Blockchain Papers

Victoria L. Lemieux

No abstract is available for this record.

Ying‐Ying Hsieh, Jean‐Philippe Vergne, Philip C. Anderson, Karim R. Lakhani · 5 authors

Bitcoin represents the first real-world implementation of a “decentralized autonomous organization” (DAO) and offers a new paradigm for organization design. Imagine working for a global business organization whose routine tasks are powered by a software protocol instead of being governed by managers and employees. Task assignments and rewards are randomized by the algorithm. Information is not channeled through a hierarchy but recorded transparently and securely on an immutable public ledger called “blockchain.” Further, the organization decides on design and strategy changes through a democratic voting process involving a previously unseen class of stakeholders called “miners.” Agreements need to be reached at the organizational level for any proposed protocol changes to be approved and activated. How do DAOs solve the universal problem of organizing with such novel solutions? What are the implications? We use Bitcoin as an example to shed light on how a DAO works in the cryptocurrency industry, where it provides a peer-to-peer, decentralized, and disintermediated payment system that can compete against traditional financial institutions. We also invited commentaries from renowned organization scholars to share their views on this intriguing phenomenon.

Daniel Broby, Greig Paul

The internet and digital transfer of money is set to fundamentally change the way financial audits are conducted. This paper critically assesses the way that such assets are currently audited when stored in distributed ledgers, transmitted via a blockchain or whose value is stored in crypto rather than sovereign currency form. In it, we identify the self-verifying nature of such financial data which negates the need for traditional audit methods. Despite the promise of such methods, we highlight the many weaknesses that still exist in the blockchain and how these presents issues for verification. We address distributed transaction and custody records and how these present auditing challenges. We suggest how auditors can use smart contracts to address these and at the same time provide arbitration and oversight. Our contribution is to propose a protocol to audit the movement of blockchain transmitted funds in order to make them more robust going forward.

JaeShup Oh, Ilho Shong

Purpose Blockchain is a distributed ledger, in which the blocks containing transaction details are connected chronologically to form a series of chains, thus raising the possibility of improving the process and innovating business model for the financial institutions. The purpose of this paper is to study the actual cases of Blockchain applied in Korea in 2017, so that a vision of business model innovation of financial institutions can be drawn. Design/methodology/approach The financial institutions in Korea are in the technology verification stage to introduce Blockchain technology. Since there is an insufficient amount of actual measurement data, case study method was adopted. The authors interviewed ICT officers of major banks in Korea. The purpose of the interview was to understand the relationship between Blockchain and business models of financial institutions, and the effects and challenges that Blockchain has on the business model of financial institutions. Findings From the perspective of financial institutions, the emergence of Blockchain does not just have technical significance – emergence of highly efficient database system – but has the possibility that if the business model of existing financial intermediaries disappears or get reduced, the financial services relying on them can disappear altogether, or some of them can be replaced, and financial transaction patterns of consumers can be changed. As a case studies researched for this paper, it was discovered that the distributed characteristic of Blockchain cannot be applied when actually developing financial services.

Soonduck Yoo

Purpose In Korea and abroad, this paper investigates the use of blockchains in the financial sector. This study aims to examine how blockchains are applied to the financial sector and how to respond to the Korean conditions. Design/methodology/approach This paper investigates the movements of the financial sector and related services using the blockchain in the current market. Findings First, as a result of examining domestic and foreign cases, it can be seen that the areas where blockchains are most actively applied in the financial sector are expanding into settlement, remittance, securities and smart contracts. Also, in Korea, many of the authentication procedures based on the equipment possessed by the consumers are used so that introduction of the blockchain in the authentication part is prominent. Second, the move to introduce a closed (private) distributed ledger that does not go through the central bank is accelerating in payments between banks. Third, domestic financial institutions also need joint action by financial institutions through a blockchain consortium to apply blockchain technology to the financial sector. Fourth, consumer needs and technological developments are changing. At the same time, as the opportunity to infringe on the information held by individuals has expanded, the need for blockchain technology is strongly emerging because of the efforts of the organizations to defend it. Originality/value This paper contributes to understanding the changes in the financial sector using the blockchain.

Anne-Claire Mansion

International audience

Richard Coyne, Tolulope Onabolu

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 ‘blockchain.’ 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.

Daniel Rainey

No abstract is available for this record.

