S. R. Mani Sekhar, G. M. Siddesh, Swapnil Kalra, Shaswat Anand
Blockchain technology is an emerging and rapidly growing technology in the current world scenario. It is a collection of records connected through cryptography. They play a vital role in smart contracts. Smart contracts are present in blockchains which are self-controlled and trustable. It can be integrated across various domains like healthcare, finance, self-sovereign identity, governance, logistics management and home care, etc. The purpose of this article is to analyze the various use cases of smart contracts in different domains and come up with a model which may be used in the future. Subsequently, a detailed description of a smart contract and blockchain is provided. Next, different case-studies related to five different domains is discussed with the help of use case diagrams. Finally, a solution for natural disaster management has been proposed by integrating smart contract, digital identity, policies and blockchain technologies, which can be used effectively for providing relief to victims during times of natural disaster.
Manimuthu Arunmozhi, V. Raja Sreedharan, G Rejikumar, Drishti Marwaha
Bitcoin is a crypto-currency-based open-source technology that operates in the peer-to-peer grid as a private payment mechanism. Bitcoin works on sophisticated cryptography supported by a local community in a peer-to-peer network. This study reviews scholarly articles to understand how bitcoin is addressed in the literature. The study reports on the attributes of bitcoin through a systematic literature review. The paper is based on primary data from existing literature and secondary data from relevant case studies in the public domain. Unlike other currencies, Bitcoin seems to have faced many hurdles and with many applications in day-to-day life, created unique challenges for the end user community. When Bitcoin came into existence, it seemed to signal hope for a better future, but the growth of bitcoin is hard to predict. Bitcoin opens up an entirely new world for both practitioners and academicians. Further, this study presents an idea about the âpotentialâ of bitcoin, highlights the prerequisites, needs, implications, and challenges faced by bitcoin in processing business transactions.
Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains have become buzzwords in the media and are attracting increasing academic interest, mainly from the fields of computer science and financial economics. In this essay, I argue that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are important objects of general social science research and thought, but not for their âmoneynessâ per se. Through a historical sociology of the antecedents and discourse leading up to Bitcoin, I show that it was never meant to be âmoneyâ in the economic sense, but rather a solution to a technical puzzle for preventing opportunistic actors from double-spending digital âcoins,â as well as a fervent ideology surrounding online privacy and infringement of individual rights in the digital age. Drawing from themes in science and technology studies, I suggest that Bitcoin and other âcryptoassetsâ are properly socio-technological assemblages that constitute new and important objects of social inquiry that must be understood beyond the myopic context of crypto-money. I conclude by proposing three alternative ontologies for blockchains relevant to economic, political, and social life: as systems of accounting, as organizational forms, and as institutions in their own right.
Md. Nazmus Saadat, Syed Abdul Halim Syed Abdul Rahman, Rasheed Mohammad Nassr, Megat F. Zuhiri
Blockchain was only used as a foundation of cryptocurrency initially, but today, we can see the rise of this new emerging technology being implemented in many industries. In the future, most technologies around the world are expected to use blockchain as an efficient way to make online transactions. One of the areas that blockchain technologies can be applied is crowdfunding platforms. The most common problem with current crowdfunding scene in Malaysia (and around the world) is that the campaigns are not regulated and some of the crowd-funding campaign turned out to be fraud. Besides, the completion of some projects also was significantly delayed. This project aims to solve these problems by applying Ethereum smart contracts to the crowdfunding site to that the contracts will be fully automatically executed, thus preventing frauds and ensuring that the projects can be delivered within duration given.
The purpose of article hereof is to introduce the significant characters of the smart contracts and certain ideas and proposals de lege ferenda on regulatory framework for smart contracts. Furthermore, present legislation with regard to the legal definition of the smart contract will be discussed from a comparative perspective. Particular note will be devoted to smart contracts in a relation to the contract law. Substantively, legal issues arising from the use of smart contracts, focussing upon actual and potential conflicts with established principles of contract law, will be introduced.
