Blockchain Papers

Ethan Heilman, Sebastien Lipmann, Sharon Goldberg

No abstract is available for this record.

William Hughes

No abstract is available for this record.

H. M. N. Dilum Bandara, Shiping Chen, Mark Staples, Xiwei Xu · 10 authors

Data from our modified Geth client used with http://ethviewer.live. Contains block, uncles, transactions (1st arrival to transaction pool and in blocks), addresses, and smart contracts data from public Ethereum network. Data between blocks 4,728,040 (2017-12-13) to 10,859,203 (2020-09-14). There are periods of missing data due to node failures and Geth client updates.

Siwapol Jumnongsaksub

With smart contracts, a wide range of applications can be implemented on blockchains. Ethereum stores smart contract byte code with the smart contract ad-dress so, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) can read and execute transactions correctly. All executed transactions (both successful and failed transactions) are stored on the platform permanently. Failed transactions are thrown by the EVM due to runtime errors and result in monetary waste. The waste from these transactions add up to around 2 million Ethers or $634.2 million. In this thesis, we propose Evitar, a warning algorithm for reducing Ethereum smart contract runtime errors, which has two mechanisms. First, Evitar proposes that users send transactions with the maximum gas allowed to avoid Out of Gas errors. However, this results in an extremely high transaction fee when transactions fail. Second, Evitar analyzes transactions called to each method in smart contracts and marks a method as a method with a high failure rate if the number of failed transactions reaches Evitar’s threshold. This mechanism prevents users from sending and paying for transactions that are likely to fail. We run experiments to evaluate the performance of Evitar by replaying transactions in a private network. The results show that Evitar can reduce failed transactions up to 99.52% compared to sending under default behaviour in exchange for a reduction in successful transactions by 1.78%. The amount of gas used by Evitar is only one-tenth compared to sending under default behaviour. Sending transactions with the maximum gas in Evitar reduces Out of Gas errors by 99.25%. In addition, Evitar can save up to 15.04 GB (82.32%) of storage in the Geth default node and 50.09 GB (50.09%) in the Parity full archive node.

Attari Nabil, Khalid Nafil, Fouad Mounir

No abstract is available for this record.

Manuel M. T. Chakravarty, James Chapman, Kenneth MacKenzie, Orestis Melkonian · 9 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Aleksi Ahola

Uusia teknologioita ilmestyy nopealla tahdilla ja monet niistä epäonnistuvat jo alkumetreillä, mutta jotkin niistä onnistuvat pysymään suosittuina ja menestymään. Lohkoketjut ovat olleet olemassa yli 10 vuotta, ja ne ovat näyttäneet kykynsä taipua moneen eri käyttötarkoitukseen. Uudet teknologiat luovat tarpeen niiden tutkimiselle, sillä uusiin teknologioihin ei voida sokeasti luottaa, kun kaikkea niistä ei vielä tiedetä. Tutkimus lohkoketjuista ja Ethereum lohkoketjusta tehtiin keskittyen turvallisuuteen. Tavoite oli selvittää, että onko lohkoketjusta hyötyä osana RGCE ympäristöä tutkimusta ja mahdollisesti kyberharjoituksia varten.
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\nTutkimuksen tuloksena saavutettiin parempi ymmärrys lohkoketju teknologiasta ja sen eri osa-alueiden turvallisuudesta. Hyökkäysvektoreiden ja -rajapintojen tutkiminen lisää ymmärrystä ja valmiutta hyökkäyksien tapahtuessa. Implementoimalla yksityisen Ethereum lohkoketjun RGCE ympäristöön mahdollistetaan JYVSECTEC:in hyödyntävän sitä tutkimuksissa ja mahdollisesti kyberharjoituksissa.
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\nTutkimuksen aikana selkeni, että vaikka lohkoketjuja pidetään turvallisena teknologiana, niin täysin turvallisia ne eivät ole. Lohkoketjujen haavoittuvuudet tulee huomioida niitä käyttäessä. Lohkoketju verkko on turvallisempi verrattuna perinteisiin keskittyihin/centralized verkkoihin, mutta lohkoketjujen päällä on usein aplikaatioita, jotka lisäävät hyökkäysten mahdollisuutta. Jokainen blockchainin päälle lisätty ominaisuus tai aplikaatio lisää hyökkäysvektoreita ja joitakin osia voidaan pitää epäturvallisina, jos niiden käyttäjät ja kehittäjät eivät ole tietoisia heikkouksista. Lohkoketjuilla aivan kuten muillakin teknoloigoilla on omat heikkoutensa, mutta yleisiä turvallisuuskäytäntöjä noudattamalla saadaan mitigoitua suurin osa yleisistä alttiuksista.

