Blockchain Papers

Martina Tambucci

No abstract is available for this record.

Dhiaeddine Rejeb

Blockchain is an open distributed database that carries out transactions on an open decentralized ledger. It is a technology that will probably be the source of a huge digital change especially in the financial sector. The application of this technology has started to take its first steps recently and its importance is undeniable in an emerging and expanding field such as Islamic finance. In this context, the purpose of this article is to study the integration of the blockchain and one of its important components, namely the smart contract in the management of the compulsory Islamic charity the zakat. To do this, we have developed a funding model linking all the stakeholders in question and the diversities of blockchain technology. We were thus able to conclude huge benefits and technical contributions in this context which encourages Islamic financial institutions to develop more models likely to support this technology without ignoring the compliance with the Islamic jurisprudence rules.

B. Cappiello, Gherardo Carullo

No abstract is available for this record.

Harikesh Singh, Amit Sinha, Ashwin Perti

A blockchain is, in the easiest of terms, a period stepped arrangement of unchanging records of information that is overseen by ia igroup iof iPCs inot ipossessed iby iany isingle ielement. iEvery ione iof ithese isquares iof iinformation iis imade isure iabout iand ibound ito ione ianother iutilizing icryptographic istandards. Ethereum iis ia iworldwide, idecentralized istage ifor icash iand inew isorts iof iutilizations. iOn iEthereum, iyou ican icompose icode ithat icontrols ithe icash, iand imanufacture iapplications iavailable ianyplace ion ithe iplanet.IA Smart iContract iis ia iPC iprogram ithat ilegitimately iand iconsequently icontrols ithe iexchange iof icomputerized iresources ibetween ithe igatherings iunder ispecific iconditions. iA ikeen iagreement iworks isimilarly ias ia iconventional iagreement iwhile ilikewise iconsequently iimplementing ithe iagreement. iSavvy icontracts iare iprograms ithat iexecute iprecisely ias ithey iare iset iup (coded, imodified) iby itheir imakers. iMuch ithe isame ias ia icustomary iagreement iis ienforceable iby ilaw, ishrewd iagreements iare ienforceable iby icode. iA ibrilliant iagreement iis ionly ian iadvanced iagreement iwith ithe isecurity icoding iof ithe iblockchain. iA isavvy icontract ihas isubtleties iand iconsents iwritten iin icode ithat irequire ia iprecise igrouping iof ioccasions ito ihappen ito itrigger ithe iunderstanding iof ithe iterms ireferenced iin ithe ibrilliant iagreement.

Erdinç Akyıldırım, Shaen Corbet, Ahmet Şensoy, Larisa Yarovaya

No abstract is available for this record.

Michele Ferrari

No abstract is available for this record.

Giesela Rühl

No abstract is available for this record.

Tiffany M. Sillanpää

Since Friedrich Kessler wrote “Contracts of Adhesion-Some Thoughts About Freedom of Contract” in 1943, condemning narrow adherence to the principle of “freedom to contract” in the face of large scale enterprises’ growing preference for standard form contracts, Courts have balanced their desire to uphold contracts while protecting weaker parties from adhesion. Today, they face similar challenges with the rise of code-driven smart contracts and blockchain governance. Similar to Kessler’s world, where standard-form contracts were a tool for “excluding or controlling the ‘irrational factor’ in litigation” such as uncertain outcomes of judicial interpretation, automated smart contracts aim to put themselves outside the control of both contractual parties and the courts, thus removing any ability to breach or tamper with the original terms. Smart contract advocates contend that removing the judiciary as the governing body over contract law and imposing contractual performance via decentralized blockchain governance improves efficiency and certainty. But, how much can one really write a contract that completely circumvents the potential for legal intervention or judicial enforcement? Will smart contracts finally achieve the complete separation between private and public law that advocates of “freedom to contract” originally claimed, or does the common law legal system’s deep-rooted belief in the rule of law and due process prevent the judiciary from being excluded from contract enforcement regardless the medium? And is there a risk that, as smart contract sceptics posit, smart contract platforms and blockchain governance create a new feudal order with a “potentially illegitimate exercise of power” and “normatively suspect” wealth distributions? The short answer, as this paper will demonstrate, is that as long as smart contracts meet the traditional requirements of a contract, they cannot fall outside the establish legal system’s purview. The only thing a smart contract truly adds to traditional contracts is automated execution that is enforced by the blockchain’s consensus mechanism; this may provide some efficiency to the legal system by streamlining basic performance but it cannot be the only form of governance over smart contracts. While there may be procedural challenges to undoing or enforcing specific performance under smart contracts because of their decentralized features, any substantive problems that could occur within a smart contract are imminently addressable with and must be subjected to the principles and remedies found in traditional contract law. Finally, I will conclude with current developments in smart contracts which point to a potential for them to become an integral part of our legal system going forward. Overall, I will argue that smart contracts, if carefully drafted to consider potential pitfalls and the future needs of contracting parties to amend or enforce, can hold the potential to provide efficiencies and greater legal certainty to contracting parties. This is achieved, not through circumventing the legal system, but by working with it to automate simple performance enforcement and deferring more complex contractual breakdowns to the judiciary.

