This paper outlines key design principles of Scilla---an intermediate-level language for verified smart contracts. Scilla provides a clean separation between the communication aspect of smart contracts on a blockchain, allowing for the rich interaction patterns, and a programming component, which enjoys principled semantics and is amenable to formal verification. Scilla is not meant to be a high-level programming language, and we are going to use it as a translation target for high-level languages, such as Solidity, for performing program analysis and verification, before further compilation to an executable bytecode. We describe the automata-based model of Scilla, present its programming component and show how contract definitions in terms of automata streamline the process of mechanised verification of their safety and temporal properties.
Feng Mai, Zhe Shan, Qing Bai, Xin Wang · 5 authors
Bitcoin’s emergence has the potential to pave the way for a technological revolution in financial markets. What determines its valuation is an important open question with far-reaching business and policy implications. Building on information systems and finance literature, we examine the dynamic interactions between social media and the monetary value of bitcoin using textual analysis and vector error correction models. We show that more bullish forum posts are associated with higher future bitcoin values. Interestingly, social media’s effects on bitcoin are driven primarily by the silent majority, the 95 percent of users who are less active and whose contributions amount to less than 40 percent of total messages. In addition, messages on an Internet forum, relative to tweets, have a stronger impact on future bitcoin value. Overall, our findings reveal that social media sentiment is an important predictor in determining bitcoin’s valuation, but not all social media messages are of equal impact. This study offers new insights into the digital currency market and the economic impact of social media.
Blockchain technology has been claimed to have the potential to disrupt a large number of industries. Despite all the hype around it, blockchain remains at a nascent state. In the early stage of the development of an IT innovation, its success is to a degree contingent on building legitimacy around it. This seems to be particularly relevant in the context of blockchain due to the questionable reputation that its most famous application, the bitcoin, has gained over time. This paper explores the usage of social media by four key actors in the blockchain ecosystem –media, IT, financial services and consulting firms – over a calendar year and through the lens of ‘organizing visions’ to identify how these organizations are trying to legitimize blockchain. Our results show that these actors employ three primary legitimation micro-level strategies through two types of legitimation mechanisms – advertising affiliations with influential field level actors (pragmatic legitimacy), describing positive market responses to blockchain and emphasizing its ongoing development (cognitive legitimacy), and describing characteristics of blockchain that are in alignment with current technological best practices (cognitive legitimacy). This paper extends the current literature on IT innovation adoption and legitimation, and contributes to the nascent literature on blockchain.
The blockchain technology, well-known for Bitcoin, can bring major benefits to various economic sectors, including energy. Firstly, by cutting out intermediaries, the adoption of blockchain in energy sector would lead to huge savings, accelerated processes and higher flexibility of the system. Secondly, the direct involvement of participants to the network, as „prosumers” (producers and consumers in the same time), would allow for profitable integration of renewable energy into the grid. Last but not least, blockchain technology could accelerate investments in energy efficiency, thus contributing to alleviate the negative effects of climate change.The large-scale adoption of blockchain technology in energy sector is a scenario hard-to-accept, especially for the big players on this market. Nevertheless, it would be a revolutionary change at the system level and the consumers would have much to gain. Undoubtedly, there are risks and limitations of this scenario, but the biggest obstacles to implement it will probably be those beyond the technological constraints
