Blockchain Papers

David W. Krause

No abstract is available for this record.

Ricardo Pasquini

No abstract is available for this record.

R. T. Tewari, Bhagwati Prasad Pande

ABSTRACT Can virtual ownership redefine our digital economy? As online communities expand, a new digital economy is emerging, driven by Non‐Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are unique digital assets that represent ownership of virtual items such as artwork, collectibles and gaming assets. However, the rapidly evolving NFT landscape presents several challenges. The present study investigates the transformative impact of NFTs on digital ownership and market dynamics while addressing the challenges and opportunities within virtual economies. The utilisation of NFTs is explored, focusing on aspects such as ownership, valuation, and market behaviour. A comprehensive literature review and analysis of marketplace data from Cryptoslam's API are conducted to uncover key trends and dynamics. Findings reveal that the NFT market is highly speculative; with value concentrated in a small number of high‐priced NFTs. Aesthetic and emotional appeal significantly influence these valuations, often driven by hype rather than intrinsic value. Despite these challenges, NFTs foster immersive experiences and personalised identities, revolutionising digital ownership and commerce. This study underscores the need for innovation, interoperability, and robust governance to ensure the sustainable growth of the NFT ecosystem. By addressing market manipulation and regulatory concerns, NFTs can continue to shape a thriving digital economy.

Engelberta Vania, Shuzlina Abdul-Rahman, Wahyu Wibowo

The rapid growth of the cryptocurrency market has raised the need for an effective model to predict opening prices and assist investors and policymakers in decision-making. Traditional econometric models often struggle with the high volatility and nonlinear patterns inherent in digital asset prices. Long short-term memory networks are effective at recognizing complex patterns, yet they lack interpretability. This study bridges this gap by integrating the error correction model with long short-term memory to improve prediction of Ethereum’s opening price. Using daily price data from January 2018 to June 2024, the model captures both long-term equilibrium relationships and short-term fluctuations, resulting in more accurate forecasts. The findings confirm a significant long-run equilibrium relationship between Bitcoin and Ethereum prices. The integrated model outperforms standalone models, by achieving a mean absolute error of 46.76, a mean squared error of 5,544.05, and an R-squared of 88%. This study contributes to both econometric and deep learning literature, highlighting Bitcoin’s influence on Ethereum, and offering a practical framework for financial forecasting. Future research could expand this work by incorporating additional macroeconomic variables, exploring alternative deep learning architectures, and testing the robustness of the model across time and market conditions.

Rebeca Herrero Morant

No abstract is available for this record.

Vanessa Villanueva Collao

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) emerged with the promise of eliminating traditional financial intermediaries and hierarchies, replacing them with trustless, automated, and decentralized systems. However, the reality of DeFi governance shows that disintermediation does not eliminate conflicts of interest or the need for trust. Cryptoenterprises—financial Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)—operate without conventional governance structures such as boards of directors or managerial oversight, relying instead on code-based mechanisms. This absence of internal governance frameworks creates fertile ground for misaligned incentives, governance opacity, and unchecked internal controls, ultimately exacerbating conflicts between insiders (cryptopromoters) and investors (cryptoasset holders). This Article examines the emerging role of cryptogatekeepers: a new category of cryptointermediaries that counterbalances these governance failures. It explores the structural deficiencies of cryptoenterprises, including the absence of internal monitoring mechanisms, and identifies the conflicts. The analysis highlights how cryptopromoters—those in control of DeFi protocols—retain significant decision-making power while obscuring accountability, which leads to agency problems reminiscent of traditional finance, sans regulatory safeguards. By assessing the function of cryptointermediaries as potential de facto governance enforcers, this Article argues that cryptogatekeepers can introduce a layer of oversight that compensates for the current governance void in DeFi. It outlines best practices for mitigating conflicts of interest, enhancing disclosure standards, and improving the monitoring of cryptointermediaries. The Article also considers transnational regulatory approaches to bolster accountability in DeFi by proposing mechanisms such as cryptointermediary registries, mutual recognition of licensed cryptointermediaries, and standardized reporting frameworks. Ultimately, this Article contends that while DeFi presents an innovative model for financial services, it cannot escape fundamental governance challenges. The rise of cryptogatekeepers suggests that some level of reintermediation is inevitable and necessary to balance decentralization with investor protection and market integrity.

