Krzysztof Lorenz, Piotr Gutowski, Ewelina Gutowska, Anna Drab-Kurowska
Digital transformation is reshaping innovation processes and capital allocation models, fostering the emergence of alternative financing mechanisms such as crowdfunding platforms. This study investigates the spatial determinants of digital innovation development using Kickstarter campaigns in the United States as a case study. Empirical data were preprocessed and classified into digital and traditional categories. Advanced AI methods, including Deep Autoencoders and Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), revealed spatial clusters of digital innovation in crowdfunding. Cluster visualizations exposed geographic concentration patterns and links to local infrastructure. AI uncovered latent ties between campaign structure and regional context, underscoring the role of AI and crowdfunding in decentralized, localized digital transformation.
This abstract explores the convergence of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), blockchain technology, and AI in creating Geospatial Smart Contracts (GSCs) for real estate. The research demonstrates how GSCs autonomously verify, execute, and enforce property agreements based on trusted spatial data, addressing challenges in title management, regulatory compliance, and transaction efficiency. Through examination of architectural frameworks, case studies, and implementation challenges including oracle integration and AI validation this chapter reveals that GSCs can reduce transaction times by up to 70% and eliminate fraud. Key findings indicate successful implementation requires standardized geospatial data, robust legal frameworks, and cross-jurisdictional cooperation. This chapter provides actionable insights for developers and policymakers seeking to implement location-aware automated agreements.
The rapid rise of the gig economy has reshaped modern labour markets, offering flexibility but also exposing workers to instability, low protection, and algorithmic control. This paper explores how Blockchain technology and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) can address these structural challenges by decentralizing trust, governance, and value distribution. Drawing upon institutional theory, transaction cost economics, and network governance frameworks, the study analyses how blockchain’s core features—immutability, transparency, and smart contracts—enable fairer, more autonomous work environments. DAOs, as digital cooperatives, allow workers to participate directly in decision-making and profit-sharing, reducing dependence on centralized platforms. The literature reviewed highlights both opportunities and limitations: while blockchain can ensure transparent payments and portable reputations, issues of scalability, regulation, and digital inclusion persist. Overall, the analysis suggests that blockchain-enabled DAOs represent an emerging paradigm for equitable and trust-based digital labour, redefining how work, ownership, and governance operate in the gig economy.
As urban ecosystems evolve into data-intensive infrastructures, the transparency of supply chains has become pivotal to cybersecurity, governance, and trust. This chapter explores how blockchain, initially developed for decentralized finance, is now foundational for traceability in smart urban logistics. It examines its convergence with IoT and governance systems to enable tamper-resistant, auditable, and privacy-aware data flows. The chapter outlines blockchain's core features, immutability, decentralization, smart contracts, and permissioned architectures, and maps these to urban sectors like food safety, pharmaceuticals, procurement, and waste. Real-world deployments across Asia, Europe, and North America demonstrate its role in enhancing collaboration, preventing fraud, and supporting compliance with regulations such as the GDPR. The chapter also identifies adoption challenges and offers ethical governance models and a strategic roadmap to position blockchain as a socio-technical foundation for trust, sovereignty, and equity in the smart city era.
The contemporary Internet, a cornerstone of modern society, is characterized by a high degree of centralization. This centralization concentrates data and power within a few large corporations, raising significant concerns regarding data privacy, censorship, single points of failure, and monopolistic control. The "Decentralized Internet," often associated with the Web3 paradigm, proposes a fundamental shift toward a more open, trustless, and user-centric network. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the decentralized Internet, beginning with an exploration of its core principles—trustlessness, censorship resistance, and user-controlled data. We then examine the key enabling technologies that underpin the decentralized Internet, including distributed ledger technologies (DLT), peer-to-peer (P2P) data protocols such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and smart contracts. Finally, we discuss the significant open challenges and research questions that must be addressed, including scalability, usability, governance, and regulatory uncertainty. This paper aims to provide a structured overview for researchers, developers, and policymakers interested in the future of Internet architecture. Index Terms—Decentralized Internet, Web3, Blockchain, Peer-to-Peer (P2P), IPFS, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), Smart Contracts, Decentralized Applications (dApps), Scalability, Governance.
Edison A. Arteaga López, Gustavo A. Ramírez González, Carlos Alberto Astudillo
This paper proposes an ecosystem based on the Internet of Things (IoT) and integrated with Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), specifically IOTA, applied to the tourism sector with a focus on the hotel industry. In developing countries, particularly in Latin America, the hotel industry has been hindered by a lack of technological adoption, which has limited its growth and competitiveness. This paper presents a methodology to enhance the interoperability, security, and traceability of tourism data through the integration of IoT and DLT. The study explores a novel technological architecture, presents preliminary results from a prototype implementation, and outlines future research directions.
