The authors’ first challenge is to decipher the complexity of Islamic banking despite the enigmatic aspects of the sector. A second focal point is the agent’s agenda; in the Islamic banking industry, contributors mandate intermediaries (agents) to transfer their contributions to socio-economic causes according to the Shariah; in principle, Islamic financial institutions must create value for their stakeholders by offering Shariah-compliant products and services. An underlying assumption of the agency theory is that agents attempt to maximize their personal welfare and compensation, but such behaviour may not always be in the best interests of other stakeholders. One objective of the article is to identify tools monitoring whether agents act in the best interests of stakeholders and consider if smart contracts are usable for all financial dealings between agents and stakeholders. A qualitative research framework was adopted because of the constraints of the enigmatic, secretive Islamic banking culture. A case study of the debacle of an award winning Islamic bank and the analysis of the 2017 International Monetary Fund Report on Islamic banking shed new light on the sector.
The world of cryptocurrency is not transparent enough though it was established for innate transparent tracking of capital flows. The most contributing factor is the violation of securities laws and scam in Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which is used to raise capital through crowdfunding. There is a lack of proper regularization and appreciation from governments around the world which is a serious problem for the integrity of cryptocurrency market. We present a hypothetical case study of a new cryptocurrency to establish the transparency and equal right for every citizen to be part of a global system through the collaboration between people and government. The possible outcome is a model of a regulated and trusted cryptocurrency infrastructure that can be further tailored to different sectors with a different scheme.
Abstract Blockchains combine digital encryption and time stamping technologies to enable digital exchange to occur in manners celebrated by proponents as ‘trust‐free’. Yet, an increasing range of scholars argue that actual applications of the peer‐to‐peer technology shifts, rather than eliminates, trust. In this article, we draw on organizational theory to argue that efforts to remove trust reorganize the action nets that underpin payment systems in manners that extend rather than eliminate longstanding pathologies afflicting financial globalization. Our analysis supports and extends the critiques that blockchain applications are far from ‘trust‐free’. By tracing how efforts to reconfigure the socio‐technical composition of the humans and objects that underpin payment systems, we illustrate how blockchain applications shift the location and character of the technical vulnerabilities that create market instabilities and concentration, as well as elite‐led governance.
Block chain, or distributed ledger \n technology, has the potential to address many problems in \n emerging markets. In this note the authors consider whether \n block chain can be used to mitigate the problem of \n de-risking by financial institutions, which affects \n receivers of remittances, businesses that need correspondent \n banking relationships, and charities working in conflict \n countries. Block chain is an evolving technology, and \n understanding its scope and limitations will be critical to \n employing it to address these and related issues.
Sanjay Prasad, Ravi Shankar, Rachita Gupta, Sreejit Roy
Purpose Over last few years, a major innovation known as blockchain technology has emerged as potentially one of the most disruptive technology of recent times. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze various critical success factors (CSFs) that can facilitate success of blockchain-based cloud services. Further, this paper aims to analyze and understand mutual interactions among these CSFs. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, 19 CSFs have been identified through literature review and expert opinions. The hierarchical framework developed using total interpretive structural modeling has revealed the inter-dependencies among these CSFs. The methodology employed in this study provides a mechanism to conduct an exploratory study by identifying the factors and analyzing their interactions through the development of a hierarchical framework. This research further categorizes CSFs into multiple clusters based on their driving power and dependence power. Findings This paper has identified 19 CSFs, namely, user engagement, industry collaboration, rich ecosystem, blockchain technology standardization, regulatory clarity, cost efficiency, energy efficiency (wasted resources), handling blockchain bloat, miner incentives, business case alignment to blockchain capability, sidechains development, blockchain talent pool availability, leadership readiness for a decentralized consensus based technology, technology investment and maturity, trust on blockchain networks, integration with other cloud services, robust and mature smart contracts platform, blockchain security and user control on data (privacy). Further, driver and dependent variables have been identified. Research limitations/implications Future research can discover and detail the sub-factors behind the 19 CSFs identified in this paper. Additionally, more work can be done to extend the current structural model for blockchain-based services to a more functional form. Practical implications It provides a comprehensive list of CSFs that are relevant for development of blockchain-based cloud services. This will help industry leaders to strategically focus on the main drivers that will ensure that businesses get maximum benefit of this disruptive technology. Originality/value This study makes a significant contribution in the literature of blockchain-based cloud services, which captures the perspective of different stakeholders. This study is one of the first (if not the first) systematic research on adoption of blockchain-based services. It creates the foundation to carry out further research in this area.
