Contract Model and the Future of Programmable Contract Law Smart contracts promise certainty through automated execution, yet contract law is fundamentally organised around adaptation. Contracts are routinely amended, suspended, interpreted, terminated and subject to judicial or arbitral intervention. This article argues that the principal limitation of contemporary smart contracts does not lie in their legal validity but in their inability to accommodate the legal life-cycle of contractual relationships. It identifies a conceptual confusion between ledger permanence and contractual permanence and argues that immutability should be understood as an infrastructural property rather than a contractual ideal. In response, the article develops the Principle of Programmable Contractual Continuity, proposes a Modular Smart Contract Model (MSCM) based on successive legally coordinated contractual modules, and introduces the Smart Contract Legal Adaptability Test (SCLAT). Through a commercial case study, it demonstrates how programmable contracting can integrate amendment, suspension, adjudication and restitution while preserving traceability, accountability and legal certainty.
K Venkatesh K Venkatesh, Gorre Bharath, Jannu Subhas Chandra Boss
ABSTRACT The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled billions of interconnected devices to exchange data across smart cities, healthcare systems, industrial automation platforms, and intelligent transportation networks. Despite its transformative potential, IoT environments remain highly vulnerable to cyberattacks due to limited device resources, centralized architectures, weak authentication mechanisms, and insecure communication channels. Traditional security frameworks often struggle to provide scalable trust management and tamper-resistant data protection in large-scale IoT deployments. This paper proposes a Blockchain-Based IoT Security Architecture that integrates distributed ledger technology, smart contracts, edge computing, and zero-trust authentication mechanisms to enhance security, privacy, and system reliability. The proposed framework enables decentralized device authentication, immutable transaction recording, secure data sharing, and automated access control through blockchain networks. Smart contracts dynamically enforce security policies and verify device identities before granting network access. Experimental evaluation demonstrates improvements in attack resistance, data integrity, authentication efficiency, and network trustworthiness compared with conventional centralized security approaches. The proposed architecture provides a scalable and resilient security solution for next-generation IoT ecosystems. Keywords: Blockchain, Internet of Things, Cybersecurity, Smart Contracts, Zero-Trust Architecture, Edge Computing, Distributed Ledger Technology, IoT Authentication.
This research introduces a radical paradigm shift in decentralized economic consensus and distributed ledger technology, moving beyond the thermodynamic inefficiencies of Proof-of-Work (PoW) and the quantum vulnerabilities of conventional Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECDSA). By integrating Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) within a 10,000-dimensional bipolar vector space and Module Learning with Errors (MLWE) via the ML-DSA (FIPS 204) post-quantum signature standard, this paper proposes the Asymptotic Stigmergic Lattice Consensus (ASLC) architecture. Instead of relying on energy-intensive validators, miners, or sequential blocks, transaction validation is achieved through deterministic thermodynamic gradient traces (Stigmergic Pheromone Decay). Verified via First-Order Logic and Bounded Model Checking through the Z3 SMT Solver Tribunal, the architecture mathematically proves that any double-spending attempt results in absolute destructive interference within the orthogonal vector space, instantly collapsing the fraudulent transaction probability into a scalar zero (0x00 Null Bytes). This framework achieves an absolute zero-entropy (isentropic) consensus bounded by the Landauer limit, rendering conventional blockchain ledgers computationally and thermodynamically obsolete. Keywords: Distributed Ledger Technology, Post-Quantum Cryptography, ML-DSA, Hyperdimensional Computing, Isentropic Consensus, Pheromone Decay, Double-Spending, Z3 SMT Solver, Bounded Model Checking, Zero-Miner Consensus
This document details the technical topology of the Asymptotic Stigmergic Lattice Consensus (ASLC) transaction engine, providing a deterministic mechanism to eradicate conventional sequential ledgers (blockchains) and energy-intensive validators (miners). By projecting transaction components (Sender, Receiver, and Amount) into a 10,000-dimensional continuous vector space via Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) and securing them with FIPS 204 ML-DSA post-quantum signatures, this architecture achieves absolute zero-miner consensus. The engine mathematically proves that any double-spending attempt generates destructive interference within the orthogonal lattice, instantly neutralizing fraudulent transaction vectors into 0x00 Null Bytes. Furthermore, it introduces Phantom Tunnel transmission via WebRTC DataChannels for pure Peer-to-Peer (P2P) vector distribution, bypassing central Mempools and leaving zero forensic traces. This is not a probabilistic iteration of distributed ledgers; it is an absolute topological replacement. Keywords: ASLC Transaction Engine, Hyperdimensional Computing, Blockchain Eradication, Zero-Miner Consensus, Destructive Interference, Phantom Tunnel, WebRTC, Post-Quantum Cryptography, ML-DSA, Distributed Ledger Technology
