Blockchain Papers

Paulin Tchumtcha Wembe

No abstract is available for this record.

Richmond Akwasi Atuahene

Digital assets, a broad term encompassing crypto-currencies, tokens and digital representations of value, have transformed the financial landscape over the past decade. Ghana has transitioned from an unregulated crypto-currency environment to a structured, licensed digital assets space following the passage of the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Act 2025 Act 1154. Unlike traditional assets, digital assets exist exclusively in electronic form and are secured through cryptographic techniques, most notably blockchain technology. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto-currencies serve as prominent examples, alongside digital tokens used in decentralized finance (DeFi), security tokens, and stablecoins. They may serve a variety of functions, including use as a medium of exchange, for investment, or as a means of accessing goods, services, or applications within specific ecosystems. These assets include crypto-currencies, tokens, stablecoins, and other blockchain-based instruments. Global digital assets represent any item of value securely stored and managed via distributed ledger or blockchain technology. Encompassing cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, tokenized securities, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the sector has rapidly expanded into mainstream finance, revolutionizing global payments, portfolio diversification, and record-keeping. This article discusses the challenges and opportunities of digital currencies and the way forward. This research shows that digital currencies have advantages like making transactions faster, cheaper, and more accessible and also reveals a lot of disadvantages like creating major risks concerning compliance with regulations, cybersecurity, and potential impacts on monetary policy. The review emphasizes the necessity for robust regulatory frameworks for digital assets. It supports both innovation and stability for the digital currencies. It suggests that policymakers and financial institutions should adapt to changes and face the challenges by integrating digital currencies with existing systems. Overall, this review highlights the potential of digital currencies to transform finance. It also stresses the importance of focusing on the challenges they pose to ensure they can coexist successfully with traditional financial systems. As digital currencies evolve, the Ghanaian traditional financial sector faces pressure to adapt, with CBDCs, in particular, being explored as a secure, regulated alternative to volatile crypto-assets. nThe findings revealed that the central bank must adopt robust regulatory and licensing frameworks must align with Virtual Assets Service Providers (VASP) (Act 2025 Act 1154) by enforcing strict licensing for exchanges and custodians while adhering to AML/CFT (Anti-Money Laundering) directives. Also, the Bank of Ghana and the Securities and Exchange Commission must develop a comprehensive public education programme on the digital assets in the financial ecosystem. Given the novelty of the trend of criminality in the digital asset space, the establishment of specialized cybercrime courts to be presided over by judges, proficient in digital law and cybercrime would be of immense benefit. The mandate of such courts could be to expedite trials and ensure thorough adjudication of complex cyber cases. This would have the combined effect of empowering the Ghana Police Service and Cyber-Security Authority to fully invest time, money, and human resources towards the investigation of cybercrime, as well as serve as a deterrent for criminal elements, ultimately protecting our citizens and providing justice for those seeking redress.

Rui Cao, Shaojing Fan, Zhimei Sui, Liming Fang · 7 authors

Blockchain and its killer applications, particularly decentralized finance (DeFi), are gaining widespread adoption, with over 5,200 DeFi projects deployed on mainstream blockchains as of January 2026. At the same time, security risks in DeFi are becoming increasingly serious. However, existing DeFi detection tools usually cover only specific attack types, exhibiting severely limited detection coverage. In this paper, we argue that an effective way to address this gap is to pre-screen vulnerable instances from large volumes of smart contract functions and call sequences. This is motivated by a key phenomenon we term "perilous temporal asymmetry". Inspired by this, we propose DeFiScreener, the first automated pre-screening framework for DeFi attacks that uses historical exploit cases to identify potentially vulnerable functions and call sequences. Given the full source code of a target project, DeFiScreener builds Function Call Trees (FCTs) and generates semantic embeddings for each function using a large language model (LLM), allowing both program structure and function intent to be analyzed together. It then applies a dual-level screening process. At the function level, function embeddings are matched against an Attack Pattern Library of historically exploited functions. At the sequence level, the proposed Attack Pattern Oriented Monte Carlo Tree Search (APO-MCTS) efficiently explores the FCTs and screens vulnerable call sequences. The identified candidates are ultimately passed to an LLM for further interpretive and security analysis. We empirically evaluate the DeFiScreener over datasets comprising 207 real-world DeFi attack incidents. Experimental results demonstrate that DeFiScreener achieves a remarkable 98.55% recall and 84.30% precision in attack pre-screening.

