Marta Massi, Andrea Vocino, Chiara Piancatelli, Paola Cillo · 5 authors
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are revolutionizing luxury fashion by offering digital experiences that promise innovation, exclusivity, and sustainability. While luxury brands increasingly experiment with these technologies, little is known about how they influence consumer perceptions of sustainability, brand legitimacy, and purchase likelihood. Drawing on dematerialization theory, institutional and legitimacy theory, and the sufficiency model, this research investigates NFTs’ role in promoting sustainable consumption and brand legitimacy. Building on insights from a preliminary qualitative study, three experiments test how product type (non-NFT, NFT, digital twin) affects purchase likelihood and how perceived product sustainability and brand legitimacy moderate and mediate these effects. Study 1 shows that digital twin products combining physical and NFT components yield the highest likelihood of purchase. Study 2 finds the positive effect of NFTs strengthens when perceived product sustainability is high. Study 3 reveals perceived product sustainability acts as a boundary condition, shaping how product type influences brand legitimacy and purchase likelihood. Findings offer theoretical insights and actionable guidance for managers.
Open access
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
Tradicionalne metode preverjanja prisotnosti, kot so ročno beleženje ali QR kode, so podvržene manipulaciji in ne zagotavljajo zadostne varnosti ter zasebnosti uporabnikov. Magistrsko delo naslavlja te izzive z razvojem decentraliziranega sistema za preverjanje fizične prisotnosti, ki temelji na tehnologiji verige blokov in ničelno spoznavnih dokazih (zk-SNARK). Sistem integrira ZoKrates ogrodje za generiranje zasebnih dokazov, geolokacijsko verifikacijo z GPS koordinatami, Ethereum pametne pogodbe ter hibridni pristop k shranjevanju podatkov. Implementirani so bili večplatformski uporabniški vmesniki (spletna in mobilna aplikacija) z različnimi načini potrjevanja prisotnosti. Razvita rešitev predstavlja funkcionalen in robusten sistem, ki omogoča varno ter transparentno preverjanje prisotnosti brez razkrivanja osebnih podatkov uporabnikov.
This paper investigates the dual impact of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and smart contracts on European Union (EU) market stability, with a focus on the role of regulation. The research problem centers on understanding how the rapid growth of DeFi interacts with emerging regulatory frameworks to shape financial stability. The purpose is to provide an integrated analysis that combines quantitative data with qualitative legal insights to inform policy. The methodology employs a fixed-effects panel data model to analyze the effect of DeFi market capitalization, smart contract deployments, and transaction volumes on a market stability index across EU member states, while also incorporating a qualitative review of the EU’s regulatory landscape, including the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation [1]. Key findings indicate that while DeFi’s growth correlates with increased market volatility, regulatory interventions like MiCA appear to have a stabilizing effect. The paper concludes that a clear and harmonized regulatory framework is crucial for mitigating the risks associated with DeFi while fostering responsible innovation. The relevance of this study lies in its timely contribution to the ongoing policy debate on DeFi regulation and its implications for financial stability in the EU [2].
This paper examines the market reaction to the approval of spot Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs), focusing on the return dynamics of a functionally diverse types of leading cryptocurrencies, including coins (BTC, BCH, LTC, XRP), smart contract platforms (ETH, ADA, AVAX), and utility tokens (LINK, MATIC). Using high-frequency intraday data, we perform an event study to assess the abnormal returns around the ETF approval dates. This study makes a significant contribution to the literature on event studies by being the first to examine investors’ reactions to information arrival in a “primary market.” Both the market model and the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) are applied to evaluate the effects of ETF approval on individual asset returns. Our results reveal that spot Bitcoin ETF approval by the US Securities and Exchange Commission leads to significant positive abnormal returns, along with heightened market volatility. In contrast, spot Ethereum ETF approval has had more modest effects. Moreover, we observe considerable shifts in the volatility spillovers among Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other major cryptocurrencies after the ETF approval, reflecting a change in market sentiment and interconnectedness. This analysis enhances understanding of how institutional products, such as ETFs, shape cryptocurrency market behavior, offering valuable insights for regulatory frameworks and investor strategies.
