Tim K. Mackey, Alec J. Calac, Tiana McMann, Ken Miyachi · 10 authors
Background: Historic and ongoing problematic practices regarding the collection, storage, and use of Indigenous health data have led to the need to ensure principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) are followed in research practices and technology development. Objective: This project, a partnership between UC San Diego and the Native BioData Consortium (NativeBio), sought to explore the practical application of blockchain technology and its potential to facilitate Indigenous-led research collaboration. Methods: This project first undertook purposeful relationship building with NativeBio to form a Community Advisory Board (CAB) for identifying community and technology needs for a blockchain research collaboration platform with an initial focus on genomic data. Over a 2-year project period, a series of public meetings and presentations at Indigenous-led conferences introduced the concept of exploring compatibility between blockchain and IDS principles, followed by iterative prototyping and co-design of a blockchain platform with NativeBio, using Ethereum as the underlying protocol. Results: Direct engagement with NativeBio and the CAB informed the initial design and development of a "b-IDS" proof-of-concept (POC) blockchain platform. The POC consists of three main components: (1) the web front-end layer, (2) the Ethereum network that executes the smart contract and blockchain storage aspects of the framework, and (3) the back-end database that stores off-chain interactions and data for future use with external genomic data repositories. After refinement of the POC, a community-based participatory research (CBPR) use case aligned with IDS principles was identified as a practical workflow and incorporated into the design of the POC for implementation. Conclusions: The findings from this project demonstrated the potential use of operationalizing IDS through blockchain technology with proactive and sustained engagement with Indigenous partners. Blockchain technology may have certain advantages over other data governance approaches and systems, facilitating timely oversight, shared decision-making and consent structures, and direct involvement of Indigenous communities in technology design, respecting the core principles of IDS and CBPR. Future development of the blockchain-IDS POC will need to incorporate other research practices and ethics frameworks to expand its use to other public health and biomedical research use cases.
Industrial supply chains involve multiple stakeholders, complex logistics operations, and financial transactions that require transparency, traceability, and secure coordination.Traditional supply chain systems suffer from limited transparency, the risk of data manipulation, and insufficient trust among participants.To address these challenges, this paper proposes a decentralized industrial supply chain management system implemented on an Ethereum-compatible blockchain network.The proposed architecture integrates smart contracts to automate workflows, including stakeholder registration and verification, multi-item order processing, shipment tracking, simulated delivery verification (SDV), and escrow-based conditional payment settlement.The system adopts a hybrid on-chain/off-chain storage architecture in which transactional records are maintained on-chain, while raw material and product images are stored off-chain using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).This design reduces blockchain storage overhead while preserving data integrity through cryptographic hash references.To improve operational efficiency and reduce overhead from repeated transactions, the proposed system supports multi-item batch transactions during procurement and ordering, while the logistics and settlement stages maintain per-item execution to preserve traceability and accountability.Experimental evaluation was conducted on the Celo Sepolia network to measure gas consumption and transaction fees for both batch-based and functionally equivalent per-item execution workflows under controlled conditions.The evaluation included multiple predefined workload configurations, and statistical analysis using mean and standard deviation was performed to assess execution stability.The results indicate that transaction aggregation reduces gas consumption by approximately 40-43% for raw material order creation and by 40-48% for raw material operations (addToMultipleCart).Product aggregation workflows also demonstrated measurable gas-efficiency improvements.These findings demonstrate the efficiency benefits of multi-item transaction aggregation within the proposed implementation while preserving lifecycle traceability and escrow-enabled settlement correctness.The reported results represent controlled implementation-level efficiency measurements within the proposed blockchain-based supply chain architecture.
