Blockchain Papers

Zhi‐Ping Fan, Xue‐Yan Wu, Bing‐Bing Cao

No abstract is available for this record.

Michael Alles, Glen L. Gray

No abstract is available for this record.

Madhavi Latha Nandi, Santosh Nandi, Hiram Moya, Hale Kaynak

Purpose Using the resource-based theoretical view of the firm, this paper aims to explore how firms’ efforts to integrate blockchain technology (BCT) into their supply chain systems and activities enable certain supply chain capabilities and, consequently, improve their supply chain performance. Design/methodology/approach Using an abductive research approach, a qualitative content analysis was conducted on 126 cases of firms attempting to implement a blockchain technology-enabled supply chain system (BCTeSCS). These firms spanning across multiple industries were identified using the Nexis Uni database. Findings Findings reveal that present BCTeSCS efforts are more-oriented toward improving operational-level capabilities (information sharing and coordination capabilities) than strategic-level capabilities (integration and collaboration capabilities). These operational and strategic-level capabilities alongside BCTeSCS deliver several supply chains performance outcomes such as quality compliance and improvement, process improvement, flexibility, reduced cost and reduced process time. However, outcomes may vary by industry type based on their uncertainties. Research limitations/implications Given the nascent state of BCT, accessibility to primary data about ongoing BCTeSCS efforts is limited. The presented framework is based on 126 cases of secondary information. Within this constraint, the paper finds scope to future empirical research by proposing a resource-based framework of BCTeSCS and related propositions. Practical implications The results and discussion of this study serve as useful guidance for practitioners involved in BCTeSCS integrations. Social implications The paper creates a BCTeSCS scenario for stakeholders to assume its potential socio-economic and socio-environmental pressures. Originality/value This paper is one of the initial attempts to examine BCTeSCS efforts across multiple industries, and thus, promises a broad future research scope.

Ferhat Karayazi, İlke Bereketli

No abstract is available for this record.

Aijun Liu, Taoning Liu, Jian Mou, Ruiyao Wang

This study assesses supplier selection at the beginning of project management to establish an evaluation system corresponding to blockchain tracing anti-counterfeiting platforms (BTAP). First, this paper determines 20 evaluation criteria from the four dimensions of platform overview, core technology, application support, and operations management. On this basis, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) based on customer needs is proposed, which consists of three main steps. First, quality function deployment (QFD) and the best and worst method (BWM) are used to evaluate the four dimensions of the BTAP and specific evaluation criteria from the perspective of customers to obtain the criteria weight. Then, this method uses the extended Vlse Kriterjumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) approach to sort the alternatives. Finally, the improved decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method is used to analyse the relationships between the 20 criteria in the four dimensions. The feasibility and effectiveness of this method are verified by an example. According to the sensitivity analysis and comparative analysis, the results show that this method can evaluate blockchain anti-counterfeiting enterprises. The main conclusions are as follows: the core technology is the most important factor influencing the choice of a BTAP project, and the role of application support in evaluation cannot be ignored.

Melis Kaska, A. Çağrı Tolga

No abstract is available for this record.

Shengqiang Li, Hua Zhang, Wei Yan, Zhigang Jiang

No abstract is available for this record.

Utkan Eryılmaz, Remco Dijkman, Willem van Jaarsveld, Wouter van Dis · 5 authors

Blockchain emerged as a peer-to-peer trust platform for trading virtual currencies and evolved to be used for different problems including supply chain provenance. Due to stringent requirements of safety, regulated manufacturing and service industries such as aerospace, healthcare, and transportation require regulated traceability for parts, from source to the last customer, with detailed information requirements for each handover and operation. In this research, we analyzed the current traceability problem and list use cases of a traceability blockchain platform. A prototype platform is developed for the aerospace industry where every single part is required to have source and path traces recorded by certified supply chain actors. We evaluate the efficiency benefits of the platform in terms of duration and address future research topics.

Bo Yan, Gaodi Liu, Xiaohua Wu, Jiwen Wu

The price risk of fresh agricultural products has been a significant topic in recent years. Taking the two-level fresh agricultural product supply chain as the research object, this paper studies the optimal ordering and coordination of supply chain based on two-period price, wholesale price and option contract. The optimal order decision of the retailer at the single period price and the optimal decision corresponding to the supplier are obtained when the output of the supplier is uncertain under decentralized decision-making. The range of penalty cost parameter that avoids supplier default is also obtained. The effect of two-period price on the optimal order decision and supply chain profits is discussed when the production yield of the supplier is fixed. Cost-sharing contract is introduced to increase the order quantity and achieve coordination because the option contract cannot completely make the supply chain coordination with two-period price. This paper provides a low-cost approach that can be applied in fresh agricultural supply chain to solve financing and order problems.