Delia-Elena Bărbuță, Cristian Nicolae Buţincu, Adrian Alexandrescu
Encouraging green innovation has become increasingly important in order to address sustainability challenges, yet startups and early-stage initiatives in this domain face numerous barriers, including lack of structured guidance, limited access to mentorship and funding, and concerns around intellectual property protection. This paper presents a solution entitled SPARK-IT GREEN, a decentralized platform designed to support eco-friendly innovation through a secure and transparent ecosystem. Building upon the original SPARK-IT framework, the platform introduces several new features, including a Green Business Model Canvas, lifecycle-aware AI matchmaking, decentralized governance via a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), and advanced intellectual property protection through blockchain-integrated encrypted storage. As an incentive for users to join the proposed SPARK-IT system, they can earn reward and reputation tokens. Our novel solution empowers innovators to define sustainability goals, find verified expert support, and apply for DAOgoverned funding based on community-aligned green priorities. It uses smart contracts deployed on a permissioned blockchain, token-based incentives, and a semantic matchmaker enriched with green project metrics. A detailed use case scenario shows how the proposed system can be used by a biodegradable packaging startup. SPARK-IT GREEN sets the foundation for a scalable, transparent, and sustainability-focused innovation ecosystem.
S. Sivakumar S., Navin kumaar S, Gugan I, Ramya S R · 6 authors
The paradigm shift is a transition to Web3 in the manner digital businesses are structured, operated and monetised. Web2 brought about the centralized platforms, scale of infrastructure and revenue through advertising, to e-commerce, social media, finance and entertainment industries. Nevertheless, due to such models, additional serious problems also arose, and these were exploitation of user information, user monopoly and bad ownership. Conversely, Web3 takes advantage of this characteristic of decentralization, blockchain trust, token economies and community-based governance to help to facilitate user sovereignty and open-value distribution. Although Web3 has all these benefits in terms of security, transparency and user-engagement, barriers to adoption have to do with scalability, usability and uncertainty in regulation. The paper will trace back the comparison between the Web2 and Web3 business model, how the business model has been applied in various industries and how the user interface design has contributed to creation of trust and compliance. In addition to that, it describes the possible approaches to transition to the realm of decentralized ecosystems and the solution to the question of sustainable and future-proof business models on the digital platform.
Abstract Increased and sustained access to the formal financial system enables communities to better meet their basic needs, prepare for and respond to unexpected shocks, and achieve broader economic growth. Yet many emerging economies like those across Latin America continue to face barriers that prevent individuals, households, and businesses from accessing the formal financial system. Financial inclusion efforts that leverage technological innovation are well suited to address some of them. Specifically, fintech products built on blockchains offer new ways to access financial services by creating pathways that do not rely on traditional infrastructure. Blockchain-based services offer easier financial access, innovative credit opportunities, and capital formation in a decentralized financial environment. While blockchain and DeFi are still in their early stages, these services have the potential to close some persistent gaps that stand in the way of more inclusive Latin American economies.
Stanton Heister, Felix Kin Peng Hui, David I. Wilson, Yaakov Anker
The 2015 Paris Agreement paved the way for the carbon trade economy, which has since evolved but has not attained a substantial magnitude. While carbon credit exchange is a critical mechanism for achieving global climate targets, it faces persistent challenges related to transparency, double-counting, and verification. This paper examines how Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) can address these limitations by providing immutable transaction records, automated verification through digitally encoded smart contracts, and increased market efficiency. To assess DLT’s strategic potential for leveraging the carbon markets and, more explicitly, whether its implementation can reduce transaction costs and enhance market integrity, three alternative approaches that apply DLT for carbon trading were taken as case studies. By comparing key elements in these DLT-based carbon credit platforms, it is elucidated that these proposed frameworks may be developed for a scalable global platform. The integration of existing compliance markets in the EU (case study 1), Australia (case study 2), and China (case study 3) can act as a standard for a global carbon trade establishment. The findings from these case studies suggest that while DLT offers a promising path toward more sustainable carbon markets, regulatory harmonization, standardization, and data transfer across platforms remain significant challenges.