S. Vishnu Murthy, Panduranga Vital Terlapu, Rakesh Salakapuri, R. S. S. Devi Ganesh · 6 authors
Web3 technology is changing social media. It helps solve problems like data ownership and censorship. This research paper presents a new decentralized social media system. It uses blockchain to focus on user privacy and trust. The study describes a Web3 platform. It uses Next.js for the front end. Solidity is used for smart contracts. Hardhat is for local deployment. IPFS provides decentralized storage. Web3.js helps with blockchain interactions. The platform allows user registration, post creation, liking, commenting, and sharing. It keeps user data secure with blockchain's immutability and encryption. The authors look at ways to make money and manage the ecosystem and also focus on making the platform easy to use. Our research shows that the platform gives users more control, keeps their information private, and prevents censorship. These features solve some problems with centralized systems. However, the authors also discuss challenges like scalability and getting users to adopt the platform and suggest future research to address these issues. This work highlights how Web3 can change social media by fostering a secure, transparent, and user-centric digital community.
Ensuring ballot secrecy is critical for fair and trustworthy electronic voting systems, yet achieving strong secrecy guarantees in decentralized, large-scale elections remains challenging. This paper proposes the concept of collectively secure voting, in which voters themselves can opt in as secret holders to protect ballot secrecy. A practical blockchain-based collectively secure voting system is designed and implemented. Our design strikes a balance between strong confidentiality guarantees and real-world applicability. The proposed system combines threshold cryptography and smart contracts to ensure ballots remain confidential during voting, while all protocol steps remain transparent and verifiable. Voters can use the system without prior blockchain knowledge through an intuitive user interface that hides underlying complexity. To evaluate this approach, a user testing is conducted. Results show a high willingness to act as secret holders, reliable participation in share release, and high security confidence in the proposed system. The findings demonstrate that voters can collectively maintain secrecy and that such a practical deployment is feasible.
Cryptocurrency markets present unique prediction challenges due to their extreme volatility, 24/7 operation, and hypersensitivity to news events, with existing approaches suffering from key information extraction and poor sideways market detection critical for risk management. We introduce a theoretically-grounded multi-agent cryptocurrency trend prediction framework that advances the state-of-the-art through three key innovations: (1) an information-preserving news analysis system with formal theoretical guarantees that systematically quantifies market impact, regulatory implications, volume dynamics, risk assessment, technical correlation, and temporal effects using large language models; (2) an adaptive volatility-conditional fusion mechanism with proven optimal properties that dynamically combines news sentiment and technical indicators based on market regime detection; (3) a distributed multi-agent coordination architecture with low communication complexity enabling real-time processing of heterogeneous data streams. Comprehensive experimental evaluation on Bitcoin across three prediction horizons demonstrates statistically significant improvements over state-of-the-art natural language processing baseline, establishing a new paradigm for financial machine learning with broad implications for quantitative trading and risk management systems.
The scalability of blockchain systems is constrained by inefficient P2P broadcasting, as most existing optimizations focus only on the logical layer without considering physical network conditions. To address this, we propose BlockSDN, the first SDN-based integrated architecture for blockchain. BlockSDN employs a distributed control plane for a global network view, a graph engine for hierarchical clustering, and a hybrid macro-micro neighbor selection with hierarchical broadcasting. A dedicated simulation platform shows that BlockSDN reduces global block synchronization time by 65% and 55% compared to Gossip and Mercury, respectively.These results highlight the potential of SDN-enabled cross-layer coordination to significantly enhance blockchain scalability and performance.
Qiushi Tian, Churong Liang, Kairan Hong, Runnan Li
Cryptocurrency markets present formidable challenges for trading strategy optimization due to extreme volatility, non-stationary dynamics, and complex microstructure patterns that render conventional parameter optimization methods fundamentally inadequate. We introduce Cypto Genetic Algorithm Agent (CGA-Agent), a pioneering hybrid framework that synergistically integrates genetic algorithms with intelligent multi-agent coordination mechanisms for adaptive trading strategy parameter optimization in dynamic financial environments. The framework uniquely incorporates real-time market microstructure intelligence and adaptive strategy performance feedback through intelligent mechanisms that dynamically guide evolutionary processes, transcending the limitations of static optimization approaches. Comprehensive empirical evaluation across three cryptocurrencies demonstrates systematic and statistically significant performance improvements on both total returns and risk-adjusted metrics.
The necessity of blockchain systems to remain decentralised limits current solutions to blockchain governance and dynamic management, forcing a trade-off between control and decentralisation. In light of the above, this work proposes a dynamic and decentralised blockchain management mechanism based on digital twins. To ensure decentralisation, the proposed mechanism utilises multiple digital twins that the system's stakeholders control. To facilitate decentralised decision-making, the twins are organised in a secondary blockchain system that orchestrates agreement on, and propagation of decisions to the managed blockchain. This enables the management of blockchain systems without centralised control. A preliminary evaluation of the performance and impact of the overheads introduced by the proposed mechanism is conducted through simulation. The results demonstrate the proposed mechanism's ability to reach consensus on decisions quickly and reconfigure the primary blockchain with minimal overhead.