Meenakshi Bhat, Shafalika Vijayal

The blockchain is a perceptive invention - the discovery of a person or group of people. But since its invention, it has evolved into something greater and present opportunities for tempestuous innovation. Blockchain has tried to allure evreryone across different domains like industrial sector, banking, healthcare, land holdings and even the public and private sector. The blockchain is an imperishable digital log of financial transactions that can be scheduled to record not just efficient transactions but practically everything that holds a price. It enables global business transactions with less conflict and more trust. Blockchain has invented an era into technology in which the digital information can be distributed without being imitated. Bitcoin blockchain is the most popular public blockchain network, with around 10K nodes. The other big cryptocurrency blockchain project is Ethereum. Ethereum however wasn't designed to be a form of currency but instead it is intended to enable "smart contracts". Many cryptocurrencies are built on the top of blockchain, with the most popular being Bitcoin. In this paper we are going to present an overview of the blockchain technology with focus on two most widely used cryptocurrencies and their comparative analysis.

Heng Wei, Aw Yoke Cheng

Objectives: From the area of the research conducted, Malaysian acceptance towards the idea of online payment methods and understanding the concept of cryptocurrency has been studied. Our main area of focus was in the area of Klang Valley, which has been found that they are one of the most technological savvy people in Malaysia. Methods: One of the main areas of our research is the level of acceptance of the Malaysian market towards the idea of the cryptocurrency, which in our area of interest was Bitcoin. Findings: This research can be further used to identify the mitigating factors that influence peoples’ interest towards online payments such as debit/credit card payments and other channel such as PayPal. Technology acceptance among the Malaysian market can be the main factor that affects the use of the online payment method. Besides, it was also been found several factors that affects the consumers choice on the acceptance of the online payment, which was used as the main variable used to measurement on the level on acceptance. Application: Acceptance of Bitcoin by the Malaysian market. Keywords: Bitcoin, Malaysian Market, Online Payment, Technology Acceptance

Nathalie Gloudemans-Voogd

No abstract is available for this record.

Roman Graf, Ross King

Modern critical infrastructures are increasingly targeted by highly sophisticated cyber attacks and are protected by increasingly complex tools. Cyber analysts face many challenges finding relevant information in large, complex data sets, and require novel distributed detection and reaction methodologies based on secured transaction techniques. These technologies should automatically analyse incident report and share analysis result in secure way between critical infrastructure stakeholders to achieve better situational awareness. Our goal is to provide solutions in real-time that could replace human input for cyber incident analysis tasks (Triage) to remove false positives and to eliminate irrelevant information. The effective and fast warning system should support cyber analyst to establish cyber situational awareness, and allow analysts to promptly respond in case of an attack. In this paper we evaluate the application of so-called “smart contracts” to an incident warning system and assess its accuracy and performance. We demonstrate how the presented techniques can be applied to support incident handling tasks performed by security operation centers. We show that a real-time “smart contracts” solution can replace human input for a large number of threat intelligence analysis tasks.

Evangeline Ducas, Alex Wilner

Driven by advances in data analytics, machine learning, and smart devices, financial technology is changing the way Canadians interact with the financial sector. The evolving landscape is further influenced by cryptocurrencies: non-fiat, decentralized digital payment systems, like Bitcoin, that operate outside the formal financial sector. While Bitcoin has garnered attention for facilitating criminal activity, including money laundering, terrorism financing, digital ransomware, weapons trafficking, and tax evasion, it is Bitcoin's underlying protocol, the blockchain, that represents an innovation capable of transforming financial services and challenging existing security, financial, and public safety regulations and policies. Canada's challenge is to find the right balance between oversight and innovation. Our paper examines these competing interests: we provide an overview of blockchain technologies, illustrate their potential in Canada and abroad, and examine the government's role in fostering innovation while concurrently bolstering regulations, maintaining public safety, and securing the integrity of financial systems.

Craig Wright, Antoaneta Serguieva

This paper introduces some of the interdependent components within the multifaceted solution our team is developing towards accelerating the functionality, complexity and versatility of blockchain-enabled services. The focus here is particularly on introducing and bringing together selected individual components of the solution to achieve a synergistic effect in expanding the functionality of blockchain-enforced smart contracts. The contributions of this paper include: (i) proposing a method for automated management of contracts with hierarchical conditionality structures through an hierarchy of intelligent agents and the use of hierarchical cryptographic key-pairs; (ii) proposing a method for efficient and secure matching and transfer of smart-contract underlyings (entities) among disparate smart contracts/subcontracts; (iii) proposing a method for producing an hierarchy of common secrets to facilitate hierarchical communication channels of increased security, and applying this method both in the context of method (i) and method (ii); and (iv) proposing the use of distributed hash tables DHT in building secure and optimized repositories in the context of method (i) and in the context method (ii), where the former involves a DHT repository of smart contracts and the latter involves a DHT repository of entities underlying smart contracts that are being exchanged among different smart contracts and subcontracts. The smart-contract focused methods introduced in this paper contribute to the overall goal towards a sustainable adaptive mechanism for processing evolving volumes, versatility, and complexity of blockchain transactions, traffic, and services. Blockchain-enabled services are efficient, secure, automated, and allowing worldwide distribution of resources. They present a more efficient and sustainable alternative to current service infrastructures within a range of domains, particularly the legal and financial domains. They also set a sustainable infrastructure for emerging Internet-of-things services.