We offer a new perspective on trust formation in smart contracts on blockchain that is based on deduction rather than induction. This shift in perspective allows us to explore the boundaries of trust in IT systems, analyze the conditions under which trust becomes dispensable, and unpack the sociotechnical complexity of supposedly “trust-free” systems. Through this approach, we introduce three key concepts: deductive certainty, a state in which an individual has full knowledge of the other party’s future behavior based on deduction; the possibility of deductive certainty that an IT system may provide; and deduction-related trust, a new type of trust rooted in the possibility of deductive certainty. We use these concepts to analyze smart contracts on a blockchain as a technology that offers the potential for deductive certainty by enabling complete deduction. Our analysis reveals the conditions under which smart contract-based applications, also known as dApps, can become “trust-free” and why, in practice, they often are not. Based on a sample of 536 dApps and a user survey, we provide evidence supporting our theoretical claims. Our findings suggest that the possibility of deductive certainty plays a significant role in forming initial trust in dApps. However, we also find that new users rely on both deduction-related trust and classical inductive trust, with the two sources of trust reinforcing each other.
Decentralized blockchain payment infrastructures are rapidly emerging as transformative tools for reshaping financial transactions in the United States.Traditional payment systems remain heavily reliant on intermediaries such as banks, card networks, and clearinghouses, which impose significant transaction fees and introduce settlement delays.These inefficiencies disproportionately affect small businesses, underbanked populations, and cross-border remittances, where costs and time lags create barriers to broader participation in the financial ecosystem.Blockchain-based payment systems, by contrast, utilize distributed ledgers and smart contracts to enable peer-to-peer transactions with reduced reliance on intermediaries.This structural shift holds the potential to substantially lower transaction fees, streamline settlement processes to near-real-time, and enhance transparency through immutable record-keeping.From a broader economic perspective, decentralized payment solutions align with the growing demand for financial inclusion and democratized access to capital flows.They allow micro-entrepreneurs, gig workers, and rural communities to participate more effectively in economic activities by reducing entry costs and providing verifiable transaction histories.In the U.S. context, the integration of blockchain into mainstream finance could complement existing systems such as ACH, FedNow, and card-based networks, while offering alternatives that better serve marginalized groups.Narrowing the focus, evidence suggests that fintech innovators piloting blockchain platforms have already demonstrated measurable reductions in processing costs and settlement times for retail and institutional payments alike.Nonetheless, challenges persist in terms of regulatory clarity, interoperability with legacy infrastructures, and concerns over scalability and energy use.Addressing these issues through targeted policy reforms and publicprivate partnerships will be critical to ensuring that decentralized blockchain payment infrastructures can deliver on their promise of inclusive, efficient, and secure economic participation.
Introduction Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), digital organizations governed by code and community, offer new paradigms for collective governance; yet many early examples have reproduced the power asymmetries, exclusionary participation models, and inefficiencies found in traditional systems. This study examines how DAO governance can evolve to support fair, inclusive, and regenerative capital flows across distributed ecosystems, particularly in contexts where traditional coordination infrastructure is limited. Methods A qualitative case study was conducted on Hypha, an organisation that evolved from a classic DAO to a Decentralized Human Organization (DHO) and subsequently to an Adaptable Organization, or DAO 3.0. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and document analysis, then interpreted using a People–Process–Technology framework to identify governance design principles. This was supported by a comparative taxonomy mapping the evolution from DAO 1.0 to DAO 3.0. Results Findings show a progression from early token-weighted DAO 1.0 models, through protocol-optimized DAO 2.0 structures, to DAO 3.0’s modular, relational, and context-adaptive designs. Hypha’s governance innovations include multi-layer modular voting, “leadership without control” protocols, real-time capital flow mechanisms, and trust-based safeguards that address fairness failures, enhance adaptability, and enable governance to respond dynamically to human complexity and local contexts. Discussion The Hypha case study positions DAO 3.0 as a prototype for regenerative coordination infrastructure where governance operates as a living system, balancing technological automation with human-centered design. This research expands DAO governance theory by clarifying conceptual boundaries, integrating recent literature, and providing practical guidance for policymakers, developers, and capital providers seeking to design equitable, regenerative governance and coordination systems.