The advent of blockchain technology has created a paradigm shift in the way digital data can be securely, transparently and decentralized managed, a paradigm that could potentially replace the longstanding centralized digital information systems. This is a full journal-grade review of blockchain as a tool to ensure trustless, immutability and decentralized data governance in a variety of important application fields. The study, which is based on a systematic review of 20 peer-reviewed publications from 2023 to 2025, explores the essential structural elements of blockchain systems: Distributed ledger structures, cryptographic hash functions, Merkle tree integrity verification, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts, and how they all contribute to removing single points of failure and institutional trust dependencies. There is a comparative study of the various public, private and consortium blockchain types, as well as the evaluation of the various consensus algorithms, such as Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). The results show that data management systems based on blockchain technology always have superior data integrity, access auditability, censorship resistance, and user data sovereignty properties compared to centralized systems, and come with trade-offs in scalability, energy efficiency, and compliance with regulations. Evidence collected for the application has come from health care organizations' record management, supply chain traceability, decentralized identity systems, Internet of Things (IoT) data integrity, an energy company data management system, and cybersecurity threat intelligence, among other contexts. Key challenges and emerging technologies, such as quantum computing systems, post quantum cryptographic standards, layer-two rollups, sharding and zero-knowledge proofs, are explored in tandem with the blockchain trilemma, GDPR compliance issues and cross-chain interoperability. The study finds that blockchain-based data management is moving from the experimental stage to becoming a core component to the digital economy's infrastructure.
Ethereum, one of the largest blockchain platforms, manages millions of dollars in digital assets daily and depends on consistent community standards and cohesive implementations to maintain network consensus. This study introduces a novel methodology for identifying and measuring temporal inconsistencies in opcode mappings across Ethereum clients and the Solidity compiler. Using this methodology, we uncover significant and previously undocumented discrepancies both among different components of Ethereum’s implementation and between theoretical specifications and practical execution behavior. We further demonstrate the potential consequences of these inconsistencies by illustrating their impact on the detection of vulnerabilities in Solidity smart contracts. Such discrepancies can substantially undermine the accuracy and reliability of vulnerability analysis, highlighting the critical need for strict consistency in Ethereum’s operational semantics. Ensuring this consistency is essential for preserving transaction security and the overall robustness of the platform.
Vabuk Pahari, B. Chandrasekaran, Johnnatan Messias, Krishna P. Gummadi · 5 authors
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a governance entity that allows its stakeholders to manage blockchain-based protocols through smart contracts. The DAO explicitly specifies how stakeholders make and enforce decisions concerning a protocol's operation in a smart contract, aptly referred to as its governance contract. The design of this governance contract, therefore, has far-reaching implications for the security (trust) and privacy (transparency) of the smart contracts managed by the DAO and its stakeholders. In this work, we (i) explicate the trust and transparency trade-offs of the design choices in implementing a DAO and (ii) highlight how poor choices introduce critical vulnerabilities, using real-world examples as case studies. To this end, we analyze $48$ public, actively used Ethereum-based DAOs that control a vast capital. We classify the design choices into a handful of key dimensions that succinctly capture how a DAO's stakeholders initiate a protocol change, vote on it, and, based on the voting outcome, execute that change. Our analyses crucially uncover a new class of attacks, which we call governance attacks, that directly exploit the fundamental design of a DAO's governance mechanisms, even if we assume bug-free implementations.
Jemima Owusu-Tweneboah, Amani Altarawneh, Deepti Gupta, Maria Luisa Figueroa
Cybersecurity and privacy frameworks such as NIST SP~800--53, ISO/IEC~27001, GDPR, and HIPAA are widely used to guide organizational security posture and regulatory compliance. In practice, however, framework adoption is often assessed through point-in-time audits, self-attestations, and fragmented evidence reviews, providing limited assurance that controls are consistently implemented, independently validated, and sustained over time, particularly in environments that rely on third-party vendors. These limitations are amplified in multi-vendor ecosystems, such as healthcare remote patient monitoring (RPM), where compliance obligations span organizational boundaries and assessments are conducted by multiple independent assessors. This paper investigates how permissioned blockchain systems can support framework implementation maturity measurement rather than static compliance verification. We propose a blockchain-based Third-Party Risk Assessment (TPRA) framework that operationalizes assessment workflows, enforces multi-party governance, and preserves longitudinal assessment state using programmable smart contracts. Building on this framework, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics and a qualitative maturity model designed to assess whether compliance controls are verifiably implemented, governed, and sustained across repeated assessment cycles.
