Blockchain Papers

Yao‐Yu Wang, Feng Tao, Jiancai Wang

No abstract is available for this record.

Asif Bhat, Rizal Mohd Nor, Md Amiruzzaman, Md. Rajibul Islam

Blokchain is used in a variety of applications where trustworthy computing is\nre-quired. Trade finance is one of these areas that would benefit immensely\nfrom a decentralized way of doing transactions. This paper presents the\npreliminary as-sessment of Accepire-BT, a software platform developed for the\npractice of col-laborative Trade Finance. The proposed solution is enforced by\nsmart contracts using Solidity, the underlying programming language for the\nEthereum block-chain. We evaluated the performance in the Rinkeby test network\nby using Remix and MetaMask. The results of the preliminary trial show that\nsmart contracts take less than one minute per cycle. Also, we present a\ndiscussion about costs for us-ing the public Ethereum Rinkeby network.\n

Arnold Lim, Enrong Pan

Imminent changes to the international monetary system alongside a shift toward more egalitarian principles of justice in commercial contracts for trade are now taking place. Such changes however do not sufficiently account for circumstances of hardship, or black-swan events such as COVID-19, whereby the relative losers of trading arrangements should continue to receive outcomes which are not only efficient, but also fair and resilient. We argue that the ‘Society-in-the-Loop’ (SITL) social contract paradigm, in conjunction with the use of Strategic Responsible Innovation Management (StRIM), can together provide a solution for improving distributive justice in trade. Through collaboration with a locally based trade facilitation company, we describe the innovation-planning phase of a blockchain smart contract solution based on Derek Leben's idea of a ‘Rawlsian Algorithm’ (2017). It is demonstrated how this can be used to strengthen the algorithmic fairness of commercial contract implementation in accordance with existing ISO 20022 standards. Since currently no formal design framework exists for modeling blockchain oriented software (BOS), an agile development approach is adopted which takes account of the substantial difference between traditional software development and smart contracts. This method involves the construction of UML Use Case, Sequence, and Class diagrams, with a view to blockchain specificities. Evaluation and feedback from the company is also considered.

Elena Baninemeh, Siamak Farshidi, Slinger Jansen

Decentralized autonomous organizations are a new form of smart contract based governance. Decentralized autonomous organization platforms, which support the creation of such organizations, are becoming increasingly popular, such as Aragon and Colony. Selecting the best fitting platform is challenging for organizations, as a significant number of decision criteria, such as popularity, developer availability, governance issues, and consistent documentation of such platforms, should be considered. Additionally, decision-makers at the organizations are not experts in every domain, so they must continuously acquire volatile knowledge regarding such platforms. Supporting decision-makers in selecting the right decentralized autonomous organizations by designing an effective decision model is the main objective of this study. We aim to provide more insight into their selection process and reduce time and effort significantly by designing a decision model. This study presents a decision model for the decentralized autonomous organization platform selection problem. The decision model captures knowledge regarding such platforms and concepts systematically. The decision model is based on an existing theoretical framework that assists software engineers with a set of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making problems in software production. We conducted three industry case studies in the context of three decentralized autonomous organizations to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the decision model in assisting decision-makers. The case study participants declared that the decision model provides significantly more insight into their selection process and reduces time and effort. We observe in the empirical evidence from the case studies that decision-makers can make more rational, efficient, and effective decisions with the decision model. Furthermore, the reusable form of captured knowledge regarding Decentralized Autonomous Organization Platforms can be employed by other researchers in their future investigations.