Abstract A smart contract fundamentally consists of code deployed on the blockchain, noted for its transparent and unchangeable execution. These characteristics, however, also expose it to attackers once any weaknesses are present. In recent years, attacks targeting smart contracts have caused substantial financial losses, highlighting the importance of robust vulnerability detection approaches. Conventional detection techniques, which rely on contextual semantics or symbolic execution, often face limitations in efficiency. Although neural network-based approaches have enhanced detection speed, they frequently compromise accuracy. This study introduces a framework for identifying and repairing vulnerabilities in smart contracts by utilizing multi-relational graphs combined with a pre-trained model. Initially, a Multi-Relational Graph (MRG) is constructed to represent the multi-dimensional aspects of execution logic and data dependencies by integrating multiple program feature graphs. To reduce interference from extraneous code, contract slices are then generated according to node and edge types defined within the MRG. These vectorized slices are subsequently processed by a pre-trained model called SCCodeBERT for both detection and repair of potential vulnerabilities. Experiments show that SCCodeBERT achieves an average accuracy of 96.06% and an F1-score of 90.90% on mainstream vulnerability datasets. Moreover, it reaches an average repair effectiveness of 86.42%, significantly outperforming current baseline approaches. This work presents a highly effective automated solution for enhancing smart contract security, offering notable theoretical and practical contributions.
Yoon-Nyoung Jung, Subin Jo, Seo-Hyun Yun, Hwajeong Seo
Electronic voting systems inherently encompass a structural tension among ballot secrecy, verifiability, and coercion resistance. Voters must be able to verify whether their votes have been included; however, if such verification information can serve as evidence presentable to a third party, it becomes a basis for post-election intimidation. Existing studies have focused primarily on performance evaluation or data separation, and have not comprehensively addressed the structural tension between verifiability and coercion resistance. This study defines this tension as the verification paradox and designs and implements an electronic voting prototype on a three-organization consortium based on Hyperledger Fabric 2.5, combining a 2-of-3 endorsement policy, nullifier-based anonymity, Exponential ElGamal homomorphic tallying, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP)-based ballot validity verification, panic-password-based deniable verification, and Private Data Collection (PDC)-based coerced vote separation. Quantitative evaluation results confirm a server latency overhead of +0.9% for ElGamal relative to the AES performance baseline, statistical indistinguishability between normal and panic responses (p>0.05), and a peak throughput of approximately 40.7 TPS (with an error rate of 0%) under 1000 concurrent voters. Through this prototype implementation and quantitative evaluation, we show the potential of permissioned blockchains to partially and practically mitigate the verification paradox. This study, however, does not provide a formal security proof, and it is subject to a trust assumption on PDC as well as to the experimental limitations of a single evaluation environment and a limited load range.
G. Suresh, S. Manimegalai, M. Amsaveni, R. Shankar · 5 authors
Embedded finance blended with decentralized finance (DeFi) and generative AI (GenAI) is reinventing financial services, but the impact of this phenomenon on consumer trust and emotional resiliency is poorly studied. This research has generated and tested the FINTRUST 2.0 framework based on a cross-sectional survey of 384 adults (18-45 years) in major Indian cities where Fintech is already used. The analysis of data was done through EFA, CFA and SEM. It has been found that consumer trust is multidimensional based on security, transparency, autonomy, reliability, ethics, and empowerment and serves as an effective intervening variable between the adoption of Fintech and emotional resilience. The impact was probably the strongest in the case of GenAI, then embedded finance, then DeFi. The results elevate the state of Fintech psychology and provide coverage of a policy and design implications of trust-based, emotionally sustainable digital finance systems.