Marten Risius, Kai Spohrer

No abstract is available for this record.

Wei‐Tek Tsai, Yong Luo, Enyan Deng, Jing Zhao · 7 authors

Purpose This paper aims to apply blockchains (BCs) for trade clearing and settlement in a realistic clearinghouse. The purpose is to demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of this approach. Design/methodology/approach The study uses account BCs and trading BCs as building blocks for trade clearing and settlement. Careful design is made to ensure that this approach is feasible and scalable. Findings A design has been proposed that can process hundreds of thousands of trades for a clearinghouse and it addresses performance, privacy and scalability of realistic trade clearing and settlement. The design has been implemented and experimented in a clearinghouse for over two months and processes over 3B real transactions from an exchange. The first month was to experiment with the system with historical data, the second month was to experiment with real-time data during market trading hours. The system performed as designed and intended. Research limitations/implications This is the first large research paper that applied BCs for clearing in the world. The authors applied the system to a clearinghouse and processed over 3 billion transactions, equivalent to 13 years of London Stock Exchange transaction volume, demonstrating that BCs can handle a large number of transactions. Practical implications The design can be duplicated to many clearinghouses in the world, and this also paves the way BCs can be used in large financial institutions. Social implications An implication is that other trading firms, clearinghouses and banks can apply the same technology for trade clearing, ushering the way BCs can be used in institutions. As clearing is a core function in business transactions, this has significant implications. The design can be discussed and improved in various communities. Originality/value As this is the first application of BCs to large clearinghouses that uses unique BC designs. This has significant value. Many studies have been performed but few have been reported in the scientific community. The system has been implemented, experimented and demonstrated in public for months.

Willi Brammertz, Allan I. Mendelowitz

Abstract Purpose This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of a cash flow generating standard for individual financial contract level data and the ability to create such a standard. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyze the importance for such a standard of software that turns natural language contracts into cash flow generating algorithms; a data dictionary that standardizes contract terms; and access to variables that represent the state of the world (e.g. market risk, counterparty risk, etc.) that affect contractual obligations. Findings The ability to realize benefits from the use of such a contract level algorithmic standard depends on the following: making the standard's software open source; fully testing the software to have complete confidence in its accuracy; and enabling the software to use of a wide range of models of various sources of risk (market, credit and behavior risk) to support forward-looking analysis. Such a standard would solve the disconnect that exists in financial firms between the representation of financial contracts for transaction processing and analysis. The ACTUS Financial Research Foundation is building, testing and making available such a standard that represents almost all financial contracts extant in markets. Practical implications The adoption of such a standard would reduce the costs of operations of financial firms, provide the computational infrastructure for more effective regulatory oversight, reduce regulatory reporting costs and improve financial market transparency. It would also enable the assessment of systemic risk by directly quantifying the interconnectedness of firms. Originality/value This is a new approach to financial analytics that clearly separates the deterministic components of finance, which can be standardized from the stochastic elements that cannot be standardized.

Petros Kavassalis, Harald Stieber, Wolfgang Breymann, K. E. Saxton · 5 authors

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to propose a bearer service, which generates and maintains a “digital doppelgänger” for every financial contract in the form of a dynamic transaction document that is a standardised “data facility” automatically making important contract data from the transaction counterparties available to relevant authorities mandated by law to request and process such data. This would be achieved by sharing certain elements of the dynamic transaction document on a bearer service, based on a federation of distribution ledgers; such a quasi-simultaneous sharing of risk data becomes possible because the dynamic transaction document maintain a record of state in semi-real time, and this state can be verified by anybody with access to the distribution ledgers, also in semi-real time. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors propose a novel, regular technology(RegTech) cum automated legal text approach for financial transaction as well as financial risk reporting that is based on cutting-edge distributed computing and decentralised data management technologies such as distributed ledger, distributed storage, algorithmic financial contract standards, automated legal text and document engineering methods and techniques. This approach is equally inspired by the concept of the “bearer service” and its capacity to span over existing and future technological systems and substrates. Findings: The result is a transformation of supervisors’capacity to monitor risk in thefinancial systembased on data which preserve informational content offinancial instruments at the most granular level, incombination with a mathematically robust time stamping approach using blockchain technology. Practical implications: The RegTech approach has the potential to contain operational risk linked toinadequate handling of risk data and to rein in compliance cost of supervisory reporting.

