Blockchain Papers

Ahmed Alketbi, Qassim Nasir, Manar Abu Talib

No abstract is available for this record.

Jhanvi Devangbhai Vyas, Meng Han, Lin Li, Seyedamin Pouriyeh · 5 authors

One of the major challenges in the healthcare industry is the information sharing and patient's privacy. The implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) [30] in 1996 made difficult for software vendors to manage the documents and records of the patients. Blockchain based technology, which uses cryptography to facilitate exchange and transaction of values and goods over a network, has been proposed to resolve this issue. The decentralized ledge of blockchain would provide immutability, confidentiality, accountability and transparency for information sharing between healthcare stakeholders. In this paper, we implemented the Ethereum Smart Contract, an extended part of the blockchain in healthcare industry with objectives of keeping all the records and transactions safe and secure, and at the same time, reducing the number of user data breaches. We carried out a number of experiments in order to demonstrate the usability and efficiency of our proposed approach.

Rafael Ziolkowski, Gianluca Miscione, Gerhard Schwabe

Blockchain comes with the promise of being a disruptive technology with the potential for novel ways of interaction in a wide range of applications. Following broader application, scholarly interest in the technology is growing, though an extensive analysis of blockchain applications from a governance perspective is lacking to date. This research pays special attention to the governance of blockchain systems and illustrates decision problems in 14 blockchain systems from four application domains. Based on academic literature, semi-structured interviews with representatives from those organizations, and content analysis of grey literature, common problems in blockchain governance have been singled out and contextualized. Studying their enactment revealed their relevance to major organizational theories in what we labelled “Patrolling the borders,” “External Legitimation,” “Reduction of Discretionality,” and “Temporal Management.” The identification of these problems enriches the scarce body of knowledge on the governance of blockchain systems, resulting in a better understanding of how blockchain governance links to existing concepts and how it is enacted in practice.

Stéphane Blémus, Dominique Guégan

This interdisciplinary article discusses the potential consequences due to distributed ledger technology (DLT), tokenization as well as the emergence of new kinds of firm stakeholders, ie the crypto-assets holders, on the governance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as of publicly traded companies. Since early 2016, a new way of issuing assets and raising funds has rapidly emerged as a major issue for FinTech founders and financial regulators. Frequently referred to as initial coin offerings, initial token offerings (ITO), token generation events (TGE) or simply ‘token sales’, we use in our article the terminology initial crypto-asset offerings (ICO), as it describes more effectively than ‘initial coin offerings’ the vast diversity of assets (utility tokens, security tokens, crypto-currencies) that could be created and which goes far beyond the sole payment instrument issue.

Lakshit Madaan, Amit Kumar, Bharat Bhushan

In the modern world where we reside in everything is shifting towards being digital, from online transaction to teaching”, thus this paper aims at something like this only that is blockchain and its application in multiple domains. The paper investigates blockchain and its current scenario, it first focuses on the emergence of blockchain and its working and also briefly explains the characteristics and challenges faced by technology. The blockchain serves as an immutable way that allows the transactions to happen in a decentralized manner and by allowing the digital information to be distributed, blockchain has built a backbone for a new type of internet. In this paper, application areas of blockchain such as banking, healthcare, etc. are also discussed.

Aarti Patki, Vinod Sople

No abstract is available for this record.

Инна Хаванова

No abstract is available for this record.

Panayiotis Christodoulou, Klitos Christodoulou

This paper presents a Blockchain-based voting mechanism that has the potential to disrupt current voting systems and fuel the development of decentralized governance. More specifically, the paper presents a study on the design and deployment of a Solidity smart contract that can interact with any Ethereum-based token (ERC-20) in order to help decentralized organizations to run public voting campaigns while at the same time engaging tokens holders in decision making. The use case scenarios outlined in the paper demonstrate with success the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Wei Wang

As the development of the national economy, SMEs(Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) have played an important role in most aspects of economic growth and commercial credit has become one essential factor in enterprises' development. Thus, developing one excellent credit evaluation system which reflects the credit level of SMEs well has become one hotspot in corresponding research field. This paper has explored one distributed credit evaluation system based on blockchain technology which has intelligent protocols and distributed features to provide credit records through unchangeable timestamps and distributed ledger and improve the defects in current centralized systems.