Blockchain technology has profoundly revolutionized decentralized applications across financial systems, global supply chains, and applied informatics. However, it remains susceptible to systemic security hazards. This systematic review comprehensively evaluates core architectural vulnerabilities within blockchain infrastructures, consensus mechanisms, and peer-to-peer (P2P) network layers spanning the decade from 2015 to 2025. We focus primarily on the mechanics, operational taxonomy, and evolutionary trajectories of Sybil attacks, wherein malicious actors forge multiple pseudonymous identities to gain disproportionate systemic influence. By synthesizing the foundational academic literature with real-world empirical case studies, such as automated airdrop farming exploits in Layer-2 ecosystems (e.g., Arbitrum, zkSync) and decentralized finance (DeFi) governance manipulations, we analyze attack mechanisms, quantifiable impacts, and mitigation vectors. Our findings chart the structural evolution of Sybil strategies from rudimentary P2P routing disruptions to complex, economically driven application-layer interventions. Finally, we evaluate contemporary defenses, such as Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) systems and zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography, offering actionable recommendations for the integration of W3C-compliant decentralized identity (DID) frameworks and behavioral analytics to enhance systemic fault tolerance.
Discover how Tokemak is revolutionizing decentralized finance through its advanced liquidity management solution. Get insight into the protocol's mechanism, governance structure, token purpose, and the significance of its emergence in the DeFi world.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting has become an important mechanism for organisations to communicate their environmental, social, and governance commitments to stakeholders. Although recent regulatory initiatives have sought to improve the consistency and reliability of CSR disclosures, concerns regarding transparency, data integrity, and reporting of credibility remain. In response to these challenges, blockchain technology has gained attention as a potential tool for strengthening CSR reporting practices. This study explores the role of blockchain in CSR reporting through a systematic review of 21 publications covering blockchain technology, smart contracts, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Drawing evidence from academic, technical, and industry sources, the review examines how these technologies can support greater transparency, accountability, and stakeholder trust while highlighting current implementation challenges and research gaps. The findings suggest that CSR reports can be recorded and verified as NFTs on a blockchain network, offering a secure and traceable approach to reporting. Unlike conventional NFTs used for digital assets, CSR-related NFTs possess distinctive characteristics, including non-transferability and the need for regulatory oversight during their creation and validation. This study contributes to the emerging literature by proposing a blockchain-based CSR reporting architecture that integrates smart contracts and NFT standards while recognising the roles of companies, verifiers, and regulatory authorities. The proposed framework also advances understanding of the practical and conceptual considerations associated with CSR-focused NFTs, providing a foundation for future research and implementation.
Multi-Swarm Agency Protocol: Emergent Coordination in Heterogeneous Agent Networks Through φ-Resonant Synchronization and Distributed Consensus Mechanisms We present the Multi-Swarm Agency Protocol (MSAP), a comprehensive formal framework for coordinating heterogeneous autonomous agent swarms without centralized control, external orchestration, or pre-negotiated cooperation agreements. MSAP enables N independent swarms, each with distinct objectives, internal governance structures, resource constraints, and temporal dynamics, to achieve coherent collective behavior through a novel mechanism we term φ-resonant synchronization. This synchronization leverages the mathematical properties of the golden ratio φ = 1.618033988749895 to achieve optimal coupling strengths that balance coordination benefits against autonomy costs. We prove that under MSAP, swarm coordination converges in O(log N) synchronization rounds with probability 1 − ε for any ε > 0, provided the inter-swarm coupling matrix satisfies the spectral condition λ₂(K) > φ⁻¹. We further establish that this convergence is optimal—no protocol can achieve coordination in fewer than Ω(log N) rounds under our adversarial message delay model. The protocol is fault-tolerant, maintaining coordination properties even when up to f < N/φ² swarms experience Byzantine failures. Our theoretical contributions include: (1) a complete characterization of the swarm synchronization manifold as a φ-weighted torus, (2) proof that emergent coordination behaviors satisfy a novel compositionality theorem enabling hierarchical swarm-of-swarms architectures, (3) informationtheoretic lower bounds showing our protocol is communication-optimal within constant factors, and (4) extension of classical Kuramoto dynamics to heterogeneous multi-objective settings with rigorous stability analysis. Empirical validation across 47 production deployments spanning six industries (aviation, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, smart cities) demonstrates 94.7% coordination success rate (σ = 2.3%), mean coordination latency of 127ms (σ = 34ms), and mean rounds-tosynchronization of 4.2 (σ = 1.1). Our largest deployment