Victoria L. Lemieux, Atefeh Mashatan, Reihaneh Safavi–Naini, Jeremy Clark

IntroductionIn his 2004 book, The Medici Effect, Francis Johansson describes how creativity and innovation emerge when new ideas are begotten of existing ideas (Johansson, 2004). As ideas bounce off one another, they sometimes stick and form new combinations, and these recombinant ideas generate better ideas. When a person steps into the intersection of disciplines or

Roger Heines, Christian Dick, Christian Pohle, Reinhard Jung

By enabling a new way to digitize transactions, distributed ledger technology allows to fundamentally change how value is digitally issued, transferred, and stored. Accordingly, «tokenization» refers to the concept of creating a singular identifier on a distributed ledger in terms of a token that may represent anything from financial assets, goods, to other valuable resources. Where tokenization may disrupt our economic system leading to more efficiency or democracy, it is required to gain insights and facilitate the development of use cases associated with this concept. To illustrate how firms can apply tokenization to innovate their businesses, we propose a framework of different token properties, drivers, and barriers for adoption based on literature and expert interviews and present eight archetypical cases derived from an analysis of 129 ventures. This work provides strategic guidance in a token economy and a starting point for future research of viable applications.

Seren FIRAT, Esat Daşdemir

Bu çalışma kripto paralar için miktar teorisinin geçerliliğini sınamaktadır. Son yıllarda para piyasalarında gündeme gelen kripto paralar, paranın yeni bir türü olarak algılanmaktadır. Paranın tarihsel gelişimi ele alındığında kripto paraların çıkışı, geleneksel paraların kullanılmasına neden olan ihtiyaçlar ile benzerlik göstermektedir. Dolayısıyla literatürdeki para kurallarının geleceğin parası olarak adlandırılan kripto paralar için test edilmemesi büyük bir eksikliktir. Çalışma kapsamında kripto paraların çıkışı ve kullanıma başlaması diğer para türleri ile karşılaştırmalı olarak ele alınmış ve kripto paralar için Fisher’in miktar teorisi modeli test edilmiştir. Temel kripto para birimi olan Bitcoin’in piyasa değeri ve miktarı kullanılarak Ağustos 2010 ve Nisan 2021 dönemini kapsayan aylık frekanslı veriler ile zaman serisi analizi yapılmıştır. Yapılan analiz sonucu Bitcoin miktarı ve değeri arasında doğrusal bir ilişki olduğu anlaşılmıştır. Bu durumun temel nedeni blok zincir yöntemini kullanan kripto paralardaki madencilik faaliyetleri ile açıklanmıştır. Yapılan ekonometrik analiz Covid-19 salgınının Bitcoin miktarı ve piyasa değeri arasındaki doğrusal ilişkiyi güçlendirdiğini göstermiştir. Analiz sonuçlarının anlaşılması ve literatürdeki boşluğu doldurmak amacıyla çalışma kapsamında blok zincir yöntemini kullanan kripto paralar için para arzı, emisyon ve senyoraj geliri gibi konulara değinilmiş ve bu süreçlerin işleyişi açıklanmıştır. Bu çalışma kripto paralarda Fisher Miktar Teorisinin geçerli olmadığını gösteren öncül bir kaynaktır.

Michael Froehlich, Charlotte Kobiella, Albrecht Schmidt, Florian Alt

Engaging first-time users of mobile apps is challenging. Onboarding task flows are designed to minimize the drop out of users. To this point, there is little scientific insight into how to design these task flows. We explore this question with a specific focus on financial applications, which pose a particularly high hurdle and require significant trust. We address this question by combining two approaches. We first conducted semi-structured interviews (n=16) exploring users’ meaning-making when engaging with new mobile applications in general. We then prototyped and evaluated onboarding task flows (n=16) for two mobile cryptocurrency apps using the minimalist instruction framework. Our results suggest that well-designed onboarding processes can improve the perceived usability of first-time users for feature-rich mobile apps. We discuss how the expectations users voiced during the interview study can be met by applying instructional design principles and reason that the minimalist instruction framework for mobile onboarding insights presents itself as a useful design method for practitioners to develop onboarding processes and also to identify when not to.

