Wencheng Chen, Jun Wang, Jeng-Shyang Pan, R. Simon Sherratt · 5 authors
The rapid advancement of Industry 5.0 has accelerated the adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, challenges such as data privacy breaches, malicious attacks, and the absence of trustworthy mechanisms continue to hinder its secure and efficient operation. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes an enhanced blockchain-based data storage framework and systematically improves the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. A four-party evolutionary game model is developed, involving agent nodes, voting nodes, malicious nodes, and supervisory nodes, to comprehensively analyze the dynamic effects of key factors—including bribery intensity, malicious costs, supervision, and reputation mechanisms—on system stability. Furthermore, novel incentive and punishment strategies are introduced to foster node collaboration and suppress malicious behaviors. The simulation results show that the improved DPoS mechanism achieves significant enhancements across multiple performance dimensions. Under high-load conditions, the system increases transaction throughput by approximately 5%, reduces consensus latency, and maintains stable operation even as the network scale expands. In adversarial scenarios, the double-spending attack success rate decreases to about 2.6%, indicating strengthened security resilience. In addition, the convergence of strategy evolution is notably accelerated, enabling the system to reach cooperative and stable states more efficiently. These results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism effectively improves the efficiency, security, and dynamic stability of IIoT data storage systems, providing strong support for reliable operation in complex industrial environments.
The article provides a theoretical substantiation of the essence of investment technologies within the system of decentralized finance. Based on a synthesis of existing scientific approaches, the author proposes original definitions for key concepts: "investment technologies", "financial technologies", and "decentralized finance". It is demonstrated that decentralized finance represents an alternative ecosystem built on public blockchains and smart contracts, which ensures the complete elimination of intermediaries. The formulated theoretical propositions establish a foundation for the further development of the organizational and economic framework for managing investment technologies within the DeFi space.
In traditional banking, repeated deposit-and-lend cycles let a single dollar of reserves support multiple dollars of claims. Decentralized finance produces an analogous structure with tokens. Constructing a Token Graph of 10,200 tokens across 200 blockchains, this paper maps the resulting hierarchy and shows that, by late 2025, each dollar of base assets supports $4.7 of total claims. An embedded yield correction disentangles two channels that raw data conflates: a compositional channel, where lending protocols concentrate in deeper tiers and mechanically raise average yields; and a liquidity channel, where each derivation step reduces secondary-market depth and depresses yields in liquidity-sensitive pools. The liquidity channel concentrates in DEX pools and vanishes in lending pools. A yield decomposition shows that the tier gradient operates entirely through fundamental protocol yields, not incentive-token emissions; quantile regressions reveal that the structural associations concentrate in the upper tail of the yield distribution, with near-zero effects at the median. These findings reframe DeFi's "double counting" as a structural risk question and identify liquidity fragmentation as the primary mechanism associated with yield variation across the token hierarchy.
This Technical Report provides an overview of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Token (NFT). It sets out the principal technical concepts and examines selected legal considerations relevant to these domains, given the close interaction between technological design and regulatory treatment. The report also identifies practical measures to strengthen trust and legal certainty, particularly in relation to NFT metadata integrity, content-addressed storage, smart-contract auditability, and the use of Digital Art Certificate (DAC), including the DAC+NFT model supported by Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) where a reliable link to real-world identity signature and rights is required. Extended with Human Time Token (HTT), a DAC+ can even certify how many hours of human time has been spent by an artist for a specific piece of art. These proposals are also relevant to future standardization work on legally robust off-chain certification and interoperability between Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) technical and legal layers.
Yuan Chang, Yinbin Miao, Tom H. Luan, Jinkai Zheng · 5 authors
The need for enhanced transaction privacy in decentralized finance (DeFi) is critical. However, existing coin mixing solutions often reveal telltale patterns on the blockchain, exposing users to heuristic analysis. This paper presents DeFiMix, an indistinguishable coin mixing scheme engineered to obscure transaction flows while guaranteeing fairness and security. DeFiMix achieves this through a dual-layer mechanism. First, an off-chain secret handshake protocol enables anonymous negotiation between senders and mixers, effectively breaking the link between transactions and participants. Second, on-chain transactions are structured using time-locks and concurrent signatures to resemble common DeFi activities such as staking and lending, rendering them indistinguishable from ordinary operations. Using security analysis and extensive simulations, we validate DeFiMix’s ability to prevent transaction linkage while remaining practically viable. The results underscore DeFiMix’s strong indistinguishability and fairness, alongside its minimal computational demands, establishing it as a compelling solution for privacy-focused transactions within the DeFi ecosystem.