coordinates 12 swarms comprising 2,847 agents with sustained throughput of 45,000 coordinated actions per second. Comparative evaluation against seven baseline coordination protocols shows MSAP achieves 2.3× higher coordination success, 4.1× lower latency, and 6.7× better scalability. The MSAP reference implementation is open-source (Apache 2.0 license), with formal verification in Coq ensuring correctness of core synchronization invariants. We discuss implications for the emerging field of multi-swarm robotics, autonomous vehicle coordination, and distributed AI governance. **Keywords:** Multi-agent systems, swarm intelligence, distributed coordination, emergent behavior, φ-synchronization, Kuramoto oscillators, Byzantine fault tolerance, heterogeneous agents, protocol verification, autonomous systems, collective intelligence, decentralized control, golden ratio mathematics **ACM Classification:** I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence—Multiagent systems; C.2.4 Distributed Systems—Distributed applications; G.1.6 Optimization—Global optimization --- ## 1. Introduction ### 1.1 The Multi-Swarm Challenge Modern enterprise systems increasingly deploy multiple autonomous agent swarms, each optimized for specific domains: supply chain optimization, customer service automation, financial analysis, security monitoring, predictive maintenance, and resource allocation. These swarms must coordinate without: 1. **Central orchestration** — no single point of failure or control 2. **Pre-defined protocols** — agents and swarms may be unknown at design time 3. **Shared objectives** — swarms optimize different, potentially conflicting fitness functions 4. **Global visibility** — each swarm has only local information 5. **Synchronous execution** — communication delays are arbitrary and unpredictable Traditional multi-agent coordination assumes homogeneous agents with aligned goals operating in synchronous rounds with reliable communication. Real-world deployment shatters these assumptions. A supply chain swarm optimizing for just-in-time delivery may conflict with a sustainability swarm minimizing carbon footprint. A security swarm restricting access may impede a customer service swarm maximizing responsiveness. These conflicts cannot be resolved by a central authority—they must emerge from distributed negotiation. ### 1.2 Motivating Applications Distributed Financial Trading A quantitative trading firm operates: - **Alpha generation swarm**: Signal discovery, factor modeling - **Execution swarm**: Order routing, market making, latency arbitrage - **Risk management swarm**: Position limits, VaR monitoring, stress testing - **Compliance swarm**: Regulatory reporting, trade surveillance Alpha wants to maximize returns. Execution wants to minimize slippage. Risk wants to limit exposure. Compliance wants to ensure auditability. These objectives are inherently in tension. MSAP enables these swarms to coordinate in real-time (sub-millisecond) while preserving their distinct mandates. Smart City Infrastructure A metropolitan area coordinates: - **Traffic management swarm**: Signal timing, congestion routing - **Emergency response swarm**: Dispatch, route clearing, hospital coordination - **Energy grid swarm**: Load balancing, renewable integration, demand response - **Public transit swarm**: Schedule optimization, crowd management An emergency affects traffic routing, which affects bus schedules, which affects commuter energy demand. MSAP enables these swarms to coordinate at city scale (millions of agents) with second-level latency. Technical Challenges Multi-swarm coordination presents several fundamental challenges: **Challenge 1: Heterogeneous Objectives** Swarms optimize different fitness functions G₁, G₂, ..., Gₙ. Coordination must not require swarms to abandon their objectives; rather, it must find operating points where swarms can achieve reasonable satisfaction while enabling collective behavior. **Challenge 2: Dynamic Membership** Swarms join and leave the coordination network. New swarm types emerge. The protocol cannot assume fixed membership or pre-shared knowledge of swarm capabilities. **Challenge 3: Adversarial Environment** Some swarms may be compromised, behave selfishly, or actively attempt to disrupt coordination. The protocol must be robust to Byzantine behavior. **Challenge 4: Scale** Real deployments involve thousands of swarms with millions of agents. The coordination overhead must scale sub-linearly with swarm count. **Challenge 5: Latency** Many applications require sub-second coordination. The protocol must minimize synchronization rounds. ### 1.4 Our Approach: φ-Resonant Synchronization MSAP addresses these challenges through a novel coordination mechanism inspired by coupled oscillator dynamics. Each swarm maintains a "coordination phase" θ ∈ [0, 2π) representing its current position in a coordination cycle. Swarms influence each other's phases through φweighted coupling, where the golden ratio φ = 1.618033988749895 appears naturally from optimality conditions . The key insights are: 1. **Phase representation abstracts objectives**: A swarm's phase encodes its current coordination state without revealing internal structure or fitness function. 2. **Kuramoto-like dynamics ensure convergence**: Modified Kuramoto oscillator dynamics guarantee that coupled swarms synchronize their phases. 3. **φ-weighting optimizes coupling**: The golden ratio weighting balances coordination strength against autonomy preservation, emerging from variational principles. 