The global healthcare supply chain is experiencing increasing challenges with respect to maintaining the security of medications, adequate storage of medications, and identifying potential issues with medications that may pose a risk to patient safety. This chapter introduces a prototype called the 'Smarter, Safe Healthcare Supply Chain.' The system brings together fast telemetry (simulating 4G and 5G), edge computing, blockchain smart contracts, and explainable anomaly detection to help stop compromised medications from reaching patients. Included in the prototype's design are an IoT temperature and location data sensing simulator; an edge service that checks the signature of a device and executes "explainable" checks; and two smart contracts associated with device tracking and alerting. Tools like latency simulation, on-chain device tracking, device allowance (i.e., allowing only those devices that have been verified via smart contracts to access the network), and audit logs allow for the prototype to demonstrate how new technologies can enhance, accelerate, and streamline operations and build trust throughout the supply chain. Some of the key results of the prototype include faster-than-anticipated response times under 5G simulated conditions, successful verification of devices (both at the edge and enterprise-level) via smart contract(s), and accurate alerting developed based on a predefined set of rules. The framework upon which the prototype is built follows the principles of Zero Trust (e.g., NIST SP 800-207A, GSMA 5G IoT Guidelines, and use case-specific Healthcare Compliance Controls). Limitations exist within the prototype (such as being a single-node blockchain and the use of rule-based alerting versus leveraging full machine learning capabilities); however, it presents a viable operational model for practical application within a regulated supply chain (e.g., pharmaceuticals). Future work will include multi-party blockchain networks, evolving AI algorithms, and demonstrating full integration of the prototype into existing regulatory workflow(s).
Abstract A secure platform for exchanging and storing agricultural data is provided via a blockchain-powered framework. By integrating edge computing, blockchain technology, and the Internet of Things (IoT) the production of crops can be boosted while using fewer natural resources. In the sector of agriculture, sensors and equipment gather various data about the landscape, which can subsequently be delivered to a server in a cloud environment. Due to its extreme fragility, these data must be securely stored and guarded from unwanted access. The core aim of this work is to propose a hybrid Reconditioned Random value-based Wombat Optimization with Adaptive Multi-scale Vision Transformer-based EfficientNet (RRWO-AMViT-ENet) model integrated with Ethereum smart contracts for secure pest detection and smart irrigation in IoT environments. The gathered agricultural images are initially stored and managed using the Ethereum blockchain. Then, node authentication is performed using the Smart Contract-based Adaptive Deep Support Vector Machine (SC-ADSVM). A Reconditioned Random value-based Wombat Optimization (RRWO) is utilized to optimize the variables of the developed SC-ADSVM. In order to perform pest detection and smart irrigation, the Adaptive Multi-scale Vision Transformer-based EfficientNet (AMViT-ENet) is used. The proposed model is implemented on the IP102-Dataset, where it obtained an accuracy of 96.39% in the pest detection operation. Thus, the proposed model provides effective results for pest detection and the smart irrigation process. From the attained results, it is concluded that the recommended strategy can provide intelligent service to the farmer.
The widespread problem of cyberbullying in today’s digital environment is made worse by the quick spread of IoT devices and the difficulties in organizing and protecting digital evidence. Traditional forensic methods are often inadequate due to their inability to provide a tamper-proof chain-of-custody and their limited scalability under high data loads. To overcome these constraints, our work makes use of innovative technologies such as a permissioned blockchain (Hyperledger Fabric), powerful encryption methods (AES-256 and RSA), and decentralized off-chain storage (IPFS). We propose an integrated, blockchain-driven forensic evidence collection framework that ensures secure, real-time evidence acquisition from diverse IoT devices, automated validation via smart contracts, and efficient, Role-Based Access Control for evidence retrieval. A hybrid consensus mechanism, combining elements of PBFT and Proof-of-Stake, enhances the system’s security and scalability while reducing processing latency and energy consumption. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves high throughput and low latency, making it a strong and reliable solution for forensic investigations in cyberbullying cases. Within our experimental scope, the framework strengthens the integrity and authenticity of digital evidence and addresses key regulatory considerations, though real-world validation remains future work.