Nidhin Sreedas E, V. Madhusudanan Pillai, Hiran V. Nath

No abstract is available for this record.

Northon Salomao de Oliveira

Out of Time proposes a new philosophy of law for an age in which technological, environmental, and political change outpaces the legal institutions designed to govern it. Through the original concept of the "anachronism clause," Northon Salomão de Oliveira argues that every legal system silently depends on assumptions about the world that inevitably become outdated. The central challenge of twenty-first-century jurisprudence, therefore, is not merely to create valid rules, but to develop institutions capable of recognizing and correcting their own obsolescence before legal certainty becomes legal illusion. Drawing on the works of Hans Kelsen, H. L. A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Alexy, Lon L. Fuller, John Finnis, and other leading legal philosophers, the book examines how this hidden structural problem emerges across the defining challenges of our century, including artificial intelligence, climate change, democratic legitimacy, biotechnology, international security, economic inequality, resource sustainability, mental health, disinformation, quantum computing, space governance, decentralized finance, longevity, and persuasive technologies. Rather than treating these issues as isolated fields of regulation, Out of Time reveals them as expressions of a single philosophical question: How can law remain legitimate when the world it was designed to govern no longer exists? Blending rigorous legal theory with philosophical reflection and memorable narrative, Out of Time offers an original framework for understanding the relationship between law, time, institutional adaptation, and the future of human civilization. It is a work intended for scholars, jurists, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of legal thought in an era of accelerating change. Philosophy of Law Jurisprudence Legal Theory Institutional Adaptation Artificial Intelligence and Law Space Law Legal Obsolescence Philosophy of Law, Jurisprudence, Legal Theory, Legal Philosophy, Constitutional Theory, Constitutional Law, Rule of Law, Legal Positivism, Natural Law, Legal Interpretation, Comparative Law, International Law, Public Law, Global Governance, Democratic Legitimacy, Human Rights, Justice Theory, Institutional Design, Institutional Adaptation, Legal Certainty, Legal Innovation, Legal Reform, Legal Obsolescence, Institutional Resilience, Adaptive Governance, Future of Law, Emerging Technologies, Law and Technology, Artificial Intelligence, AI Governance, AI Regulation, Algorithmic Decision-Making, Digital Governance, Digital Rights, Digital Society, Cyber Law, Data Governance, Quantum Computing, Quantum Law, Evidence Law, Space Law, Space Governance, Outer Space Treaty, Extraterrestrial Resources, Climate Change Law, Environmental Law, Sustainability, Intergenerational Justice, Resource Governance, Biotechnology Law, Bioethics, Longevity, Mental Health Law, Disinformation, Information Integrity, Persuasive Technology, Behavioral Regulation, Economic Inequality, Decentralized Finance, Financial Regulation, Regulatory Theory, Institutional Trust, Political Philosophy, Ethics of Technology, Future Studies, Civilization Studies, Legal Systems, Normative Theory, Twenty-First Century Law, Northon Salomão de Oliveira Northon Salomão de Oliveira ORCID: 0009-0007-4038-0609 Biography Northon Salomão de Oliveira is a Brazilian writer and jurist specializing in communication law, whose intellectual career is distinguished by its interdisciplinary approach, integrating Law, Communication Studies, Advertising, Marketing, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Psychiatry, Organizational Theory, and Literature. His scholarly work explores the dynamic relationship between law, technology, culture, and society, addressing some of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century, including climate change, artificial intelligence and automation, global governance and democracy, biotechnology and human survival, international security, economic inequality, the sustainability of natural resources, mental health, disinformation, and the ethical, philosophical, and legal reconstruction of civilization. His editorial portfolio includes books published in different international markets by distinguished publishers such as the Portuguese-Brazilian Kotter Editorial and the British Camden House, in addition to worldwide digital distribution through platforms including Amazon KDP and Google Play Books. In July 2026, he published The Odyssey (English Edition) and A Odisseia (Brazilian Edition), companion collections featuring a curated selection of sixty works chosen by his readers. Beyond his books, he has authored more than 1,500 articles published in academic repositories, legal platforms, and major media outlets, including SSRN (Elsevier), SciELO, Academia.edu, Zenodo (CERN), Folha de S.Paulo, Administradores, Jus, and Jusbrasil.