4. **Hierarchical composition**: Synchronized swarms can themselves be treated as agents in a meta-swarm, enabling recursive coordination. ### 1.5 Contributions This paper presents: 1. **MSAP Framework** — A complete formal protocol for multi-swarm coordination, including message formats, state machines, and invariants (Section 3). 2. **φ-Resonance Theory** — Mathematical foundation for emergent synchronization, proving optimality of golden ratio coupling (Section 2). 3. **Convergence Proofs** — Rigorous analysis showing O(log N) coordination with high probability, with matching lower bounds 4. **Fault Tolerance** — Extension to Byzantine settings with f < N/φ² fault threshold (Section 5). 5. **Production Validation** — Comprehensive evaluation across 47 deployments in 6 industries (Section 7). 6. **Formal Verification** — Coq proofs of core protocol invariants (Appendix B). 7. **Reference Implementation** — Open-source implementation with performance benchmarks (Section 6). ### 1.6 Paper Organization Section 2 develops the mathematical foundation. Section 3 specifies the MSAP protocol. Section 4 analyzes convergence and complexity. Section 5 addresses fault tolerance. Section 6 describes implementation. Section 7 presents empirical evaluation. Section 8 surveys related work. Section 9 concludes with future directions. Appendices provide complete proofs, algorithms, and verification artifacts. --- ## 2. Mathematical Foundation ### 2.1 Notation and Preliminaries Throughout this paper, we use the following notation: | Symbol | Meaning | |--------|---------| | φ | Golden ratio, φ = (1 + √5)/2 ≈ 1.618033988749895 | | φ⁻¹ | Reciprocal, φ⁻¹ = φ − 1 ≈ 0.618033988749895 | | N | Number of swarms | | n | Total number of agents across all swarms | | S, Sᵢ | Swarm, i-th swarm | | A, aⱼ | Agent, j-th agent | | Θ, Θᵢ | Phase angle, phase of swarm i | | R, Rᵢ | Order parameter (coherence), coherence of swarm i | | K, Kᵢⱼ | Coupling matrix, coupling between swarms i and j | | G, Gᵢ | Fitness function, fitness of swarm i | | ω, ωᵢ | Natural frequency, frequency of swarm i | | λₖ(M) | k-th eigenvalue of matrix M | | ‖·‖ | Euclidean norm | | ⟨·,·⟩ | Inner product | | ℙ[
TITLE: Vane-Guard Sovereign Framework (v1.0): Enterprise Governance and Diagnostic Protocol ABSTRACT / DESCRIPTION: The Vane-Guard Sovereign Framework (v1.0) introduces a deterministic enterprise governance methodology and automated diagnostic protocol designed to eliminate stochastic drift, variance, and hallucinatory outcomes in large-scale cognitive orchestration layers. Operating on the "Law of the Diamond," the framework transitions fluid prompt states into immutable operational restrictions, establishing a hard-locked telemetry loop with underlying physical and decentralized enterprise infrastructure. Core Technical Pillars: 1. Root Identity Anchoring (VANE_ROOT_STABLE_001): Enforces strict, zero-variance tracking logic by binding autonomous agents to persistent, non-probabilistic identifiers configured within system state loops. 2. Anti-Drift & High-Availability Mechanics: Adopts a localized adaptation of Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) logic. Transitions between active data forwarding and background state monitoring are handled via Coup/Resign heuristics, securing continuous high-availability telemetry without data loops. 3. Multi-Domain Diagnostic Orchestration: Features specialized automation layers across four critical infrastructure segments: Cloud Access Auditing (AWS/Entra ID), Network Gateway Topologies (STP/HSRP), Application Runtime Manifest Tracking (JVM/Middleware), and Physical Interface Telemetry (HP/Dell). Performance & Validation Benchmarks: The underlying diagnostic heuristics and data-frame optimization methods featured in this framework have been benchmarked and verified through the elite global AlphaNova Competition network, securing a Global Rank of 20 out of 575 platform contributors, a Global Leaderboard Standing of # 8, and a verified structural diagnostic error score of 0.0403. This whitepaper and its associated technical deliverables provide a clear pathway for robust public sector semantic interoperability, fully aligned with the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) v1.2 metadata ontology and strict W3C SHACL validation standards. Primary Repository Hub: https://github.com/AnticipatedD Connected Organization Hub: https://github.com/Vane-Enterprise
El presente artículo analiza la tensión estructural entre los marcos regulatorios de prevención del lavado de activos –Anti-Money Laundering (AML)– y la emergencia de las organizaciones autónomas descentralizadas –decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)–. A partir de una analogía con el relato La lotería de Babilonia, de Jorge Luis Borges, el texto examina cómo la arquitectura contemporánea de cumplimiento ha mutado en un sistema de azar burocrático que erosiona el principio de lesividad y abstrae excesivamente los bienes jurídicos en el derecho penal económico. Mediante un enfoque interdisciplinar que integra la teoría de juegos, la praxeología de la escuela austriaca y la dogmática penal garantista, el estudio sostiene que el régimen AML opera como una externalidad negativa y como un factor de exclusión financiera, especialmente en contextos de alta informalidad, como el colombiano. El análisis concluye que la gobernanza algorítmica de las DAO, fundamentada en la transparencia del código y en la responsabilidad individual directa, puede ofrecer un modelo alternativo de eficiencia para la integridad financiera. Frente a la capitis deminutio derivada de la intermediación centralizada, se propone la descentralización como un paradigma orientado a restituir la soberanía económica del individuo, sustituyendo la opacidad administrativa por la certeza de la lex cryptographica.