Mirko Staderini, Andrea Bondavalli

The Minisymposium investigated areas that cover embedded information systems, dependability and security, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and cyber-physical systems.

Nenad Tomić

The objective of the study is to determine whether the Bitcoin forks have produced significant effects on the cryptocurrency market. The event study methodology is used in this paper in order to determine the statistical significance of the abnormal return of leading cryptocurrencies after three Bitcoin forks. The forks were viewed as three isolated events, with the estimations windows and the event windows constructed separately for each of them. There were statistically significant negative effects related to the creation of Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin SV. Contrary to expectations, there was no statistically important effect throught out the most famous Bitcoin forking and emergence of Bitcoin Cash. Although cryptocurrencies are a current topic, the literature lacks quantitative research dealing with price changes. Without quantitative analysis, it is difficult to conclude whether the return change is a consequence of a statistically significant event The analysis would therefore provide the tool to determine the statistical significance of their impact on the market. A small number of observed cryptocurrencies is the main limitation of this research. Future researches could cover a wider scope of the market and include other famous cases of forking, for example, the Ethereum forks.

Monika di Angelo, Christian Sack, Gernot Salzer

No abstract is available for this record.

Mansour Abdelrhim, Abdullah Elsayed, Mahmoud Mohamed, Mahmoud Farouh

No abstract is available for this record.

Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Woo-Young Kang, Fabio Spagnolo, Nicola Spagnolo

This paper provides some comprehensive evidence on the effects of cyber-attacks on the returns, realized volatility and trading volume of five of the main cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, XRP and Stellar) in 99 developed and developing countries. More specifically, it investigates the effects of four different types of cyber-attacks (cyber-crime, cyber-espionage, hacktivism and cyber-warfare) on four target sectors (government, industry, finance and cryptocurrency exchange). We find that in the US cyber security firms tend to overreact to cyberattacks affecting cryptocurrencies and more wealth is spent on cyber security compared to other countries. Both hacktivism and cyber-warfare have a significant impact on cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency exchanges are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks in non-US countries and in the presence of high economic uncertainty and less so if the industry sector is already being targeted. Finally, cryptocurrency investors exhibit risk-loving behaviour when the hash rate and cryptocurrency returns increase and risk-averse one when cyber-attacks target the financial and industry sectors and economic uncertainty is high.

Muhammad Abubakr Naeem, Kashif Saleem, Sheraz Ahmed, Naeem Muhammad · 5 authors

We explore extreme return-volumes dependence among different cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin by using the Copula approach. We use Student-t, Frank, Clayton, Survival Clayton, Gumbel, and SJC copulas. We filter out margins by using the EGARCH model for return series and GARCH model for volume series. Evidence of significant symmetric dependence between return-volume is not found due to insignificance of student-t and Frank copula parameters. In a return-volume relationship, coefficients of lower tail dependence are significant for Bitcoin, Ripple, and Litecoin which means that low returns are followed by low volumes. Lower tail dependence for the return-volume relationship is stronger than the upper tail dependence for Bitcoin, Ripple, and Litecoin. Moreover, for negative return-volume, left tail dependence coefficients are significant for Ripple and Litecoin, which means that high returns are followed by low volumes for Ripple and Litecoin. Our investigation shows that investors (buyer or seller) are very careful in extreme market conditions for both Ripple and Litecoin. Extreme upper tail and lower tail dependence coefficients are insignificant for Ethereum.