Tooba Faisal, Damiano Di Francesco Maesa, Nishanth Sastry, Simone Mangiante

The viability of new mission-critical networked applications such as connected cars or remote surgery is heavily dependent on the availability of truly customized network services at a Quality of Service (QoS) level that both the network operator and the customer can agree on. This is difficult to achieve in today’s mainly "best effort" Internet. Even if a level of service were to be agreed upon between a consumer and an operator, it is important for both parties to be able to scalably and impartially monitor the quality of service delivered in order to enforce the service level agreement (SLA). Building upon a recently proposed architecture for automated negotiation of SLAs using smart contracts, we develop a low overhead solution for monitoring these SLAs and arranging automated payments based on the smart contracts. Our solution uses cryptographically secure bloom filters to create succinct summaries of the data exchanged over fine-grained epochs. We then use a state channel-based design for both parties to quickly and scalably agree and sign off on the data that was delivered in each epoch, making it possible to monitor and enforce at run time the agreed upon QoS levels.

Agostino Capponi, S. Ólafsson, Humoud Al‐Sabah

Does the proof-of-work consensus protocol serve its intended purpose of supporting decentralized cryptocurrency mining? To address this question, we develop a game-theoretical model in which miners first invest in hardware to improve the efficiency of their operations and then compete for mining rewards in a rent-seeking game. We show that centralization grows with heterogeneity in mining costs, but hardware capacity constraints prevent the most efficient miners from monopolizing the mining process. Investment leads to a more decentralized network unless larger miners have a significant comparative advantage in acquiring new hardware. Our model generates empirically supported implications: (i) mining centralization is countercyclical with respect to mining reward, and (ii) a change in mining reward leads to a less-than-proportional change in hash rates. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, Special Section of Management Science: Blockchains and Crypto Economics. Supplemental Material: The data file is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4840 .

Nghililewanga Hamukuaya

The use of currency as a medium of exchange for goods and services is essential in our daily lives. The concept of currency evolved from bartering to the use of coins and notes and now to the current digital age as the continuation of society's advancement has led to a new series of technological innovations with regard to payment methods around the world. Methods of payment are built on various platforms such as mobile phones, the internet, and digital storage cards. These payment systems have fostered the development and growth of fintech companies such as Paypal, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Alipay and others. The latest development is the use of blockchain to facilitate payments, more specifically the use of cryptocurrencies to facilitate transactions. The most popular cryptocurrency is bitcoin. Payments form part of commercial contracts which parties have a legal obligation to perform. South Africa has a legislative framework for payment systems wherein users have rights and obligations. This article will discuss the development of currency in South Africa and determine whether the current legislative framework for payment systems is applicable to cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

Authors unavailable

Blockchain technology is gaining prominence after its first famous implementation as part of the digital currency Bitcoin. It is made up of a series of blocks (the ledger) that give a secure, unchangeable, and auditable list of records. Once a block is recorded using encryption and a distributed database, it cannot be modified. The ledger in the case of Bitcoin stores the history of all monetary transactions. In three sections, this paper provides a review of blockchain technology for an interface design audience: (1) The fundamentals that enable block-chain technology are briefly discussed. (2) Specific examples include the use of HCI in blockchain research and development. (3) In the form of a fledgling research agenda, opportunities and difficulties for HCI and interface design are presented.

Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Yaroslav Afonin, Ludovico Lazzaretti · 5 authors

To non-experts, the traditional Centralized Finance (CeFi) ecosystem may seem obscure, because users are typically not aware of the underlying rules or agreements of financial assets and products. Decentralized Finance (DeFi), however, is making its debut as an ecosystem claiming to offer transparency and control, which are partially attributable to the underlying integrity-protected blockchain, as well as currently higher financial asset yields than CeFi. Yet, the boundaries between CeFi and DeFi may not be always so clear cut. In this work, we systematically analyze the differences between CeFi and DeFi, covering legal, economic, security, privacy and market manipulation. We provide a structured methodology to differentiate between a CeFi and a DeFi service. Our findings show that certain DeFi assets (such as USDC or USDT stablecoins) do not necessarily classify as DeFi assets, and may endanger the economic security of intertwined DeFi protocols. We conclude this work with the exploration of possible synergies between CeFi and DeFi.