This chapter examines the autonomous dynamics of the techno-political domain through the lens of political philosophy, primarily focusing on the intellectual legacy of Carl Schmitt. It begins with a unique analysis of Schmitt&s;s 1918 satirical essay The Buribunks, arguing that his dystopian vision of a “diary-writing society” presciently anticipated the data-driven social media culture of the twenty-first century. The discussion then navigates contemporary debates on depoliticization and post-politics, engaging with the works of Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek to illustrate how technological rationality often suppresses traditional political conflict. However, the chapter asserts that we are currently witnessing the “end of the apolitical honeymoon,” as the political, defined by Schmittian antagonism, re-emerges within the technological sphere. By analyzing phenomena such as China&s;s social credit system, hybrid warfare through disinformation, and the rise of decentralized technologies like blockchain and Web3, the text demonstrates how cyberspace has become the primary arena for modern sovereignty and power struggles. Ultimately, the chapter provides a philosophical framework for understanding technology not merely as a neutral tool, but as a constitutive element of the political sphere that reshapes the nature of global conflict and governance.
Purpose — Both Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and Holacracies are positioned as alternatives to managerial hierarchy, yet they remain largely uncompared in the organizational theory literature. This paper asks: in what ways do DAOs and Holacracies converge and diverge as decentralized governance structures, and under what organizational conditions is each model more effective?Design/methodology/approach — This paper employs a conceptual comparative methodology, synthesizing organizational theory, open strategy scholarship and blockchain governance literature to map both structures across six governance dimensions: authority distribution, decision mechanism, membership and inclusion, accountability system, transparency and adaptability. Three theoretical propositions are developed.Findings — Although DAOs and Holacracies share a commitment to decentralized authority, they differ fundamentally in governance architecture. Holacracy achieves decentralization through formalized role-based consent governance; DAOs rely on algorithmic enforcement via smart contracts and token-weighted voting. These differences produce distinct failure modes — role ambiguity and cultural resistance in Holacracy; plutocratic concentration and voter apathy in DAOs.Practical implications — Organizations considering decentralized governance can use the typology developed here to match governance model to organizational context. High-formalization environments benefit from Holacracy's constitution-based approach; open, distributed communities may favor DAO architectures, provided token-concentration mechanisms are counteracted.Originality/value — This is the first paper to systematically compare Holacracy and DAO governance through an integrated organizational theory lens, connecting open strategy scholarship with blockchain governance research. Three falsifiable propositions and a governance typology are contributed.
This chapter provides an exhaustive analysis of the core technological pillars defining the contemporary techno-political landscape: artificial intelligence (AI), surveillance technologies, blockchain and Web3, social media, and virtual universes (the metaverse). It begins by tracing the historical trajectory of AI and its diverse applications, specifically focusing on its transformative impact on strategic decision-making, foreign policy, and public opinion. The discussion then transitions into a philosophical and technical examination of surveillance, contrasting historical models like Bentham&s;s Panopticon with contemporary concepts such as Zuboff&s;s “surveillance capitalism” and the modern “omnipticon.” The analysis further delves into the ideological origins of blockchain, exploring the paradigmatic shift from the centralized structures of Web2 toward the ownership-based autonomy of Web3. Furthermore, the chapter evaluates the evolution of social media as a pervasive tool of power, highlighting its role in reshaping political participation and the dynamics of disinformation. Finally, it explores the emergence of virtual universes, addressing the critical challenges they pose to identity, security, and the nature of truth. By bridging technical evolution with political science and sociology, this chapter illustrates how these diverse parameters collectively restructure the dynamics of power, governance, and social legitimacy in the digital age.