Jungsuk Han, Jongsub Lee, Tao Li

No abstract is available for this record.

Cristiano Bellavitis, Paul P. Momtaz

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) crowdfunds to invest in various projects. The decentralization feature of DAOs submits that decision-making is a collective democratic action of all DAO members. The autonomy feature of DAOs suggests that decision-making is an algorithmic process governed by self-executing smart contracts. However, in reality, DAOs are neither perfectly decentralized nor completely autonomous. Our empirical analysis shows that deviations from the ideals of decentralization and autonomy are costly. Non-algorithmic off-chain voting governance of decision-making leads to a substantial discount in DAO value. Non-decentralized aspects such as large voting coalitions also affect DAO value. Interaction effects are also shown. The study implies that platform governance design choices are crucial for DAO success. • DAOs with off-chain voting raise 87% less funding. • Larger communities worsen the valuation hit from off-chain voting. • Big voting coalitions deepen off-chain governance drawbacks. • On-chain transparency is key to DAO success—especially in large technical teams.

İnci Toral, Selcen Öztürkcan

This article examines how “brandless by design” strategies in Web3, particularly among digital nomads and creators of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), reshape consumer behavior, market intermediation, and governance. Using a structured thematic synthesis of interdisciplinary academic and gray literature, we integrate five analytical lenses: affordances (provenance, programmability, composability, and token-gated access), signaling (credibility through on-chain histories and disclosures), consumer identity (the extended self in digital ownership and display), parasocial interaction (attachment without human embodiment), and governance (smart contract terms, platform policies, and community charters). Three primary themes emerge. First, creative autonomy and disintermediation, as NFTs enable direct creator-to-consumer exchange and programmable provenance. Second, engagement and authenticity, as communities cohere around transparent access and shared utility rather than traditional brand logos. Third, sustainability and decentralization, which highlight tensions around environmental impact, intellectual property, cultural legitimacy, and consumer protection. Cross-cutting subthemes, including parasocial credibility, accessibility and cultural sensitivity, and brand control versus co-creation, explain why brandlessness can appear simultaneously intimate and precarious. We propose a conceptual framework that links brandlessness to decentralized identity and on-chain governance, clarifying when provenance signals, token-bound permissions, and community norms substitute effectively for legacy brand cues. The review concludes with implications for practice and policy, such as standardized licenses, clear disclosures, participatory design, on-chain royalty registries, and interoperable memberships that balance value capture with oversight. Future research should prioritize cross-cultural adoption, sustainability auditing that incorporates off-chain infrastructure, and mixed-methods designs combining on-chain telemetry with ethnography and experiments to assess trust, authenticity, and wellbeing.

경상국립대학교 강사, 법학박사, Seungrae Kim, Inbang Song

No abstract is available for this record.

Олена Шатілова, Nikita Smohorzhevskyi

The article examines the evolution of venture business from its inception to contemporary trends driven by digital transformation. It outlines the key stages of development, starting from the mid-20th century and explores the influence of Web 3.0 innovations, including blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), on investment processes. The structure of venture funds is analyzed in detail, highlighting the roles of key stakeholders, funding mechanisms such as SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity), SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens), and convertible notes, as well as the stages of the venture lifecycle. The study emphasizes how emerging approaches to asset tokenization and the implementation of smart contracts are transforming capital management models and contributing to the globalization of venture business. Special attention is given to the legal aspects of venture investments, particularly the role of the Term Sheet in shaping deal conditions. Furthermore, the article discusses how digital technologies reshape traditional practices, facilitate cross-border investments, and enable new stakeholder collaboration. It underscores the potential of Web 3.0 to democratize access to venture capital, create innovative funding opportunities, and foster sustainable growth in the global venture ecosystem. By examining case studies and providing a comprehensive overview of current practices, the study concludes that the integration of Web 3.0 technologies is not only revolutionizing venture capital processes but also redefining the future of the investment landscape.