Xiaolong Xu, Dawei Zhu, Xiaoxian Yang, Shuo Wang · 6 authors

Currently, the integration of the supply chain and blockchain is promising, as blockchain successfully eliminates the bullwhip effect in the supply chain. Generally, concurrent Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus method, named C-PBFT, is powerful to deal with the consensus inefficiencies, caused by the fast node expansion in the supply chain. However, due to the tremendous complicated transactions in the supply chain, it remains challenging to select the credible primary peers in the concurrent clusters. To address this challenge, the peers in the supply chain are classified into several clusters by analyzing the historic transactions in the ledger. Then, the primary peer for each cluster is identified by reputation assessment. Finally, the performance of C-PBFT is evaluated by conducting experiments in Fabric.

Pietro De Giovanni

No abstract is available for this record.

Dnyaneshwar Jivanrao Ghode, Vinod Yadav, Rakesh Jain, Gunjan Soni

Purpose Adoption of blockchain technology (BT) leads to shrinking supply chains, produces a better quality product, saves product development time and increases the customized offering to the customer. Since it is a new and growing area of research, researchers and practitioners are not entirely aware of challenges in the adoption of BT in supply chain (SC). Therefore, the objective of this research is to provide an overview of BT in SC and modeling of challenges in the adoption of BT in SC. Design/methodology/approach Interpretive structural modeling (ISM) is used to model the challenges of adoption of BT in SC. Challenges are identified by the literature review and verified by expert's opinions. Findings This study presents some key challenges, i.e. to develop trust within SC management system, obey the governance rules and regulations of institution while implementation of BT in SC, provide transparency of data, obtain tamperproof data to avoid fraud, improve coordination and information sharing among the SC partners, choose a profit-earning product SC for adoption of BT, adopt societal changes and train the participants to strengthen behavioral intention towards adoption of BT in SC. Additionally, interrelationships among the challenges have been identified. This work discusses potential implications based on challenges and provides a platform for the adoption of BT in SC. Originality/value The interrelations of the challenges will provide valuable understandings for developing BT solutions in SC to the practitioners.

Samira Keivanpour, Amar Ramudhin, Daoud Aı̈t-Kadi

The supply chain plays an essential role in the cost reduction of offshore wind energy. Supply chain complexity is a major driver of end-to-end supply chain costs and at the same time a source of competitive advantage. In this study, a strategic complexity management approach is suggested for analysing and controlling the complexity of the supply chain in offshore wind energy. The adoption of blockchain via the development of software architecture and a discussion of its impact on complexity are provided. A comparative study focused on two UK offshore wind farms based on real industrial data illustrates the complexity analysis and the contribution of blockchain technology to the strategic management of this complexity.

Guido Perboli, Vittorio Capocasale, Danilo Gotta

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that can be adopted in several business models. However, its applicability in the Supply Chain and in the context of the Logistics 4.0 and Smart Logistics revolution in particular, must still be proved from both an economic and an efficiency standpoint. This paper describes a Hyperledger Sawtooth-based framework for Supply Chain and Smart Logistics. The performance evaluation tests are performed on two Smart Logistics system settings. The results underline the performance decay of the system when concurrent transactions are submitted to multiple nodes.

Peng Li, Toshiaki Miyazaki, Wanlei Zhou

Off-blockchain payment channels can significantly improve blockchain scalability by enabling a large number of micro-payments between two blockchain nodes, without committing every single payment to the blockchain. Multiple payment channels form a payment network, so that two nodes without direct channel connection can still make payments. A critical challenge in payment network construction is to decide how many funds should be deposited into payment channels as initial balances, which seriously influences the performance of payment networks, but has been seldom studied by existing work. In this paper, we address this challenge by designing PnP, a balance planning service for payment networks. Given estimated payment demands among nodes, PnP can decide channel balances to satisfy these demands with a high probability. It does not rely on any trusted third-parties, and can provide strong protection from malicious attacks with low overhead. It obtains these benefits with two novel designs, the cryptographic sortition and the chance-constrained balance planning algorithm. Experimental results on a testbed of 30 nodes show that PnP can enable 30% more payments than other designs.