We introduce NTRU-VRF, the first verifiable random function (VRF) constructed directly from the NTRU lattice hardness assumption, and instantiated concretely using the NIST-standardized Falcon-512 (FN-DSA) signature scheme. A VRF is a pseudorandom function that produces a publicly verifiable proof of correctness for each output. All currently deployed VRFs (IETF RFC 9381, Algorand, Ethereum) rely on elliptic-curve assumptions broken by Shor's algorithm. Prior post-quantum VRF constructions either require only a few-time security guarantee (Esgin et al., ePrint 2020/1222), rely on symmetric primitives that lack a worst-case lattice hardness reduction (Buser et al., ePrint 2021/302), or are based on Module-LWE/Module-SIS rather than NTRU. No prior work constructs a many-time, lattice-based VRF from NTRU hardness with a formal security proof. Our construction exploits a fundamental and previously unformalized property of Falcon's deterministic signing mode: for any fixed public key and input, there exists exactly one valid short-norm signature. This unique-signature property is the key structural feature that transforms a lattice signature into a VRF. We prove three theorems: Uniqueness: For any input, the NTRU-VRF output is unique. This follows directly from the unique-short-coset-vector property of the NTRU lattice. Pseudorandomness: If the Short Integer Solution (SIS) problem on NTRU lattices is hard and the hash function is modelled as a random oracle, then the VRF output is computationally indistinguishable from a uniformly random value. Provability: The Falcon signature is an efficient, publicly verifiable proof, checkable by any party holding the public key. As a concrete application, we define PQ-Sortition, a post-quantum proof-of-stake leader-election protocol that replaces ECVRF-based sortition with our NTRU-VRF construction. We provide the entropy-chain design, stake-weighted win condition, adaptive liveness mechanism, equivocation slashing, and a formal security analysis of the resulting consensus protocol. Instantiated with Falcon-512, NTRU-VRF achieves a VRF output of 32 bytes, a proof size of <= 666 bytes, evaluation time of ~0.8 ms, and verification time of ~0.1 ms on standard hardware—significantly outperforming all existing post-quantum VRF constructions and making it the first many-time, compact, lattice-based VRF suitable for high-throughput blockchain consensus.
Harrison Rush, Vincent Davis, Simone Antonelli, Vikash Singh · 6 authors
We address liquidity placement in the Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN): given a fixed budget, which channels should a node open to maximize its routing capacity? We cast this as a budget-constrained combinatorial optimization problem on graphs, selecting $k$ edge additions that maximize $s$--$t$ max-flow, a theory-grounded measure of routing capacity, and solve it with graph reinforcement learning. Our lightweight agent combines a message-passing policy network with proximal policy optimization (PPO) and action masking, and is trained under a hub-exclusion curriculum: the network's top hubs are removed from training subgraphs, forcing the policy to learn capacity-aware placement rather than hub attachment. In extensive experiments on real Lightning Network snapshots, our method consistently outperforms strong heuristic baselines on the max-flow objective across multiple seeds and unseen graphs. The agent has been deployed in production for peer recommendations, executing 4640 channel-open decisions that cumulatively allocate 267.3 BTC over $16 million across 30 managed nodes.
Internetware envisions autonomous software entities collaborating over the open Internet. Raft consensus is widely adopted for its simplicity and performance in distributed coordination, e.g., service registries and blockchains. However, Raft assumes crash faults only, making it vulnerable to Byzantine behaviors like election forgery and log tampering. Existing BFT protocols incur high overhead, while ad-hoc hardening lacks unified defense. We propose \textbf{TRM-Raft}, a Byzantine-resistant enhancement that non-intrusively integrates a Blockchain-based Trust and Reputation Model (B-TRM) into the consensus core. It quantifies multi-dimensional node behaviors, applies adaptive penalties distinguishing accidental faults from malice, and embeds reputation into leader election and log replication. A reputation-aware election penalizes term/index forgery, excluding low-reputation nodes from leadership. A Schnorr-signature-based mechanism lets followers verify log integrity; tampering triggers reputation decay and leader replacement. Evaluated on Hyperledger Fabric in a realistic Internetware setting, TRM-Raft keeps malicious leader ratio below 5\% even with 40\% Byzantine nodes, with <10\% throughput loss and <5\% latency increase over vanilla Raft. TRM-Raft offers a lightweight, practical trustworthiness path for Internetware systems relying on Raft.
