Blockchain Papers

Przemysław Rodwald

No abstract is available for this record.

Yu Jiang, Xiaolong Xu, Honghao Gao, Adel Rajab · 6 authors

Blockchain can help edge IoT-enabled Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS) in solving its privacy and security problems. In this paper, a lightweight blockchain called LBlockchainE is designed for edge IoT-enabled MTS to guarantee the security of sensor data stored in an edge computing environment. To save the resources of edge servers on ship, a data placement strategy is proposed. To encourage edge servers to positively contribute to storing data generated by sensor devices, storage resource consumption is employed as an influencing parameter, and servers with abundant resources are selected for priority storage. The data placement strategy also takes care of the access delay between servers and selects the nodes with the least access and storage costs as the priority storage choice. LBlockchainE applies the low-energy-consumption characteristics of Proof of Stake to determine the ownership of bookkeeping rights through a small number of competitive calculations and the resources of the node. Experimental results indicate that compared with Ethereum, the consensus mechanism of LBlockchainE consumes less energy and occupies less storage space. On average, the new system uses 1.6% less time and consumes 78% less battery power compared with traditional blockchain systems. In comparison to the random storage, the best storage, and the optimal data storage strategies, the proposed strategy maintains the same message costs.

Abdellah Ouaguid, Noreddine Abghour, Mohamed Ouzzif

No abstract is available for this record.

Klitos Christodoulou, Leonidas Katelaris, Marinos Themistocleous, Panayiotis Christodoulou · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Nikolaos Nousias, George Tsakalidis, Sophia Petridou, Kostas Vergidis

No abstract is available for this record.

Otabek Sattarov, Jaeyoung Choi

Aspiring to achieve an accurate Bitcoin price prediction based on people's opinions on Twitter usually requires millions of tweets, using different text mining techniques (preprocessing, tokenization, stemming, stop word removal), and developing a machine learning model to perform the prediction. These attempts lead to the employment of a significant amount of computer power, central processing unit (CPU) utilization, random-access memory (RAM) usage, and time. To address this issue, in this paper, we consider a classification of tweet attributes that effects on price changes and computer resource usage levels while obtaining an accurate price prediction. To classify tweet attributes having a high effect on price movement, we collect all Bitcoin-related tweets posted in a certain period and divide them into four categories based on the following tweet attributes: $(i)$ the number of followers of the tweet poster, $(ii)$ the number of comments on the tweet, $(iii)$ the number of likes, and $(iv)$ the number of retweets. We separately train and test by using the Q-learning model with the above four categorized sets of tweets and find the best accurate prediction among them. Especially, we design several reward functions to improve the prediction accuracy of the Q-leaning. We compare our approach with a classic approach where all Bitcoin-related tweets are used as input data for the model, by analyzing the CPU workloads, RAM usage, memory, time, and prediction accuracy. The results show that tweets posted by users with the most followers have the most influence on a future price, and their utilization leads to spending 80\% less time, 88.8\% less CPU consumption, and 12.5\% more accurate predictions compared with the classic approach.

Ahto Buldas, Dirk Draheim, Mike Gault, Risto Laanoja · 11 authors

<p>Since its introduction with Bitcoin in 2009, blockchain technology has received tremendous attention by academia, industry, politics and media alike, in particular, through extended blockchain-based visions such as smart contracts, decentralized finance, and, most recently, Web3. The critical prerequisite for any such blockchain-based vision to be turned into reality is uncapped scalability. Furthermore, and equally important, blockchain technology needs to transcend the stage of specialized tokens into an adaptive, heterogeneous tokenization platform. In this paper, we explain the Alphabill family of technologies that addresses both unlimited scalability and unrestricted adaptivity. We deliver a sharded blockchain technology with unlimited scalability and performance, called KSI Cash, which is based on a new form of electronic money scheme, the bill scheme. We present performance tests of KSI Cash that we have conducted with the European Central Bank and a group of eight national central banks from the Eurosystem in order to assess the technological feasibility of a digital euro, showing the system operating with 100 million wallets and 15 thousand transactions per second (under simulation of realistic usage), having an estimated carbon footprint of 0.0001g CO2 per transaction (Bitcoin = 100 kg and more); furthermore, showing the system operating with up to 2 million payment orders per second, an equivalent of more than 300.000 transactions per second (in a laboratory setting with the central components of KSI Cash), scaling linearly in terms of the number of deployed shards. We explain, in detail, the key concepts that unlock this performance (i.e., the concepts of the bill money scheme). The results provide evidence that the scalability of our technology is unlimited in both permissioned and permissionless scenarios, resulting into the Alphabill Money technology. Next, we contribute the architecture of a universal tokenization platform that allows for universal asset tokenization, transfer and exchange as a global medium of exchange, called Alphabill platform. We reveal the crucial conceptual and technical contributions of the platform's architecture and their interplay, including the data structures of KSI Cash and Alphabill Money, the dust collection solution of Alphabill Money, and the atomic swap solution of the Alphabill platform.</p>