This study is part of the project âIncentives and innovative finance for scaling Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) up and outâ which as part of the flagship âClimate-Smart Technologies and Practicesâ. Through case study research, the project aims to develop context-specific knowledge on the factors and conditions which constitute an effective technical and financial package to scale up and scale out CSA practices and businesses. The impact of these packages on the adoption of CSA and the resilience of farmers and Small to Medium Enterprises to climate change will be assessed by means of three case studies. The first case aimed at upscaling CSA with small scale food producers who were organised in village savings and loans in Tanzania. The second case study focused on climate smart villages using climate-smart financial diaries for scaling in Kenya. This third study focuses on the financial resilience of smallholder farmers in Kenya who are affected by climate change. We will use blockchain technology as a lens to discuss the potential impact provided through this innovative technology. In the next year we envisage to run a small pilot with blockchain technology in Kenya. Kenya is particularly interesting considering blockchain, as mobile payment systems are well and widely adopted. This enhances possibilities for linking blockchain technology.
StĂŠĚphane Ducasse, Henrique Rocha, Santiago Bragagnolo, Marcus Denker ¡ 5 authors
Smart contracts are new computational units with special properties: they act as classes with aspectual concerns; their memory structure is more complex than mere objects; they are obscure in the sense that once deployed it is difficult to access their internal state; they reside in an append-only chain.There is a need to support the building of new generation tools to help developers.Such support should tackle several important aspects: (1) the static structure of the contract, (2) the object nature of published contracts, and (3) the overall data chain composed of blocks and transactions.In this chapter, we present SmartAnvil an open platform to build software analysis tools around smart contracts.We illustrate the general components and we focus on three important aspects: support for static analysis of Solidity smart contracts, deployed smart contract binary analysis through inspection, and blockchain 1 Accepted to appear in "Blockchain and Web 3.0:
This article argues that there are many questions that lawyers might ask, and conversations that they might have, about smart contracts; that some questions that are asked are more important than others; and that there are some questions that are not asked but which should be asked. First, it is argued that the question that preoccupies âcoherentistsâ (concerning the application of the law of contract to smart contracts, and the fit between smart contracts and the paradigmatic âfiat contractsâ that are recognised by the law of contract) is neither as puzzling nor as important as might be supposed. Secondly, it is argued that, if there are concerns about the acceptability of smart contracts, then the conversation that needs to be had is of a âregulatory-instrumentalistâ nature; in particular, if the question is one of public policy restrictions on the use of smart contracts, then the appropriate balance of interests needs to be made by an institution that has both the necessary mandate and the appropriate mind-set. Thirdly, it is argued that there are conversations that we currently do not have but which urgently need to be had. Blockchain is a potentially transformative technology and it is important to have more fundamental conversations about the kind of community that we want to be.
In recent years, we have seen a great deal of both academic and practical interest in the topic of vulnerabilities in smart contracts, particularly those developed for the Ethereum blockchain. While most of the work has focused on detecting *vulnerable* contracts, in this paper, we focus on finding how many of these vulnerable contracts have actually been *exploited*. We survey the 23,327 vulnerable contracts reported by six recent academic projects and find that, despite the amounts at stake, only 1.98% of them have been exploited since deployment. This corresponds to at most 8,487 ETH (~1.7 million USD), or only 0.27% of the 3 million ETH (600 million USD) at stake. We explain these results by demonstrating that the funds are very concentrated in a small number of contracts which are *not exploitable* in practice.