Anurag Shrivastava, RVS Praveen, Raed H. C. Alfilh, Navdeep Singh · 6 authors
The rapid integration of blockchain technology into smart city infrastructure presents both transformative opportunities and environmental challenges. While blockchain enhances transparency, security, and decentralization, its conventional consensus mechanisms-particularly Proof of Work (PoW)-are energy-intensive and environmentally unsustainable. As cities worldwide move towards carbon neutrality, there is an urgent need for energy-efficient and environmentally aligned blockchain systems. This paper introduces a novel Green Consensus Mechanism (GCM) tailored for smart cities that optimizes energy use, reduces carbon emissions, and leverages renewable energy sources. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from environmental science, distributed computing, and urban planning, the proposed GCM aligns blockchain operations with sustainability goals. Through simulations and comparative analysis against existing mechanisms such as Proof of Stake (PoS), Proof of Authority (PoA), and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), this study demonstrates significant gains in energy efficiency and operational scalability. The results indicate that GCM can serve as a foundational layer for building carbonneutral smart cities while ensuring secure and decentralized digital governance.
Rayhan Ferdous Srejon, M. Fahim, Sk. Md. Shadman Ifaz, Md. Kamrul Hasan · 6 authors
Ride-sharing platforms have revolutionized urban mobility, offering millions of users convenient and costeffective transportation. However, mainstream centralized platforms such as Uber and Lyft continue to face pressing concerns including data privacy breaches, high service charges, security vulnerabilities, and a lack of transparency due to centralized control. To address these limitations, this research proposes a semipublic blockchain-based ride-sharing platform integrating Hyperledger Fabric for secure and permissioned data management with Ethereum smart contracts for transparent ride booking, fare calculation, and payments. The platform leverages the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for immutable, decentralized storage and uses the Cosmos SDK to enable seamless interoperability between public and private blockchains. A user-centric pay-as-you-drive model is introduced to ensure fair and distance-based billing. Preliminary evaluations show that our system outperforms traditional blockchain consensus methods (PoW, PoA) in throughput, latency, and resource usage. At the same time, it remains economically viable with an operational cost of under 33,000 BDT per node. Future improvements include benchmarking with Hyperledger Caliper, transitioning from Vagrant to Docker for better scalability, and implementing backend services using Node.js or Golang with MongoDB for efficient metadata handling. Together, these enhancements support a secure, decentralized, and scalable alternative to existing ride-sharing systems.
Asst. Prof. Panchami M Hegde, Asst. Prof. Swetha M
Carpooling has emerged as one of the most practical strategies for reducing the growing challenges of traffic congestion, fuel consumption, and environmental pollution, yet conventional carpooling systems that are operated through centralized platforms continue to face numerous issues that restrict their effectiveness and adoption. Existing solutions largely depend on intermediaries to coordinate between drivers and passengers, creating a system that lacks transparency, suffers from high service costs, and exposes user data to privacy risks and security breaches. Moreover, traditional systems are often criticized for inefficient dispute resolution, a reliance on single points of failure such as central servers, and the absence of mechanisms that foster accountability and long-term trust among users. These weaknesses make centralized carpooling platforms vulnerable to manipulation, biased practices, and technical outages, thereby limiting their scope as sustainable mobility solutions. To address these persistent challenges, blockchain technology—specifically the Ethereum ecosystem—offers a transformative alternative. Ethereum supports the development of decentralized applications (dApps) driven by smart contracts, which are self-executing agreements coded directly onto the blockchain. By embedding business logic into these contracts, processes such as ride creation, ride booking, payment settlements, user verification, and rating are automated, ensuring that interactions remain tamper-proof, transparent, and immune to third-party manipulation.
Paul Griffiths, Nuno Fernades Crespo, Carlos J. Costa
ABSTRACT Non‐fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital artifacts built on blockchain technology that have achieved notoriety for their rapid consumer adoption, technical sophistication, and dramatic price swings. This paper synthesizes contemporary academic research on NFT consumer behavior to better understand the current state of the field, to explore its focus and quality, and to identify the authors and subjects that are driving the research. Applying the Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Reviews (SPAR‐4‐SLR) protocol and using an ACO‐TCM framework systematic review of literature, this study of 53 curated articles organizes the existing body of research on NFT consumer behavior to identify current themes and gaps in the academic literature, finding ample opportunities for further research. Finally, this paper proposes areas for further study based on the emerging opportunities in research streams, both in depth and in breadth, concerning NFT consumer behavior.