Ali Tekeoglu, Chen-Fu Chiang, Saumendra Sengupta, Norman Ahmed · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Quinten Stokkink, Can Umut Ileri, Dick Epema, Johan Pouwelse

Web3 is emerging as the new Internet-interaction model that facilitates direct collaboration between strangers without a need for prior trust between network participants and without central authorities. However, one of its shortcomings is the lack of a defense mechanism against the ability of a single user to generate a surplus of identities, known as the Sybil attack. Web3 has a Sybil attack problem because it uses peer sampling to establish connections between users. We evaluate the promising but underexplored direction of Sybil avoidance using network latency measurements, according to which two identities with equal latencies are suspected to be operated from the same node, and thus are likely Sybils. Network latency measurements have two desirable properties: they are only malleable by attackers by adding latency, and they do not require any trust between network participants. Our basic SybilSys mechanism avoids Sybil attackers using only network latency measurements if attackers do not actively exploit their malleability. We present an enhanced version of SybilSys that protects against targeted attacks using a variant of the flow correlation attack, which we name TrafficJamTrigger. We show how the message flows of Round-Trip Time measurements can be used to expose attack patterns and we propose and evaluate six classifiers to recognize these patterns. Our experiments show, through both emulation and real-world deployment, that enhanced SybilSys can serve a fundamental role for Web3, effectively establishing connections to real users even in the face of networks consisting of 99% Sybils.

Ahto Buldas, Dirk Draheim, Mike Gault, Märt Saarepera

Abstract The Web3 vision takes blockchain disintermediation to a next level by making it ubiquitous, encompassing not only payments and financial services but also digital identities, data and business models. Recently, Web3 has gained massive attention by major analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, Forbes Technology Council and the Harvard Business Review. Albeit the current enthusiasm about Web3, we are lost in a state of confusion about what Web3 actually is – or could be. In this paper, we take an engineering approach. We discuss a potential foundation of Web3 in terms of fundamental components, architectural principles and a Web3 design space. We conclude that, from an engineering viewpoint, the Web3 can be characterized as the integration of digital rights exchange into the (application layer) internet protocols. Finally, on the basis of these findings, we discuss the Alphabill platform as a Web3 enabling technology.

Weijia Zhang, Tej Anand

The Ethereum blockchain is a fascinating platform that uses innovative smart contract capability to empower decentralized applications in almost all major business sectors. Pioneered by Vitalik Buterin and several cofounders, Ethereum has gone through the milestones of initial launch, stable coins, ICO (Initial Coin Offering), DeFi (Decentralized Finance), DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), NFT (nonfungible tokens), and L2 (Layer 2) for scalability. The Ethereum blockchain and infrastructure are transitioning to POS (proof of stake) with sharding and are on the way to impose big impacts on CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) and enterprise blockchains with promising potential. After years of astronomical growth, Ethereum has reached a market cap of $400 billion, just trailing behind Bitcoin. Compared with bitcoin, the Ethereum blockchain has advantages such as supporting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and smart contracts, supporting more diverse use cases, and being more nimble by changing consensus from POW to POS to save energy costs.

David Guzman, Dirk Trossen, Mike McBride, Xinxin Fan

No abstract is available for this record.