Quantum blockchains provide inherent resilience against quantum adversaries and represent a promising alternative to classical blockchain systems in the quantum era. However, existing quantum blockchain architectures largely depend on entanglement to maintain inter-block connections, facing challenges in stability, consensus efficiency, and system verification. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel quantum blockchain framework based on quantum walks, which reduces reliance on entanglement while improving stability and connection efficiency. We further propose a quantum consensus mechanism based on a weighted quantum voting protocol, which enables a fairer voting process while reflecting the weights of different nodes. To validate the proposed framework, we conduct circuit simulations to evaluate the correctness and effectiveness of both the quantum walk-based block construction and the quantum voting consensus mechanism. Compared with existing entanglement-dependent approaches, our framework achieves stronger stability and enables simpler verification of block integrity, making it a practical candidate for quantum-era blockchain applications.
Introduction to the Problem: This article examines the U.S. strategy for countering corruption and the increasing challenges of money laundering involving cryptocurrencies in a globalized financial ecosystem. As digital assets gain legitimacy, they have simultaneously become tools for illicit finance, prompting the need for coordinated global regulatory efforts. The United States, home to the world’s largest crypto exchanges and a leading jurisdiction for asset seizures, has developed a comprehensive Five-Pillar Strategy emphasizing global coordination and institutional strengthening. Purpose/Objective Study: This study analyzes how U.S. policy frameworks, including those under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), and Dodd-Frank Act, respond to transnational threats of corruption, crypto-related crime, and illicit finance. It assesses how these measures promote transparency and shape international cooperation mechanisms. Design/Methodology/Approach: Using a mixed-method legal approach grounded in methodological pluralism, this research integrates normative legal analysis, legal sociology, and neoliberal institutionalism to evaluate the adaptive capacity of global coordination in addressing crypto-related financial crimes. Findings: The study finds that effective responses to crypto-based corruption require not only domestic policy coherence but also institutionalized multilateral coordination anchored in international regimes such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), and the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework. The U.S. Five-Pillar Strategy strengthens transparency through beneficial ownership reporting, enhances the detection of illicit transactions via FinCEN and CFTC oversight, and reinforces cross-border collaboration through FATF and UNCAC partnerships. These frameworks collectively represent a pragmatic application of neoliberal institutionalism (where institutions mitigate the risks of an anarchic financial order) and sociological jurisprudence, which treats law as a dynamic tool of social engineering. However, gaps persist in enforcement harmonization and data-sharing, underscoring the continued need for adaptive and inclusive global coordination mechanisms. Paper Type: Research Article
B. Jeyaprabha, Anthony L. Rose, Rachit Jain, Animesh Pratap Singh · 6 authors
The paper discusses the use of smart contracts based on blockchain in the insurance sector in terms of improving transparency, security, and efficiency in the process of policy management. In the case of the automated claims processing through the application of smart contracts, the study shows how blockchain technology can simplify the claims verification and approval procedure with the involvement of humans and mistakes minimized. The presence of smart contracts with set conditions makes smart contract transparent as everyone can be able to access unchangeable terms of the contract and the blockchain is decentralized, preventing fraud and data integrity. The study utilizes the Ethereum smart contracts, which are created with the help of Solidity program language, as the main instrument of automatizing and insuring processes. It is this example of a combination of blockchain technology and automated processes that will result in faster claims processing, reduced administrative expenses, and increased customer satisfaction. Generally, and throughout the paper, the challenges that blockchain-based solutions can address have the capacity to enhance the insurance industry in the context of enhancing the efficiency of the operations, as well as increasing trust due to transparency and security of the processes involved.