In recent years, the rapid development of cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology has revived Szaboâs original idea of smart contracts, i.e., computer protocols that are designed to automatically facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation and implementation of digital contracts without central authorities. Smart contracts can find a wide spectrum of potential application scenarios in the digital economy and intelligent industries, including financial services, management, healthcare, and Internet of Things, among others, and also have been integrated into the mainstream blockchain-based development platforms, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger. However, smart contracts are still far from mature, and major technical challenges such as security and privacy issues are still awaiting further research efforts. For instance, the most notorious case might be âThe DAO Attackâ in June 2016, which led to more than $50 million Ether transferred into an adversaryâs account. In this paper, we strive to present a systematic and comprehensive overview of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, aiming at stimulating further research toward this emerging research area. We first introduced the operating mechanism and mainstream platforms of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, and proposed a research framework for smart contracts based on a novel six-layer architecture. Second, both the technical and legal challenges, as well as the recent research progresses, are listed. Third, we presented several typical application scenarios. Toward the end, we discussed the future development trends of smart contracts. This paper is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.
The article examines the rapidly developing area of blockchain finance as a potential opportunity for new creative ventures to obtain external investment funding and generate revenues. We focus on the music industry, as an example of how alternative Internet-based finance utilizing blockchain could provide opportunities for start-up funding and ongoing revenue streams. Our pioneering pilot research findings are drawn from literature review and emerging case studies, and are grounded in the academic literature of start-up funding gaps. Although some expect blockchain technology to remove intermediaries, facilitating a direct relationship between artist and fan, initial findings are that intermediation in some form will remain. The articleâs central focus is the crucial emerging role of these facilitator organizations â the new breed of financial intermediaries or âinfomediariesâ. We examine this evolving process through adoption and development of financial intermediation theory, exploring the wider financial intermediary concept of incubators and accelerators as expert investors and promoters of new and very early-stage ventures â including artists. The article poses the question of whether blockchain technology offers a new, more cooperative approach for creative ventures, or merely the reinvention of existing corporate structures, for instance, the three major record labels that currently dominate recorded music. The article identifies four possible paths for the adoption of blockchain technology within the music industry, ranging from the anarcho-libertarian to the corporate and from the âutopianâ to the âdystopianâ.
Shayan Eskandari, Seyedehmahsa Moosavi, Jeremy Clark
We consider front-running to be a course of action where an entity benefits from prior access to privileged market information about upcoming transactions and trades. Front-running has been an issue in financial instrument markets since the 1970s. With the advent of the blockchain technology, front-running has resurfaced in new forms we explore here, instigated by blockchains decentralized and transparent nature. In this paper, we draw from a scattered body of knowledge and instances of front-running across the top 25 most active decentral applications (DApps) deployed on Ethereum blockchain. Additionally, we carry out a detailed analysis of Status.im initial coin offering (ICO) and show evidence of abnormal miners behavior indicative of front-running token purchases. Finally, we map the proposed solutions to front-running into useful categories.
Abeer ElBahrawy, Laura Alessandretti, Andrea Baronchelli
The production and consumption of information about Bitcoin and other digital-, or crypto- , currencies have grown together with their market capitalization. However, a systematic investigation of the relationship between online attention and market dynamics across multiple digital currencies is still lacking. Here, we quantify the interplay between the attention towards digital currencies in Wikipedia and their market performance. We consider the entire edit history of currency-related pages and their view history from July 2015. First, we quantify the evolution of the cryptocurrency presence in Wikipedia by analyzing the editorial activity and the network of co-edited pages. We find that a small community of tightly connected editors is responsible for most of the production of information about cryptocurrencies in Wikipedia. Then, we show that a simple trading strategy informed by Wikipedia views performs better than baseline strategies, in terms of returns on investment, for most of the covered period although the âbuy and hold strategyâ dominates during the periods of explosive market expansion. Our results contribute to the recent literature on the interplay between online information and investment markets, and we anticipate it will be of interest for researchers as well as investors.
In the early 1970s, the legal community grappled with whether to allow payment of legal fees by then-innovative means: the credit card. The first ABA opinion on the subject permitting payment of legal services by credit card was issued in 1974.
