This article canvasses examples of developments and initiatives driven by distributed ledger technology or blockchain technology within the insurance industry. These activities undertaken by insurers and reinsurers are designed to improve efficiency, lower the costs of transaction processing and to improve data quality and transparency. Fraud detection, risk prevention and âsmartâ contracting are at the forefront of several collaborative efforts undertaken within the industry or in conjunction with major external technology entities. However, as this article discusses, these opportunities are not without their corresponding challenges and risks, technological, legal and otherwise. Key challenges and risks to be considered in the context of existing legal frameworks relate to security and privacy, governance, scalability and standardisation. While this new technology may enhance data security it is not âbullet proofâ and may commonly give rise to three major types of potential liability risk: ledger transparency risks, cyber risks and operational risks. Paradoxically, for example, one of the perceived strengths of distributed ledgers being the enhanced level of transparency whereby every node operator has access to data stored on a distributed ledger, does also facilitate re-personalisation of data stored on a distributed ledger or enable nodes to make an informed guess as to identities entering into certain transactions. This in turn leads to two main legal risks, being data privacy and insider trading and market abuse. Regulators globally have to date largely taken a âlight touchâ approach to the question as to whether existing legal frameworks are sufficient to meet the technological challenges posed by distributed ledger technology or blockchain technology. This article considers industry initiatives within the existing legal framework and reviews some of the challenges in extending and applying private law and regulation to blockchain applications.
Naoyuki Yoshino, Tim Schloesser, Farhad TaghizadehâHesary
To achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) as well as the Paris Agreement major investments in renewable energy (RE) production are necessary worldwide. In particular, decentralized, small-scale projects offer copious potential to create energy access as well as to contribute to an affordable, reliable and sustainable energy supply system. However, in developing countries such projects often face issues in finding funding. Direct private investment tools like the community-based hometown investment trust (HIT) fund address this issue and offer a way of financing for those projects. Technical developments in the sphere of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) provide the opportunity to increase the fund's transparency and thus to improve its functioning. On that basis, this paper contributes to the literature in two ways: First, it delineates a concrete application of DLTs in the field of green financing, which offers the potential to increase social welfare. Second, the decision problem of investors is modeled, which illustrates through which channel the use of DLTs impacts the investors' behavior.
Blockchain is considered one of the most disruptive technologies of our time. Numerous cities around the world are launching blockchain initiatives as part of the overall efforts toward shaping the urban future. However, the infancy stage of the blockchain industry leads to a severe gap between the knowledge we have and the actions urban policy makers are taking. This paper is an effort to narrow this rift. We provide a systematic literature review on concrete blockchain use cases proposed by the research community. At the macro-level, we discuss and organize use cases from 159 selected papers into nine sectors recognized as crucial for sustainable and smart urban future. At the micro-level, we identify a component-based framework and analyze the design and prototypes of blockchain systems studied in a subset of 71 papers. The high-level use case review allows us to illustrate the relationship between them and the four pillars of urban sustainability: social, economic, environmental, and governmental. The system level analysis helps us highlight interesting inconsistencies between well-known blockchain applicability decision rules and the approaches taken by the literature. We also offer two classification methodologies for blockchain use cases and elaborate on how they can be applied to stimulate cross-sector insights in the blockchain knowledge domain.
Ioannis Karamitsos, Maria Papadaki, Nedaa Baker Al Barghuthi
Blockchain is a fast-disruptive technology becoming a key instrument in share economy. In recent years, Blockchain has received considerable attention from many researchers and government institutions. This paper aims to present the Blockchain and smart contract for a specific domain which is real estate. A detailed design of smart contract is presented and then a use case for renting residential and business buildings is examined.
Taylor C. Nelms, Bill Maurer, Lana Swartz, Scott Mainwaring
The payments industry â the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures â is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in âsocialâ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of âjust usâ â a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovatorsâ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics.