The governance of new technology projects in remote and developing economies is frequently undermined by severe information asymmetry and fragmented telecommunications infrastructure. While theoretical public policy advocates for the deployment of distributed ledger technologies to enhance institutional design and regulatory transparency, evaluating the economic impact of these systems relies heavily on static, retrospective datasets. This paper proposes a cloud-native architectural framework utilizing Amazon Web Services to construct a real-time, serverless pipeline for telecommunications governance and blockchain integration. By deploying asynchronous Python middleware integrated with simulated smart contracts, the proposed system programmatically ingests high-frequency network telemetry and cross-border telecommunications data. The system translates these inputs into a dynamic Institutional Transparency Index, instantly identifying regulatory bottlenecks and pricing friction across public-private partnerships. Preliminary architectural evaluations demonstrate that decoupling the governance tracking from legacy, centralized state databases significantly reduces information asymmetry, providing policy researchers with a deterministic, highly scalable tool for modeling the economics of distributed ledgers in developing contexts.
Electronic voting has become an important digital governance mechanism for remote elections, institutional decision-making, shareholder voting, public consultations, and large-scale Internet-based democratic participation. Despite its growing relevance, secure electronic voting remains difficult to implement because a practical system must simultaneously preserve voter anonymity, verify voter eligibility, prevent double voting, ensure ballot integrity, support public auditability, and maintain acceptable transaction throughput. To address these challenges, this study proposes a post-quantum secure and privacy-preserving blockchain-based electronic voting framework that integrates Dilithium digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, nullifier-based double voting prevention, encrypted ballot submission, smart contract-based election rule enforcement, and a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanism. In the proposed architecture, Dilithium signatures are used for post-quantum authentication of voter transactions and validator messages, whereas the zero-knowledge proof layer is used separately to verify voter eligibility, candidate validity, credential ownership, and correct nullifier generation without revealing the voter identity or ballot choice. Dilithium verification is performed externally at the transaction authentication layer, while the zero-knowledge circuit handles privacy-preserving voting logic. Each voter locally generates a private credential and submits only a public commitment during registration, thereby reducing the risk of authority-based impersonation or identity-to-vote linkage. Smart contracts verify the proof, reject reused nullifiers, enforce voting rules, and record auditable election events on the permissioned blockchain ledger. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed prototype achieves an average throughput of 408 transactions per second and an average block finalization time of 2.18 s under stress testing. The results indicate that the framework can provide a practical balance between post-quantum security, privacy preservation, verifiability, and transaction efficiency in permissioned electronic voting environments.
Abstract: Product traceability within supply chains is a critical concern that has gained increasing attention in recent years. One promising solution to this problem is the use of Public Blockchain (PBC) technology, which offers an immutable, transparent, and decentralized ledger for storing key information such as ownership transfers and distribution records. These blockchain-based systems significantly enhance traceability by ensuring that data, once recorded, cannot be altered. However, a key challenge arises from the fact that information stored on public blockchains is freely accessible to anyone, potentially exposing sensitive distribution data. In this paper, I introduce a novel method that preserves the privacy of distribution data while maintaining high traceability in supply chain systems leveraging PBC. The proposed method utilizes encryption to safeguard sensitive data and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to allow supply chain participants to authenticate themselves without revealing private information, such as their blockchain addresses. The solution was implemented using Ethereum smart contracts and evaluated for its cost-effectiveness. The results show that the transaction fee per supply chain participant is capped at USD 2.6, demonstrating that the approach is practical for real-world deployment.