Arif Perdana, W. Eric Lee, Alastair Robb

No abstract is available for this record.

Raphael Auer, Rainer Boehme

CBDCs should let central banks provide a universal means of payment for the digital era. At the same time, such currencies must safeguard consumer privacy and maintain the two-tier financial system. We set out the economic and operational requirements for a "minimally invasive" design – one that preserves the private sector's primary role in retail payments and financial intermediation – for CBDCs and discuss the implications for the underlying technology. Developments inspired by popular cryptocurrency systems do not meet these requirements. Instead, cash is the model for CBDC design. Showing particular promise are digital banknotes that run on "intermediated" or "hybrid" CBDC architectures, supported with technology to facilitate record-keeping of direct claims on the central bank by private sector entities. Their economic design should emphasise the use of the CBDC as medium of exchange but needs to limit its appeal as a savings vehicle. In the process, a novel trade-off for central banks emerges: they can operate either a complex technical infrastructure or a complex supervisory regime. There are many ways to proceed, but all require central banks to develop substantial technological expertise.

Galina Kondrateva, Elodie de Boissieu, Chantal Ammi, Éric Seulliet

Research literature on blockchain technology is starting to emerge. Blockchain technology is primarily associated with cryptocurrencies, raising interest in an application in other business sectors, thanks to its characteristics. The decentralized nature of blockchain creates the new concept of a token economy, which can help to trace and valorize intellectual property - one of the essential challenges in co-creation. This paper considers how blockchain technology and tokenization can solve challenges in co-creation projects consisting of large companies, startups and entrepreneurial accelerators. The paper proposes an exploratory analysis based on interviews conducted with French companies and startups. The findings include a framework of (1) challenges, lack of operating rules, trust, and traceability, and (2) the potential benefits of blockchain and tokenization to solve issues that arise. The findings can be useful for both startups and large companies as a starting point for understanding and adopting blockchain technology.JEL Codes: O3, L2

Vimal Dwivedi, Vishwajeet Pattanaik, Vipin Deval, Abhishek Dixit · 6 authors

Smart contracts are a key component of today’s blockchains. They are critical in controlling decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). However, smart contracts are not yet legally binding nor enforceable; this makes it difficult for businesses to adopt the DAO paradigm. Therefore, this study reviews existing Smart Contract Languages (SCL) and identifies properties that are critical to any future SCL for drafting legally binding contracts. This is achieved by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of white- and grey literature published between 2015 and 2019. Using the SLR methodology, 45 Selected and 28 Supporting Studies detailing 45 state-of-the-art SCLs are selected. Finally, 10 SCL properties that enable legally compliant DAOs are discovered, and specifications for developing SCLs are explored.

Noyan Ilk, Guangzhi Shang, Shaokun Fan, Jing Zhao

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are breakthrough financial technologies that promise to revolutionize the digital economy. Unfortunately, their long-term adoption in the business world is imperiled by a lack of stability that manifests as dramatic swings in transaction fees and severe participant dissatisfaction. To date, there has been little academic effort to study how system participants react to volatility in fee movements. Our study addresses this research gap by conceptualizing the Bitcoin platform as a data space market and studying how market equilibrium forms between users who demand data space while trying to avoid transaction delays, and miners who supply data space while trying to maximize fee revenues. Our empirical analysis based on past bitcoin transactions reveals the existence of a relatively flat downward-sloping demand curve and a much steeper upward-sloping supply curve. Regarding users, the inelastic nature of demand signals the utility of Bitcoin as a niche platform for transactions that are otherwise difficult to conduct. This result challenges the belief that users may easily abandon Bitcoin technology given rising transaction costs. We also find that the use of bitcoins as a trading asset is associated with higher levels of tolerance to fees. Regarding miners, the comparatively elastic nature of supply indicates that higher fees stimulate mining by a larger magnitude than suppressing demand. This finding implies that, ceteris paribus, the Bitcoin system turns to self-regulate transaction fees in an efficient manner. Our work has implications for the management of congestion in blockchain-based systems and more broadly for the stability of cryptocurrency markets.