Abstract Humanityâs notion of trust is shaped by new platforms operating in the emerging sharing economy, acting as intermediate matchmaker for ride sharing, housing facilities or freelance labour, effectively creating an environment where strangers trust each other. While millions of people worldwide rely on online sharing activities, such services are often facilitated by a few predatory companies, managing trust relations. This centralization of responsibility raises questions about ethical and political issues like regulatory compliance, data portability and monopolistic behaviour. Recently, blockchain technology has gathered a significant amount of support and adoption, due to its inherent decentralized and tamper-proof structure. We present a blockchain-powered blueprint for a shared and public programmable economy . The focus of our architecture is on four essential primitives: digital identities, blockchain-based trust, programmable money and marketplaces. Trust is established using only historical interactions between strangers to estimate trustworthiness. Every component of our proposed technology stack is designed according to the defining principles of the Internet itself: self-governance, autonomy and shared ownership. Real-world viability of each component is demonstrated with a functional prototype or running code. Our vision is that the highlighted technology stack devises trust, new acts, principles and rules beyond the possibilities in current economic, legal and political systems.
Concepts of the sharing economy are gaining traction in retail, finance, business and law. What has it to do with architecture? We examine the sharing economy's basis in peer-to-peer exchange, and its relationship with the intriguing technology known as the âblockchain.â We look critically as the practical applications of the technology to architecture in areas such as the exchange of digital assets and the automation of certain types of contracts, as well as the metaphors about the city it brings to light as a stimulus to design.
As the technologies are evolving day by day, they are able to rejuvenate any sector either individually or by incorporating other technologies. There are many prominent sectors in the market such as healthcare, education, entertainment, business, information technology, retail, etc. Every sector has its own set of profits and consequences, but apart from all, the banking or finance sector is the only sector that provides dynamicity to all other sectors and helps them to generate maximum revenue from their principal investment. In this chapter, the authors are focusing on the traditional and modern ways of banking, currencies such as cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and how the modern currency will change the transaction procedure in the global banking system, creating an amalgamation of such currency with a current transaction system with the role of technology such as Blockchain in the betterment of the global banking system making the system fully decentralized, distributed, transparent, fast, immutable, and efficient.
Temporary work is an employment situation useful and suitable in all occasions in which business needs to adjust more easily and quickly to workload fluctuations or maintain staffing flexibility. Temporary workers play therefore an important role in many companies, but this kind of activity is subject to a special form of legal protections and many aspects and risks must be taken into account both employers and employees. In this work we propose a blockchain-based system that aims to ensure respect for the rights for all actors involved in a temporary employment, in order to provide employees with the fair and legal remuneration (including taxes) of work performances and a protection in the case employer becomes insolvent. At the same time, our system wants to assist the employer in processing contracts with a fully automated and fast procedure. To resolve these problems we propose the D-ES (Decentralized Employment System). We first model the employment relationship as a state system. Then we describe the enabling technology that makes us able to realize the D-ES. In facts, we propose the implementation of a DLT (Decentralized Ledger Technology) based system, consisting in a blockchain system and of a web-based environment. Thanks the decentralized application platforms that makes us able to develop smart contracts, we define a discrete event control system that works inside the blockchain. In addition, we discuss the temporary work in agriculture as a interesting case of study.
Platforms are important actors in contemporary cultural economic processes. They include social network sites, online content management systems, streaming media platforms, mobile communication infrastructures, supply chain logistics solutions, and cryptocurrencies. Analysis of platforms and their capitalization should take into account the ways they structure social practice as assets and the constitutive opacity of platforms as configured realities. It explores capitalization by focusing on the problems of counting people and things on platforms. Via a case study of the software repository platform [Github.com] (https://github.com), it analyzes how 'platform numbersâ participate in capitalization. It describes attempts to enumerate the elements of the platform by counting, mapping or listing them. The paper shows how attempts to enumerate people and things encounter forms of association, duplication, combination, imitation and configuration that are crucial to the ensemble but remain refractory to capitalization. It proposes configurative enumeration of the platform numbers as a way of conceptualizing these un-enacted excesses. In a configurative enumeration, the composition, the rhythms of imitation, variation and commutation, and constant relating, repairing and adjusting of configurations crucial to the ongoing formation of platforms come into view. Configurative enumerations engage the inventive realities of platformization, realities that precede and sometimes overflow their capitalization.