Mohsin Ur Rahman, Barbara Guidi, Fabrizio Baiardi, Laura Ricci

No abstract is available for this record.

Jian Ping, Zheng Yan, Sijie Chen, Liangzhong Yao · 5 authors

The increasing electric vehicle (EV) penetration in a distribution network triggers the need for EV charging coordination. This paper firstly proposes a hierarchical EV charging coordination model and an algorithm based on Lagrangian relaxation. A barrier to the implementation of the coordination algorithm is that there usually does not exist a reliable coordinator of charging stations. This paper shows that an unreliable coordinator may collude with some charging stations and behave dishonestly by disobeying the coordination algorithm. Thus, the collusion coalition can gain more profits while lowering the profits of others and the total social welfare. To provide reliable coordination of charging stations, a novel blockchain-based coordination platform via Ethereum is established, including a coordination structure and a smart contract. A mathematical analysis is given to show that the proposed platform can mitigate the collusion behaviors in the coordination. Simulation results show the consequence of collusion and how blockchain can prevent the collusion.

Kevin Jonathan, S.Si. Anny Kartika Sari

Di saat kita terus bergerak terhadap sebuah dunia yang lebih canggih, salah satu hal yang tetap kita lakukan secara tradisional adalah voting. Melihat bagaimana tersebarnya literasi komputer, terasa lebih mengejutkan mengapa kita belum mengimplementasikan e-voting secara luas. Voting adalah sesuatu yang sangat berkembang jika didigitalisasikan. Hal ini dapat menghemat banyak usaha, kertas, dan tenaga kerja. Dan untungnya bagi kita, teknologi blockchain yang sedang berkembang adalah teknologi yang tepat untuk merealisasikan hal ini. Belakangan ini, penggunaan teknologi blockchain telah menyaksikan peningkatan yang tajam, terutama karena keunggulan yang ditawarkan. Blockchain juga memiliki banyak potensial dalam masa depan yang terdesentralisir. Dalam riset ini, sebuah blockchain Ethereum diintegrasikan kedalam sebuah sistem e-voting dengan harapan jika menggunakan sistem ini, pemilihan umum dapat dilakukan lebih efisien, efektif, terdesentralisir, transparan, dan bebas penipuan. Ganache digunakan untuk mensimulasikan jaringan Ethereum, dan Metamask digunakan sebagai wallet untuk menangani transaksi yang dilakukan. Aplikasi yang dikembangkan mensimulasikan Ethereum Virtual Network secara local dan smart contracts nya dapat dijalankan di blockchain. Tampilan aplikasinya kemudian dapat berkomunikasi dengan blockchain nya dengan bantuan Web3.js yang dapat mengambil dan menulis data secara permanen ke blockchain, sambil melakukan hot reload tampilannya untuk setiap transaksi yang ditambahkan kedalam perhitungan suara. Walau demikian, diperlukan riset dan pengembangan lanjut agar aplikasi ini dapat diadopsi kedalam penggunaan dunia nyata. As we keep on moving forward towards a more sophisticated world, one of the things remained being done mostly traditionally is voting. Considering how widespread computer literacy has been, it is more surprising that we have not implement e-voting widely yet. Voting is one of the things that would improve greatly should it be digitalized. It could save a lot of work, paper, and manual labour. And luckily for us, the emerging blockchain is just the right technology to make that a reality. Lately, blockchain technologies have seen a significant boom, mostly due to the many advantages it offers that could be applied in just about every aspects. Blockchain is also seeing huge potentials in a future of decentralization. In this research, an Ethereum Blockchain is integrated into an e-voting system in hopes that upon using this system, election could be done more efficiently, effectively, decentralized, transparent, and fraud-proof. Ganache is used to simulate the Ethereum network, while Metamask is used as the wallet to handle the transactions performed. The developed application simulates the Ethereum Virtual Machine locally and the smart contracts can be successfully deployed to the blockchain. The application interface then can communicate with the blockchain with the help of Web3.js that it could fetch and write data immutably to the blockchain, successfully hot reloading the interface with every transaction added to keep track of the vote count. In spite of that, further research and development is needed for this application to be adopted into real world use.