Nicolas Neysen

Purpose: A burgeoning body of research has described how the blockchain technology may affect the way firms operate within the recording industry which has undergone profound changes due to the dematerialisation of music and the emergence of now consumption habits. The purpose of the paper is to explore both the challenges and the opportunities related to the application of smart contracts and blockchain mechanisms to the recording industry. Approach/Methodology/Design: Based on a review of contributions made to the literature in various fields, we discuss recent developments, relying on several examples and use cases which bring an updated perspective to a topical question. While the blockchain brings interesting solutions in favour of an improved management of copyright data and fees collection, several barriers impede their uptake and large-scale adoption. Findings: We argue that the absence of both technological and regulatory standards, the resistance to change, and the necessary use of cryptocurrency, are all obstacles to a profound transformation of the sector. Practical Implications: To overcome these limitations, we suggest three recommendations that deal with technological standards, cooperative agreements, and international regulation around blockchain. Originality/Value: So far, the literature tends to focus either on blockchain technology or on smart contracts when discussing technological evolution within the recording industry. In this paper, we bring together these two elements which are definitely complementory to each other. Further research efforts are required to investigate in more details the feasibility and relevance of the recommendations we make.

Marta Maciejasz-Świątkiewicz, Robert Poskart

Purpose: The paper explores the differences between countries concerning perception and use of traditional and virtual money. We try to answer the question who uses virtual money for investment and building assets and who uses it just for Internet payments. The background of the analysis are significant changes that have taken place in the virtual money market in recent years in relation to changes in the global financial market. Design/methodology/approach: A pilot study was conducted in Poland, the Russian Federation, and China, which is supposed to be an introduction to the bigger and wider survey. It was conducted within December 2019 and January 2020 with 81 surveyed persons. These were students of financial studies in the chosen countries. The paper questionnaire used in the survey consisted of 26 questions connected to virtual money plus 5 demographic questions. It was provided personally by teachers in class. Findings: The findings indicated that there are differences between countries in perception and the use of traditional and virtual money. These discrepancies can have cultural or historical background. Practical Implications: The practical usefulness of the whole study is that gathered information will permit to examine the economic and financial literacy of the respondents and their preferences for the use of innovative financial instruments. Originality/value: The study is related to the very current issue – virtual money as alternative to the currently functioning fiduciary money. The result of the research as one of the first indicated that a different perception of traditional and virtual money among different countries exist. This statement might be a huge contribution to the analysis of the current and further financial system.

Mohamed Laarabi, Abdelilah Maach, Abdelhakim Hafid

Smart contracts are a common topic in scientific discussions held by computer scientists. Due to the dynamic nature of its applications, smart contracts must be considerably more adaptable, responsive and controllable. Yet the longstanding focus on security issues has affected negatively the development of smart contracts in the transfer of ownership of the real estate.In this paper, we study the possibilities and the limitations of how to transfer properties on the block chain using a digital record, as a back- support in case of litigation. We propose storing a registry catalog to handle the property historical data and criminal record of the owners. The execution of the smart contract is enforced using a digital identity of the two parties. We design the components of what the registry should contain to integrate with block chain infrastructure and we also analyze and discuss the government endorsement needed for the success of the implementation.

