The theme of accounting in blockchain environment has been referenced and theoretically discussed over the last few years in international publications, both of academic and professional nature. However, until today, there are no other known works that pursued a path in order to perform accounting records in blockchain. In the present work the authors go beyond this, as they will demonstrate, also proposing a practical solution for its implementation and use in a generalized way. The authors present two new proofs of concept, which are part of an ongoing work process to obtain the development of the Portuguese accounting system using blockchain. The most recent of the sequential steps was designing and developing the tokenization process and a Dapp that will be used to perform and consult accounting operations through any mobile device, by developing smart contracts. In a near future, this system will allow accounting operations to be carried out, in a simple way, on the blockchain, assuming implications for the way in which accountants, users of financial information, and software houses work.
As the Blockchain technology develops, more and more cryptocurrencies were invented after Bitcoin. This paper introduces the technology of Blockchain, including the basic concept of Blockchain and how Blockchain works to allow decentralization of trades; The system of Ethereum and the cryptocurrency Ether (ETH), how it was invented, what was the central mission of its invention, as well as how it differs from Bitcoin and how can it allow more decentralized application to be developed, which in turn illustrates what it means and where its values lie. As all cryptocurrency markets have a huge fall in value in the year 2022, as shown in figure 1, many people are losing faith in cryptocurrency. Many believe that since it is entirely digital and non-government based, it has no actual value, that the entire cryptocurrency market is a bubble. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies introduce a very revolutionary concept, which is the decentralization of applications, and this decentralization can apply to many things, leading to a great technological structure modification, even for social structures. Because of its anonymous and democratic nature, there is also always going to be demand for cryptocurrencies. Thus, this paper also analyzes the expectations of cryptocurrency, mainly Ether, and the predictions of its future development.
Abstract Presently data are indispensably important as cities consider data as a commodity which can be traded to earn revenues. In urban environment, data generated from internet of things devices, smart meters, smart sensors, etc. can provide a new source of income for citizens and enterprises who are data owners. These data can be traded as digital assets. To support such trading digital data marketplaces have emerged. Data marketplaces promote a data sharing economy which is crucial for provision of available data useful for cities which aims to develop data driven services. But currently existing data marketplaces are mostly inadequate due to several issues such as security, efficiency, and adherence to privacy regulations. Likewise, there is no consolidated understanding of how to achieve trust and fairness among data owners and data sellers when trading data. Therefore, this study presents the design of an ecosystem which comprises of a distributed ledger technology data marketplace enabled by message queueing telemetry transport (MQTT) to facilitate trust and fairness among data owners and data sellers. The designed ecosystem for data marketplaces is powered by IOTA technology and MQTT broker to support the trading of sdata sources by automating trade agreements, negotiations and payment settlement between data producers/sellers and data consumers/buyers. Overall, findings from this article discuss the issues associated in developing a decentralized data marketplace for smart cities suggesting recommendations to enhance the deployment of decentralized and distributed data marketplaces.
Asan Nainar, Vigneshwaran, S. Surya, Saran Kumar · 5 authors
This blockchain-based decentralized ecommerce project aims to create a platform that enables buyers and sellers to interact and transact directly without the need for intermediaries. The project utilizes blockchain technology to ensure security, transparency, and immutability of transactions, and also incorporates Firebase and Moralis Web3 to provide seamless integration with existing web platforms. Firebase is a cloud-based platform that offers various services, including authentication, real-time database, and hosting, which are crucial in providing a secure and efficient e-commerce experience. Moralis Web3, on the other hand, provides a backend-as-a-service for web3 applications, allowing developers to interact with the Ethereum blockchain easily. In summary, this blockchain-based decentralized e-commerce project offers an efficient, secure, and cost-effective platform for buyers and sellers to engage in transactions without intermediaries. The integration of Firebase and Moralis Web3 enhances the platform's usability, making it accessible to a wider audience.
The paper discusses the issues of legal regulation of decentralized financial services (DeFi). The purpose of the work is to form a systematic understanding of the direction and scope in which they can be regulated based on the DeFi technological features and the nature of the relationships that arise between digital platforms and their users. The methodological basis of the study is determined by the range of tasks and is focused on the analysis of decentralized finance simultaneously in technological, socio-cultural, political and legal aspects. Structural functional, taxonomic, constructive, situational, innovative, targeted and program-targeted methods form the complexity of the study. Taken together, they allowed us to study DeFi in their systemic unity and formulate the following conclusion. Decentralized finance is an independent model of finance organization both in terms of a set of technical characteristics (the use of distributed registry technology, smart contract protocols, oracles, etc.) and in terms of the nature of relations between the parties (horizontal P2P communications). The identified features allow us to consider them as a separate object of legal regulation. At the same time, it is important to take into account that the matrix of DeFi regulation at the national and international levels should be built in accordance with their taxonomy and assume simultaneous balanced consideration of technological features and product affiliation of services. The legal regulation of decentralized finance in the Russian Federation should primarily be focused on minimizing the risks associated with user identification, as well as determining the legal status of decentralized autonomous societies (DAOs), organizing centralized examination of protocols and preventing cyber attacks.