Today, attorneys are faced with another cutting-edge method of paying legal fees: virtual currency, also known as cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is not money - it is property. Attorneys accepting cryptocurrency in payment of fees raises a number of ethical and practical issues which should be addressed by the attorney in the engagement letter with the client.
The emergence of blockchain technology and increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) have created a new opportunity for peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. However, challenges arise in such transactive markets to ensure individual rationality, incentive compatibility, budget balance, and economic efficiency during the trading process. This thesis creates an hour-ahead P2P energy trading network based on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain and explores a comparative analysis of different auction mechanisms that form the basis of smart contracts. Considered auction mechanisms are discriminatory and uniform k-Double Auction with different k values. This thesis also investigates effects of four consumer and prosumer bidding strategies: random, preference factor, price-only game-theoretic approach, and supply-demand game-theoretic approach. A custom simulation framework that models the behavior of the transactive market is developed. Case studies of a 100-home microgrid at various photovoltaic (PV) penetration levels are presented using typical residential load and PV generation profiles in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. Results indicate that regardless of PV penetration levels and employed bidding strategies, discriminatory k-DA can outperform uniform k-DA. Despite so, discriminatory k-DA is more sensitive to market conditions than uniform k-DA. Additionally, results show that the price-only game-theoretic bidding strategy leads to near-ideal economic efficiencies regardless of auction mechanisms and PV penetration levels.
Friedrich Holotiuk, Francesco Pisani, JĂźrgen Moormann
Blockchain is receiving considerable attention among practitioners and academics. However, a detailed analysis investigating how the impact of blockchain is going to unfold is still missing. Our article sets out to assess the radicalness of blockchain at an early stage of its development and substantiates the analysis with evidence from the payments industry. We start by distilling five key aspects of radical innovation from extant literature. Our analysis of blockchain then focuses on the payments industry, which represents a major business field of banking and the cradle of this technology. The results of a Delphi study provide 17 statements about the current development of blockchain. The statements deliver insights into the impact of blockchain on the payments industry and reveal the radicalness of the technology. Based on these insights, we investigate how blockchain affects the five key aspects of radical innovation and develop contributions from an innovation managementâs perspective.
This document outlines our approach to conducting a rapid realist review to identify evidence for potential impacts on people and society of peer-to-peer energy trading (and of distributed ledger technology used in this context). Our motivation for the study is to help anticipate who might stand to win or lose (and how and why), inform policy/regulation to help maximize benefits and minimize harm, and identify research gaps. While our focus is in the energy sector, we also plan to draw on evidence (where relevant) from examples of sharing economy models in non-energy sectors. We have already developed and engaged around a provisional programme theory (presented as a set of Context-Mechanism-Outcome statements), which we will develop as the review progresses. We set out where and how we will seek to identify evidence (through online searching, reference checking and calling for evidence). In line with our exploratory and iterative approach, we propose broad inclusion criteria. We will assess evidence quality subjectively on the basis of relevance and rigour for each Context-Mechanism-Outcome group, not at document level. Synthesis will be achieved through developing our programme theory and connecting evidence to it. We will disseminate findings through an academic paper (or papers), one or more policy briefings (with associated engagement events), one or more public blogs, and materials will be openly shared on an ongoing basis through an Open Science Framework page.