Mohammad Shurman, Abed Al-Rahman Obeidat, Saif Al-Deen Al-Shurman

Integrating IoT with blockchains and Smart Contracts could be a solution of many problems in terms of security and scalability. A lot of applications are now implemented based on IoT Blockchain in smart governments and cities, industrial fields and smart transactions of sensitive data in order to maintain confidentiality and integrity of the data without the need of trusted third parties. However, we explained the terms Internet of things, Blockchains, Smart Contracts and how they work in separate. also suggested an architectural guideline for blockchain enabled IoT devices which facilitates sharing them between multiple blockchain ecosystems and at the same time, ensures the exclusive access to them seamlessly through blockchain smart contracts.

Eleanna Kafeza, Syed Juned Ali, Irene Kafeza, Haseena Bader Alkatheeri

Block chain technology provides a decentralized and secure platform for executing transactions. Smart contracts in Ethereum have been proposed as the mechanism to automate legal contracts securely without the involvement of third parties. Yet, there are still several issues to be resolved especially regarding the updating of smart contracts in blockchain as well as the use of blockchain as part of a legal smart contracts system. In this work we propose a methodology and an architecture for building and deploying legal contracts in the blockchain. As the blockchain is immutable, we cannot update the code of the smart legal contracts, but in real life applications updating of contracts is a requirement that cannot be ignored. In this paper we address the problem of contract update by introducing a new versioning system that keeps track of the changes and links the different versions using a linked list. Moreover, we propose a system architecture where the user interface, the application logic and the blockchain are smoothly integrated in a manner that each part of the system contributes for producing a flexible and transparent execution. We show the applicability of our approach by implementing a system for the case of a rental agreement.

Archana Sahai, Rajiv Pandey

Land Registry System in India is a very time-consuming process involving many middlemen, thus increasing the fraudulent cases. These problems can be eliminated by the usage of Blockchain Technology for Land Registry Management in India. This paper highlights issues, such as minimal transparency, accountability, incoherent data sets with different Government Departments relating to the same portion of land and delays in the current Land registry management process. The paper describes the current process of land records maintenance and land registration in the country. It emphasizes on the importance of smart contract for land registry applying the Blockchain.

A. Kotishwar

Blockchain technology is emerging strong in many areas and is playing a major role in financial transactions, mainly in the banking domain. The study was conducted using primary data by considering the convenient sampling method. The study examined the perceptions on the usage of blockchain technology's implementation with the help of statistical method of discriminant analysis and the results revealed that the perception was higher in case of the attributes such as mitigation of transaction costs and highly secured. The SEM model indicated that smart contracts had a higher impact on the efficiency of financial transactions followed by digital currency. This paper will be useful to the various financial institution regulators, stakeholders, and academicians.

Oleksandr Sushchenko, Reimund Schwarze

Climate insurance is already a hot topic due to the increased number of climate-related catastrophic events accompanied by associated losses for the economy in general and insurance companies, in particular. The extremely hot and dry summer of 2018 in some European countries highlighted existing weaknesses of the agricultural insurance mechanisms in Europe, where the farmers had to wait for months before compensation payments could bemade. Our paper aims to compare features of the yield-based insurance2and the index-based insurance (IBI)3in agriculture in the light of new developments and trends in information technologies (IT). The results show that an application of the distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in combination with IBI could not only resolve existing problems, but also facilitate development of the innovative insurance mechanisms at the EU level –providing effective protection against climate-related risks and preventing a systemic risk escalation