Jia Fu, Jade Zheng, Florence Li

In the rapidly evolving landscape of GameFi, a fusion of gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi), there exists a critical need to enhance player engagement and economic interaction within gaming ecosystems. Our GameFi ecosystem aims to fundamentally transform this landscape by integrating advanced embodied AI agents into GameFi platforms. These AI agents, developed using cutting-edge large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and Claude AI, are capable of proactive, adaptive, and contextually rich interactions with players. By going beyond traditional scripted responses, these agents become integral participants in the game's narrative and economic systems, directly influencing player strategies and in-game economies. We address the limitations of current GameFi platforms, which often lack immersive AI interactions and mechanisms for community engagement or creator monetization. Through the deep integration of AI agents with blockchain technology, we establish a consensus-driven, decentralized GameFi ecosystem. This ecosystem empowers creators to monetize their contributions and fosters democratic collaboration among players and creators. Furthermore, by embedding DeFi mechanisms into the gaming experience, we enhance economic participation and provide new opportunities for financial interactions within the game. Our approach enhances player immersion and retention and advances the GameFi ecosystem by bridging traditional gaming with Web3 technologies. By integrating sophisticated AI and DeFi elements, we contribute to the development of more engaging, economically robust, and community-centric gaming environments. This project represents a significant advancement in the state-of-the-art in GameFi, offering insights and methodologies that can be applied throughout the gaming industry.

Yury Yanovich, Maksim Shuklin, Yash Madhwal

No abstract is available for this record.

Francisca Duarte Camelo, Fábio Duarte

Abstract Initial coin offerings (ICOs) have emerged as a new form of digital and decentralized finance. They have the potential to disrupt conventional finance sources and expand capital-raising alternatives. However, their decentralized nature, lack of regulation, and market complexity, along with fraud events, have led to a crisis of trust. This crisis jeopardizes firms' fundraising success. This study examines the role of specialized venture capitalists (VCs) in overcoming transparency issues and restoring trust in the market and ICO issuers. Based on data from 191 ICOs, our results show that VC-backed firms have higher ICO success. This success is more pronounced for firms affiliated with VCs specializing in blockchain technologies, especially if ICO issuers are opaque and riskier. Specialist VC affiliation leads investors to buy more tokens. This effect increases with additional affiliations with other specialized VCs. For early-stage firms with a product/service, generalist VC affiliation also plays a certification role, enhancing the probability of ICO success.

Yongxu Han, Meng Wang

Vulnerabilities in EOSIO smart contracts have caused significant economic losses. Although some approaches have been proposed to detect these vulnerabilities, they often face several limitations, such as inefficiency in path exploration, insufficient diversity of test cases, and path explosion, which col-lectively reduce code coverage and detection accuracy. Currently, there is a lack of hybrid fuzzing techniques specifically designed for EOSIO smart contracts to address these issues. To fill this gap, we propose a coordination-driven hybrid fuzzing approach for discovering vulnerabilities in EOSIO smart contracts. Our method employs a scheduling strategy using an online linear regression model based on stochastic gradient descent to reduce the edge redundancy detection in hybrid fuzzing and enhance the efficiency of path exploration during symbolic execution. Additionally, a synchronization strategy based on constraint domain abstraction and random walk sampling ensures uniform sam-pling in simplified scenarios, thus improving code coverage and mitigating path explosion. Furthermore, we design a function-level mutation strategy to rapidly diversify test cases in the seed pool, facilitating the efficiency of detecting vulnerabilities. We implement our method in a tool named CDHF and evaluate it on 3,440 smart contracts. Experimental results indicate that CDHF can detect vulnerabilities more precisely and efficiently, achieving an approximate 20 % improvement in code coverage compared to WASAI.