Muhammad Wahid, Shahzaib Khan, Mashhood Ali, Muhammad Hassan · 6 authors
The immutable nature of smart contracts makes it challenging to fix and patch bugs once they are deployed to a blockchain. This implies that security vulnerabilities may be exposed to possible exploitation for a longer period, necessitating comprehensive pre-deployment testing. Property-based testing combined with fuzzing has proven itself as a promising technique for uncovering vulnerabilities. Traditionally, system properties are written by human experts, which is time-consuming and consequently expensive.With the recent advancement in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ability to 'understand' natural language and code semantics, it may be possible to generate effective properties. This study, leverages state-of-the-art LLMs to generate high-quality properties for Soliditybased smart contracts. We measure the quality of the generated properties using mutation testing. Our results show that LLMs have the potential to generate high-quality properties that are close to those written by human experts. We extensively evaluate LLMs using various prompting techniques (e.g., zero shot, few shot, and prompt chaining). Overall, we find that Gemini Pro 1.5, when combined with prompt chaining, achieves the highest average mutation score of 25.99% among all studied configurations, closely approaching the human written benchmark of 31.75%. However, our per contract analysis reveals notable variance, particularly for the LibBit contract, where Gemini Pro 1.5 under prompt chaining achieves a mutation score of 74.34%, which is on par with human written properties (74.83%). This highlights that while average performance is informative, individual contract level results demonstrate that LLMs can, in some cases, match expert level property generation.
Large-scale biometric identification in outsourced settings requires two properties simultaneously: biometric templates and queries must remain protected during computation, and the encrypted similarity outputs produced by an untrusted compute node must be verifiably correct before any application result is released. Existing FHE-based biometric systems primarily address confidentiality, while practical verifiability introduces two bottlenecks in the underlying encrypted 1:N matching layer: rotation- and bandwidth-heavy similarity evaluation and the high cost of proving repeated homomorphic similarity traces. We present BioZKFHE, a framework for scalable encrypted biometric identification via verifiable homomorphic similarity evaluation that combines BGV homomorphic computation with committee-mediated proof opening/decryption and smart-contract verification of opened proof batches. To reduce encrypted storage and avoid rotation-heavy encrypted 1:N matching, we propose Single-Coefficient Multi-Value (SCMV) packing, which binds multiple quantized embedding values into each plaintext entry through base-T expansion. To make proof generation practical, we propose Parallelizable and Verifiable Similarity Computation (PVSC), which exploits the Double-CRT execution structure of BGV to decompose each blockwise similarity trace into parallel proof instances that are opened and checked before result release. Under standard lattice assumptions and explicit committee/verifier assumptions, we analyze recoverability, noise growth, confidentiality, encrypted-output integrity, and finalized-result integrity. Experiments on FaceNet and MobileFaceNet show near-lossless biometric utility, up to 67 percent encrypted-storage reduction, and about 22 to 44 seconds end-to-end proof-verified runtime for 10k to 40k templates.
This study investigates critical success factors crucial for the effective implementation of blockchain-based smart contracts in supply chain management. Through qualitative content analysis of expert interviews, diverse perspectives from industry professionals and blockchain technologists were synthesized. The findings emphasize critical dimensions such as technological infrastructure, stakeholder collaboration, regulatory compliance, data privacy, security, organizational culture, and change management. These factors collectively form a comprehensive framework essential for successful adoption. This research offers valuable guidance for organizations aiming to integrate blockchain-based smart contracts into supply chain operations. The insights derived from eight expert interviews provide strategic direction for practitioners, policymakers, and academics navigating the complexities of blockchain and smart contract technology in supply chain ecosystems.
Online disruption of financial systems is one of the most meaningful paradigmatic shifts between centralized institutional frameworks and decentralized blockchain-based infrastructure. In the present research paper, the author thoroughly reviews how blockchain technology and FinTech innovation can transform financial services, payment systems, and capital markets. Our inquiry focuses on the role of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) in mitigating such areas as transaction speed, cost reduction, improved security, and transparent audit trails. The article dwells upon the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) systems that are embedded into blockchain networks and used to offer advanced access control and privacy in a multi-cloud financial system. The main technological advancements that are identified by our research are smart contracts, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, and blockchain-based custodial solutions. We examine experimental applications that show the increase in performance in terms of transaction processing, efficiency in encryption, and validation of authorization in blockchain-enabled financial networks. The paper deals with issue of regulation, and scalability as well as integration of old financial systems. Results indicate that financial systems based on blockchain are able to cut transaction costs by 87 percent and still have the same level of cryptographic security as current banking systems. The study will add value to comprehending the best blockchain set-ups of financial services providers and give recommendations based on evidence about digital transformation strategies. Future trends are creation of interoperable blockchain networks, high-privacy preserving technologies, and regulatory frameworks that facilitate financial innovation.