S.A. Pranesh, Vignesh Kannan V., N. Viswanathan, M. Vijayalakshmi

Blockchain is becoming more popular because of its decentralized, secured, and transparent nature. Supply chain and its management is indispensable to improve customer services, reduce operating costs and improve financial position of a firm. Integration of blockchain and supply chain is substantial, but it alone is not enough for the sustainability of supply chain systems. The proposed mechanism speaks about the method of rewarding the supply chain parties with incentives so as to improve the security and make the integration of supply chain with blockchain sustainable. The proposed incentive mechanism employs the co-operative approach of game theory where all the supply chain parties show a cooperative behavior of following the blockchain-based supply chain protocols and also this mechanism makes a fair attempt in rewarding the supply chain parties with incentives.

Rong Zhang, Wai Kin Victor Chan

Abstract Although there are several special features in block-chain technology such as machine trust, traceability, and security, high energy consumption remains an issue in broadening the applications of block-chain technology. Some researchers proposed the use of proof of stake (PoS) mechanism rather than proof of work (PoW) mechanism to reduce energy consumption of block-chain. However, because PoS cannot guarantee fairness, mixed consensus mechanisms could be a solution and has been adopted in many studies. This paper aims to evaluate the performances of PoW, PoS and mixed consensus mechanisms from three aspects: energy consumption, fairness, and reliability. An agent-based model of a typical block-chain system equipped with different consensus mechanisms is created in NetLogo. This model simulates and evaluates the performances of different consensus mechanisms in the block-chain system.

Fabian Schär

Blockchain forks can have severe economic implications, sow uncertainty and undermine trust. In this paper, we introduce a formal framework to study the emergence, persistency and economic consequences of blockchain forks. We argue that blockchain forks can be process- or protocol-based and emerge unintentionally or deliberately. We then proceed with a sub-classification of protocol-based forks and study the circumstances under which a chain split may become permanent. It can be shown that the persistency of a fork depends on the nature of the change to the consensus rules and on the relative allocation of the consensus-relevant resources. Lastly, we discuss business implications as well as potential consequences for policy makers and practitioners.

Yunshu Liu, Zhixuan Fang, Man Hon Cheung, Wei Cai · 5 authors

Miners in a blockchain system are suffering from the ever-increasing storage costs, which in general have not been properly compensated by the users' transaction fees. In the long run, this may lead to less participation of miners and jeopardize the blockchain security. In this paper, we study the economics of blockchain storage and identify the incentive issues related to this storage cost problem. More specifically, we model the interactions among users (who generate transactions) and miners in two stages, where the users set the transaction fees in Stage 1, and the miners select which transactions to include in Stage 2. Through characterizing the Nash equilibrium of the two-stage game, we find that the transaction fees indeed cannot cover the storage costs under the current practice in general, due to the negative externality and the unfair delay-based pricing. We also identify that a longer block interval can alleviate the concern by raising the transactions fees at the expense of larger delay.

James R. Riehl, Jonathan S. Ward

In this paper, we present a pricing mechanism that aligns incentives of agents who exchange resources on a decentralized ledger with the goal of maximizing transaction throughput. Subdividing a blockchain ledger into shards promises to greatly increase transaction throughput with minimal loss of security. However, the organization and type of the transactions also affects the ledger's efficiency, which is increased by wallet agents transacting in a single shard whenever possible while collectively distributing their transactions uniformly across the available shards. Since there is no central authority to enforce these properties, the only means of achieving them is to design the system such that it is in agents' interest to act in a way that benefits overall throughput. We show that our proposed pricing policy does exactly this by inducing a potential game for the agents, where the potential function relates directly to ledger throughput. Simulations demonstrate that this policy leads to near-optimal throughput under a variety of conditions.

