Amaç: Bu araştırmanın amacı, Bitcoin ve altcoin kripto para piyasalarında finansal balonların varlığını araştırmaktır. Tasarım/Yöntem: Çalışmada, Bitcoin ve piyasa değeri açısından Bitcoin’den sonra gelen ilk beş kripto para birimine (Ethereum, Litecoin, Chainlink, Ripple ve Cardano) ait veriler kullanılmıştır. Kripto para piyasasında finansal balonların tespitinde GSADF testi kullanılmıştır. Bulgular: Çalışma sonucunda Bitcoin ve altcoinlerde finansal balonlar tespit edilmiştir. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple ve Chainlink için tespit edilen balonlar istatistiksel olarak anlamlı iken Litecoin ve Cardano için tespit edilen finansal balonlar istatistiksel olarak anlamlı değildir. Sınırlılıklar: Çalışmada altcoin kripto para piyasasını temsilen piyasa değeri bakımından ilk beş kripto para birimine ait veriler kullanılmıştır. 2021 yılı başında çeşitli borsalarda işlem gören dört binden fazla altcoin olduğu göz önünde bulundurulduğunda çalışmanın veri setinin çalışmanın kısıtını oluşturduğu söylenebilir. Özgünlük/Değer: Çalışmadan elde edilen bulgular, araştırmacılar, politika yapıcılar, profesyoneller ve yatırımcılar açısından önem arz etmektedir. Çalışmada kullanılan veri setinin güncel olması 2020 yılı sonunda gerçekleşen finansal balonların tespitini olanaklı kılmıştır. Bu nedenle de çalışmanın ilgili literatüre katkı sağlaması beklenmektedir.
Nikolay Ivanov, Jianzhi Lou, Ting Chen, Jin Li · 5 authors
Ethereum holds multiple billions of U.S. dollars in the form of Ether cryptocurrency and ERC-20 tokens, with millions of deployed smart contracts algorithmically operating these funds. Unsurprisingly, the security of Ethereum smart contracts has been under rigorous scrutiny. In recent years, numerous defense tools have been developed to detect different types of smart contract code vulnerabilities. When opportunities for exploiting code vulnerabilities diminish, the attackers start resorting to social engineering attacks, which aim to influence humans -- often the weakest link in the system. The only known class of social engineering attacks in Ethereum are honeypots, which plant hidden traps for attackers attempting to exploit existing vulnerabilities, thereby targeting only a small population of potential victims. In this work, we explore the possibility and existence of new social engineering attacks beyond smart contract honeypots. We present two novel classes of Ethereum social engineering attacks - Address Manipulation and Homograph - and develop six zero-day social engineering attacks. To show how the attacks can be used in popular programming patterns, we conduct a case study of five popular smart contracts with combined market capitalization exceeding $29 billion, and integrate our attack patterns in their source codes without altering their existing functionality. Moreover, we show that these attacks remain dormant during the test phase but activate their malicious logic only at the final production deployment. We further analyze 85,656 open-source smart contracts, and discover that 1,027 of them can be used for the proposed social engineering attacks. We conduct a professional opinion survey with experts from seven smart contract auditing firms, corroborating that the exposed social engineering attacks bring a major threat to the smart contract systems.
Vladyslav Tipanov, О. В. Драчов, Світлана Ткаленко, Tetiana Mirzodaieva · 5 authors
Abstract. The essence of cryptocurrencies is considered and the definition of their legal status is offered. The experience of some jurisdictions regarding the opportunities and threats of using and regulating cryptocurrencies has been studied. The authors analyzed the cryptocurrency market. The factors that led to the widespread use of cryptocurrency, which include financial instability, significant currency fluctuations, limiting capital flows and inflation of the currency in the country. The problem of information protection using blockchain technology, which is solved by a combination of block design and cryptographic protection, is considered. The capitalization of TOP cryptocurrencies for the last three years is analyzed, among which the leading ones are Bitcoin (VTS), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT) and others. Identified issues that need to be addressed in the field of finance and legal regulation. In the process of analyzing the experience of regulating cryptocurrency, we have found similar and distinctive features in some jurisdictions. First, each country, in view of the great potential of the blockchain technology, is trying in one way or another to create a favorable climate for its development. Secondly, the use of cryptocurrency goods is rapidly developing, and their impact on economic processes, both at the international and national levels is increasing, while states are faced with the problem of adapting their tax legislation to the current challenges of the digital economy, since the definition of the status of cryptocurrency does not directly lead to lack of funds to the state budget from operations with these assets. Thirdly, today there are more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies is traded through various trading platforms — stock exchanges and can be used to launder proceeds from crime. Thus, it is necessary to develop common standards for the regulation of cryptocurrency and the requirements for such crypto exchange counterparts, through the licensing of operations with cryptocurrencies. At the same time, the important question is what government bodies should exercise such control. Keywords: technology blockchain, cryptocurrency, virtual currency, legal regulation of cryptocurrencies, state functions, cryptocurrencies taxation. JEL classіfіcatіon F01, F20, K33, K34 Formulas: 0; fig.: 0; tabl.: 1; bibl.: 23.