Yan Zhuang, Yin-Wu Chen, Zon‐Yin Shae, Chi‐Ren Shyu

BACKGROUND Data coordination across multiple health care facilities has become increasingly important for many emerging health care applications. Distrust has been recognized as a key barrier to the success of such applications. Leveraging blockchain technology could provide potential solutions tobuild trust between data providers and receivers by taking advantage of blockchain properties such as security, immutability, anonymity, decentralization, and smart contracts. Many health technologies have empirically proven that blockchain designs fit well with the needs of health care applications with certain degrees of success. However, there is a lack of robust architecture to provide a practical framework for developers to implement applications and test the performance of stability, efficiency, and scalability using standard blockchain designs. A generalized blockchain model is needed for the health care community to adopt blockchain technology and develop applications in a timely fashion. OBJECTIVE This study aimed at building a generalized blockchain architecture that provides data coordination functions, including data requests, permission granting, data exchange, and usage tracking, for a wide spectrum of health care application developments. METHODS An augmented, 3-layered blockchain architecture was built on a private blockchain network. The 3 layers, from bottom to top, are as follows: (1) incorporation of fundamental blockchain settings and smart contract design for data collection; (2) interactions between the blockchain and health care application development environment using Node.js and web3.js; and (3) a flexible development platform that supports web technologies such as HTML, https, and various programing languages. Two example applications, health information exchange (HIE) and clinical trial recruitment, were developed in our design to demonstrate the feasibility of the layered architecture. Case studies were conducted to test the performance in terms of stability, efficiency, and scalability of the blockchain system. RESULTS A total of 331,142 simulated HIE requests from accounts of 40,000 patients were successfully validated through this layered blockchain architecture with an average exchange time of 11.271 (SD 2.208) seconds. We also simulated a clinical trial recruitment scenario with the same set of patients and various recruitment criteria to match potential subjects using the same architecture. Potential subjects successfully received the clinical trial recruitment information and granted permission to the trial sponsors to access their health records with an average time of 3.07 seconds. CONCLUSIONS This study proposes a generalized layered blockchain architecture that offers health technology community blockchain features for application development without requiring developers to have extensive experience with blockchain technology. The case studies tested the performance of our design and empirically proved the feasibility of the architecture in 2 relevant health application domains.

Jinjiang Li, Zhihua Zheng, Zhi Li, Ziyu Niu · 6 authors

Summary Difficulties in financing and low utilization of funds are main financial problems that plague the development of small and medium‐sized enterprises. The key to solving this problem lies in opening up the social data circulation between enterprises. It is a good solution for enterprises with frequent data interactions to form groups. Using group loans, the borrowing enterprises could solve the funding difficulties and the loan enterprises could improve the utilization rate of funds. In this article, we construct a group loan system based on blockchain technology, which can promote the free flow of funds among enterprises in the group. We combine the blockchain with the trusted execution environment to realize the automatic determination of loan conditions and realize the automatic execution of smart contracts. We also use the linkable group signature technology to ensure the traceability of loan users while protecting the anonymity. In addition, we use homomorphic encryption technology to make the statement confidential and computable.

Hiro Midas

We propose BSC, a Bitcoin Smart Contract implementation. It integrates the functionality of smart contracts into the Bitcoin system, giving developers the ability to build decentralized applications on Bitcoin. BSC will require a new hard fork, on which Bitcoin holders can use their existing funds directly. BSC combines the unlimited creative space of smart contracts and the vast network effect of Bitcoin, which will bring even more possibilities to the cryptocurrency world.

Nigeria Al-Hussaini, Adamu Abubakar Ibrahim, Mohamad Fauzan Noordin, Hazwani Mohd Mohadis

This paper presents a qualitative study that examine the perception of users on Islamic approach toward
\npurification of transaction with cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is has been used as a case study which is one of the
\ntype of cryptocurrency. There are huge discrepancies from many Islamic school of thought about
\ntransaction with bitcoin. Specifically, some school of thought viewed it as a tool used for illegal purposes
\nand that the global public already uses Bitcoin mostly for illegal and non-Shari’ah-compliant purposes
\nunder Islamic perceptions. As a result, this study developed an interview-qualitative research approach in
\norder to examine how the negative perceptions of cryptocurrency from Islamic views cnd be purify. Sample
\nof Eight informant were used in the study. The finding of this study indicated that the use of cryptocurrency
\nas a legitimate as any payment method. It is also argued that it facilitated transactions and cut the normal
\ncost of international money transfer, and some Muslim countries are actively encouraging the use of
\ncryptocurrency due to its easy use and transparency. This has been also supported by “hadith”. Finally, the
\nanalysis also confirmed that from the Shari'ah point of view, cryptocurrencies are as compliant as fiat
\nmoney and ought to be accepted as another mode of payment that can be used in transaction as its value can
\nbe measured and quantified. Therefore, this study has contributed in understanding the Islamic views
\nbehind the implementation of cryptocurrency.