Federico Casolari, Mariarosaria Taddeo, Aina Turillazzi, Luciano Floridi
Abstract The article analyses the role of smart contracts in the architecture of the European Union’s Data Act proposal. It identifies five difficulties: lack of flexibility in terms of both content and operation; dependence on oracles which could lead to errors; vulnerability to bugs and changes in architecture; immutability and privacy; and problems of enforcement. It then offers some recommendations about how to address them to improve the Data Act.
Mikel Cortes-Goicoechea, Tarun Mohandas-Daryanani, José L. Muñoz, Leonardo Bautista-Gomez
Like most modern blockchain networks, Ethereum has relied on economic incentives to promote honest participation in the chain's consensus. The distributed character of the platform, together with the “randomness” or “luck” factor that both proof of work (PoW) and proof of stake (PoS) provide when electing the next block proposer, pushed the industry to model and improve the reward system of the system. With several improvements to predict PoW block proposal rewards and to maximize the extractable rewards of the same ones, the ultimate Ethereum's transition to PoS applied in the Paris Hard-Fork, more generally known as “The Merge”, has meant a significant modification on the reward system in the platform. In this paper, we aim to break down both theoretically and empirically the new reward system in this post-merge era. We present a highly detailed description of the different rewards and their share among validators' rewards. Ultimately, we offer a study that uses the presented reward model to analyze the performance of the network during this transition.
Abstract Distributed Ledger technology (DLT) has recently emerged as a disruptive system with a wide range of applicability, with prospect to improve societal interactions at large. In virtual enterprise (VE) context researchers and practitioners have started to investigate the deployment of DLT to automate the processing of data and implementation of decisions to support the provision of digital services. Although academic interest in this domain is growing, a practical analysis of DLT from a governance perspective is still lacking to date. Accordingly, this study aims to fill this gap and provide implications related to decentralized governance of DLT. This article develops an architectural governance-by-design framework that defines the governance of DLT as a combination of architectural layers and governance of DLT dimensions. Design science is employed, and IOTA tangle an open-source DLT which employs a decentralized asynchronous network is deployed to evaluate the applicability of the developed architectural governance-by-design framework through qualitative interviews and literature inquiry. The findings confirm the developed architectural governance-by-design framework and offer a shared discussion and insight surrounding the topic of governance of DLT. The findings also identify limitations associated with governance of DLT solutions and proposes policy recommendations to be used as guidelines for practitioners to improve the adoption of DLT to accelerate VE digitalization.
This paper defines Conditional Token (CT) as the token with specific conditions and proposes the use functions for its operations in smart contract so that it can be deployed at the public blockchain. If CTs were exchanged to/equivalent to fiat currency once then all conditions are realized, that is, the required performances and obligations/rights are agreed upon. In use, the obligation-type CT can be used as a divisible mortgage or be used as a representation of accounts receivable, accounts payable and vouchers as it is used in accounting. While the rights-type CT can be used as divisible fixed-income bonds or as an investment vehicle. Integrate both types of CTs with a matching methodology can thus be used in any kind of peer-to-peer (P2P) system of the decentralized finance, such as crowdfunding and P2P lending. This paper thus applying this new model to solve the complex issues of supply chain finance. For feasibility, this study concludes CT is the “Verdinglichung Obligatorischer Rechte”, and CTs are better than the current corporate loans in terms of cost and benefits. In addition, it is capable of transferring risk to other investors. In terms of implementation, this paper proposes a system framework and has completed a proof of concept of the system.
Blockchain is a new, emerging, and pioneering technology under which the society has evolved from the existing Web 2.0 to the innovative Web 3.0. Blockchain paves the way to a decentralized system diverging from the current centralized system. One such captivating phenomenon in the Blockchain would be that of NFTs. NFTs are non-fungible tokens; they are a form of digital art and could be anything from pictures, music, videos, or games. NFTs could be considered the real-world equivalent of indispensable assets like gold, silver, stocks, or bonds. They are unique and have predominant characteristics that make them invaluable to their collectors, admirers or even creators allowing them to be a great source of investment and trading. This great potential in acquiring a large capital is what makes the establishment of a platform that could be used by both creators and consumers for doing dealings in NFTs exceedingly compelling. This paper puts forth a way to develop an NFT marketplace i.e., a decentralized application(dApps) for the trade of NFTs. For this cutting-edge application, some key and fundamental concepts such as smart contracts, wallets, token standards and a lot more are explored. A system design has been proposed that highlights all the essential features like minting, listing, buying, and selling of NFTs. A precise analysis of the benefits and limitations associated with NFTs, and their marketplaces is done. Benefits being immutability, security and tokenization and the limitations being gas fees, legal issues, and environmental concerns, to properly determine the feasibility and value of developing such an application.