José Luis Sampietro Saquicela, Leandro Alexander Bermúdez Herrera, Raúl Clemente Ulloa de Souza, Jaime Rafael Bastidas Heredia · 6 authors
Smart contracts are self-executing digital agreements deployed on blockchain platforms, where ensuring security is crucial due to their immutable nature. Understanding token-level semantics plays a key role in identifying potential vulnerabilities in these contracts. However, existing methods often rely on rule-based or syntax-level analysis, which struggle to capture the deeper semantic patterns that lead to complex vulnerabilities. To address these limitations, this study proposes a framework called Fine-Tuning CodeBERT (FTC-BERT), which integrates CodeBERT's pretrained transformer capabilities with task-specific fine-tuning to automatically detect and highlight vulnerabilities in smart contract Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). This method analyzes token-level semantics, enabling precise detection and contextual understanding of vulnerabilities. Developers can use this framework directly within IDEs for real-time vulnerability alerts and suggestions. Experimental results demonstrate that FTC-BERT significantly improves detection accuracy and recall over traditional methods, offering an efficient, automated, and semantic-aware solution for smart contract vulnerability detection.
In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, ensuring trust, transparency, and security in online collaborations remains a significant challenge, particularly for innovators and experts engaged in knowledge exchange. The proposed SPARK-IT platform leverages blockchain, AI-driven matchmaking, decentralized identity management, and tokenomics to foster a secure innovation ecosystem. By utilizing a permissioned blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized storage, SPARK-IT ensures intellectual property protection, traceability of contributions, and non-repudiation in mentor-innovator engagements.This paper presents the technical architecture of the platform, demonstrating how distributed ledger technology and AI-driven methodologies can establish a human-centered, sustainable and trustworthy online innovation ecosystem. By bridging academia, startups, and industry, SPARK-IT redefines digital trust and collaboration in the innovation economy.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is having an increasingly significant impact on the cryptocurrency financial sector, particularly on the best-known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, which has become a very important type of investment. This has accelerated the need to develop advanced AI techniques to address issues such as price forecasting, portfolio management and fraud detection. Today, the fundamental tools for reducing investment risks, predicting market trends, building portfolios and detecting fraud are artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, including tools such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM). This paper analyses the convergence between AI and cryptocurrencies, focusing on innovative applications and risks such as technological obsolescence, ethical issues, algorithmic opacity, volatility, and cybersecurity. Special attention is given to European regulation, in particular the AI Act, which aims to ensure responsible AI development while protecting rights and financial stability.
Vladyslav Nekriach, Sidi Mohamed Beillahi, C. Li, Peilun Li · 7 authors
This paper introduces HEMVM, an innovative heterogeneous blockchain framework that seamlessly integrates diverse virtual machines (VMs), including the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and the Move Virtual Machine (MoveVM), into a unified system. This integration facilitates interoperability while retaining compatibility with existing Ethereum and Move toolchains by preserving high-level language constructs. HEMVM's unique cross-VM operations allow users to interact with contracts across various VMs using any wallet software, effectively resolving the fragmentation in user experience caused by differing VM designs. Our experimental results demonstrate that HEMVM is both fast and efficient, incurring minimal overhead (less than 4.4 %) for intra-VM transactions and achieving up to 9300 TPS for cross-VM transactions. Our results also show that the cross-VM operations in HEMVM are sufficiently expressive to support complex decentralized finance interactions across multiple VMs. Finally, the parallelized prototype of HEMVM shows performance improvements up to 44.8 % compared to the sequential version of HEMVM under workloads with mixed transaction types.
W. M. A. B. Wijesundara, Joong-Sun Lee, Eleni Aloupogianni, Dara Tith · 6 authors
Rapid proliferation of smart home IoT devices has intensified the demand for secure, scalable, and autonomous firmware authentication mechanisms. Traditional centralized solutions face challenges related to privacy concerns, limited scalability, and vulnerability to single point of failure. In this paper, we propose DIDAuth-IoTFW, a novel decentralized identity and firmware authentication framework that uniquely integrates Ethereum Layer-2 Arbitrum, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and W3C-compliant Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs). DIDAuth-IoTFW provides a complete firmware authentication life cycle, from decentralized identity registration to real-time, on-chain verifiable revocation. While enabling autonomous, cryptographic verification directly on resource-constrained IoT devices and ensuring reliable performance even when gateways are compromised or unavailable. Our proof-of-concept implementation on ESP32 and Raspberry Pi achieved complete resistance to replay, forgery, and revocation threats with verification consistently under 1.2 s. Compared to prior work, DIDAuth-IoTFW uniquely combines firmware–VC hash binding, contract binding that prevents cross-registry replay, and device-side enforcement resilient to gateway compromise. Experimental results indicate a robust, privacy-preserving, and scalable alternative to centralized firmware-update pipelines for smart-home IoT.