Louis Tremblay Thibault, Tom Sarry, Abdelhakim Hafid

Blockchain systems have seen much growth in recent years due to the immense potential attributed to the technology behind these systems. However, this popularity has outlined a critical scalability issue that most blockchain systems are now confronted with. With their increasing popularity comes an increasing amount of load on the system. Several scaling solutions that modify either the functioning of the underlying protocol or that build on top of them have already been proposed; however, each of these solutions comes with their advantages and disadvantages. This paper aims to survey the current state-of-the-art of rollups as a scaling solution. We discuss the mode of operation of the different types of rollups, outline state-of-the-art implementations of each type together with their features and limitations. We also conduct a performance analysis comparing these implementations. Finally, we outline avenues for future research around rollups as a scaling solution.

Mengqian Zhang, Jichen Li, Zhaohua Chen, Hongyin Chen · 5 authors

Nowadays, sharding is deemed as a promising way to save traditional blockchain protocols from their low scalability. However, such technique also brings several potential risks and huge communication overheads. An improper design may give rise to the inconsistent state among different committees. Further, the communication overheads arising from cross-shard transactions unfortunately reduce the system's performance. In this paper, we first summarize five essential issues that all sharding blockchain designers face. For each issue, we discuss its key challenge and propose our suggested solutions. In order to break the performance bottlenecks, we propose a reputation mechanism for selecting leaders. The term of reputation in our design reflects each node's honest computation resources. In addition, we introduce a referee committee and partial sets in each committee, and design a recovery procedure in case the leader is malicious. Under the design, we prove that malicious leaders will not hurt the system and will be evicted. Furthermore, we conduct a series of simulations to evaluate our design. The results show that selecting leaders by the reputation can dramatically improve the system performance.

Xiaoyang Shi, Hang Xiao, Weifeng Liu, Xi Chen · 7 authors

The distributed consensus mechanism is the backbone of the rapidly developing blockchain network. Blockchain platforms consume vast amounts of electricity based on the current consensus mechanism of Proof-of-Work (PoW). Here, we point out a different consensus mechanism named Proof-of-Stake (PoS) that can eliminate the extensive energy consumption of the current PoW-based blockchain. We comprehensively elucidate the current and projected energy consumption and carbon footprint of the PoW- and PoS-based Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain platforms. The model of energy consumption of PoS-based Ethereum blockchain can lead the way toward the prediction of other PoS-based blockchain technologies in the future. With the widespread adoption of blockchain technology, if the current PoW mechanism continues to be employed, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and Ethereum will push the global temperature above 1.5 °C in this century. However, a PoS-based blockchain can reduce the carbon footprint by 99% compared to the PoW mechanism. The small amount of carbon footprint from PoS-based blockchain could make blockchain an attractive technology in a carbon-constrained future. The study sheds light on the urgency of developing the PoS mechanism to solve the current sustainability problem of blockchain.

Zixin Wang, Bin Cao, Chenxi Liu, Congfang Xu · 5 authors

Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) has been regarded as a promising solution to the alleviation of the ever-increasing traffic burden on current and future wireless networks, for it shifts the caching and computing resources from remote cloud to the network edge. However, it makes wireless networks more vulnerable to security attacks as well. To resolve this issue, in this article, we propose a secure yet trustless Blockchain-based F-RAN (BF-RAN), which allows a massive number of trustless devices to form a large-scale trusted cooperative network by leveraging the key features of blockchain, such as decentralization, tamper-proof, and traceability. The architecture of BF-RAN is first presented. Then, the key technologies, including access control, dynamic resource management, and network deployment are discussed. Finally, challenges and open problems in the BF-RAN are identified.

Cong T. Nguyen, Dinh Thai Hoang, Diep N. Nguyen, Eryk Dutkiewicz

Metaverse has recently attracted paramount attention due to its potential for future Internet. However, to fully realize such potential, Metaverse applications have to overcome various challenges such as massive resource demands, interoperability among applications, and security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose MetaChain, a novel blockchain-based framework to address emerging challenges for the development of Metaverse applications. In particular, by utilizing the smart contract mechanism, MetaChain can effectively manage and automate complex interactions among the Metaverse Service Provider (MSP) and the Metaverse users (MUs). In addition, to allow the MSP to efficiently allocate its resources for Metaverse applications and MUs’ demands, we design a novel sharding scheme to improve the underlying blockchain’s scalability. Moreover, to leverage MUs’ resources as well as to attract more MUs to support Metaverse operations, we develop an incentive mechanism using the Stackelberg game theory that rewards MUs’ contributions to the Metaverse. Through numerical experiments, we clearly show the impacts of the MUs’ behaviors and how the incentive mechanism can attract more MUs and resources to the Metaverse.