NFTs provided an extraordinary real-time laboratory for bubble economics: returns were exceptionally right-skewed, illiquidity pervaded even the most active platforms, and a handful of trades drove aggregate performance. Investors extrapolating from realized returns without recognizing selection bias and survivorship faced a substantial risk of disappointment. As our data and simulations confirm, successful NFT investing during the bubble required an almost perfect confluence of timing, liquidity, and luck. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org .
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are blockchain-based entities that operate without centralized management or shareholders, enabling worldwide token holders the option of participating in their governance through self-executing smart contracts. With approximately fifty thousand DAOs controlling over $30 billion in assets, these organizations offer unprecedented efficiency and global collaboration, enabling stakeholders to participate and contribute to the operation of DAOs regardless of their jurisdiction or physical presence. DAOs, however, also present significant legal and regulatory challenges, particularly concerning liability, contractual enforcement, tax obligations, and oversight. Their decentralized and fluid structure makes it substantively difficult for any single country—including powerful actors such as the United States and the European Union—to assert jurisdiction or exercise regulatory authority over such organizations. In addition to governance considerations, the decentralized, pseudonymous, and borderless structure of DAOs may be exploited for unlawful purposes, most notably money laundering. This Article examines how DAOs, particularly within the decentralized finance sector, facilitate anonymous cross-border transactions that pose novel and significant money laundering risks. By analyzing existing regulatory responses in major jurisdictions including the United States and the European Union, as well as efforts by key international organizations such as the Financial Action Task Force, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations, the Article demonstrates that prevailing regulatory frameworks and enforcement models cannot adequately respond to the distinct challenges presented by DAOs. This regulatory vacuum poses significant risks to global financial stability, the integrity of the financial systems, and core national-security interests, including the prevention of sanctions evasion, counterterrorism and proliferation financing, and the deduction and disruption of state-sponsored, cyber-enabled illicit finance. Accordingly, the Article proposes a novel, modular, risk-based, global anti-money laundering framework tailored to DAOs’ unique operational realities. The proposed framework aligns with principles of functional equivalence, technological neutrality, and transnational cooperation, offering a more effective means of addressing DAO-related, anti-money laundering risks while preserving space for innovation.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) face a fundamental decentralization paradox: the characteristics that make them theoretically superior to existing hierarchical structures simultaneously undermine their practical effectiveness. This thesis investigates whether and how this paradox can be addressed through a multi-level analysis that encompasses price stability, market performance, and philanthropic implications. In doing so, this thesis aims to provide critical insights into DAOs, which are considered a new form of digital enterprise that facilitates collective action in managing digital commons. The thesis comprises three interconnected essays, each underpinned by a specific research question.<br><br>The first essay investigates how non-traditional performance indicators impact DAO volatility. Unlike some DAOs, which issue decentralized stablecoins to maintain stable token prices, most DAOs are built on a native token basis, whose value depends entirely on the effectiveness of governance and the protocol’s future adoption. This means their prices are more exposed to speculative trading, making volatility a central concern for these DAOs. Under these circumstances, native DAOs that are not built on a stable mechanism must rely on relevant performance indicators to assess token price stability from an investment perspective. However, non-traditional performance indicators, such as social media and wealth inequality, are not typically included when measuring the riskiness of crypto assets. Based on several econometric models and robustness checks (e.g., MM-type, GMM, and entropy balancing), the findings show that both social media dominance and wealth inequality significantly reduce DAO volatility. Drawing on herding behavior and equity theories, the concepts of digital elites and stability pacts demonstrate that strategic recentralization enhances price stability and enables the development of novel DAO risk assessment frameworks. This essay recognizes the relevance of social media dominance and wealth inequality as non-traditional performance indicators for predicting DAO volatility and can help establish a risk assessment framework that crypto investors can rely on when making informed decisions. <br><br>The second essay examines the impact of ownership concentration and duration on the performance of DAO markets. Using several econometric models and robustness checks (e.g., GLS, GMM, and PSM), the findings reveal a positive and significant impact of ownership concentration and duration across categories on DAO market performance. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the average ownership duration has a significant positive impact, whereas ownership concentration has a significant negative impact on DAO market performance. Drawing on participatory governance and social exchange theories, this essay proposes an optimal governance equilibrium model to enhance and sustain DAO market performance. Overall, this essay offers novel insights into how the token-holders’ commitment mitigates decentralization's operational inefficiencies.