The blockchain activity within the energy sector is high, and the list of use cases is continuouslygrowing. The distributed and immutable nature of blockchain technology could potentially beleveraged to accelerate the ongoing transition to more decentralized and digitalised energy systemsand to address some of the challenges the industry is facing. However, blockchain is an emergingtechnology and it is seen as a critical uncertainty by many incumbents as the challenges andopportunities of implementation are still largely unknown. There is thus a lack of knowledge andscarcity of decision-making tools for understanding why, when and how the technology can addprofound value. This study sets out to explore how utilities can evaluate and prioritize amongblockchain-based use cases and gain practical knowledge about how blockchain could beimplemented.In the first part of the study, a broad initial scope was applied as a large part of the blockchain-baseduse cases within the energy market were inventoried and grouped into clusters based on their overallarea of use. Each cluster was analysed and evaluated to best fit both the strategy of the commissioningcompany and the criteria for using blockchain technology. After the first stage of the use caseevaluation approach, four clusters most suited to the specified selection criteria were selected. Theseare P2P Energy Trading, EV Charging & Management, Grid Stabilization & Management andEnvironmental Commodity Management & Trading. Given a final evaluation based on the overallmaturity of the clusters, EV Charging & Management and more specifically, the use case of EmobilityRoaming, was prioritized and selected for further evaluation given the high market relevanceof the use case.In the second part of the study, both the business and the functional layers of the e-mobility roamingcase were investigated. By adding an additional blockchain layer to the current solution, fourscenarios for blockchain implementation were identified. Several observations were made from thedevelopment of the scenarios and the evaluation of their impact on the business and the functionallayers within the e-mobility market. It became evident that many of the current functions andprocesses could be automated with the use of blockchain. As the technology allows for instantaneoussettlement of transactions, the current manual and time-consuming process of exchanging chargedetail records and the following billing and settlement functions could be removed. This further hasimplications on the market environment as some of the responsibilities of the incumbent marketplayers could become obsolete. By evaluating the scenarios based on the technology, market,customer and regulatory aspects it became clear that the scenarios based on a permissionlessblockchain are further away from commercialization in the energy sector due to the volatile nature ofcryptocurrencies, scalability issues, and regulatory constraints compared to a permissioned consortiumblockchain. On the other hand, these scenarios are easier to start exploring until the technology ismature, since it does not require any initial investment to start building Proof of Concepts foreducational purposes.In conclusion, the industry interest and dedication towards blockchain is high as both incumbents andstart-ups are investigating the potential of the technology. However, given the high complexity of thetechnology, it is essential for companies to evaluate both the technology and the applications beforeinitiating projects and taking investment decisions. It can additionally be seen that while blockchainhas a significant potential to provide scalable and automated solutions with lower transaction costs,the technology is currently not mature enough to do so. There are still issues concerning scalability aswell as a lack of a coherent policy mix in place limiting the development of commercial applications.However, as the adoption of EVs is increasing and interesting technologies such as machine-tomachinepayments and inductive charging are being investigated, value lies in taking a proactivestance and to start exploring scalable and automated solutions.
Systems that use blockchain technology to improve the know-your-customer (KYC) process have only been proposed at a conceptual level and all share certain attributes that make their adoption very difficult. We propose and program a blockchain-based system that reduces and shares out among the financial institutions (FIs) that work with a customer the costs of the KYC process and also makes it possible for FIs to dynamically update information related to customers and disseminates this information among participating FIs. Additionally, our system addresses some of the attributes that hinder the adoption of previously proposed solutions by FIs. The result is a stand-alone solution that reduces the cost of the KYC process without requiring any central instance to store the customer's data, and in which FIs share the initial costs of the KYC process as well as the running costs of keeping the information about customers up to date.
Hanyue Guo, Jiting Zhou, Jiaqi Wang, Xiaodong Wang
Leakage of user privacy and vandalism of the sharing bike have been the most serious problem since sharing bike came on the scene. Accordingly, it is very urgent to rebuild the underlying trust mechanism. Most bike sharing systems are centralized, leading to overpressure on the central server. This paper proposes a bike sharing system based on blockchain service platform and a shared operation mode of C2C. The system uses the blockchain system as the trust guarantee. The extra chain payment - lightning network is used to improve the efficiency of the blockchain system and the smart contract is used to provide the rights and interests of the two parties.