We investigate the potential and limits of privacy-preserving corporate blockchain applications for information provision. We provide a theoretical model in which heterogeneous firms choose between adopting a blockchain application or relying on traditional third-party intermediaries to inform the capital market. The blockchain’s ability to generate information depends on each firm’s data profile and all firms’ endogenous adoption decisions. We show that blockchain technology can improve the information environment and outperform traditional institutions with firms’ adoption decisions serving as a credible value signal and the application uncovering firm values by analyzing all participating firms’ data. However, we also characterize an adverse mixed-adoption equilibrium in which neither of the two channels realizes its full potential and information provision declines not only for individual firms, but also in aggregate. The equilibrium is a warning sign that has broad implications for policymakers’ regulatory effort and investors’ assessment of corporate blockchain applications. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Funding: B. Franke and Q. Gao Fritz gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Project-ID 403041268–TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency. A. Stenzel gratefully acknowledges financial support from the DFG through CRC TR 224 (Project C03) during prior employment at the University of Mannheim. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4718 .
Aijaz A. Shaikh, Nadia Dahmani, Sana Khan, Ravi Sharma
The competitive value of customer loyalty programs is well-known among marketing strategists. With the emergence of digital platforms, their impact has skyrocketed, with mobile applications replacing more cumbersome physical cards with unique identification numbers on embedded magnetic strips or smart chips. However, these programs generally suffer from two major drawbacks that limit their growth. Firstly, physical cards and mobile applications are restricted to particular merchants and programs. There is no mechanism for customers to transfer their loyalty points between programs or to other customers (although airlines are pioneering efforts in this direction). Secondly, the payoffs of participating in these programs and transactions are not fair to all players (customers, merchants and program operators). Finally, the operational mechanisms of such programs are rarely transparent and traceable; hence, disputes are not easily mediated. Using the innovative strengths of blockchain technology, we present a conceptual architecture for a meta or universal customer loyalty program that supports the design principles of transparency, accountability, fairness and ethics.
Blockchain technology has been integrated into diverse software applications by enabling a decentralised architecture design. However, the defects of on-chain algorithmic mechanisms, and tedious disputes and debates in off-chain communities may affect the operation of blockchain systems. Accordingly, blockchain governance has received great interest for supporting the design, use, and maintenance of blockchain systems, hence improving the overall trustworthiness. Although much effort has been put into this research topic, there is a distinct lack of consideration for blockchain governance from the perspective of software architecture design. In this study, we propose a pattern-oriented reference architecture for governance-driven blockchain systems, which can provide guidance for future blockchain architecture design. We design the reference architecture based on an extensive review of architectural patterns for blockchain governance in academic literature and industry implementation. The reference architecture consists of four layers. We demonstrate the components in each layer, annotating with the identified patterns. A qualitative analysis of mapping two concrete blockchain architectures, Polkadot and Quorum, on the reference architecture is conducted, to evaluate the correctness and utility of proposed reference architecture.
For most citizens, the primary touch point for central bank digital currency (CBDC) transactions would be a digital currency wallet. A CBDC wallet may have attributes in common with a cryptocurrency wallet and others in common with a mobile payment wallet. If a CBDC is built on distributed ledger technology with token-based access, it would have even more in common with a cryptocurrency wallet than a mobile payment wallet. The unbanked population is increasingly using cryptocurrency wallets and mobile payment wallets. To promote broad adoption of a CBDC among populations currently underserved by the financial industry, governments will first need a greater understanding of the barriers to adoption. This paper examines the user-facing issues pertaining to access and financial inclusion, usability, security, privacy and interoperability, and identifies 11 key user-centred issues relating to the use of CBDC wallets, along with recommendations to address these issues. By adopting these recommendations, a CBDC wallet would better meet the needs of populations underserved by the traditional financial system.
In this paper we explore the importance of platform governance. We discuss various problems of centralized architecture in the context of the metaverse or sharing economy applications which may lead to monopoly market structures. We argue that open standards and blockchain-based governance can potentially mitigate some of these issues. We then collect governance data from the first blockchain-based virtual world and conduct an empirical analysis to study voter behavior within Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). We provide empirical evidence that open standards and blockchain-based governance are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a decentralized and neutral platform. Centralization and concentrated voting power may lead to dependencies, rent extraction behavior and create hold-up problems. Consequently, producers, prosumers and service providers must evaluate the governance structure of the platform before establishing a presence.