<br><br>The third essay examines the application of DAOs in the charity sector and aims to deepen the understanding of crypto donors' perceptions of this technology. Improving transparency and trust in the charity sector is crucial, as donors increasingly seek new ways to monitor and verify their contributions. Specifically, this essay examines Maxity, the world's first Web3 Social Impact protocol that contributes to the 17 UN SDGs. By adopting a netnography approach and using UMAP, HDBSCAN, and BERTopic — three unsupervised machine learning models — this essay identified four latent dimensions related to DAO-based charitable activities. These findings reveal how donors perceive DAO as an effective channel for contributing to charitable causes, enabling greater transparency, faster donation delivery, cost-effectiveness, and increased trustworthiness. Furthermore, the concept of sociotechnical governance was introduced to theorize how DAO-enabled NFTs reshape institutional trust and refine traditional charity governance paradigms. This essay contributes to the expanding discussion on DAOs as an innovative channel for organizing and responding rapidly to humanitarian crises.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) aim to foster decentralization but often exhibit "shadow-centralization" (i.e., a small group essentially exercises their governance power in voting, despite the wide distribution of voting rights). While prior literature has noted the potential for centralization in DAOs, it has not adequately distinguished between the centralization of governance power (i.e., tokens) holding and the centralization of power exercise through voting, nor has it examined the transition from the former to the latter. Furthermore, the literature has underexplored the consequences of this power transition for governance outcomes and the related contingent factors. Our study fills this gap by explicitly examining how centralization shifts from holding to voting and how this transition impacts the performance of DAO-governed decentralized applications (DApps). We also examine how these effects are contingent on the capability of voters and the nature of the governance issues. Focusing on both on-chain and off-chain DAOs, we find that an increase in centralization from holding to voting negatively affects DApp performance, confirming that concerns about "shadow-centralization" are warranted. We also find that this negative impact is mitigated when voters possess greater experience and connectivity than the broader group of token holders. Also, the adverse effect is more salient for proposals requiring higher deliberation and is less salient for novel proposals. Our study advances the understanding of DAO governance by highlighting the source of shadow centralization and reveals that it implications depend on who votes and what they vote on.
Traditional facility management often relies on centralized decision-making structures that limit stakeholder participation, leading to misalignment with occupant needs and reduced satisfaction. This paper proposes a novel blockchain- and Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)-based framework for community-based facilities management in smart buildings. The framework comprises two key components: a decentralized governance platform that facilitates transparent collective decision-making through blockchain-based voting, and a maintenance management platform with an incentivization mechanism that encourages building occupants to actively contribute to facility upkeep through tokenized rewards. System evaluation includes cost analysis, scalability, data security considerations, usability testing, and semi-structured interviews with facility managers and researchers to assess the platform's usefulness, challenges, and adoption potential. The findings demonstrate the framework's potential as a viable incentivization solution for engaging stakeholders in the collective upkeep and improvement of building infrastructure.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are transforming how collaboration, governance, and value coordination operate in digital societies. However, most DAOs remain technically and socially fragmented, limiting their evolution beyond isolated communities. This thesis introduces the concept of the Meta-Social Blockchain DAO, a socio-technical framework that reconceptualizes DAOs as interoperable governance ecosystems rather than standalone blockchain entities. Drawing upon computer science, sociology, and organizational theory, this research identifies three DAO formation modes: engineered DAOs, emergent tokenless DAOs, and meta-social DAOs enabling cross-community coordination. Together, these modes form an evolutionary continuum explaining how decentralized organizations evolve toward interoperable socio-technical ecosystems. The research integrates literature synthesis, empirical case studies, longitudinal community analysis, and infrastructure prototyping. Through investigations of engineered and tokenless DAO communities, including the AI Developer Community DAO, the study demonstrates decentralized coordination mechanisms beyond traditional cryptoeconomic incentives. The thesis further proposes a 5D Principle Model — Debug, Decentralized, De-confrontation, De-risking, and Distributed Open-Source — explaining how decentralized communities evolve from rule-based coordination toward self-organizing meta-social ecosystems. Based on these findings, a cross-community DAO infrastructure platform is designed to support governance interoperability, persistent identity, social interaction, and scalable collective intelligence. By bridging social theory and blockchain system design, this thesis advances a socio-technical theory of DAO evolution and contributes architectural principles for next-generation decentralized human–machine collaboration systems.
Transaction fees are a core economic mechanism in blockchain systems, intended to price scarce blockspace and align resource consumption with economic cost. However, in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and decentralized finance (DeFi) environments, fee mechanisms can be exploited to impose asymmetric and persistent economic harm without violating protocol rules. This paper defines <b><i>Gas Fee Drain Loops</i></b>, commonly referred to as <i>grief attacks</i>, as a class of economic exhaustion attacks that weaponize execution costs, transaction ordering, and revert semantics to drain capital from targeted participants. We analyze the structural conditions that enable such attacks, demonstrate why conventional fee market assumptions fail under adversarial strategies, and show how gas griefing degrades security through economic exclusion rather than consensus failure. Finally, we propose a logic-layer mitigation model that bounds execution costs, restores economic symmetry, and preserves open participation under adversarial conditions.