Sergey Smetanin, Aleksandr Ometov, Niclas Kannengieser, Benjamin Sturm · 6 authors

Interest in applications based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) is on the rise, with corporations worldwide shifting from simply exploring DLT's potential to creating productive business cases. However, despite the existence of numerous DLT applications, developers are still lacking proper tools and instruments for evaluating system behavior (e.g., performance) of their applications on different distributed ledgers before deployment. Since the behavior of such applications is highly dependent on the characteristics of the distributed ledger they are built upon and changing the distributed ledger after deployment of an application is difficult, selecting the wrong ledger can have severe negative consequences. To address the issue, we conducted an extensive literature review to identify and synthesize published modeling and simulation approaches for distributed ledgers. Based on the results, this paper also presents a research agenda to improve modeling of the system behavior of distributed ledgers and to support the development of distributed ledgers and viable DLT applications. In doing so, we facilitate informed decision-making for suitable modeling or simulation approach, which helps application developers to identify a suitable distributed ledger before implementing an application. In addition, our work contributes to science, as we provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of extant simulation and modeling approaches in DLT that accumulates the current state-of-the-art in the rapidly growing DLT field.

İsmail Erol, İlker Murat Ar, Ali İhsan Özdemir, İskender Peker · 7 authors

Purpose The objective of this study is to assess quantitatively how feasible blockchain is for various industries, such as logistics and supply chain, health, energy, finance, automotive, pharmaceutical and agriculture and food using a comprehensive list of indicators. Design/methodology/approach A decision aid was applied to the problem of identifying the feasibility of blockchain in Turkish industries. To this end, first, a set of indicators was identified. Then, the fuzzy AHP and fuzzy TOPSIS were utilized to assess the feasibility comparatively using the data gathered from a group of experts. Finally, a scenario analysis was conducted to ensure the consistency of our evaluation. Findings The findings of this study suggest that comparatively, logistics and supply chain , finance and health industries are the most feasible industries for blockchain. This study further suggests that blockchain is the least feasible for the automotive industry compared to the rest of the identified industries. Research limitations/implications It is cumbersome to find out the respondents who have sufficient knowledge of both blockchain and the identified industries. Even if we took the utmost care in identifying the right respondents, we limited our search to the biggest industrial hubs of Turkey. Practical implications The findings of this research may help various decision-makers employed in governments, conglomerates, software and consulting firms and national research institutions make more informed decisions and allocate their resources more effectively. Originality/value To this date, the current studies have solely investigated possible research opportunities in blockchain and demonstrated several blockchain applications in stand-alone cases. To the best of our knowledge, however, no single study exists that evaluates the feasibility of blockchain comparatively and holistically among a group of industries using various indicators.

Hongwei Shi, Shengling Wang, Yinhao Xiao

There is evidence that blockchain plays a crucial role in the Internet of Things (IoT)-based implementation due to its transparency, traceability, and immutability, in which the participants are incentivized to behave authentically and precisely for rewards. Despite the domination of subsidy in reward, the decrease of the mining rate and the imperativeness of fees make the fee market become a pivotal role to motivate miners in the blockchain. However, the current mechanism for selecting transactions into a block poses a risk to the stability of the system, which stems from the vicious competition of users and the insufficient incentives of miners. In this article, we propose a novel transaction selection mechanism by leveraging the Lyapunov optimization and large deviation theory. This article is: 1) fair because the proposed mechanism is not single-factor dominated, both personal utility of the miner and overall utility of the system are taken into account; 2) sustainable since miners are incentivized greatly to guarantee the mining behavior; and 3) robust. The analysis based on the large deviation theory enhances the robustness of the blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to consider both miner's benefit as well as system benefit to establish a better fee market in the blockchain for IoT enhancement. Our theoretical analyses and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.

Yugang Yu, Ganquan Huang, Xiaolong Guo

Thanks to the credibility and transparency of blockchain technology, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can use self-guarantee to obtain loans from financial institutions. Unlike the well-developed supply chain finance (SCF) using guarantees provided by a core enterprise, the effectiveness of SCF with self-guarantee is unclear, especially in a multi-sided market setting. The current paper explores this effectiveness by building an analytical model involving four kinds of players: a multi-sided platform, a customer, a bank, and multiple transportation service providers. In this setting, a traditional SCF model with Platform Undertakes Guarantee (PUG) and a novel SCF strategy with self-guarantee (i.e. Customer Undertakes Guarantee (CUG)) are analysed. The results indicate that CUG can bring a Pareto improvement for the market compared to PUG. Although CUG displays higher efficiency, it is not always beneficial to the platform when the customer's opportunity cost rate is higher than the platform's. Furthermore, to mitigate credit risk caused by a low-credit customer, the platform may employ a prepayment strategy. Analytical results of this study indicate that the prepayment ratio does not affect the customer's cost, and thus, providing a high prepayment ratio but a relatively low service fee rate to low-credit customers is suggested to the platform.