The rapid growth of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) boosts the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, attacks towards DeFi applications (apps) are increasing. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing smart contract vulnerability detection tools cannot be directly used to detect DeFi attacks. That's because they lack the capability to recover and understand high-level DeFi semantics, e.g., a user trades a token pair X and Y in a Decentralized EXchange (DEX). In this work, we focus on the detection of two types of new attacks on DeFi apps, including direct and indirect price manipulation attacks. The former one means that an attacker directly manipulates the token price in DEX by performing an unwanted trade in the same DEX by attacking the vulnerable DeFi app. The latter one means that an attacker indirectly manipulates the token price of the vulnerable DeFi app (e.g., a lending app). To this end, we propose a platform-independent way to recover high-level DeFi semantics by first constructing the cash flow tree from raw Ethereum transactions and then lifting the low-level semantics to high-level ones, including token trade, liquidity mining, and liquidity cancel. Finally, we detect price manipulation attacks using the patterns expressed with the recovered DeFi semantics. We have implemented a prototype named \tool{} and applied it to more than 350 million transactions. It successfully detected 432 real-world attacks in the wild. We confirm that they belong to four known security incidents and five zero-day ones. We reported our findings. Two CVEs have been assigned. We further performed an attack analysis to reveal the root cause of the vulnerability, the attack footprint, and the impact of the attack. Our work urges the need to secure the DeFi ecosystem.
Javier Arcenegui, Rosario Arjona, Roberto Román, Iluminada Baturone
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are widely used in blockchain to represent unique and non-interchangeable assets. Current NFTs allow representing assets by a unique identifier, as a possession of an owner. The novelty introduced in this paper is the proposal of smart NFTs to represent IoT devices, which are physical smart assets. Hence, they are also identified as the utility of a user, they have a blockchain account (BCA) address to participate actively in the blockchain transactions, they can establish secure communication channels with owners and users, and they operate dynamically with several modes associated with their token states. A smart NFT is physically bound to its IoT device thanks to the use of a physical unclonable function (PUF) that allows recovering its private key and, then, its BCA address. The link between tokens and devices is difficult to break and can be traced during their lifetime, because devices execute a secure boot and carry out mutual authentication processes with new owners and users that could add new software. Hence, devices prove their trusted hardware and software. A whole demonstration of the proposal developed with ESP32-based IoT devices and Ethereum blockchain is presented, using the SRAM of the ESP32 microcontroller as the PUF.
Open access
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
The idea of sharing economy gives rise to unique ideas and develops innovative businesses. This article aims to relate the smart city concept by introducing the smart transport system and explores the opportunities of adopting blockchain technology in ride-sharing services. Blockchain technology is a distributed, decentralized public ledger that allows peer-to-peer transactions in a secured way without any third party. This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework from the existing centralized framework for a ride-sharing service and implements the same as a decentralized application (DApp) based on smart contracts on Ethereum Blockchain. Using smart contracts facilitate the users with automated transactions, removes the intermediaries, and enables various activities to be carried out safely and securely. Implementation of smart contracts is done using the Solidity programming language. This DApp uses the min matching algorithm to match riders requesting rideshare to save total travel distance. With the overwhelming growth in the usage of cryptocurrencies, smart contracts usage in applications as proposed in this paper can transform the sharing economy.
Modern day businesses are largely dependent on digital technologies. People prefer viewing the reviews before making any decisions. It applies to all consumables like buying Electronic items, Clothing, Travel, Guest-House, Restaurant, Rental, Housing, Automobile, Cosmetics, Jewellery, Movies, etc. Online services like Mantra, Yelp, Amazon, Facebook, Google My Business, Trip Advisor offer great services to the customer. However, drawbacks of these systems are fake reviews, negative reviews and sometimes even tampering of the reviews given by the customers, which has a huge impact on the business leading to huge financial losses. Sometimes a competitor in the business might also influence the ratings being provided. The centralized storage of these reviews also leads to problems like tampering or manipulation of the data being stored. In this paper we propose an application in the restaurant industry that solves all these drawbacks by making use of the Ethereum blockchain. The food reviews given by the customers are stored as smart contracts in the blockchain, which can't be altered, thus guaranteeing the authenticity of the reviews. Validity of the reviews is ensured because it is difficult for the restaurants to delete or create new accounts to wipe away the bad reviews given. Blockchain is immutable so we ensure that the reviews are genuine and the system is trustable.