Andrea Pinna, Gavina Baralla, Giorgia Lallai, Michele Marchesi · 5 authors

The building workers sector is one of the most challenging for Human Resources (HR) management. In this work we propose a solution relying on the Blockchain technology and present the design of a Blockchain-Oriented Software system conceived for managing the building workers sector with a focus on workers' safety and guided by sustainable and Agile Methodologies in software design. The proposed approach takes advantage of different features of the Blockchain technology and provides transparency for labour inspectors, grants data integrity and immutability, relies in tamper proof time stamps for any recorded activity, allows the implementation of Smart Contracts where clauses are automatically respected without the need of a trusted control authority, acknowledges the legal requirements in the field, including the possibility of creating the Operational Safety Plans, which construction companies have to provide and finally implements the creation of vacant job positions which workers can find and apply to. In order to achieve these goals we adopt the Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering (BOSE) methodology to design Blockchain software applications and apply an Agile methodology centered on Blockchain Software development, (called ABCDE) for the design and development of the decentralized application. Such methodology allows to center the software development around the actors of the system in the specific domain, such as Building Workers, Construction Companies, Labour Inspectors and so on. In addition we rely on the software sustainability analysis, based on the five dimensions of sustainability, to evaluate the approach and to avoid mistakes in the system development. We design system elements with specific diagrams and we divided our system in the on-chain and the out-of-chain components. The implementation of the system, done by using Ethereum and the ERC721 standard, allows us to improve some aspect of the design, to know the deployment and usage costs, and to evaluate the effect of the user interface. Finally, we discuss about the effects of our system and its sustainability, and provide a comparison of our system with a similar per aims but centralized system.

Antonio Welligton S. Abreu, Emanuel Ferreira Coutinho, Carla Bezerra

Blockchain is an emerging technology that has piqued the interest of researchers and industry today. Following the success of this technology in the financial market with virtual currencies, blockchain begins to be used by different domains such as government and education as it provides a reliable, scalable and unchanging distributed environment for conducting and storing transactions on a network. Higher education is a system with many challenges that could be solved by adopting this technology. Protecting data transactions that involve student degrees is one of the challenges considered by educational institutions. Thus, this paper presents a reference architecture proposal based on blockchain technology and a proof of concept to register and consult student certificates issued by higher education institutions. With this architecture, we intend to evaluate a new business model in this technology applied to the educational domain. As a proof of concept, we presented a prototype implementation using smart contracts based on the Ethereum platform and an evaluation made by experts in high education.

Sabam Parjuangan, Suhardi Suhardi

Blockchain-based smart contracts are contracts that can be executed in whole or in part without human interaction. Nevertheless, all processes can be trusted by anyone associated with the contract platform. The purpose of this study was to discover the latest field of study related to smart contracts. This paper also offered a broad perspective on blockchain-based smart contract platforms. This review will help pinpoint gaps to be marked in future research. This research was conducted by extracting 134 digital library articles, namely IEEE, ACM, Scopus, and Springer. After a detailed review, the 47 publications deemed worthy were current, popular, and distinctive. The extraction results show that the platforms needed for trading transactions are smart contract platforms. This platform must have the characteristics of being fast (creating blocks), reliable, safe, stable, and user-friendly.