The emergence of big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is reshaping the world. While the technological revolution improves the quality of our life, new concerns are triggered. The superhuman capability enables AI to outperform human workers in many data- and/or computing-intensive tasks. Also, digital superpowers are showing arrogance towards individuals, which erodes the trust foundation of the society. In this position paper, we suggest to construct trustworthy and safe communities based on a BLockchain-Enabled Social credits System (BLESS) that rewards the residents who commit in socially beneficial activities. Human being's true value lies in serving other people. The BLESS system is considered as an efficient approach to promote the value and dignity in efforts focused on enhancing our communities and regulating business and private behaviors. The BLESS system leverages the decentralized architecture of the blockchain network, which not only allows grassroots individuals to participate rating process of a social credit system (SCS), but also provides tamper proof of transaction data in the trustless network environment. The anonymity in blockchain records also protects individuals from being targeted in the fight against powerful enterprises. Smart contract enabled authentication and authorization strategy prevents any unauthorized entity from accessing the credit system. The BLESS scheme is promising to offer a secure, transparent and decentralized SCS.
This paper explains how Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency could be enhancing the financial reporting process, and therefore improve corporate governance model of transparency and monitoring. The technology and forces behind the adoption of Blockchain are discussed as they relate to accounting, auditing and corporate governance. To demonstrate such applications examples from revenue recognition are used to illustrate how Blockchain can improve financial reporting, and transparency and monitoring aspects of the corporate governance.
John Weru is a Kenya-born writer, blogger and co-founder of PayHub East Africa. In a conversation with ICT Update, John talked about the rise of cryptocurrency, the potential of the blockchain to improve efficiency in the agricultural value chain in Africa, and theurgent need to educate people about the technology itself and the economy that it is creating.
In the present article, we analyze the transaction fees market on smart contracts-enabling blockchains. On such systems, as opposed to traditional on-premise and cloud computing solutions, users are effectively competing for computational resources through an auction for priority. This paper proposes a way to estimate the bid one has to offer to have a transaction included in the next block. This method outperforms naive bidding (bidding the optimal value of the last block) if the user is realistically "impatient" to have a transaction processed. It also shows that users collectively spend several million of dollar every years for transaction fees that could be avoided without degrading the service received. This is this "waste" we seek to reduce throughour forecasting method.
Governments and financial Institutions worldwide are in deep need to reduce the payment, clearing and settlement cycles of various transactions thereby eliminating operational and financial inefficiencies and mitigating risks. Various consortia have been formed in order to lay the foundation stones, standards to create industry acceptable solutions. Seamless transactions and information sharing between different banks and financial institutions is still a distant dream. This paper presents a novel architecture to seamlessly integrate e-wallets of different banks and participating institutions using blockchains that shall act as a foundation of Digital ledger technology (DLT) for financial sector in India. A swarm based peer-to-peer network is designed for the proposed e-wallet system. The proposed solution shall minimize the load on the Core Banking Solution of the banks thus reducing the load on the servers at the data centers.
Panayiotis Christodoulou, Klitos Christodoulou, Andreas S. Andreou
A prototypical smart contract (wrapped as a decentralized application) is presented for investigating the potential benefits for applying Blockchain for Logistics. The decentralized application proposed exposes the various design challenges that programmers are likely to face when realizing the implementation of the application. The proposed methodology utilises the implementation of a dedicated smart contract that was developed based on a special-purpose structure for satisfying the requirements of the usecase. The evaluation was based on the execution of each of the functions measuring the gas costs and execution time. The prototype design was deployed and evaluated on a real-world Blockchain framework and can be considered as a first solution to how the Blockchain technology can be utilized within Logistics to overcome any barriers that may exist between professionals. In this paper we present a real implementation of a smart contract for the Logistics industry. The proposed dApp provides a live example of how Blockchain can be utilized within Logistics as it enables users to send and track products.
Sofia Alexaki, George Alexandris, Vasilios Katos, Nikolaos E. Petroulakis
Circular, data-driven healthcare is increasingly being considered as an effective model to provide efficient, cost-effective and sustainable healthcare services in the future. Central to this model is the service-dominant “building-block”-type provision of care services to patients, paired with the collaboration of healthcare providers through a common infrastructure. This combination enables the forming of a decentralized, holistic care cycle. Sharing of patient medical informationis pivotal towards reaching this goal; however, preserving medical record integrity and privacy, while at the same time allowing provider interoperability are often conflicting requirements. Blockchains and Smart Contracts can provide the underlying technology to support the decentralized care cycle by addressing patient privacy and medical record integrity, while simultaneously offering efficient interoperability between providers. To demonstrate how this could be achieved, a conceptual medical record access and sharing mechanism is presented which is suitable for a system operating within a regulated healthcare jurisdiction.
Distributed Ledgers, such as blockchains implement business collaboration processes in the form of smart contracts (SCs). Blockchain technology and smart contracts have received significant attention as they exhibit autonomy, decentralization, trust, and transparency over peer-to-peer networks while moving the assets digitally among peers without a third-party such as lawyers in conventional contracts (CCs). Smart contracts are computerized scripts or protocols that execute contractual clauses when certain pre-defined conditions meet and thereby digitally enforce the negotiation and performance of a contract. Smart contracts, although, being self-executable and self-enforceable, are irreversible once written and lack contractual flexibility in the face of a contingency. A high degree of automation is sought to manifest blockchain enabled smart contracts into the so-called self-aware contracts (SAC) that can be aware of its internal contextual environment and the external environment or real-world events. This Ph.D. work aims to develop the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model based multi-agent system on the top of the blockchain technology-enabled smart contracts to yield the so-called self-aware contracts. This research follows the guidelines of Design Science Research (DSR) methodology.