Plenty of research on smart mobility is currently devoted to the inclusion of novel decentralized software architectures to these systems, due to the inherent advantages in terms of transparency, traceability, trustworthiness. MOVO is a decentralized application (dApp) for smart mobility. It includes: (i) a module for collecting data from vehicles and smartphones sensors; (ii) a component for interacting with Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) and Decentralized File Storages (DFS), for storing and validating sensor data; (iii) a module for "offline" interaction between devices. The dApp consists of an Android application intended for use inside a vehicle, which helps the user/driver collect contextually generated data (e.g. a driver's stress level, an electric vehicle's battery level), which can then be shared through the use of DLT (i.e., IOTA DLT and Ethereum smart contracts) and DFS (i.e., IPFS). The third module consists of an implementation of a communication channel that, via Wi-Fi Direct, allows two devices to exchange data and payment information with respect to DLT (i.e. cryptocurrency and token) assets. In this paper, we describe the main software components and provide an experimental evaluation that confirms the viability of the MOVO dApp in real mobility scenarios.
Purpose Preprint has become an important vehicle for academic communications and discussions. However, in preprint, there is a lack of a sufficient quality control mechanism such as peer review, which is a proven quality assurance practice that is used in traditional academic publishing services. To address the problem leveraging on the power of this practice, the authors introduce into preprint a self-organizing peer review method by applying the concept of token economy and the blockchain technology. Design/methodology/approach Specifically, this paper proposes an idea that applies the token economy concept to the design of the incentive and penalty mechanisms for peer reviewers in preprint to assure the qualities of its publications. Steemit has been studied to demonstrate the characteristics of the mechanisms. Findings A token economy-enhanced framework for self-organizing peer review in preprint is also proposed. The resulting preprint system is an academic community-oriented, self-organizing and blockchain-based content publishing system that is designed to run on both permissioned and permissionless blockchains. Research limitations/implications First, since peer review is on a voluntary basis and not profits oriented, the “monetary” incentive and penalty mechanisms borrowed from Steemit may conflict with academic ethics. Second, the authors proposed to deploy the authors’ token economy on blockchain, but the current mainstream decentralized blockchain services are too few to warrant a foreseeable successful future for the authors’ application. In fact, as the flagship of blockchain 2.0, the Ethereum blockchain suffers from the problem of scalability, which leads to its applications' lower performances, longer response times and eventually more negative user experiences as time goes by. Finally, the authors’ proposed version of preprint has not been implemented, and hence, its practical effectiveness and acceptance by academia are yet to be evaluated. Practical implications In this paper, the authors proposed a token economy-based framework for self-organizing peer review in preprint leveraging on blockchain technology. This framework encourages positive interactions between authors and reviewers, which helps to establish a healthy academic ecology that produces more contents with better qualities. Application of a solution based on the authors’ framework should impact the current academic communities by offering a new academic peer reviewing tool that has a built-in mechanism for self-behavior correction and quality assurance. Social implications Through adaption, the framework can be applied to other domains as well. In such domains, a large amount of feedbacks from partakers are needed and there exists a tremendous amount of work to filter noises in feedbacks so as to ensure that as many the quality ones as possible are delivered for a variety of purposes. The authors’ framework essentially impacts almost all domains where there exists a need to collect and filter large amount of feedbacks, and using the authors’ framework-based solution is cost-saving, which can be seen as a major potential contribution of the research. Originality/value The incentive and penalty mechanisms encourage positive interactions between authors and reviewers, and it helps to establish a healthy academic ecology that produces high-volume contents with good qualities.
The advancement of internet technology, cybersecurity, and the distributed system has enabled the development and establishment of electronic voting systems. This study focuses on the design and architecture of a secure and auditable electronic voting system that consists of a website, database system, and blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain is chosen due to its smart contract that is suitable for applications such as e-voting. The implementation is done using the Go language, and the Ethereum blockchain is accessible through the e-voting website. Initial testing and evaluation results show that the proposed design and architecture of the e-voting system allows a secure transaction to take place and auditable at the same time. Several configurations on the blockchain, such as block size, gas limit, and the number of sealers, could be modified to boost the performances further.
In this paper I report the discovery of neurons which showed a neural correlate with ongoing fluctuations of Bitcoin and Ethereum prices at the time of the recording. I used the publicly available dataset of Neuropixel recordings by the Allen Institute to correlate the firing rate of single neurons with cryptocurrency price. Out of ~40.000 recorded single neurons, ~70% showed a significant correlation with Bitcoin or Ethereum prices. Even when using the conservative Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons, ~35% of neurons showed a significant correlation, which is well above the expected false positive rate of 5%. These results were due to "nonsense correlations": when correlating two signals which both evolve slowly over time, the chances of finding a significant correlation between the two are much higher than when comparing signals which lack this property.