This article proposes a novel blockchain-based architecture for cross-border payments that integrates self-sovereign identity (SSI) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to address the fundamental challenges of traditional systems. The proposed framework enables near-instant settlement while preserving privacy and ensuring regulatory compliance by design. By layering an identity infrastructure with ZKP-gated smart-contract escrows and regulatory oracles, the system allows participants to prove compliance with jurisdiction-specific requirements without revealing sensitive personal data. The architecture comprises three interconnected layers — identity, value, and compliance — that work together to streamline remittances, business transactions, and international payroll processes. Comparative analysis demonstrates significant advantages over both correspondent banking and current blockchain networks in terms of settlement speed, transaction costs, fraud prevention, and automated compliance. While the approach faces challenges, including network adoption barriers, technical scalability, and governance complexity, this study outlines promising directions for future development, particularly in the context of emerging central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and regulated stablecoins.
Blockchain sharding has emerged as a promising solution to address scalability and performance challenges in distributed ledger systems. In the sharded blockchain, yanking can reduce the communication overhead of smart contracts between shards. However, the existing smart contract yanking methods are inefficient, increasing the latency and reducing the throughput. In this paper, we propose a novel DRL-Based Cross-Shard Smart Contract Yanking (DCSCY) framework which intelligently balances three critical factors: the number of smart contracts processed, node waiting time, and yanking costs. The proposed framework dynamically optimizes the relocation trajectory of smart contracts across shards. This reduces the communication overhead and enables adaptive, function-level migrations to enhance the execution efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces the cross-shard transaction latency and enhances smart contract utilization. Compared to random-based and order-based methods, the DCSCY approach achieves a performance improvement of more than 95%.
The rapid evolution of Blockchain technologies has propelled the rise of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) as a transformative alternative to traditional financial systems. This study investigates the key drivers influencing the secure and inclusive adoption of DeFi, with a specific focus on the roles of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and smart contracts. The research aims to examine how these technologies mitigate intermediary dependence, enhance transactional security, and promote financial inclusion. Utilizing a quantitative approach, data were collected through a structured questionnaire administered to 230 respondents with backgrounds in finance, technology, and Blockchain. The dataset was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics to explore the relationships between DLT features and adoption challenges in the DeFi ecosystem. The results indicate that smart contract integration significantly reduces reliance on intermediaries (52.2%) and enhances security and operational efficiency (56.5%). Furthermore, DLT-based identity verification mechanisms contribute to improved financial inclusion (56.5%). Despite these benefits, the study identifies ongoing challenges such as scalability limitations, energy consumption, and regulatory uncertainties that may hinder widespread adoption. The findings underscore the transformative potential of DLT and smart contracts in shaping a more transparent, efficient, and inclusive financial infrastructure. This research highlights the importance of technological innovation and cross-sector collaboration in addressing existing limitations and optimizing DeFi’s integration into global financial systems.
Nur Nisa Humairah Rosdi, Amysha Qistina Amerolazuam, Nur Zafirah Adira Ahmadzamani, Ahmad Anwar Zainuddin
This concise review paper discusses the application of smart contracts to increase blockchain interoperability. The emergence of blockchain has opened many opportunities to explore the advantage of modern technology. Blockchain networks operate as isolated ecosystems, hindering the seamless transfer of assets and data across different platforms. This ecosystem leads to the inability to interact or communicate within the blockchain. Smart contracts present a promising solution for facilitating interoperability between blockchains. In this paper, the potential of smart contracts as bridge technologies between blockchains is explored. The design and implementation of smart contracts to enable secure, trust less communication and asset transfer between disparate blockchain networks are analysed. Several academic papers were reviewed to understand the existing research and development efforts towards smart contract-based interoperability solutions. The ongoing discourse on blockchain interoperability is contributed to by highlighting the potential of smart contracts as bridge technologies, identifying key challenges and research gaps in this domain, and providing insights for further development of secure and efficient cross-chain communication protocols.
From the beginning of the World Wide Web, humanity has been demanding social interaction and online activity from the Internet. From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, users have been offered participation and co-creation tools by the web to mold their internet. This change in the architecture of the internet is what Web3 introduces as decentralization is a leading concept now. The underlying blockchain technology used by Web3 has the possibility to revolutionize all the centralised models of trustless transfers, secure asset ownership, and decentralised administration. The use of smart contracts and DApps promotes transparency and automation and consequently minimises the role of intermediaries. The financial inclusiveness is enhanced and made accessible for unbanked access to global banking services using DeFi. Web3 also meets the Metaverse at a point where the virtual experiences in an immersive nature and user-controlled are actualized. This paper discusses blockchain in Web3 comprehensively from the technology building block, applications, issues, and research trends of the future. This research identifies the overall influence of blockchain on internet governance, economic systems, and social interaction during the decentralized era from the perspective of how the blockchain can reframe the entire portion of Web3.