Smart contracts and blockchain have the potential to change the current shape of cloud markets by enabling the development of completely decentralized cloud/fog solutions, which lower costs and enforce predictable results without requiring any intermediary. In this article, we survey three of these solutions, namely Golem, iExec, and SONM, compare them, and identify some of the problems they leave unsolved. Moreover, we consider existing standards for the development of interoperable decentralized cloud solutions that would allow such systems to compete with large providers and would prevent vendor lock-in. We believe that our study contributes to the evolution of cloud systems not only by pointing out incompatibilities among projects and possible solutions for research problems in the area, but also by reviewing the existing standards and suggesting new standardization opportunities.
Marko Hölbl, Aida Kamišalić, Muhamed Turkanović, Marko Kompara · 6 authors
Blockchain technology enables the creation of a decentralized and distributed environment in which transactions and data are not controlled by a central authority. Simultaneously transactions are secure, ubiquitous and trustworthy due to the used cryptographic principles. In this paper, we present a global decentralized blockchain-based platform and ecosystem called EduCTX. The platform enables managing, assigning and presenting credentials for individuals and educational institutions as well as other potential stakeholders such as companies, institutions and organizations. Further it enables the development of own digital services, which offers organizations the opportunity to automate the evaluation of individuals' skills and knowledge. The EduCTX platform is implemented on the blockchain platform Ethereum on a consortium-based network of Ethereum run nodes. The platform enables a globally efficient, simplified and ubiquitous environment to avoid language and administrative barriers.
Smart contracts play an advent role in automated business participation by rendering collaboration processes more time-efficient, cost-effective and establishing more transparency. Smart contracts facilitate trust-less systems, without the need for intervention from third-party intermediaries. Existing smart-contract languages mainly focus on technical utility and do not take into consideration social and legally relevant issues, e.g., lack of semantics, ontological completeness, and so on. In this research, we address the gap by developing with rigorous means a smart contract's language that aims to be legally relevant, and that comprises socio-technical utility for cross-organizational business collaboration. The proposed language seeks to retain the strengths of the already existing languages of different generations while eluding their limitations. We aim to identify and implement abstract grammar patterns for a smart-contract language that has the expected application utility and verifiability. We evaluate the developed language based on automating industry-collaboration cases with our novel smart-contract language to test the suitability, utility, and expressiveness.
Cryptocurrencies are often thought to operate out of the reach of national regulation, but in fact their valuations, transaction volumes and user bases react substantially to news about regulatory actions. The impact depends on the specific regulatory category to which the news relates: events related to general bans on cryptocurrencies or to their treatment under securities law have the greatest adverse effect, followed by news on combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism, and on restricting the interoperability of cryptocurrencies with regulated markets. News pointing to the establishment of specific legal frameworks tailored to cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings coincides with strong market gains. These results suggest that cryptocurrency markets rely on regulated financial institutions to operate and that these markets are segmented across jurisdictions, bringing cryptocurrencies within reach of national regulation.
This paper tackles the shortcomings of the traditional centralized stock exchange systems, such as high transaction fees, centralized governance susceptible to attacks and lack of openness regarding the market actions and algorithms, by proposing an innovative architecture using blockchain to develop a decentralized stock exchange and an open continuous market. The proposed blockchain based solution solves the drawbacks of the centralized stock exchange architecture by ensuring the integrity and security of the owner's assets and orders, self-enforcing smart agreements between parties as well as achieving democratic and reliable decisions regarding the execution and settlement of the orders through consensus algorithms. The proposed architecture uses smart contracts to enforce the validation of the owner's rights and the correct execution and settlement of the orders, thus eliminating the need of a central authority that ensures the correctness of the stock exchange process. The solution was validated by implementing a prototype in Ethereum for a subset of rules for the Bucharest Stock Exchange. The experimental results show that the decentralized solution can offer lower transaction fees by replacing the commissions owed to brokers and central authorities with mining fees that are used to compensate the miners for their honest work in keeping the integrity of the system.
Benjamin D. Trump, Marie‐Valentine Florin, H. Scott Matthews, Douglas Sicker · 5 authors
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have the capacity to improve how many companies and organizations conduct transactions or store information securely, among many other potential benefits. However, their development and implementation does not occur in a contextual vacuum and instead must adapt to the needs and requirements of their given user. As such, we argue that the governance of DLT and blockchain must be applied against two core questions: who should have access to information within a given DLT/blockchain, and should management of that system be open or restricted/permissioned? While the technology is still emerging, its application to and success within various organizations will be largely dependent upon these key governance concerns.