Koray Çalışkan

Abstract Proposed by an unknown young man using the pseudonym Electra01, Electra appeared in the cryptocurrency markets in 2018. Thanks to its innovative supply mechanism, the money's market capitalization briefly reached 136 billion USD, surpassing Bitcoin in value. Focusing on the empirical case of Electra, a project that was chosen as the “best cryptocurrency community” by the users of world's largest exchange, Binance, this paper ethnographically analyzes the sociological universe of a cryptocurrency community. The research consists of two years of fieldwork, interviews with the core team and the project's anonymous founder, a survey among its community members, and computational analyses of the interaction data of the project's Twitter community of 376,600 handles, as well as their Bitcointalk forum. The paper approaches the socio‐technical universe of a cryptocurrency community by examining the devices, networks, and representations that the community actors produce, use, and maintain in data‐money making and proposes a way to make visible and examine centers of power in a global community operating a seemingly “decentralized” blockchain.

AIDA MARYANI RASHID

E-Donation cloud funding system is an indispensable part of the society. It is a feasible method to assist any donors in any part of the world. Donors require fully secured system where there all information will not be hacked by hackers. As Web 3.0 is the third generation of internet services that can make the system fully secured which is distributed decentralized and semantic. It means with the Artificial Intelligence (AI); it does not have a centralized control node. Public Blockchain- a decentralized, distributed ledger technology - is the implementation of Web 3.0 that technology will be used to develop this system which would be an open source. This paper will look into Ethereum Blockchain technology and recognize the fundamental support it provides for Web 3.0 framework.

Mays Alshaikhli, Tarek Elfouly, Omar Elharrouss, Amr Mohamed · 5 authors

Internet of Things (IoT) is the new paradigm to the scaling nature of things and their elements, interconnected, exchanging data over a network supported with nodes. The Ubiquitous use of tiny devices and embedded sensor frameworks has pushed IoT to the forefront of emerging technologies used in many applications like peer-to-peer networks, smart energy grids, home and building automation, vehicle to vehicle communication, and wearable computing devices. This massive growth and extensive use brought forth security risks that could hinder its commencement in many novel applications. The number of interconnected devices leads the way to several entry points for intruders and, along with it, security risks. The sensitive nature of the IoT applications such as health, automation, and energy grids cannot afford security risks. Traditional security mechanisms will not design or develop to secure such an emerging technology as IoT. Existing technologies have to be relied on with the non-existence of security mechanisms for this purpose. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is one such technology that can reduce the security risks in IoT. The central node vulnerability that can compromise the whole system can be mitigated by eliminating the need for a central node by using the distributed ledger. Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, has attracted tremendous attention and harnessed in itself a real-world value. However, computationally costly with limited scalability is not entirely suited for the IoT environment. IoT Application (IOTA) technology is the distributed ledger technology that can provide unlimited scalability specifically suitable for the IoT industry. This survey provides an in-depth introduction to how blockchain performs and its constraints in its nature as a generic platform for DLT. In contrast, IOTA is introduced as the technology for IoT, the next-generation blockchain overcoming blockchain’s limitations for its use in IoT.

Hamza Baniata, Ahmad Anaqreh, Attila Kertész

Blockchain (BC) systems mainly depend on the consistent state of the Distributed Ledger (DL) at different logical and physical places of the network. The majority of network nodes need to be enforced to use one or both of the following approaches to remain consistent: (i) to wait for certain delays (i.e. by requesting a hard puzzle solution as in PoW and PoUW, or to wait for random delays as in PoET, etc.) (ii) to propagate shared data through shortest possible paths within the network. The first approach may cause higher energy consumption and/or lower throughput rates if not optimized, and in many cases these features are conventionally fixed. Therefore, it is preferred to enhance the second approach with some optimization. Previous works for this approach have the following drawbacks: they may violate the identity privacy of miners, only locally optimize the Neighbor Selection method (NS), do not consider the dynamicity of the network, or require the nodes to know the precise size of the network at all times. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a Dynamic and Optimized NS protocol called DONS, using a novel privacy-aware leader election within the public BC called AnoLE, where the leader anonymously solves the The Minimum Spanning Tree problem (MST) of the network in polynomial time. Consequently, miners are informed about the optimum NS according to the current state of network topology. We analytically evaluate the complexity, the security and the privacy of the proposed protocols against state-of-the-art MST solutions for DLs and well known attacks. Additionally, we experimentally show that the proposed protocols outperform state-of-the-art NS solutions for public BCs. Our evaluation shows that the proposed DONS and AnoLE protocols are secure, private, and they acutely outperform all current NS solutions in terms of block finality and fidelity.