R Naveenkumaran, S. Geetha, Kaushik Selvaraju, C Kishore · 5 authors

Crowdfunding is a method of online fundraising process that was initially developed for public members to make modest contributions to support the projects of creative individuals. Crowdfunding uses blockchain technology to offer smart contracts for users. This allows us to offer crowdfunding in a secure, transparent, and safe manner. The task of this work is to provide interactive forms for campaign development and financial contributions. Both campaign makers and donors may develop and support the campaigns by viewing or submitting requests for approval and fulfilling requests using this system. In addition, the donor may be able to see the progress of the funds they provide. All transactions will be recorded on the blockchain and stored as blocks. It is alluring to use smart contracts in blockchain. Without the aid of a trustworthy third party, a blockchain-based agreement must be negotiated, carried out, and enforced amongst unreliable participants. It is essential to develop executable code that runs on the blockchain. Blockchain was initially primarily used as the basis for cryptocurrencies, but in recent years, it has expanded to various industries. Blockchain is anticipated to be the most widely used technology as a green way to conduct internet transactions One application area for blockchain technology is crowdfunding websites. The biggest problem with today’s global crowdfunding market is that campaigns are no longer under strict control, and some crowd- investment efforts have proven fake. By utilizing Ethereum smart contracts on the crowdfunding site, this work aims to allay these worries by assuring that the initiatives may be added within the designated time limit, eliminating fraud, and allowing the contracts to be fully mechanically performed.

Ali Alkhajeh

The study aims at understanding the current scenario of blockchain education and whether it is meeting the increasing demand of blockchain professionals in the job market. In addition, it also provided a comparison between Ethereum and Hyperledger and analyzed the one best suited for better academic curriculum design. By drawing from various sources of data, including journals, articles, reports, the study provided critical insights into the various aspects of a blockchain education. It assesses the existing curriculum on the blockchain that includes courses and programs from various renowned universities and business schools. The study reveals that although the courses are comprehensive in developing theoretical knowledge of the learner, it does not provide the scope for practical skill development. This gap reflects the skill-shortage of blockchain professionals in the job market. To address this, the research also provides some guidelines for developing a comprehensive pedagogical structure using Hyperledger technology. The discussion also highlights the benefits associated with Hyperledger and the way it can foster active learning among the learners. Finally, the researcher also provided the practical and theoretical implications of the study and assessed its limitations directing on the future course of research.

Alexei Zamyatin, Zeta Avarikioti, Daniel Pérez, William J. Knottenbelt

No abstract is available for this record.

Mazin Debe, Khaled Salah, Muhammad Habib ur Rehman, Davor Svetinović

Fog computing systems are designed to provide localized computation, storage, and communication services in close proximity to the endpoint mobile and IoT devices. Fog service providers typically monetize their service usage via centralized payment mechanisms in unverifiable and non-transparent manner. Therefore, there exists a need for a trust-enabling payment mechanism whereby fog service providers should be incentivized or penalized based upon the continuous feedback from endpoint devices. We propose a decentralized reverse-bidding scheme developed using the key features of blockchain and smart contracts. We develop a solution that allows the users or devices to initiate the bidding process by making a request for services to be provided by nearby public fog nodes, and these fog nodes to make bid offers in return. The proposed scheme ensures that all fog nodes on the network can equally and fairly make offers to win the bid. The bidding process incorporates the automated payments at the end of the service. Our solution is implemented using Ethereum smart contracts. It also integrates a reputation system for fog nodes and imposes a penalty for misbehaving nodes. Our solution is fully decentralized and provides a high level of trust, transparency, and security. In the paper, we present the system architecture, implementation details, and show the correct functionality of the overall proposed solution. In addition, we provide performance, cost, and security analyses of the smart contract code to demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness against major security concerns. The results show that the cost of running the smart contract remained less than three cents with the current Ethereum price (i.e., 183.22 USD/Eth). We have also made our smart contract code publicly available on Github.