Chris Liu, Peter Bodorik, Dawn Jutla

Research on blockchains addresses multiple issues, with one being writing smart contracts. In our previous research we described methodology and a tool to generate, in automated fashion, smart contracts from BPMN models. The generated smart contracts provide support for multi-step transactions that facilitate repair/upgrade of smart contracts. In this paper we show how the approach is used to support collaborations via smart contracts for companies ranging from SMEs with little IT capabilities to companies with IT using blockchain smart contracts. Furthermore, we also show how the approach is used for certain applications to generate smart contracts by a BPMN modeler who does not need any knowledge of blockchain technology or smart contract development - thus we are hoping to facilitate democratization of smart contracts and blockchain technology.

Keyaba Gohil, Krisha Darji, Ayushi Shah, Rajesh Gupta · 6 authors

There has been a major change in the financial environment with the recent transition of traditional banking systems towards Decentralized Finance (DeFi). A decentralized alternative that includes DeFi, lessens conventional financial institutions’ drawbacks and improves privacy, transparency, transaction speed, and worldwide accessibility. The work presented here shows an Intelligent NFT-Backed Loans Framework for valuing and managing risk in the DeFi ecosystem. The architecture uses blockchain technology, smart contracts, and artificial intelligence to assure transaction security and integrity. In DeFi, we use Google Colaboratory to build a framework and evaluate its performance across five crossvalidation folds. With a maximum accuracy of 87.35 %, the framework demonstrates its efficacy and consistency over a wide range of data subsets. Using performance evaluation over 5 cross folds for training and validation data, this model enhances loan transaction security by identifying benign nodes for efficient valuation and compliance. Performance evaluation for DeFi extends to training and validation accuracy and loss over 5 folds, and also testing accuracy for 5 folds. This methodology maintains the integrity and security of NFT-backed loans by detecting unauthorized nodes on Proof of Stake permissionless blockchains.

Ilan Alon, Andreas Sauge Berthelsen, Espen Bjellerås, Bernardo Silva-Rêgo

No abstract is available for this record.

Miracle Agholor, Shaheen Khatoon, Mhd Saeed Sharif

This article discusses the creation of a decentralized healthcare crowdfunding platform using Thirdweb technology. It explores the growth of crowdfunding in healthcare emphasizing its role in funding treatments from various sources. Multiple existing fundraising platforms are identified to understand their suitability for medical research and treatment to carry on funding campaigns. The goal is to develop a decentralized medical funding application for research and treatment that enables researchers to create fundraising campaigns on the Ethereum blockchain while ensuring transparent and auditable usage of funds through smart contracts. The study's main contributions include a development process for healthcare crowdfunding platforms, enhanced security through audited smart contracts, improved scalability for global initiatives and a user-friendly interface to encourage broader usage. As proof-of-concept validity, the fundraising application was deployed to blockchain and can be accessed by the public.

Mojtaba Eshghie, Viktor Åryd, Cyrille Artho, Martin Monperrus

Structured code differencing is the act of comparing the hierarchical structure of code via its abstract syntax tree (AST) to capture modifications. AST-based source code differencing enables tasks such as vulnerability detection and automated repair where traditional line-based differencing falls short. We introduce SoliDiffy, the first AST differencing tool for Solidity smart contracts with the ability to generate an edit script that soundly shows the structural differences between two smart-contracts using insert, delete, update, move operations. In our evaluation on 353,262 contract pairs, SoliDiffy achieved a 96.1% diffing success rate, surpassing the state-of-the-art, and produced significantly shorter edit scripts. Additional experiments on 925 real-world commits further confirmed its superiority compared to Git line-based differencing. SoliDiffy provides accurate representations of smart contract evolution even in the existence of multiple complex modifications to the source code. SoliDiffy is made publicly available at https://github.com/mojtaba-eshghie/SoliDiffy.