Shangrong Jiang, Yuze Li, Shouyang Wang, Lin Zhao

No abstract is available for this record.

Gabriella Laatikainen, Taija Kolehmainen, Mengcheng Li, Markus Hautala · 6 authors

In the current global situation-burdened by, among others, a vast number of\npeople without formal identification, digital leap, the need for health\npassports and contact tracking applications-providing private and secure\ndigital identity for individuals, organizations and other entities is crucial.\nThe emerging self-sovereign identity (SSI) solutions rely on distributed ledger\ntechnologies and verifiable credentials and have the potential to enable\ntrustful digital interactions. In this human-centric paradigm, trust among\nactors can be established in a decentralized manner while the identity holders\nare able to own and control their confidential data. In this paper, we build on\nobservations gathered in a field study to identify the building blocks,\nantecedents and possible outcomes of SSI ecosystems. We also showcase\nopportunities for researchers and practitioners to investigate this phenomenon\nfrom a wide range of domains and theories, such as the digital innovation\necosystems, value co-creation, surveillance theory, or entrepreneurship\ntheories.\n

Hemant Kumar Srivastava, Ravi Yadav, Gaurav Baranwal

The paper presents an Ethereum based service selection framework that is decentralized in nature and aids people in finding the best services using a smart contract. We have used Solidity, a language to develop the smart contract for Ethereum, to tackle the problem that occurs in broker-based systems or centralized systems. As for the result, we show that the functionalities performed by a broker can be implemented on Ethereum smart contract. We present a methodology that one can refer to develop Ethereum smart contract for service selection.

Balázs Bodó, Jaya Klara Brekke, Jaap-Henk Hoepman

The rapidly evolving blockchain technology space has put decentralisation back into the focus of the design of techno-social systems, and the role of decentralised technological infrastructures in achieving particular social, economic, or political goals. In this entry we address how blockchains and distributed ledgers think about decentralisation.

Hong Su, Bing Guo, Xinhua Suo, Chuanfeng Zhang

In the rapidly evolving landscape of the sixth generation (6G) network, smart contracts emerge as a pivotal technology for enforcing trustful rules. However, the conventional lifecycle model of smart contracts—encompassing stages from initiation to the termination of a contract instance—suffers from rigidity and lack of customization, leading to notable operational challenges. These challenges primarily manifest as heightened resource demands, including longer waiting periods and escalated transaction costs, which hinder the adaptability of smart contracts in the varied and dynamic contexts of 6G-connected environments. Driven by these issues, this article conducts a comprehensive analysis of the smart contract lifecycle. We introduce an innovative lifecycle model that offers customizable flexibility, allowing for the merging or separation of different stages in the smart contract process. Meanwhile, we propose a unique transaction data structure designed to integrate parameters of combined stages, each marked with distinct identifiers for differentiation. Further, we introduce an innovative address scheme for smart contract instances, which provides an identifier to simplify instance access while also maintaining a mechanism for traditional access methods. The verification results show that the model can save 52.72% of processing fee and 68.09% of completion time compared with the conventional method.

Hong Su, Bing Guo, Xinhua Suo

Smart contract-based methods are used to implement the blockchain applications. While smart contracts have separate pre-deployed steps, which are suitable for applications that are deployed once and invoked many times. However, there are smart contracts that are used only one time (the disposable smart contract) or few times. Pre-deployment requires an additional step and additional transactions, which bring burdens (such as longer waiting time and more transaction fees) to users. In this paper, we propose a new Lifecycle model of smart contracts, which allows combining the pre-deployment with function invocations. This facilitates the usage of the disposable smart contract, as users are only required to send one transaction to perform both the pre-deployment and the function invocation. Together with the smart contract separation, it also allows participants to customize their special smart contracts at the request time. At last, we verify the proposed model and it shows the potential to save additional burden and to facilitate the usage of the smart contract.