Binh Minh Nguyen, Thanh-Chung Dao, Ba-Lam Do

Anti-forgery information, transaction verification, and smart contract are functionalities of blockchain technology that can change the traditional business processes of IT applications. These functionalities increase the data transparency, and trust of users in the new application models, thus resolving many different social problems today. In this work, we take all the advantages of this technology to build a blockchain-based authentication system (called the Vietnamese Educational Certification blockchain, which stands for VECefblock) to deal with the delimitation of fake certificate issues in Vietnam. In this direction, firstly, we categorize and analyze blockchain research and application trends to make out our contributions in this domain. Our motivating factor is to curb fake certificates in Vietnam by applying the suitability of blockchain technology to the problem domain. This study proposed some blockchain-based application development principles in order to build a step by step VECefblock with the following procedures: designing overall architecture along with business processes, data mapping structure and implementing the decentralized application that can meet the specific Vietnamese requirements. To test system functionalities, we used Hyperledger Fabric as a blockchain platform that is deployed on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Through performance evaluations, we proved the operability of VECefblock in the practical deployment environment. This experiment also shows the feasibility of our proposal, thus promoting the application of blockchain technology to deal with social problems in general as well as certificate management in Vietnam.

Ashmitha Nagraj

Financial Technology (FinTech) has transformed Capital Markets, Payments, Lending and Risk Management through faster processing of financial decisions in real-time and expanding access to financial services digitally. Beneath these user-friendly applications, FinTech platforms rely on foundational Data Structures and Algorithms to provide consistent Latency, Scalable Throughput, Auditing capabilities, and Resilience under adversarial conditions. The purpose of this paper is to review which core Data Structures (Arrays, Linked Lists, Hash Tables, Balanced Trees, Heaps and Graphs) are used to support key FinTech Workload applications (Algorithmic Trading, Fraud Detection, Credit Risk Assessment and Blockchain-based Recordkeeping). In addition, this paper will review the Algorithmic Foundations used to enable common tasks across all these workload applications including Sorting/Searching, Optimization, Statistical Learning and Cryptography, and how Asymptotic Complexity must be evaluated with respect to practical system constraints including Caching Behavior, Concurrency and Failure Modes. There is evidence from the academic literature that Algorithmic Trading can increase liquidity in certain Market Structures while also introducing Systemic Fragility during Stress [1],[2],[3]. And, similarly, there is evidence that Fraud Detection is an inherently adversarial domain where Models and Features must evolve as Attacker Behavior evolves [4],[5]. Lastly, the Paper will discuss several open challenges associated with Scale, Security, Model Governance and Privacy; and evaluate Future-Facing Directions such as Privacy-Preserving Analytics (Federated Learning and Zero-Knowledge Proofs) and Cryptographic Agility to prepare for post-Quantum risk.

Vikas Hassija, Gaurang Bansal, Vinay Chamola, Neeraj Kumar · 5 authors

Credit scoring is a rigorous statistical analysis carried out by lenders and other third parties to access an individual's creditworthiness. Lenders use credit scoring to estimate the degree of risk in lending money to an individual. However, credit score evaluation is primarily based on a transaction record, payment history, professional background, etc. sourced from different credit bureaus. So, evaluating a credit score is a laborious and tedious task involving a lot of paperwork. In this paper, we propose how blockchain can provide the solution to decentralized credit scoring evaluation and reducing the amount of dependence of paperwork. Lending money is not always objective but subjective to every lender. The decision of lending involves different levels of risk and uncertainty, depending on their perspective. This paper uses the prospect theory to model the optimal investment strategy for different risk vs. return scenarios.