Mohammad Hamdaqa, Lucas Alberto Pineda Metz, Ilham Qasse

Smart contracts are immutable digital programs deployed onto blockchain platforms to codify agreements. They enable blockchain technology to play a vital role in many fields, such as finance, health care, and energy. An important aspect of modeling and deploying smart contracts is to define the business process and rules that govern the agreements under which the corresponding actions are executed. Unfortunately, these models use a mix of technical and business-centric terminologies that are different based on the underlying blockchain platform that the smart contract is targeting. To address this issue, in this paper, we followed a feature-oriented domain analysis approach to identify the commonalities and variations between three of the common blockchain platforms that are used to deploy smart contracts; namely IBM Hyperledger Composer, Azure Blockchain Workbench, and Ethereum. Accordingly, we propose a reference model for smart contracts. The reference model is then realized as a modeling framework that enables developers to model and generate the structural code required to deploy a smart contract onto multiple blockchain platforms. The coverage of the proposed reference model was shown through mapping the concepts of the reference models to its corresponding constructs within each blockchain platform. Moreover, we provide three use cases to show how the proposed framework can empower developers to generate the structural code of smart contracts for the target platform through model transformation.

Jing Zhang, Rong Tan, Chunhua Su, Wen Si

No abstract is available for this record.

Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, Anisha Tasnim, Aysha Akther

Bangladesh is a small country with a large population. Its increasingly developing economy further makes land a lucrative source of fixed capital. On the other hand, land titling is a cumbersome and lengthy process, where different government bodies process different sets of documents, and bureaucratic loopholes encourage fraudulent activities by organized people. As a result, the current model suffers from good governance. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based solution that offers data synchronization and transparency, ease of access, immutable records management, a faster and cheaper solution. Considering the technological knowledge and capacity of the people and the government, we introduced a phase by phase Blockchain adoption model that starts with a public Blockchain ledger and later gradually incorporates two levels of Hybrid Blockchain. We provide detailed smart contracts design of the public Blockchain and implement a prototype system using Ethereum. Our experimental setup uses local and live Ethereum test networks to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system. Our analysis shows that the proposed model reduces the number of required travels, the overall cost of information processing as well as provide easy access to vital information. As a result, Blockchain adoption can improve the land title digitization effort of Bangladesh.

Artyom Kosmarski

Blockchain has received considerable attention recently, due to its promises of verifiable, permanent, and decentralized data handling. In 2017-2020, blockchain (and associated technologies such as smart contracts) has progressed beyond cryptocurrencies, and has been hailed as a disruptive technology for a score of industries. This study adds to the growing body of research on blockchain adoption and blockchain-driven innovation in various fields, including transport, finance, and education. However, the impact of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) on the management of science has not been systematically studied so far. This paper aims to fill the gap by studying the experience of adoption of blockchain-based solutions in academia in 2017-2020. The research is based upon a critical review of projects, relevant literature, and qualitative research: interviews (N = 24) and focus groups (N = 4) with startup founders, scholars, university executives, librarians, and IT experts from the European Union (EU), the United States of America (USA), Russia, and Belarus. Key challenges and barriers to blockchain adoption in academia are delineated: usability and security issues, legal concerns, conflict of values, and a critique of political dimensions of blockchain governance.

Марина Козлова, Maria Aleksandrina

No abstract is available for this record.

Fabian Schär

The Ethereum Blockchain is home to an alternative financial infrastructure. It is implemented in a highly transparent , trust-minimizing and interoperable way. In particular, everything is built on smart contracts and protocols are composable (meaning, that they may freely interact with each other). Moreover, there is no need for trusted third parties, such as custodians or central clearing houses - at least in theory. In reality, most Decentralized Finance protocols are subject to severe dependencies and centralized governance processes. The focus seems to have shifted towards interoperability and away from trust-minimization. Consequently, Decentralized Finance is starting to look a lot like open banking, or to be more precise, an actual realization of open banking's long-term vision.

Jean-Marie Ayer, Bruno Pasquier

This chapter argues that blockchain technology enables start-ups and small and medium-sized companies to raise funds from a multitude of investors on a peer-to-peer basis without the involvement of an intermediary. It discusses the phenomenon of initial coin offerings (ICO), illustrates with concrete examples, and reviews the legal framework governing ICOs. Using the potential of distributed ledger technologies, ICOs have emerged as a novel mechanism for financing entrepreneurial ventures. One of the main challenges related to the legal regulation of ICOs is the functional diversity of the tokens issued in crowdfunding campaigns. Tokens can be linked to different types of rights, such as membership rights or property rights. A key aspect regarding the financial market regulations of ICOs is whether the tokens qualify as securities. A fundamental problem for the said qualification lies in the different definitions, depending on the applicable jurisdictions.