The power system and markets have become increasingly complex along with an effort to digitalize the energy sector. Accessing flexibility services, in particular, through digital energy platforms, has enabled communication between multiple entities within the energy system and streamlined flexibility market operations. However, digitalizing these vast and complex systems introduces new cybersecurity and privacy concerns, which must be properly addressed during the design of the digital energy platform ecosystems. In this study, the potential and operation of digital flexibility platforms are reviewed, and a generic architecture with/without a combined distributed ledger technology framework is proposed. Finally, concerns about cybersecurity and privacy on digital energy platforms are discussed.
Recently interest in a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) based on blockchain technology is growing. Among them, Olympus DAO is attracting attention as an innovative model that first proposed the concept of Protocol Owned Liquidity and introduced bonding and staking mechanisms that are different from the existing Defi models. However, the unusually high APY and large price drops of OHM tokens have also raised suspicions of Ponzi scams. In this paper, we analyze the mechanism of Olympus DAO in detail and examine the system architecture based on deployed smart contract codes. In addition, after inspecting the market status related to Olympus DAO, we predict future prospects and suggest ways to improve it.
Lioba Heimbach, Quentin Kniep, Yann Vonlanthen, Roger Wattenhofer
Many classical blockchains are known to have an embarrassingly low transaction throughput, down to Bitcoin's notorious seven transactions per second limit.Various proposals and implementations for increasing throughput emerged in the first decade of blockchain research. But how much concurrency is possible? In their early days, blockchains were mostly used for simple transfers from user to user. More recently, however, decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFT marketplaces have completely changed what is happening on blockchains. Both are built using smart contracts and have gained significant popularity. Transactions on DeFi and NFT marketplaces often interact with the same smart contracts. We believe this development has transformed blockchain usage. In our work, we perform a historical analysis of Ethereum's transaction graph. We study how much interaction between transactions there was historically and how much there is now. We find that the rise of DeFi and NFT marketplaces has led to an increase in "centralization" in the transaction graph. More transactions are now interconnected: currently there are around 200 transactions per block with 4000 interdependencies between them. We further find that the parallelizability of Ethereum's current interconnected transaction workload is limited. A speedup exceeding a factor of five is currently unrealistic.
Форгор Лемпого, William Leslie Brown‐Acquaye, Millicent Agangiba, Daniel Selassie Kwasi Twumasi
Although information technology has positively influenced operations in the Ghanaian financial sector, there is still a high operational cost in performing KYC procedures due to duplication of efforts during clients' onboarding. The decentralized nature of blockchains makes them ideal for addressing these challenges. In this paper, the blockchain maturity model was used to assess the maturity and readiness of Ghanaian banks to adopt blockchain technology for KYC processes. Using primary data obtained via questionnaires and interviews, the individual components of the blockchain maturity model were assessed. The results indicate that the network, hardware, and software components are at repeatable, defined, and managed stages, respectively, while the people component lags in the initial stage due to a lack of adequate staff training. Finally, security and privacy are at the defined stage, whereas policy and regulations are at the initial stage.
Developments in the field of internet technologies have changed traditional shopping behaviors and led consumers to shop online on electronic commerce sites. Developments in the field of electronic commerce have also diversified payment systems and virtual currencies have started to be used in payments. When it comes to virtual currencies, the first concept that comes to mind recently is cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies, which are seen as investment instruments, have started to be used as payment methods by many brands in the global market. At this stage, the basis of the research is to reveal the intention of consumers in Turkey to use cryptocurrencies in online shopping. The goal of the study, which was conducted within the framework of the Technology Acceptance Model, was to discover the implications of consumers' perceptions of cryptocurrencies' ease of use, risk, and trust factors on their perceived benefit and intention to use cryptocurrencies in online purchasing. For this aim, it was discovered that perceived ease of use and trust have a significant positive effect on perceived benefit, while perceived risk has a significant negative effect, based on the analysis of data obtained from 391 customers via the online survey technique. In addition, perceived ease of use, trust and benefit also positively affect the intention to use cryptocurrency in online shopping. It is concluded that the perceived risk factor does not affect the intention to use cryptocurrency in online shopping. The findings provide significant theoretical and practical contributions to the fields of cryptocurrency and electronic commerce.
The research, in its general lines, tends to open an interpretative perspective on the fact that the bitcoin and blockchain (BTC-BC) phenomenon could be defined primarily through the social learning lens, and in that case would be considered a privileged way to investigate humans' behavior related to the emergent innovations, considering voluntariness in information seeking as antecedent of reduced reticence to acceptance. The approach inherent in the analysis proposed should be considered as exploratory and embryonic, but interesting and crucial for a seminal investigation of the field, due to the rapid emergence of the phenomenon object of the study. The main implication of the interpretative paradigm provided on the BTC-BC scene, considering the social learning view, could be found on the managerial side, thanks to the possible indirect knowledge-based strategy, able to shape an informed social context, promoting the future probable and potentially facilitated application of “disruptive” technologies in several work environments.