Abstract This study examined the evolving oil market efficiency by applying daily historical data to the three benchmark cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple), gold, and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil. The data coverage of daily returns was from August 2015 to April 2019. We applied two alternative tests to examine linear and nonlinear dependency, i.e., automatic portmanteau and generalized spectral tests. The analysis of observed results validated the adaptive market hypothesis (AMH) in all markets, but the degree of adaptability between the data was different. In this study, we also analyzed the existence of evolutionary behavior in the market. To achieve this goal, we checked the results by applying the rolling-window method with three different window lengths (50, 100, and 150 days) on the test statistics, which was consistent with the findings of AMH.
With the prosperous development of blockchain technologies in the past few years, some cybercrimes have emerged in the blockchain ecosystem, such as the phishing scams on Ethereum. To alleviate these security problems, a few anomaly detection frameworks were proposed. Specifically, previous studies usually model the transfer relationship between accounts in the blockchain ecosystem as a transaction network, where nodes represent accounts and edges represent the corresponding transaction records. Inspired by the adversarial attacks on graph data, we believe the robustness of existing detection frameworks still needs to be further verified even though they have achieved good performance. In this paper, a phishing detection framework based on feature learning and a phishing hidden framework based on inserting transaction records are proposed, respectively. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our phishing detection framework and the superiority of the phishing hidden strategies, which indicate that existing phishing detection frameworks are lack of robustness and still need further improvement against malicious attacks.
Decentralized services are increasingly being developed and their Decentralized applications are increasingly developed but their performance metrics are not tested enough. The total number of transactions that can be supported by the blockchain network and the performance effects of selecting different consensus protocols, using different block intervals and block size should be tested. There are some blockchain performance tools but most are built for specific blockchain frameworks and require complex configuration. The GoHammer tool is developed to provide an easy to use, flexible test tool for the Ethereum/Quorum blockchain frameworks. Transaction per second (TPS) values and several performance metrics will be tested. This tool is also a part of the series of tools that can be integrated with Tubu-io. This tool will help in developing more efficient decentralized systems and will affect decreasing the costs of developing decentralized application projects.
Nirav P. Patel, Arpit Shukla, Sudeep Tanwar, Dhananjay Singh
Abstract The advent of agro‐industrialization has helped the agricultural food supply chain (AFSC) in introducing ease and innovation to other facets. In addition, Blockchain (BC) technology is revolutionizing each distributed data‐related application by adding authentication and trust among the system's stakeholders. Inspired by the above‐mentioned argument, this article proposes a system, KRanTi , to promote the supply chain of agricultural food by BC embedding across the 5G network. The 5G network upgrades the data connectivity by enhancing network infrastructure efficiency. In KRanTi , we present an efficient credit system that enables associated farmers to purchase the requisite agricultural raw product of higher quality without the pressure of instant payment. A score‐based farm‐food quality assurance system is then proposed, which guarantees optimal quality grading. Trust, transparency, and traceability are preserved through the implementation of Smart Contracts (SC) distributed across public Ethereum BC. The cost‐effective off‐line data storage service in AFSC is offered through the use of the Inter‐Planetary File System (IPFS), a shared storage system to hold all data from stakeholders. Results show that the efficiency of the proposed scheme KRanTi is improved compared with traditional schemes with metrics such as less than 1 millisecond latency with 99.99% reliability compared with LTE with 5G, scalability, packet failure ratio, BC performance, cost‐quality ratio, and data storage contrast.
The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technology across many applications, such as autonomous systems, communication, and healthcare, is driving the market’s growth at a positive rate. The emergence of advanced data analytics techniques such as blockchain for connected IoT devices has the potential to reduce the cost and increase in cloud platform adoption. Blockchain is a key technology for real-time IoT applications providing trust in distributed robotic systems running on embedded hardware without the need for certification authorities. There are many challenges in blockchain IoT applications such as the power consumption and the execution time. These specific constraints have to be carefully considered besides other constraints such as number of nodes and data security. In this paper, a novel approach is discussed based on hybrid HW/SW architecture and designed for Proof of Work (PoW) consensus which is the most used consensus mechanism in blockchain. The proposed architecture is validated using the Ethereum blockchain with the Keccak 256 and the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) ZedBoard development kit. This implementation shows improvement in execution time of 338% and minimizing power consumption of 255% compared to the use of Nvidia Maxwell GPUs.
Quantum computation represents a threat to many cryptographic protocols in operation today. It has been estimated that by 2035, there will exist a quantum computer capable of breaking the vital cryptographic scheme RSA2048. Blockchain technologies rely on cryptographic protocols for many of their essential sub-routines. Some of these protocols, but not all, are open to quantum attacks. Here we analyze the major blockchain-based cryptocurrencies deployed today -- including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and ZCash, and determine their risk exposure to quantum attacks. We finish with a comparative analysis of the studied cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technologies and their relative levels of vulnerability to quantum attacks.