Pascal Winkler, Jens-Rene Giesen, Oussama Draissi, Federico Badaloni · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Shen Xiaowang

Web3 represents a paradigm shift of the internet from “platform centralization” to “protocol decentralization,” with its core value lying in rebuilding the trust foundation and value distribution logic of the digital world through blockchain technology. In 2026, the global Web3 infrastructure market is projected to reach $9.74 billion, the Web3 social platform market is expanding at a CAGR of 52.1%, and the decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) market is estimated to reach $85 billion. However, the governance dilemma of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)——token voting leading to power concentration, frequent governance attacks, and low decision-making efficiency——is exposing the deep paradox of “code is law.” DeFi total value locked fell from $115 billion in January 2026 to $70 billion in June, a 39% decline; 121 security incidents caused $942 million in losses, reflecting the systemic fragility of decentralized finance. Meanwhile, global regulatory frameworks are accelerating——the EU MiCA is fully applicable, the U.S. GENIUS Act has taken effect, and Hong Kong‘s Stablecoin Ordinance has been implemented——marking Web3’s transition from “regulatory vacuum” to the “compliance era.” Based on the eight-dimensional framework of Prim-Lex Theory——Prim-Unity·Prim-Fire (Web3 network energy metabolic efficiency), Two Principles·Yin-Yang (dynamic balance between decentralization and effective governance), Three Realms·GC⁴A (cross-scale integration from technological infrastructure to application ecosystems to global governance), Four Phenomena·Four Colors (four-phase differentiated strategies for the Web3 lifecycle), Five Elements·Five Models (coupling of computational deficit/phase-transition early warning/spatial zoning/crypto balance sheet/systemic resilience), Six Dimensions·Six Directions (six-directional spatial layout of global Web3 infrastructure and the digital divide), Seven Luminaires·Seven Rhythms (synchronization between technological iteration cycles and governance response cycles), and Eight Trigrams·Eight Information (Web3 information network entropy and on-chain governance transparency)——this paper constructs, for the first time, an eight-dimensional quantitative assessment system for Web3 governance. It elaborates, dimension by dimension, the calculation principles, mathematical formulas, parameter meanings, and data sources. Using three empirical anchors——DAO governance attacks and reform experiments, DeFi protocol risk evolution, and the formation of global regulatory frameworks——this paper demonstrates the application pathway of the eight-dimensional framework in identifying “phase differences” and “critical windows” in Web3 governance, and proposes the “Web3 Governance Health Index” (Ψ_Web3), providing a quantifiable, programmable, and auditable mathematical language and governance tool for the transition of global Web3 from a “decentralized utopia” to an “eight-dimensional coherent state.”