The Blockchain algorithm has advanced the accountability and transparency of modern digital infrastructures. Enforcing responsible behavior and data integrity across distributed environments involves several key components, such as smart contracts, access control models, cryptographic techniques, and a decentralized identity framework. Because the blockchain ledger is immutable and transparent, once a transaction is recorded, it cannot be altered without detection, making fraudulent actions easily traceable and thereby ensuring accountability. However, the need for hybrid approaches that combine on-chain and off-chain solutions for an efficient reliability system introduces challenges, including privacy preservation, scalability, and regulatory compliance. This paper analyzes the effective features that enhance blockchain accountability, such as immutability, traceability, auditability, and decentralized control. We propose research gap directions for the research community. To improve the reliability of blockchain systems across various domains, based on a systematic analysis and integration of recent developments and real-world demands. Consequently, we have distinguished 33 relevant research studies from a total of 358 publications covering the period between 2020 and 2025 by employing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework. We identified three major themes addressed by the papers in the reviewed studies: further investigations into the ML role in enhancing accountability are required, especially using lightweight ML algorithms such as BNN and Tseltin machine, examining the limitations of blockchain’s auditability for real-time applications and decision-making efficiency, and a practical study of mechanism scalability in trade-off cost-efficiency.
Fuzzing is an effective technique to detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts. The challenge of smart contract fuzzing lies in the statefulness of contracts, which indicates that certain vulnerabilities can only be manifested in specific contract states. State-of-the-art fuzzers may generate and execute a plethora of meaningless or redundant transaction sequences during fuzzing, incurring a penalty in efficiency. To this end, we present DepFuzz , a hybrid fuzzer for efficient smart contract fuzzing, which introduces a symbolic execution module into the feedback-based fuzzer. Guided by the distance-based function dependencies between functions, DepFuzz can efficiently yield meaningful transaction sequences that contribute to vulnerability exposure or code coverage. The experiments on 286 benchmark smart contracts and 500 large real-world smart contracts corroborate that, compared to state-of-the-art approaches, DepFuzz achieves higher instruction coverage rate and uncovers many more vulnerabilities with less time.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Auction Theory and Applications
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Brandon Dulisse, Nathan T. Connealy, Amanda Harrison, Matthew W. Logan
The exponential rise of cryptocurrency has outpaced both understanding and safeguards regarding its utility, rendering crypto markets susceptible to fraud on a massive scale. In this paper, we seek to understand drivers behind female cryptocurrency purchasing behavior, as well as whether gender influences risk of victimization. Based on the analysis of a survey of over 900 cryptocurrency purchasers (33% female), this study explores the relationship between gender and a variety of influences related to cryptocurrency purchasing behavior. Our analysis revealed a significant relationship between gender and cryptocurrency knowledge as well as victimization. These findings have several implications, most crucially that female crypto purchasers may be differentially influenced by subcultural factors that increase risk of victimization compared to their male counterparts.
In recent years, zero-knowledge proofs have made great strides in efficiency, on two fronts: minimizing the finite field size without sacrificing security and allowing more constructs in their intermediate representations, such as look-ups. These have lead to novel, efficiently aritmetizable, hash functions, which are the backbone of modern proof systems. We take advantage of these improvements and present a resource constrained hardware design for the Monolith hash function, targeted torwards embedded, edge IoT devices. The hardware implementation demonstrates a significant performance advantage over the software-only solution on the Zynq SoC, achieving a 22× speed-up while consuming only a few hundred milliwatts.
Cryptographic Implementations and Security
Cryptography and Residue Arithmetic
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Climate change, energy crises, military actions in the world, and unstable oil prices create enormous challenges for the world’s nations. The need to use less fossil fuels opens opportunities for new or somewhat neglected green technologies. To reform the energy sector, it is necessary to have a clear and measured strategy. This allows for the identification of the potential of renewable resources in each space, while finding sources of financing for the transformation. The use of renewable resources makes it possible to solve an actual problem of the developed world—as the population of cities grows, the economic vitality of regions drops significantly. By creating new energy production capacities in the regions, social exclusion is reduced, and the main resources of the regions are better used—land areas, farms, and biomass sources. Nowadays, mankind is experiencing the third significant transformation that converts from conventional fossil fuels to new energy. The future development will go along with the three major trends—resource-type carbon reduction, production technology intensification, and utilization method diversification [1]. Based on these directions of transformation, the main investment decisions will be made, which will promote the progress of the energy system. Humanity is so far the least advanced in carbon collection and burial technologies, but the development of other trends allows for tangible progress.