Zhili Zhou, Meimin Wang, Zewen Ni, Zhihua Xia · 5 authors

To facilitate the consumers’ online shopping, it is very necessary to build a reliable and sustainable product evaluation management (PEM) system to store, secure, and retrieve the evaluation data of products. To this end, we propose a novel PEM system based on blockchain technologies. In this PEM system, the evaluation data of products including evaluation scores and comments are stored in the interplanetary file system (IPFS), and then the data hash addresses are returned and stored on the blockchain. Then, the retrieval of evaluation data is implemented by designing and deploying smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Since it is almost impossible to change any data stored in blockchain and IPFS, the proposed PEM system can protect the comment data from intentional or unintentional modifications. Moreover, the proposed PEM system allows users to efficiently and reliably retrieve the relevant evaluation data of a certain product by a given query keyword with the increase of data stored on the blockchain. In addition, to achieve high sustainability, the proposed system also contains an economic incentive mechanism, which is beneficial to form a virtuous circle in online shopping. The proposed system is simulated on the popular blockchain platform, i.e., Ethereum with Solidity programming language. The experimental results and analysis demonstrate that the proposed PEM system achieves desirable usability, reliability, and sustainability.

Zhengyi Du, Xiongtao Pang, Haifeng Qian

Blockchain, a specific distributed database which maintains a list of data records against tampering and corruption, has aroused wide interests and become a hot topic in the real world. Nevertheless, the increasingly heavy storage consumption brought by the full-replication data storage mechanism, becomes a bottleneck to the system scalability. To address this problem, a reliable storage scheme named BFT-Store (Qiet al.2020), integrating erasure coding with Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), was proposed recently. While, three critical problems are still left open: (i) The complex re-initialization process of the blockchain when the number of nodes varies; (ii) The high computational overload of downloading data; (iii) The massive communication on the network. This paper proposes a better trade-off for blockchain storage scheme termed PartitionChain which addresses the above three problems, maintaining the merits of BFT-Store. First, our scheme allows the original nodes to merely update a single aggregate signature (e.g., 320 bits) when the number of nodes varies. Using aggregate signatures as the proof of the encoded data not only saves the storage costs but also gets rid of the trusted third party. Second, the computational complexity of retrieving data by decoding, compared to BFT-Store, is greatly reduced by about$2^{18}$times on each node. Third, the amount of transmitted data for recovering each block is reduced from$O(n)$(assuming$n$is the number of nodes) to$O(1)$, by partitioning each block into smaller pieces and applying Reed-Solomon coding to each block. Furthermore, this paper also introduces a reputation ranking system where the malicious behaviors of the nodes can be detected and marked, enabling PartitionChain to check the credits of each node termly and expel the nodes with misbehavior to the specific extent. Comparing with BFT-Store, our scheme allows blockchain system to suit dynamic network with higher efficiency and scalability.

Jinwen Xi, Shihong Zou, Guoai Xu, Yanhui Guo · 7 authors

Blockchain technology has been widely used in many fields, such as smart cities, smart health care, and smart manufacturing, due to its anonymity, decentralization, and tamper resistance in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. However, poor scalability has severely affected the widespread adoption of traditional blockchain technology in high-throughput and low-latency applications. Therefore, based on the three-layer architecture, this study presents a variety of solutions to improve the scalability of the blockchain. As the scale of the network expands, one of the most practical ways to achieve horizontal scalability is sharding, where the network is divided into multiple subnetworks to avoid repeated communication overhead, storage, and calculations. This study provides a systematic and comprehensive introduction to blockchain sharding, along with a detailed comparison and evaluation for primarily considered sharding mechanisms. We also provide the detailed calculations and then analyze the characteristics of existing solutions along with our insights.