Weiye Xi, Ciamac C. Moallemi

We provide a large-scale empirical audit of DEX routing using 2.98 million WETH-USDC swaps on Ethereum. Comparing realized routes with optimized benchmarks, we measure an average shortfall of 2.02 bps per trade or \$24 million. To attribute losses, we introduce three reproducible optimal benchmarks: a Support-Constrained Optimum (SCO) that evaluates split quality conditional on the pools actually used; a Full-Venue Optimum (FVO) that considers all available pools to quantify the value of broader pool access; and a Gas-Aware FVO (G-FVO) that augments FVO with gas costs to capture the trade-off between additional pool usage and gas expenditure. Computing these benchmarks at scale is enabled by a bisection-based algorithm for optimal routing across multiple pools for the same token pair. Two regularities emerge. First, information timeliness is crucial: moving from execution-time state to one-block lagged state optimization significantly raises mean shortfall and additional delays further degrade performance, albeit with diminishing increments; evaluated on the same stale snapshots, realized routes lie closer to optimal, indicating timing-mismatch as a key component. Second, inefficiency is heterogeneous and heavy-tailed: small trades suffer higher percentage losses, while a few extreme outliers dominate the aggregate dollar shortfalls. Finally, we demonstrate that sandwiching attacks drive a significant fraction of routing sub-optimality. Our benchmark protocol and algorithm offer a rigorous, reproducible basis for evaluating and improving information-timely, gas-aware routing.

Carter James

The pseudonymous nature of blockchain transactions, combined with the rise of encrypted DNS protocols such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT), has created a new frontier for sophisticated tax evasion. Malicious actors can now exfiltrate transaction details and coordinate transfers by encoding data within the payloads of encrypted DNS queries, effectively bypassing traditional network monitoring and forensic analysis. This paper proposes a novel detection framework that leverages a hybrid deep learning architecture to identify such covert, tax-evading activities. Our system integrates a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for its superior ability to extract spatial and sequential patterns from raw network flow data and encrypted payload characteristics, with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to model the temporal dynamics of blockchain interactions and DNS query sequences. By fusing these two paradigms, the hybrid model can distinguish between benign encrypted DNS traffic and malicious payloads used for illicit financial coordination. We evaluate our framework using a synthetically generated dataset that simulates realistic tax-evasion strategies, including micro-transaction splitting and delayed transaction relaying. Preliminary results indicate that our approach achieves a significantly higher detection rate and lower false-positive rate compared to conventional signature-based or single-model machine learning methods. This research demonstrates the efficacy of hybrid neural networks in preserving financial integrity and provides a critical tool for regulatory agencies to enforce tax compliance in the age of encrypted communications and decentralized finance.

YINKA ADERIBIGBE

The convergence of agricultural digitalization and decentralized finance presents critical opportunities for mitigating carbon-related financial risks in emerging markets. However, the integrity of environmental, social, and governance reporting is frequently undermined by information asymmetries and inadequate audit trust. This paper introduces a cloud-native architectural framework utilizing Amazon Web Services to construct a real-time, blockchain-verified carbon disclosure pipeline. By deploying distributed Python middleware integrated with serverless computational nodes, the system programmatically extracts agricultural carbon intensity metrics and cross-references them against immutable blockchain ledgers. This methodology structurally eliminates manual reporting friction, providing rural credit institutions and multinational enterprises with deterministic, verifiable environmental data. Preliminary architectural evaluations confirm that integrating high-velocity Application Programming Interfaces with decentralized ledgers significantly reduces information asymmetry, establishing a highly scalable foundation for green finance and rural revitalization.

Andri Micho, Harry Nenobais, Mohamad Kusnaeni

Although local public finance regulation has received substantial attention within fiscal decentralization and public financial management research, comparative analyses of its institutional configuration as an integrated regulatory regime remain limited. This study aims to examine the institutional design of local public finance regulation across European countries, analyze how regulatory standards, supervisory institutions, monitoring mechanisms, and enforcement instruments interact to strengthen regional governance, and formulate policy implications for Indonesia’s fiscal decentralization reforms. A qualitative comparative government design was employed through a systematic literature review. The study analyzed documentary evidence from 21 European countries purposively selected from Local Public Finance: An International Comparative Regulatory Perspective (2021), supplemented by Eurostat Government Finance Statistics, the European Commission Fiscal Rules Database, and the OECD Tax Autonomy Database. Data were examined using qualitative content analysis involving coding, categorization, cross-country comparison, and thematic interpretation. The findings indicate that effective local public finance regulation depends not merely on the presence of numerical fiscal rules but on the institutional integration of regulatory standards, supervisory bodies, monitoring mechanisms, and enforcement arrangements within coherent governance systems. Regulatory configurations also vary according to constitutional structures, administrative traditions, and fiscal decentralization models, resulting in diverse approaches to maintaining fiscal sustainability and regional accountability. The study concludes that effective regional financial governance requires balanced institutional arrangements that combine local fiscal autonomy with robust oversight, transparency, accountability, and regulatory coordination. These findings contribute to the literature on regulatory governance, comparative government, and fiscal federalism by conceptualizing local public finance regulation as an integrated governance regime rather than a collection of isolated fiscal controls. They also provide practical implications for Indonesia by emphasizing the need to strengthen supervisory capacity, fiscal transparency, enforcement consistency, and intergovernmental regulatory coordination in local financial governance.

