoljnije zamjene preko USDC tokena.
Purpose: The purpose of the study is to analyze the regulation of cryptocurrencies within the specific context of Competition Law. The research aims to examine the interrelationship between Competition Law and the blockchain technology that underlies cryptocurrencies. Theoretical framework: Cryptocurrencies is of concern in almost all the jurisdiction across the global and is of great challenge before all the regulators. The acceptance given to cryptocurrencies across various industries and among various countries is steadily increasing. This research paper would analyze on the regulation of cryptocurrencies in specific lines of Competition Law. Design/methodology/approach: The research undertaken is a Doctrinal one. The study mainly depends on the collection of primary and secondary sources from books, journals, websites, case laws and such other sources. This study uses analytical, critical, comparative and other necessary methods to deduce the conclusion and to make out the findings of the study and to provide the suggestions. Findings: The obtained results of the study allowed us to establish that there is a close interrelationship between Competition Law and the technology that operates the cryptocurrency which is the block chain technology. Cryptocurrencies give rise to several common and particular challenges to Competition Law enforcement agencies. They include the jurisdiction issue, market area, network effect, onus of liability, mergers and acquisitions, etc. Research, Practical & Social implications: The paper contributes to the understanding of the regulation of cryptocurrencies, specifically within the context of Competition Law. The paper sheds light on the legal implications of cryptocurrencies and provides insights into their impact on competition in various industries. The findings of this research can inform policymakers, regulators, and legal professionals involved in shaping the regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies. The research paper contributes to fostering a better understanding of the potential impact on market dynamics, consumer protection, and fair business practices. This understanding can promote transparency, trust, and accountability in the use of cryptocurrencies, benefiting both businesses and consumers. Originality/value: The result of the research paper would give possible solutions to the problem faced by the Competition Law enforcement agencies in dealing with cases related to cryptocurrencies.
В данной статье рассматривается значение криптовалюты в целом и влияние IGO на индустрию криптовалюты, а также оценить IGO как новый инструмент краудфандинга в индустрии криптовалют. This article examines the value of cryptocurrency in general and the impact of IGO on the cryptocurrency industry, as well as assess IGO as a new crowdfunding tool in the cryptocurrency industry.
The traditional decentralised supply chains are facing challenges to meet the increasing demands for openness, transparency, trust and efficiency. As a result, blockchain-based decentralised supply chains are emerging. However, how to identify and discover various services in a decentralised supply chain remains an unsolved issue. This paper presents a new framework for modelling and discovering services in decentralised supply chain systems. In the framework, W3C Decentralised Identifier (DID) is adopted to describe service attributes to meet different business and technical requirements for a supply chain service. While blockchain is used for publishing and storing DID, a graphic-database-based service repository is proposed to organize these DID strings in a natural way as a graph for better service discovery. An Ethereum-based prototype is implemented as a proof of concept to demonstrate its feasibility and usefulness.
The aim of this study is to examine the efficiency of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) derived from differences in corporate governance structures and transaction costs compared to traditional organizations. Core assumptions on these differences from academic and grey literature are integrated into a model of the governance layers of the innovative socio-technical arrangement that is a DAO. We test this model against the case of “The DAO”, an early experiment in decentralized autonomous organization, which was forced to be stopped after a hacker stole around 50 Million USD in ETH tokens in 2016. The case history and its effects on actors in and outside “The DAO” highlight important aspects to be considered in judging the efficiency of governance structures of DAOs and related transaction costs. Results indicate that especially in situations of crisis, transaction costs rise again and that people are not as far at the margins of the corporate governance as the concept of a DAO proposes.
Jul 1, 2023·2023 IEEE 10th International Conference on Cyber Security and Cloud Computing (CSCloud)/2023 IEEE 9th International Conference on Edge Computing and Scalable Cloud (EdgeCom)
Peilin Zheng, Bowei Su, Zigui Jiang, Changlin Yang · 6 authors
Blockchain applications have grown tremendously recently, especially in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-fungible Token (NFT) markets. The DeFi and NFT markets generate massive transactions and research-worthy data. However, few studies have systematically processed and analyzed them, preventing users from understanding the ecosystem. The main challenge of analyzing the DeFi & NFT markets is the heterogeneity of data that different markets have heterogeneous businesses and data. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a framework to explore the heterogeneous decentralized markets in DeFi and NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Based on this framework, we analyze the data of 21 exchange/lending markets in DeFi/NFT, with 184,173,656 records in total. We investigate the activity, profitability, and security of these markets. We obtain several findings to help market users through quantitative analysis. Datasets and codes are released.