Smart contract platforms, the most notable of which is probably Ethereum, facilitate the development of important and diverse distributed applications (e.g., naming services and fungible tokens) in a simple manner. This simplicity stems from the inherent utility of employing the state of smart contracts to store, query and verify the validity of application data. In Ethereum, data storage incurs an underpriced, non-recurring, predefined fee. Furthermore, as there is no incentive for freeing or minimizing the state of smart contracts, Ethereum is faced with a tragedy of the commons problem with regards to its monotonically increasing state. This issue, if left unchecked, may lead to centralization and directly impact Ethereum's security and longevity. In this work, we introduce an alternative paradigm for developing smart contracts in which their state is of constant size and facilitates the verification of application data that are stored to and queried from an external, potentially unreliable, storage network. This approach is relevant for a wide range of applications, such as any key-value store. We evaluate our approach by adapting the most widely deployed standard for fungible tokens, i.e., the ERC20 token standard. We show that Ethereum's current cost model penalizes our approach, even though it minimizes the overhead to Ethereum's state and aligns well with Ethereum's future. We address Ethereum's monotonically increasing state in a two-fold manner. First, we introduce recurring fees that are proportional to the state of smart contracts and adjustable by the miners that maintain the network. Second, we propose a scheme where the cost of storage-related operations reflects the effort that miners have to expend to execute them. Lastly, we show that under such a pricing scheme that encourages economy in the state consumed by smart contracts, our ERC20 token adaptation reduces the incurred transaction fees by up to an order of magnitude.
Sabyasachi Chakraborty, Satyabrata Aich, Sim Jong Seong, HeeâCheol Kim
Blockchain the technology of the decade which has disrupted the complete technological sector and moreover has plotted its jurisdiction over almost all other industrial sectors with a significant coefficient. The credit industry in terms of credit cards and also the credit system of the financial supply chain management proves to be one of the competent use cases for the blockchain technology to be tendered upon. In the credit card-based system the structure terms to be quite complicated and also there are a lot of challenges in order to pass a credit fund to a particular customer and also there are huge processing and validation charges that are levied upon. Moreover, the financial organization which is responsible for dedicating a card to the user for smooth processing of the credit funds, also has to fulfil some tenacious check on the customers where the verification procedure lies into multiple segments to determine the pay term history, CIBIL Score and also the capability of the customer to pay out the credit funds. Also, in the financial supply chain management, the credit system is indeed one of the toughest systems to be managed as in Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM), the transactions are not in lower dimensions of few hundred thousand dollars rather are in millions and billions. Also, in the credit system of the FSCM, the credit exposure or the limit of a particular client is dynamic and the credit limit or exposure depends upon a wide variance of factors such as previous pay term history, average days past due, average term revenue, and revenue insurance. Moreover, the analysis and the validation of the capability of the customer to pay a certain amount is quite a time intensive and depends upon variables from numerous sectors. Therefore, a blockchain based environment may allow to assess the eligibility of a customer over the order limit or credit limit that have been demanded. Hence a blockchain based credit analysis framework can be very useful for gathering information about the customers from multiple financial sectors, analysis of the eligibility of the customer to stand the credit and to calculate the credit score of the customers based on the consensus of multiple stakeholders in the network including banks, insurance agencies and other third-party financial organizations.
Felix Hartmann, Gloria Grottolo, Xiaofeng Wang, Maria Ilaria Lunesu
Blockchain-based crowdfunding is an emerging economic phenomenon and a state-of-the-art strategy to finance ventures. It bears similarity to conventional crowdfunding, but has its own unique characteristics. Therefore the success factors that affect the outcome of traditional crowdfunding may have a different impact on blockchain-based crowdfunding. Despite that the number of blockchain-based crowdfunding campaigns has increased drastically in the past few years, there is a lack of good understanding of what the success factors are for them in comparison to the ones for conventional crowdfunding. Such understanding is crucial for companies to design their blockchain-based fundraising initiatives properly and facilitate potential investors to seek main signals and drivers of outstanding projects. Furthermore it could help regulators and market participants to understand how the existing regulatory framework applies to blockchain-based crowdfunding. Due to specific characteristics of blockchain-based crowdfunding, regulatory frameworks may require potential re-interpretation of requirements to allow an effective application of regulations. To fill this knowledge gaps, we have reviewed a set of relevant literature on success factors for conventional and blockchain-based crowdfunding. The result of this literature review sheds light on the directions for future research and development. The contribution of our work is a better understanding of the distinctions and similarities of blockchain-based crowdfunding compared to traditional crowdfunding.