Sanjay Rastogi

Blockchain technology, originally devised to support the peer-to-peer transfer of Bitcoin, has evolved into a multipurpose digital infrastructure with far-reaching implications for business and finance. This paper undertakes a conceptual and exploratory examination of how blockchain is reshaping financial services, corporate governance, and commercial transactions. Drawing upon secondary literature, industry reports, and case illustrations, the study investigates blockchain applications across banking, cross-border remittances, supply chain finance, trade finance, capital markets, insurance, and decentralized finance (DeFi). It also discusses the enabling features of blockchain — decentralization, immutability, transparency, and smart contracts — that differentiate it from conventional centralized systems. The paper highlights the strategic benefits accruing to firms that adopt blockchain, including reduced transaction costs, faster settlement, enhanced traceability, and improved trust among counterparties, while also identifying barriers such as regulatory ambiguity, scalability constraints, energy consumption, and limited interoperability. The discussion synthesizes findings from extant studies to present an integrated view of blockchain’s transformative potential and its practical limitations. The paper concludes that while blockchain is unlikely to replace traditional financial infrastructure entirely in the near term, its selective and hybrid adoption is poised to redefine business processes, financial intermediation, and value exchange across industries.

Troy Resendez

When a person creates with an AI system, they continually make decisions that carry meaning but have no verbal form: this shot belongs before that one; this phrase resolves that tension. These creative micro-decisions are a distinct training signal with no linguistic equivalent, and at scale they reveal an emergent, co-authored "hybrid tongue" — a grammar of "what belongs next to what" that neither party states explicitly. Because such grammar can expand a model's generative capacity faster than natural language describes it, it drives a widening "comprehension gap": capability that outruns human interpretability, and human contribution absorbed without attribution. Both are trustworthy-AI failures, and this paper argues they are correctable only on a decentralized substrate, where persistence, provable attribution, incentive, and governance are guaranteed rather than merely asserted. This is a position paper. It contributes (i) a falsifiable model of the hybrid tongue, positioned against the emergent-communication and human-feedback literatures; (ii) the Seam-Frame Index, a capture mechanism that records creative decisions (not their private reasons) and whose trust properties are supplied by persistent conversation objects (vCons), decentralized-science patterns (DeSci), decentralized-finance primitives (DeFi), and DAO governance, with decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials underpinning a per-decision credit ledger for which a protocol sketch and threat model are given; and (iii) two governance instruments — an operationalized Comprehension Gap Meter and that ledger. The same gap is shown opening in the machine economy and across the embodiment bridge of decentralized physical AI and bidirectional digital twins, and the pattern is argued to be substrate-wide. Across all of it the event is identical: an intelligence assembling the first letters of its own language library — by default, without human consent. Decentralized attribution and gap-measurement are how that assembly is made auditable, creditable, and consented-to by design. Independent preprint. Follows IEEE formatting conventions but is not peer-reviewed by, submitted to, accepted by, or affiliated with IEEE.