Bianca Cristina da Silva, Ivan da Silva Sendin

Os smart contracts representam novas possibilidades de aplicações, sendo o comércio eletrônico e organizações financeiras descentralizadas exemplos dessas aplicações, as quais são capazes de obter benefícios da confiança da correta execução de programas fornecidas por essa nova tecnologia. Todavia, ainda que vantajoso no aspecto de corretude, smart contracts sofrem com a perda de privacidade dos dados, pois, uma vez que utilizam uma estrutura descentralizada, os dados são acessíveis a todos os nós da rede. Nesse estudo, apresentamos o uso da computação segura multiparte no ambiente descentralizado oferecido pelos smart contracts.

Chetan Chawla

No abstract is available for this record.

Pierluigi Martino, Cristiano Bellavitis, Carlos M. DaSilva

This chapter explores how cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology affect entrepreneurship, by providing an overview on the initial coin offerings (ICO) phenomenon and outlining its advantages and risks. ICOs are a new form of fund-raising from the public that leverages the power of cryptocurrencies and the underling blockchain technology. One of the key features of an ICO is that it works on a distributed ledger technology or blockchain. This enables new ventures to expand their funding opportunities compared to traditional crowdfunding. By relying on blockchain technology, ICOs can reduce the friction in fund-raising, ease access to capital and thereby promote entrepreneurship and innovation. Future studies may investigate the effectiveness of ICOs in terms of their returns and successes after the offerings, as well as their consequent ability to foster entrepreneurship. Research on the role played by the human and social capital of the founders is also needed in explaining ICOs outcomes.

Tatjana Jovanić

The rise of the crypto-asset market has opened up a number of questions on their benefits and risks. As a new form of virtual property, cryptocurrencies and tokens of investment nature are characterized by specific technological infrastructure. In order to understand the regulatory perspective of the crypto-asset market, it is necessary to briefly present the issues related to digital assets infrastructure and the forms of crypto-assets, which blur the line between financial products and virtual property. Cryptoassets represent a form of fintech innovation that could materially affect the financial landscape (notably payments, investments and capital raising), may have impact on the financial sector and therefore may create conditions for regulatory arbitrage where regulated participants operate in a highly regulated environment. The Paper aims to identify the basic issues of the crypto-assets regulatory framework and the extent of applicable regulatory approaches. Comparative regulatory practices of selected countries, as well as the global regulatory perspective of this market, serve as a guide to assess the existing regulatory framework and regulatory challenges, in order to assess urging issues which the regulators in Western Balkan countries are facing. Regulators are confronted with a dilemma: how to promote financial innovation while preserving financial stability and protecting investors. That is why many regulators have adopted a regulatory stance in regulating distributed ledger (blockchain) technologies and tend to formulate regulatory strategies which are risk based, phased and adaptive. Regulatory responses vary from a complete ban on issuing or trading crypto-assets, warnings and principles-based regulation, to extending existing rules on the capital markets and payment systems to specific intermediaries which are licensed almost as financial institutions per se. A tendency towards developing a new set of legislation specifically aiming to register and/or license providers of services connected to virtual property based on cryptography may be observed, and a proposal for an EU regulation on Markets in Crypto-Assets is a clear example.

Azlin Alisa Ahmad, Mat Noor Mat Zain, Nur Diyana Amanina Zakaria

<p>A smart contract is a computer protocol contract of which its innovation rooted from the traditional contract. However, Sharia-compliant transaction necessitates a contract to fulfils all pillars of Islamic contracts in order smart contract can be accepted as an innovation of Islamic contracts. Thus, this paper aims to make a comparison between Islamic contracts and smart contract on blockchain. This paper is a qualitative research by adopting content analysis method to analyze some related topics. The pillars of Islamic contract are compared with the smart contract to ensure whether the smart contract follows the guidelines of Islamic contract or vice versa. The analysis shows that smart contract does not entirely comply with the Islamic principles of a contract. Even though smart contract generally has three pillars of Islamic contract but in details, it does not comply with the Sharia principles. By comparing between the pillars of Islamic contract and smart contract on blockchain, it shows that smart contract on blockchain is not underline with the Islamic contracts pillars. Contracting parties participate in the smart contract does not recognize each other that can be lead to <em>gharar</em>. Meanwhile, every transaction in the smart contract allows prohibited subject matters such as illegal drugs, weapons where as it is not allowed in Islamic contracts transactions. </p>\n\n<p> </p>

Satya Prakash Yadav, Krishna Kant Agrawal, Bhoopesh Singh Bhati, Fadi Al‐Turjman · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.