Daniel Hoang, Sebastian Gatzer, Martin Ruckes

We analyze a unique chief financial officer (CFO) survey data set to examine capital allocation in firms. Top management is aware of agency and information problems at the divisional level and organizes the budgeting process to counteract managerial opportunism, employing systems of interconnected measures, including layers of approval, divisional budgets, reporting requirements, and compensation schemes. When making funding decisions, top management relies heavily on top-level nonfinancial information, such as the assessment of divisional managers’ abilities. However, substantial parts of the capital budget do not require top management approval as firms trade off the benefits and costs of decentralization, thereby deviating from the traditional paradigm of decentralized project initiation but centralized project approval. Even firms with active internal capital markets tilt capital allocation toward relatively even distributions, reflecting the use of capital allocation as a credible communication device. We also find that within-firm agency problems may result in capital rationing, that is, divisions’ restricted access to internal capital. CFOs also believe that integrating multiple businesses into an internal capital market results in tangible financial benefits, predominantly lower costs of capital and higher debt capacities. Thus, our findings also support coinsurance arguments suggesting that internal capital markets may improve access to external financing. This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance. Funding: This work was supported by the BBBank Karlsruhe, Wissenschaftsförderung der Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, and Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (Karlsruhe House of Young Scientists). Publishing fees were supported by the “Funding Programme Open Access Publishing” of the University of Hohenheim. Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02755 .

Minal Shukla, Biswaranjan Acharya, Asik Rahaman Jamader

The term “ledger development” might sound like an arcane subject, but it lies at the heart of blockchain innovation. Ledgers are no longer confined to a simple record of financial transactions; they have grown into a distributed, tamper-resistant, and transparent foundation for a wide array of applications. These applications are not only transforming the financial sector but also extending their reach into supply chains, healthcare, real estate, and beyond. In this exciting era, the future of ledger development takes center stage, offering a glimpse into a world where information is not just stored but secured, shared, and harnessed with unparalleled efficiency. At the heart of this transformation are smart contracts. These self-executing, code-based agreements have the potential to eliminate intermediaries, automate complex processes, and ensure trust without relying on centralized authorities. In the world of blockchain, smart contracts are the catalysts for change, empowering individuals and organizations to streamline their operations, reduce costs, and enhance security.

Dat Tien Nguyen, Dung Cam Huynh, Tran Bao Anh Nguyen

The Industrial Revolution 4.0 and modern technology have had a significant impact on Vietnam’s economy. One of the most notable developments is the emergence of blockchain technology. “Smart contracts” or “virtual contracts” have become an important term on the Blockchain platform, offering many advantages and being widely deployed in areas such as finance, business, trade, and insurance. Although smart contracts have potential benefits, businesses are still hesitant to establish them. The article employs analytical methods and synthesizes data to provide evaluative insights. Additionally, this article analyzes the concept and characteristics of smart contracts, the trend of applying smart contracts in some countries worldwide, and provides suggestions for Vietnamese businesses on how to apply smart contracts, along with notes and recommendations.

Ido Sadeh, Moran Ofir

Blockchain-based fundraising transforms the way issuers raise capital from the public, promising to reduce transaction costs, expand financial access, and reshape issuer-investor interactions. Despite these promises, the blockchain finance market is currently plagued by severe asymmetric information and is rife with fraudulent and low-quality issuers who exploit this friction. This chapter explores the reasons for the severe asymmetric information in this market and discusses the extent to which signaling and analysts can address it. It suggests that the effectiveness of signaling is limited due to the low costs of producing and disseminating signals and investors' inability to verify biased signals ex ante and punish biased signals ex post. These limitations make analysts a vital source for reducing asymmetric information but they, too, appear to suffer from significant problems – ranging from conflicts of interest to lack of transparency to low competence and expertise – which hinder their effectiveness in reducing asymmetric information. The chapter concludes with the policy implications arising from these observations, which can also guide policy-makers in addressing emerging blockchain-based fundraising mechanisms, such as non-fungible token (NFT) offerings.