The blockchain technology is a new innovation with the potential to disrupt the\nworld as we currently know it, despite several limitations and challenges to overcome.\nOne of these challenges for software producing organizations is selecting the\nright technology for their case. In this research, we haveve identified this selection\nprocess as a multi-criteria decision making problem. Based on this we have created\na Decision Support System which aids developers during the technology selection\nprocess of blockchain platforms. Contemporary solutions to this problem were only\nrather simplistic decision-trees, which struggle with complexity and adaptations.\nThe novelty of this Decision Support System lies in being a feature-based artifact\nwhich incorporates ISO Software Quality Aspects and feature prioritization based\non the MoSCoW-technique. These contemporary generic blockchain features have\nbeen gathered through nine interviews with blockchain experts. Based on prioritized\nfeatures as input, the Decision Support System gives a score for feasible solutions\n(e.g. Ethereum or Hyperledger) as result. This Decision Support System was\nevaluated in three different case-studies for organization creating blockchain-based\nsolutions. In addition to this, the artifact has been validated by a blockchain-domain\nexpert. The main difficulties and obstacles of this whole research were grounded in\nthe immaturity of the blockchain domain as a whole.
The purpose of this paper is to integrate quality management system, corporate social responsibility guidelines, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, blockchain related documents and qualitative interview results from Hong Kong and Slovakia to design a set of social inclusive quality indicators within the context of the higher education sector. Three levels for social inclusive quality indicators in relation to blockchain content distribution technology in HE have been identified: governance with transparency, trust building with the sustainable community in needs fulfilment; industry innovations with risk and security audit mechanism. The contribution of this paper is to raise awareness of educators, industry practitioners and policy makers about the importance of social inclusion in blockchain technology. This study fills the gap through integrating system thinking, humanistic thinking and proactive thinking in the higher education context.
Background: Blockchain have attracted a lot of attention in the last few years. It has been described as a technology that will increase the effectiveness of monitoring and improve the auditability of transactions which would have great implications for accountants and auditors. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how blockchain can help auditors to implement audit trails. The aim is to increase awareness about what the blockchain technology is, investigate if blockchain can be used in audit trails and if it can contribute to more cost-effective, reliable and secure audit trail. Methodology: The study is an exploratory research to increase the knowledge and understanding of blockchain and audit trails. It has a qualitative approach where primary data is collected from a semi-structured interview with Deloitte. Conclusion: The results indicates that there exists a gap in the literature of previously research on blockchain in relation to audit trails that needs further investigation. Furthermore, this study shows that blockchain is a technology with a lot of potential, but knowledge is still limited. This study concludes that there is too little research conducted to be able to provide any conclusive evidence. Due to findings and limitations of this research, suggestions for further research is provided.
Every time the development of technology enters a new epoch, big changes inthe business and society will follow. Especially for the entrepreneurs, it signifies both opportunities and challenges at the same time. In the next decade, IoT, AI and blockchain will be the main driving forces in the upcoming technological revolution and demonstrate great synergic potential. There is an old saying, “In a strong wind even turkeys can fly”. The company who can seize this chance may become to the next GAFAs (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple); whereas those who completely ignores it may be rolled out of the marketeventually. Business model canvas is a very popular method for startups to align the resources and formulate the strategy, which is also the framework used in our research. The main target of this thesis is to demonstrate a thinking method to converge these new technologies in the business models and evaluate the most significant elements in the business planning stage. It could help the future startups to take advantages of the opportunities and overcome the challengesin the new business environment.
After Satoshi Nakamoto published ‘Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ in 2008, Blockchain has been GPT (General Purpose Technologies) that affect the whole cycle of the 4th Industrial Revolution. This study attempted to identify the innovativeness of Blockchain. Because of Blockchain’s ambidextrous characteristics, Blockchain has two kinds of innovativeness, technological innovation by physical technology and social innovation by social technology. Thus, this study will be useful to increase understanding and establishing strategy for Blockchain.
NEW JOB POSITIONS AND RECRUITMENT OF EMPLOYEES SHAPED BY BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES Jelena M. Lukić Modern Business School, Terazije 27/4, Belgrade, Serbia Hadžib Salkić Modern Business School, Terazije 27/4, Belgrade, Serbia Bojana Ostojić Modern Business School, Terazije 27/4, Belgrade, Serbia DOI: https://doi.org/10.31410/limen.2018.314 4th International Scientific – Business Conference LIMEN 2018 – Leadership & Management: Integrated Politics of […]