Ying‐Ying Hsieh, Jean‐Philippe Vergne, Sha Wang

Blockchain technology proposes to create value by decentralizing the creation, verification, validation, and secure storage of economic transactions, both within and between organizations. The chapter provides deeper understanding of how these blockchain solutions would be operated and by whom. It focuses on decentralization as the key dimension by which organizational governance forms vary. The chapter utilizes theory on organizational and corporate governance to unpack how blockchain-based organizations operate. It examines the relationship between internal and external governance design features and cryptocurrency returns. Blockchain-based organizations such as cryptocurrencies compete with traditional economic institutions by proposing alternative forms of organizational governance. Demand for cryptocurrencies mainly stems from two sources: first, consumers and merchants using cryptocurrencies as a means of payment; and second, investors holding a cryptocurrency as an investment, hoping that the price will rise. Many cryptocurrencies were created from the open-source Bitcoin software code, and follow the same open-source development model.

Quinn DuPont

This chapter describes a short-lived experiment in organizational governance that attempted to utilize algorithmic authority through cryptocurrency and block-chain technologies to create a social and political world quite unlike anything we have seen before. It details the governance structures that were promised by the developers and community members involved in the making of The decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), and in contrast, those that were observed in its discourses before, during, and after the “exploit.” The DAO was a decentralized, crowdfunded, direct-management organization and investment platform. In the original vision of decentralized autonomous organizations, as proposed by Vitalik Buterin, founder and member of the Ethereum Foundation, a DAO is a pseudo-legal organization run by an assemblage of human and “robot” participants. From the earliest days of The DAO, many community members acknowledged that the enormous complexity of decentralized and algorithmic governance required a new kind of experimental “science” to map the “uncharted territory” The DAO was entering.

Jens Ekkenga

Article Bitcoin und andere Digitalwährungen – Spielzeug für Spekulanten oder Systemveränderung durch Privatisierung der Zahlungssysteme? was published on November 27, 2017 in the journal Computer und Recht (volume 33, issue 11).

Hsin-Ke Lu, Liwei Yang, Peng-Chun Lin, Tzu‐Han Yang · 5 authors

Since the global financial crisis in 2008 had caused the global economic depression, the public were commonly losing confidence in monetary system and international fund associations. Thus, the concept of untraditional currency exchange was developed. Nakamoto (2008) designed bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency which is launched and traded on the Internet. Bitcoin is being gradually accepted by the public, which is attributed to the feature of decentralization and anonymity. The exchange rate of bitcoin reached to the peak price at $4425.30 USD on August 16th, 2017. However, due to the concern of the security challenges such as being stolen, the public lost the confidence of bitcoin and had a conservative attitude toward bitcoin. It also shows that the relevant technical application and transaction model of bitcoin still need to be improved.

Zelong Yi, Yulan Wang, Ying‐Ju Chen

In this study, we consider a decentralized agricultural supply chain consisting of a capital-constrained smallholder farmer and an intermediary platform. The smallholder farmer sells the agricultural products through the intermediary platform but lacks the financial resources for production. In addition to the traditional solution of bank financing (provided by a bank) as a source of finance for the capital-constrained farmer to ensure the sustainable production of the agricultural goods, the intermediary platform can also provide loans directly to the smallholder farmer (known as direct financing) or serve as a guarantor if the capital-constrained farmer has insufficient creditworthiness to obtain bank loans (known as guarantor financing). The farmer can thus obtain a loan through three methods: bank financing, guarantor financing, and direct financing. We find that the smallholder farmer produces the most under direct financing and the least under bank financing, and that the intermediary platform prefers direct financing over guarantor financing in a weak sense. Specifically, when the farmer’s production cost is low, the intermediary platform prefers financing the farmer directly; when the cost is in an intermediate range, the platform prefers either direct or guarantor financing; and when the cost is high, it is in the best interest of the intermediary platform to encourage the farmer to raise funds from the banking market. We also assess the best financing format for profitability of the smallholder farmer and the sustainability of the whole supply chain, and find that the farmer prefers bank financing while the preference of the supply chain as a whole depends on the cost. Interestingly, under both guarantor financing and direct financing, the smallholder farmer’s level of production can be higher than that under a centralized chain (where the farmer and the intermediary platform belong to the same entity) regardless of whether the chain encounters financial constraints. Moreover, the decentralized supply chain can be coordinated under direct financing when the farmer’s production cost is relatively low.

James Nicholson

This article considers Bitcoin as a system of exchange, and the block chain technology it is built on, in the context of supporting developing nations. If integrated correctly Bitcoin could have far reaching applications, from tackling corruption to empowering women. This article found Bitcoin to be a feasible option, with support from real world applications and global endorsement from users. The discussion is then applied in the context of corruption as it puts forward this emerging technology as an alternative to traditional centralised fiscal systems. The article posits that public libraries could be potential facilitators and a crucial component of this integration.