Araz Zirar, Abdul Jabbar, Hannan Amoozad Mahdiraji
Smart contracts (SCs), appended to a blockchain, protect digital environments and their resources, processes, and structures, reducing mismatches between legal and actual rights and ownership. They enhance digital resilience by improving transparency, traceability, and trust in digital transactions. Utilising SCs requires businesses to adapt their models, revenue streams, and customer relationships. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), SCs present challenges, requiring proactive decision-making for their effective utilisation and the trade-offs involved. By employing the integrated multi-layer ISM-MICMAC-SWARA framework (Interpretive Structural Modelling, Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification, and Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis), we explain the complex interrelationships among the challenges and propose mitigating risk management strategies. We identify technical limitations and human errors as key drivers, confidentiality and manipulation as linkage challenges, and fraud and hacking as dependence challenges. These findings highlight the interconnected nature of the challenges and their impact on SMEs, and we emphasise the need for targeted resilience strategies. Our research highlights the global dimension of SC adoption. When deploying SCs, SMEs must navigate international regulations, cross-border transactions, and cultural diversity. This global perspective informs smart contracts’ strategic, business, and organisational aspects. Our findings offer insights for academics, industry leaders, managers, and policymakers seeking to understand the potential and risks of adopting SCs in SMEs.
This study examines scientific articles on the transformation of blockchain technology in various industries, including banking, agriculture, finance, and transportation, identifying trends, emerging areas, and research challenges. This study explores the potential of blockchain technology for decentralizing the internet, addressing concerns related to privacy, security, and censorship, while also exploring its trends and associated issues. This study explores the potential of blockchain technology to revolutionize internet elements including data storage, content delivery, and identity management, while examining current acceptance patterns for decentralization. Smart contracts enhance transaction efficiency and transparency, while interoperability standards enable seamless communication across blockchain networks, despite substantial obstacles in decentralising the internet. Scalability, regulatory uncertainty, interoperability, and environmental concerns all pose challenges to blockchain networks, hindering widespread adoption and compromising the interoperability and energy usage of internet infrastructure.
The rapid advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the creation of large-scale interconnected networks of smart devices capable of autonomously collecting, processing, and exchanging data in real time across diverse application domains. While this development offers significant benefits, it also introduces critical challenges related to data security, privacy protection, interoperability, and the increasingly complex governance of distributed IoT systems. Traditional centralized governance approaches often fail to address these issues effectively due to single points of failure, limited transparency, and insufficient trust mechanisms. The integration of blockchain technology into IoT ecosystems provides a promising alternative by leveraging decentralized architecture, immutable ledgers, transparency, and tamper-resistant features that enhance accountability and trust. This study aims to identify and design an appropriate governance model for blockchain-integrated IoT systems that balances security, operational efficiency, and decentralization. The research adopts a conceptual and qualitative approach through a systematic literature analysis and the synthesis of existing governance, blockchain, and IoT frameworks to develop a structured governance model. The proposed framework defines institutional roles, policy structures, decision-making processes, and control mechanisms among participating entities. The results demonstrate that a blockchain-based governance model enhances system security, operational efficiency, and inter-organizational trust by reducing reliance on centralized authorities and improving data integrity. In addition, the use of smart contracts enables automated policy enforcement, transparent coordination, and sustainable system operations, supporting scalable and resilient governance for future blockchain IoT ecosystems.
This study systematically examines the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in addressing the persistent challenges of blockchain technology across protocols, smart contracts, and distributed ledger management. Although blockchain offers decentralization, immutability, and transparency, its broader adoption remains constrained by scalability limitations, security vulnerabilities, inefficient consensus mechanisms, and the complexity of contract design and auditing. The findings of this review demonstrate that AI provides promising solutions to these barriers. Reinforcement learning (RL) applied to Proof-of-Stake reduced consensus latency by 30-50%, while NLP-based smart contracts lowered vulnerabilities by up to 40%, though both approaches introduced new concerns related to energy overheads and auditability. In addition, intelligent algorithms enhance ledger efficiency and data analytics, supporting more scalable and secure transaction processing. Drawing on 28 peer-reviewed studies published between 2018 and 2024, and guided by the PRISMA 2020 framework, this paper synthesizes state-of-the-art research, maps sector-specific applications in finance, healthcare, and supply chain management, and highlights unresolved gaps in ethics, reproducibility, and regulatory compliance. Notably, only 12% of the reviewed studies validated their approaches on live networks underscoring the gap between simulation-driven research and real-world deployment. The discussion culminates in the AI–Blockchain Interaction Model (AIBIM), a conceptual framework that systematizes synergies across consensus, contract, and application layers. By integrating empirical insights with critical evaluation, this work emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of AI–blockchain research and provides actionable directions for advancing decentralized, scalable, and ethically aligned systems. This synthesis provides actionable insights for developers, regulators, and researchers in deploying AI-blockchain systems across finance, healthcare, and supply chains.
This study and implementation focus on the complex healthcare supply chain, encompassing resource procurement, supply management, and service delivery to all the stakeholders without any geographical boundaries. It introduced a novel approach utilising Ethereum blockchain technology to establish a track-and-trace mechanism for healthcare supply chains, bolstered by smart contracts and data immutability. By leveraging smart contracts, contractual obligations are automatically executed, ensuring prompt results without intermediaries or time delays. The proposed solution addresses the prevalent issues of transparency and monitoring within conventional supply chains. The method, rooted in solidity smart contracts, undergoes rigorous testing across various inputs, culminating in an average gas cost evaluation for various functionalities of system. This innovative system meticulously tracks the lineage of goods, with an average gas cost of 18,027 for all accounts. Notably, the process incurs a gas cost of 292,000 for all operations.