Cüneyt Gürcan Akçora, Murat Kantarcioglu, Yulia R. Gel
In this chapter, you will explore the vulnerabilities and attack surfaces of blockchain systems that arise from their open, permissionless nature. You will learn how privacy and security issues manifest at different layers of blockchain architecture, including peer-to-peer networking, transaction propagation, block mining, and smart contract execution. The chapter introduces you to key privacy challenges such as identity leakage, transaction linkability, and deanonymization in UTXO and account-based systems. You will also study how adversaries can mount attacks that exploit consensus protocols, timestamp synchronization, and transaction ordering. The chapter concludes with detailed examples of smart contract vulnerabilities, including reentrancy, front-running, and oracle manipulation, and highlights the economic and technical incentives that make these attacks feasible in Decentralized Finance ecosystems.
Aircraft maintenance records are critical to airworthiness and asset valuation, yet they are often fragmented across stakeholders, creating verification bottlenecks and information asymmetry that may suppress aircraft residual value. This paper proposes a blockchain-anchored decentralized application (dApp) based on a dual-layer architecture that combines InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)-based off-chain storage with on-chain anchoring of Content Identifiers (CIDs) and selected metadata. With respect to off-chain file size, the on-chain payload per record remains $\mathcal{O}(1)$, compared with $\mathcal{O}(n)$ for direct on-chain file storage. The architecture incorporates metadata and traceability controls informed by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) electronic recordkeeping guidance. The main contribution is an economic framework that models the relationship between tamper-evident maintenance-record provenance, audit workflow duration, aircraft residual value, and operational cost. In a 7-kB experiment conducted on the BNB Smart Chain testnet, CID anchoring reduced gas consumption by 93.9\% compared with direct on-chain storage. Under explicitly stated scenario assumptions, the audit-cost model indicates potential savings of more than 90\%. These results support the technical feasibility of the prototype and illustrate its economic potential, while the estimated financial benefits remain to be validated using operational data.
Blockchain and its killer applications, particularly decentralized finance (DeFi), are gaining widespread adoption, with over 5,200 DeFi projects deployed on mainstream blockchains as of January 2026. At the same time, security risks in DeFi are becoming increasingly serious. However, existing DeFi detection tools usually cover only specific attack types, exhibiting severely limited detection coverage. In this paper, we argue that an effective way to address this gap is to pre-screen vulnerable instances from large volumes of smart contract functions and call sequences. This is motivated by a key phenomenon we term "perilous temporal asymmetry". Inspired by this, we propose DeFiScreener, the first automated pre-screening framework for DeFi attacks that uses historical exploit cases to identify potentially vulnerable functions and call sequences. Given the full source code of a target project, DeFiScreener builds Function Call Trees (FCTs) and generates semantic embeddings for each function using a large language model (LLM), allowing both program structure and function intent to be analyzed together. It then applies a dual-level screening process. At the function level, function embeddings are matched against an Attack Pattern Library of historically exploited functions. At the sequence level, the proposed Attack Pattern Oriented Monte Carlo Tree Search (APO-MCTS) efficiently explores the FCTs and screens vulnerable call sequences. The identified candidates are ultimately passed to an LLM for further interpretive and security analysis. We empirically evaluate the DeFiScreener over datasets comprising 207 real-world DeFi attack incidents. Experimental results demonstrate that DeFiScreener achieves a remarkable 98.55% recall and 84.30% precision in attack pre-screening.