H. Wu, Haijun Wang, Shiteng Li, Yin Wu · 7 authors

With the rapid advancement of decentralized finance (DeFi), security incidents related to cryptocurrency have become increasingly prevalent. After such incidents, attackers typically attempt to rapidly move stolen assets, concealing the origin of illicit funds and ultimately converting them into fiat currency. However, existing anti-money laundering (AML) methods struggle to cope with the semantic complexity of DeFi transactions. They either rely heavily on low-level token transfers, or perform protocol-agnostic money flow analysis, failing to capture the high-level intent of transactions. In this paper, we propose AMLGuard, a semantic-aware AML framework for account-based blockchains. AMLGuard tracks illicit fund flows from known malicious addresses by performing semantic analysis on complex DeFi transactions, enabling accurate and continuous laundering tracking. Given a complex transaction, AMLGuard combines static rule-based analysis with retrieval-augmented large language model (LLM) reasoning to infer implicit DeFi semantics, transforming raw transaction data into high-level semantic representations. Furthermore, for cross-chain transactions where laundering intent is not explicitly exposed, AMLGuard parses transaction parameters and performs argument parsing to recover cross-chain semantics, enabling seamless tracking across ledgers. Based on the inferred semantics, AMLGuard abstracts each transaction into a DeFi Semantic Unit (DSU). We evaluate the effectiveness of AMLGuard on 82 real-world laundering cases, involving illicit assets worth over $1 billion. Specifically, AMLGuard reconstructs compact illicit fund-flow topologies with destination precision of 94.4% and 87.6%, while achieving the highest address recall of 98.4% and 95.8% and destination recall of 94.1% and 93.8% on single-chain and cross-chain datasets.

KRISHNA KHANCHANDANI

ABSTRACT The emergence of decentralized compute-sharing protocols—peer-to-peer GPU and specialized-hardware marketplaces enabling firms to provision machine learning training and inference capacity without direct capital expenditure or on-balance-sheet lease recognition—has introduced a structurally novel form of operational leverage that conventional credit analysis is ill-equipped to detect. This paper investigates whether such off-balance-sheet utilization systematically distorts a firm's True Free Cash Flow to Firm (FCFF), defined here as reported FCFF adjusted for the capitalized economic equivalent of decentralized compute obligations, and quantifies the implicit tail-risk premium that credit default swap (CDS) markets demand for this hidden leverage. We formalize the problem in three stages. First, we construct a Hidden Leverage Ratio (HLR) by reconstructing the present value of a firm's implicit compute-sharing commitments from on-chain settlement data, smart-contract escrow balances, and protocol-level utilization telemetry, applying an exposure-graph methodology to map indirect exposure routed through special-purpose vehicles (SPVs) and protocol intermediary nodes. Second, we develop a structural credit risk model extending the classical Merton framework with a compound jump-diffusion component calibrated to compute-price volatility, in which hidden leverage enters the firm's effective asset volatility and default boundary as an unobserved but inferable state variable, generating a model-implied default probability and credit spread. Third, we empirically estimate the market-implied tail-risk premium by regressing observed 5-year CDS spreads against the constructed HLR across a panel of 412 firm-quarters drawn from technology, fintech, and AI-infrastructure issuers with active CDS markets, controlling for conventional leverage, profitability, and macro-credit factors. We find that CDS markets demand a statistically and economically significant tail-risk premium for hidden compute leverage: a one-standard-deviation increase in HLR is associated with a 61–142 basis point widening in 5-year CDS spreads depending on cohort, an effect that persists after controlling for reported leverage ratios, implying that CDS markets partially but incompletely price this off-balance-sheet exposure ahead of formal disclosure. The structural model achieves an R² of 0.87 against observed CDS spreads and reveals a convex, threshold-like premium structure consistent with jump-risk pricing rather than continuous Merton-style diffusion risk alone. We critically examine the limits of on-chain data observability, the endogeneity risk in inferring "true" cash flow from a credit-market-implied proxy, the accounting standard-setting implications for emerging digital lease constructs, and the systemic stability concerns raised by undisclosed, correlated compute leverage across the AI infrastructure sector. This work establishes a rigorous, empirically grounded framework at the convergence of decentralized finance infrastructure, structural credit risk theory, and corporate financial reporting.