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Internet of Things and AI
Innovations and Analysis in Business and Education
Sabam Parjuangan, Suhardi -, I Gusti Bagus Baskara Nugraha
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) require secure, efficient, and low-cost digital transaction systems. However, many blockchain-based platforms are designed for large-scale applications and impose significant computational overhead, making them unsuitable for resource-constrained SMEs. This study proposes a lightweight smart contract blockchain platform tailored for SME-scale service environments. The system implements a modular smart contract architecture integrated with a lightweight blockchain and automates key transactional processes, including balance top-ups, service ordering, order confirmation, and payment execution, while ensuring data integrity through a simplified Proof-of-Work mechanism. System performance is evaluated using a Design of Experiment (DOE) framework with a full factorial design and analyzed through Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The results show that execution time remains below 5 seconds under workloads of up to 20 concurrent transactions, with CPU utilization below 55%. ANOVA results indicate that transaction concurrency and smart contract complexity significantly affect performance, while block size has a limited impact. Security evaluation confirms resistance to unauthorized access, double-spending, and reentrancy attacks.
Uche-Nwachi E, Orogwu C. P, Mikop E, Anoke C.S · 7 authors
The advancement of blockchain technology has revolutionized the field of data security by introducing a decentralized, transparent, and tamper-resistant system originally designed for secure cryptocurrency transaction. Blockchain technology plays a pivotal role in a wide range of data protection applications beyond finance, to sectors like healthcare and supply chain management, where safeguarding sensitive data is essential. This paper explores how blockchain enhances data security by decentralizing data storage, using cryptographic algorithms, and enabling transparency and immutability. Through an analysis of case studies and research literature, we survey the significant impact blockchain has on reducing vulnerabilities, preventing data breaches, and ensuring trust in digital systems. The findings emphasize the potential of blockchain in the revolution of data security while focusing on current limitation in scalability and privacy.
Svetlana Marković, Radovan Vladisavljević, Marko Marković
Smart contracts are one of the most prevalent and important blockchain-based technologies in the field of financial security, as the automatic execution of predefined rules provides additional efficiency, lowers costs and minimizes the involvement of intermediaries. This research will examine the use of smart contracts for process automation, risk reduction and organizational restructuring in the financial sector. In particular, the interaction between centralized and decentralized financial systems, the technology behind the implementation of blockchain and security issues associated with the use of smart contracts will be considered. At the same time, escrows will be presented as an example of the practical use of smart contracts for financial operations. The results of this analysis will show that smart contracts can be used as a means to increase the reliability of financial operations; however, their widespread use depends on proper regulation, security assessment and integration with the existing financial infrastructure.
Blockchain technology, in simple words, is an innovative force that democratizes the methodologies of financial transactions by creating safe, traceable, and unalterable digital data. This research investigates how blockchain increases financial transparency in banking, government, and supply chain management for different sectors. It identifies block chain’s core features: decentralized ledgers, real-time auditing, and transparent data sharing, in total reducing information asymmetry and thus fraud, increasing public trust. This study will focus on the role of block chain in financial reporting, as immutable transaction records ensure audit-free error-free error checks and compliance with regulatory standards. The primary use cases for this are anticorruption government procurement systems, banking networks improving fraud detection, and supply chain platforms ensuring product traceability. Smart contracts integrated into financial processes help reduce intermediaries and promote accountability. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging trends in zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized finance, and blockchain-based governance systems that may transform the standards of transparency. Some policy recommendations for leaders are investment in blockchain research, the development of regulatory frameworks, and fostering cross-industry collaboration. Blockchain technology is expected to redefine financial transparency through accountability, fraud reduction, and increased public trust in digital economies.
d IoT security perspective. It makes use of three essential Blockchain features— transparency, immutability, and decentralization— to build environment that are reliable and impenetrable. This application is realized through the utilization of features such as AI-driven fraud detection, Blockchain security, data privacy, the reliability of Smart Contracts, transaction speed, and system scalability. The result is, Blockchain-IoT Security Perspective, the first rank is System Scalability, the lowest rank is AI-based Fraud Detection, Blockchain Security is the fourth rank, Data Privacy is the fifth rank, Smart Contract Reliability is the third rank, and Transaction Speed is the first rank.
Healthcare systems increasingly rely on digital twin technology to create virtual representations of patients, medical devices, and clinical workflows. However, secure data sharing across medical digital twin edge networks faces critical privacy and security challenges when handling sensitive patient information and treatment protocols. This paper presents a medical digital twin blockchain sharding (MDTBS) framework that leverages blockchain sharding technology to address security and privacy concerns in healthcare data sharing while maintaining the real-time responsiveness required for clinical operations. The framework incorporates a novel dual-layer architecture combining local medical data sharing chains using directed acyclic graph consensus for intra-hospital communications with global medical data sharing chains employing delegated proof of stake consensus for inter-hospital collaboration. Considering the dynamic characteristics of medical environments and mapping errors between physical healthcare systems and their digital twins, we formulate an adaptive resource allocation model that jointly optimizes medical cluster head selection, hospital base station consensus access, and spectrum and computation resource allocation to maximize blockchain sharding transaction throughput. A medical digital twin edge network-empowered two-layer proximal policy optimization algorithm solves the complex optimization problems while adapting to time-varying medical workflows and equipment configurations. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the framework achieves superior performance across all evaluation metrics compared to baseline methods, including 15-25% improvements in transaction throughput with statistical significance (p-value less than 0.001), sub-three-second emergency response times, and 85%+ privacy preservation efficiency scores.