Ethereum non-fungible tokens (NFTs) implement ownership, transfer, authorization, and metadata operations through smart contracts, making contract vulnerabilities a direct risk to digital assets. Existing static analyzers provide efficient rule-based screening but can struggle with application-specific logic, whereas unconstrained large language model analysis may be distracted by irrelevant code or produce inconsistent outputs. We present a vulnerability-detection method that combines vulnerability-focused code slicing, an ERC-721-oriented knowledge base, and constrained DeepSeek analysis. Regular-expression patterns locate candidate statements for reentrancy, integer overflow or underflow, and timestamp dependence. A structure-aware context-window algorithm then extracts line-numbered code slices. DeepSeek analyzes each slice using explicit decision rules and a fixed output schema, and the resulting records support automated batch processing. On 450 NFT contract samples, the full configuration produced 437 positive labels, corresponding to a reported positive-label rate of 97.1%. Removing the external knowledge base reduced this rate to 87.11%, while analyzing complete contracts without the knowledge base reduced it to 73.78%. These results indicate that focused code context and domain constraints materially affect the detector's reported output.
Cüneyt Gürcan Akçora, Murat Kantarcioglu, Yulia R. Gel
In this chapter, you will learn how to write, deploy, and interact with smart contracts using Solidity. We will cover fundamental data types, control structures, functions, and contract organization. You will understand the Ethereum Virtual Machine, how contracts send and receive Ether, and how to use events, modifiers, and visibility specifiers. The chapter also introduces reference types like arrays and mappings, common security practices, and techniques for optimizing gas usage.
K.E. Otebaliyeva, Zh. T. Shaimukhanova, Z. A. Erzhanova, A. .K. Adibayeva
A smart contract is more than a technical phenomenon; it raises legal questions about intent, transaction form, and obligation performance in a digital environment. Kazakhstani law, including the Civil Code and the Law on Electronic Documents, provides a basis for digital tools in contracts, recognizing electronic forms and the principles of freedom of contract. AIFC law further validates automated systems. However, the lack of a conceptual definition in civil legislation creates challenges for public law. This article argues that smart contracts should not be viewed as standalone contract types but through a functional approach: as either a form of expressing intent or an automated performance mechanism. Special focus is placed on criminal proceedings. The authors demonstrate that the absence of a clear definition complicates distinguishing civil torts from cybercrimes and hinders the use of code as evidence or the seizure of digital assets. The core issue is the discrepancy between traditional civil law constructs, blockchain logic, and current procedural evidentiary standards in Kazakhstan.
The digital transformation of commerce has introduced smart contracts—self-executing, code-based agreements on blockchain infrastructure—that challenge traditional legal doctrines by automating performance and minimizing intermediaries. While gaining global traction across finance and supply chains, their legal status within Indian commercial law remains doctrinally fragmented. This article critically examines whether existing Indian statutory frameworks, particularly the Indian Contract Act, 1872, and the Information Technology Act, 2000, can accommodate these blockchain-enabled arrangements. It interrogates foundational legal questions surrounding automated offer and acceptance, algorithmic consent, the enforceability of self-executing obligations, and the evidentiary admissibility of decentralized records. Furthermore, the study analyzes the technological anatomy of smart contracts, distinguishing between legal contracts expressed in code and autonomous software protocols, to highlight legal complexities that conventional doctrines fail to address. Through a comparative examination of regulatory developments in the US, UK, Singapore, EU, and UAE, the article highlights an international movement toward the formal recognition of blockchain contracting. Against this backdrop, it argues that India’s existing legal framework, though interpretively flexible, is structurally inadequate for resolving the jurisdictional, liability, and consumer protection challenges posed by algorithmic transactions. The study concludes that smart contracts necessitate a paradigm shift in commercial jurisprudence. India must move beyond mere interpretive accommodation and develop a coherent legislative architecture that balances technological innovation with legal certainty, contractual fairness, and commercial accountability. Keywords: Smart Contracts; Indian Contract Law; Blockchain Technology; Algorithmic Transactions; Commercial Jurisprudence; Digital Contracts.