Zhang, Lin, Zhang, Lin, Lee, Brian, Qiao, Yuansong

Ethereum is a conventional but evolving blockchain approach to support smart contract by enabling Turingcomplete computations at miners. With smart contract as a back-end support, anyone can publish their Decentralized Applications (DApps), thus transfer the existing Internet services/applications onto the blockchain.The requirements of service quality for different services can be quite different, varying from bandwidth sensitive and end-to-end transaction latency sensitive. This paper experimentally evaluates the Ethereum end-to-end latency and the factors that affect latency on the Ethereum main-net.

Ammar Battah, Mohammad Madine, Hamad Alzaabi, Ibrar Yaqoob · 6 authors

Multi-party authorization (MPA) typically involves multiple parties to control and grant access to shared data. MPA is used to solve the insider’s attack problem by ensuring that a single authority or party is not acting alone. Currently, almost all existing implementations of MPA are centralized and fall short in providing logs and events related to provenance of granting permissions in a trusted, secure, immutable, auditable, and decentralized manner. Moreover, for sharing data, proxy re-encryption algorithms are often used to give secure access to encrypted shared data. These schemes and algorithms are also centralized and cannot be trusted. In this paper, we propose a fully decentralized blockchain-based solution in which MPA is implemented using Ethereum smart contracts, and proxy re-encryption algorithms (which are computationally expensive) are implemented using multiple oracles to give access to encrypted shared data stored on a public and decentralized storage platform, such as the Interplanetary File Systems (IPFS). The smart contracts help to validate results based on the majority of encrypted results determined by the oracles. For this, we incorporate reputation mechanisms in the proposed smart contracts to rate the oracles based on their malicious and non-malicious behaviors. We present algorithms along with their full implementation, testing, and validation details. We evaluate the proposed system in terms of security, cost, and generalization to show its reliability and practicality. We make the smart contract source code publicly available on Github.

Christian P. Nielsen, Elias Ribeiro da Silva, Fei Yu

Digital Twins and Blockchain are key elements that when connected allow continuous data acquisition in the factory. As the connection between digital twins and blockchain is rather under-explored, the key contribution of this paper is the conceptual development of a digital twin prototype connected with an Ethereum-based blockchain. The outcome of the paper provides a concept to ensure the unique tokens represent the physical assets without being tampered with by applying digital twin technology. The paper includes a case study focused on Matrix-Structured Manufacturing Systems for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises.

M. Sivaram, E. Laxmi Lydia, Irina V. Pustokhina, Denis A. Pustokhin · 7 authors

The booming applications of bitcoin Blockchain technologies made investors concerned about the return and risk of financial products. So, the return rate of bitcoin must be foreseen in prior. This research article devises an effective return rate prediction technique for Blockchain financial products based on Optimal Least Square Support Vector Machine (OLS-SVM) model. The parameter optimization of the LS-SVM model was performed using hybridization of Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) with Differential Evolution (DE), called optimal GWO (OGWO) algorithm. The hybridization process is performed to eliminate the local optima problem of GWO and enhance the diversity of the population. To verify the goodness of the proposed model, the Ethereum (ETH) return rate was chosen as the target and experimental analysis was performed on it to verify the predictive results on the time series. The experimental outcome was analyzed in terms of two performance measures namely Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The obtained simulation outcome infers that the OLS-SVM model yielded better predictive outcome of the return rate of financial products.