Over the past few years, Bitcoin has emerged as the first decentralized, global currency. The rise of Bitcoin has brought attention not only to digital currencies but also to the underlying technology empowering digital currencies: blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed ledger that records and secures transactions in a peer-to-peer network. Besides empowering digital currencies, blockchain technology has given innovators the capability of creating digital tokens to represent scarce assets, potentially reshaping the landscape of entrepreneurship and innovation. Blockchain tokens may democratize (1) entrepreneurship by giving entrepreneurs new ways to raise funds and engage stakeholders, and (2) innovation by giving innovators a new way to develop, deploy, and diffuse decentralized applications. Blockchain technology and tokens have sparked a new wave of innovation, which may start to revolutionize entrepreneurship and innovation.
The increasing automation and capacity of communication of industrial systems brings new possibilities and challenges to the sector. We investigate a problem of distributed and collective supply and discuss solutions to the issue of fair and reliable decision making in open systems. By combining principles of social organisation with blockchain and smart-contract technologies, we show that it is possible to develop a system for common-pool resource management able to take quick decisions on an industrial scale, while ensuring cooperation and self-organising strategies that encourage compliance. Our results demonstrate that our model -- the Smart-CPR - is able to distribute resources efficiently and is capable of detecting and punishing non-compliant or unhelpful behaviour.
Abstract The blockchain innovation appears to represent viable catalysts for achieving global sustainable development targets. Projects and initiatives seeking to extend the reach of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) seem mostly intended for the benefit of forâprofit businesses, governments, and consumers. DLT projects devised for the public good could aim, in theory, to fulfill the United Nationâs current sustainable development goals. Blockchain technology is being applied in ways that could transform this ambition for good into a practical reality.
Cryptocurrencies â being digitally transmitted and embodied within peer-to-peer infrastructures â may mediate new forms of peer-driven interactions and collaborations among Internet users. In this paper, I performed in-depth interviews of cryptocurrenciesâ emerging uses with 16 participants between September 2013 and March 2015. My analysis of how these users have used cryptocurrencies revealed a new feature, large-crowd, cost-effective transactions (trades involving massive numbers of participants), that can drive trades involving massive numbers of participants. Cryptocurrencies, having a peer-driven logical infrastructure, are already known to offer a freer alternate medium for users to customize or automate monetary processes. But the newly identified feature makes it possible for peer producers to organize work payment options involving a large crowd of contributors. This capacity suggests the emergence of many-to-many financial flows in small individual amounts. Taken together, I identify a cluster of temporal and spatial ways that cryptocurrencies remix and automate payment mechanisms and pathways.
This chapter looks beyond the novelty of self-executing âsmart contractsâ in blockchain networks and explores developments against the background fact that commercial parties have, for centuries, used documentary credit to simulate autonomous performance. Blockchain-based smart contracts and documentary credit share three core functionalities which are essential to any effective autonomous performance, analogue or digitalâthey both (i) act through internalized media of exchange; (ii) operate as closed systems; and (iii) provide means of securing sufficient resources to guarantee contractual performance. Using these three functionalities as a framework, this chapter conducts a comparative analysis of mechanisms for effecting autonomous contractual performance in a commercial setting. From this comparison, a few hypotheses are drawn regarding the potential areas where smart contract technology is more likely to find fruitful application. In particular, the chapter considers potential limitations to applying smart contracts to scenarios beyond digital asset transfers, how dispute resolution mechanisms should be designed to complement (rather impair) the autonomous nature of contractual performance under smart contracts, and potential capital cost implications which might arise in some cases when parties seek to replace human intermediaries with smart contracts.
A current trend in both retailing and retail financial services aims to match customers to their purchases with the least amount of friction. For depositary institutions this entails enabling customers to deal with their financial affairs, including purchases, through whatever channel the customer chooses (branch, ATM, web, mobile, etc.). For merchants, it entails shipping and delivering the purchase when and how the customer chooses (in store, at a desired location, at a pick-up point, etc.), while settling outstanding financial claims with the different actors involved in the manufacturing, storage, shipping and distribution network. This essay briefly explores the potential use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) to deliver integrated omni-channel solutions