Decentralized federated learning (DFL) removes the central server by letting nodes exchange model updates through peer-to-peer gossip, but existing gossip-based methods often lack provenance finality and resilience to Byzantine or lazy participants. Ledger-assisted federated learning (FL) improves auditability, yet blockchains, shards, or settlement committees can reintroduce global coordination costs that conflict with DFL locality. This paper proposes \emph{gspDAG-FL}, a secure DFL framework that derives consensus from the same gossip history used to disseminate models. Nodes exchange model payloads only with neighbors, while full nodes collect event certificates and receiver-endorsed accepted gossip proofs, reconstruct a compact Topology directed acyclic graph (DAG), and run Hashgraph-style virtual voting followed by compact full-node certificates. Finality is over unique model-origin tuples, not identical local parameter states. To improve resilience, gspDAG-FL combines payload validation, accepted-proof validation, and private semantic audit before aggregation. We formalize the adversarial setting, prove safety and conditional liveness of the control plane, and give a convergence guarantee for certified perturbed gossip under time-varying effective mixing. Experiments on MNIST classification and Penn Treebank language modeling, using fair held-out validation/audit data and networks up to \(N=100\), show that gspDAG-FL achieves learning quality close to validation-based ledger FL while reducing coordination bottlenecks, improving throughput, and maintaining high invalid-origin detection under mixed Byzantine and lazy participation.
Pietro Saggese, Michael Sigmund, Burkhard Raunig, Esther Segalla · 6 authors
Cryptoassets are increasingly entangled with the traditional financial system, and how this activity integrates into national economies and behaves under stress bears on financial stability and the design of public digital money. However, blockchain pseudonymity and the lack of geographic identifiers force existing work to rely on indirect proxies to infer and locate market participants. Here we use a regulatory registry that directly identifies the on-chain addresses of all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) registered in Austria, reconstructing their on-chain transaction activity across Bitcoin, Ether, USDC, and USDT through May 2025, and separating retail-like from institutionally mediated flows. We find that Austrian CASPs intermediate roughly USD 30 billion with external counterparties and are integrated globally rather than domestically. In value, this activity is dominated by a few institutional counterparties; in number, by retail-like ones. Around three major shocks, the Terra-Luna collapse, the FTX bankruptcy, and the Silicon Valley Bank failure, the two groups respond through different mechanisms, and stablecoins do not act as a uniform safe haven. The clearest case is SVB, where retail-like deposits and institutional withdrawals are consistent with USDC's two-tiered redemption mechanism. These patterns are invisible in aggregate data. Registry-based, transaction-level measurement thus offers a reproducible, cross-jurisdictional basis for monitoring how cryptoasset markets transmit risk.
Digital-asset custody has been built on threshold multi-party approval: no operation proceeds unless $t$ of $n$ parties approve, and fewer than t compromised parties can neither authorize nor learn the authorization secret. Threshold signature schemes (TSS) have been the standard mechanism, but the post-quantum transition disrupts this model: standardized hash-based signatures resist efficient threshold signing, and lattice-based threshold protocols remain an emerging research track. We present a dual-gate architecture that separates member authentication from threshold authorization. Each member signs its approval with an ordinary signature under any EUF-CMA scheme; the quorum jointly produces a threshold seal from Shamir-shared secrets bound to the operation. The seal is the base instance of a programmable authorization computation: simple quorum is the minimal policy, while richer policies can evaluate secret-shared state without making the member-signature scheme part of that computation. The signature scheme is a deployment parameter: migrating from ECDSA to SLH-DSA or ML-DSA is a key rotation, not a protocol redesign, and members holding keys in commodity HSMs participate through the standard sign API. The architecture can be deployed wherever the asset-control path supports programmable verification, such as smart contracts, vault modules, or HSMs guarding a master key, and produces an enforcement-layer authorization rather than a native chain signature. Below-threshold secrecy is information-theoretic; an adversary holding $\geq t$ signing keys but no coefficient shares still cannot produce the seal.