As blockchain technology evolves to support a wide range of Web3 services, seamless interoperability between heterogeneous blockchain platforms has emerged as a key technical challenge. Existing studies mainly address interoperability in homogeneous environments, often neglecting critical platform-specific factors such as consensus mechanisms, asset models, and block generation parameters. Additionally, current standards by ISO and ITU-T define architectural frameworks but fall short in offering practical guidance for real-world implementation. This paper introduces a practical gateway-based interoperability framework designed to support dynamic and policy-driven interactions across diverse blockchain networks. The proposed architecture decouples interoperability logic from blockchain-specific interfaces, enabling modular scalability and flexible integration. Interoperability policies are defined with respect to consensus trust levels, transaction types, and asset compatibility to ensure atomicity and consistency in cross-chain operations. To validate the approach, we implemented a cross-chain asset transfer scenario between Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Besu (Private Ethereum). The case study demonstrates high success rates, low latency, and consistent data integrity, confirming the framework’s practical applicability in Web3 environments. Future work will explore enhanced support for asynchronous execution, trust-based transaction control, and regulatory compliance in cross-jurisdiction blockchain interactions.
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.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly framed as a driver of economic transformation, yet its capacity to alleviate poverty in the Global South remains contested. This article introduces the notion of AI Economics—the political economy of value creation, extraction, and redistribution in AI systems—to interrogate h ow innovation agendas intersect with structural inequalities. This article examines how Social Innovation (SI) systems, when coupled with decentralized Web3 technologies such as blockchain, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and data cooperatives, may challenge data monopolies, redistribute economic gains, and support inclusive development. Drawing on Action Research (AR) conducted during the AI4SI International Summer School in Donostia-San Sebastián, this article compares two contrasting ecosystems: (i) the Established AI4SI Ecosystem, marked by centralized governance and uneven benefits, and (ii) the Decentralized Web3 Emerging Ecosystem, which promotes community-driven innovation, data sovereignty, and alternative economic models. Findings underscore AI’s dual economic role: while it can expand digital justice, service provision, and empowerment, it also risks reinforcing dependency and inequality where infrastructures and governance remain weak. This article concludes that embedding AI Economics in context-sensitive, decentralized social innovation systems—aligned with ethical governance and the SDGs—is essential for realizing AI’s promise of poverty alleviation in the Global South.
The Blockchain Revolution [1] is an illuminating, critically important manifesto for the next digital age.Blockchain and crypto have drastically altered the way people look at the Internet and finance over the years.DApps (decentralized Applications) are an interesting and socially important field that has emerged with the Blockchain revolution.In this paper, we discuss how Web3-based crypto wallet interacts with decentralized applications and how these wallets are different from Blockchain-based crypto wallets.Today, cryptos are considered an asset in this world, however, managing these assets seems to be a hassle.The paper will focus on different aspects of different wallets, both Web3 and traditional blockchain-based wallet (non-Web3), and understand the importance and functionality of each wallet.Finally, we will address the challenges and future aspects of these wallets in an increasingly decentralized network.The paper will revolve around crypto wallets and will explain how smart contracts act as a bridge between blockchain and decentralized applications.Furthermore, we will discuss how Web3 and decentralization can be a powerful tool for this world, if used ethically.
‘ReFi’ is a rapidly emerging movement in the web3 space that seeks to leverage blockchain technology and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to deliver positive real-world impact. While ReFi is short for regenerative finance, regenerative practitioners query the regenerative claims of the movement. This perspective article explains why the regenerative claims of the ReFi movement are under scrutiny and highlights the implications for the Global Commons if the movement does not adhere to regenerative principles. Given that ReFi is a blockchain-enabled movement, the impact of ReFi on the Global Commons is implicitly a blockchain-related concern. This article provides a regenerative practitioner’s perspective on the ReFi movement as a point of reference for blockchain practitioners in the ReFi movement seeking to be a force for good. Long-standing research in ecological economics highlights the negative impacts of over-financialization and commoditization on the natural world. Given that blockchain technology enables more of the world’s natural assets to become commoditized, securitized, and collateralized than ever before, the article asserts that DeFi’s drive to financialize everything could make the Global Commons the next, and final, commodity frontier. It also asserts that the ReFi movement has the potential to reverse this trend if it can genuinely adhere to the regenerative paradigm.
This article investigates how Web3 decentralization unfolds in practice and asks two guiding questions: (i) How democratic are decentralized governance systems in practice? (ii) Under what institutional conditions can technological decentralization translate into social inclusion? Based on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2025) across Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., Europe, and the Global South, this study draws on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and comparative analysis of seven ecosystems—Ethereum, MakerDAO, Uniswap, Mastodon, Celo, Grassroots Economics, and GoodDollar. The findings show that participation asymmetries are structural: token-based governance is dominated by a small group of technically skilled or capital-rich actors, while voter turnout often remains below ten percent. Intermediaries such as foundations, developers, NGOs, and cooperatives are indispensable for coordination, contradicting the idea of hierarchy-free decentralization. In contrast, projects that institutionalize clear membership, monitoring, and accountability—particularly in cooperative and federated settings—display stronger democratic resilience. Comparative evidence also reveals oligarchic consolidation in Global North ecosystems and infrastructural exclusion in the Global South. These results substantiate what Richard R. Nelson termed “the Moon and the Ghetto” paradox: extraordinary technical innovation without corresponding social progress. Interpreted through innovation systems theory, the study concludes that advancing decentralized technologies requires parallel investment in mission-oriented institutions that ensure participation, equity, and accountability in digital infrastructures.
Igor Calzada, Géza Németh, Mohammed Salah Al-Radhi
As generative AI (GenAI) technologies proliferate, ensuring trust and transparency in digital ecosystems becomes increasingly critical, particularly within democratic frameworks. This article examines decentralized Web3 mechanisms—blockchain, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and data cooperatives—as foundational tools for enhancing trust in GenAI. These mechanisms are analyzed within the framework of the EU’s AI Act and the Draghi Report, focusing on their potential to support content authenticity, community-driven verification, and data sovereignty. Based on a systematic policy analysis, this article proposes a multi-layered framework to mitigate the risks of AI-generated misinformation. Specifically, as a result of this analysis, it identifies and evaluates seven detection techniques of trust stemming from the action research conducted in the Horizon Europe lighthouse project called Enfield: (i) federated learning for decentralized AI detection, (ii) blockchain-based provenance tracking, (iii) Zero-Knowledge Proofs for content authentication, (iv) DAOs for crowdsourced verification, (v) AI-powered digital watermarking, (vi) explainable AI (XAI) for content detection, and (vii) Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML). By leveraging these approaches, the framework strengthens AI governance through peer-to-peer (P2P) structures while addressing the socio-political challenges of AI-driven misinformation. Ultimately, this research contributes to the development of resilient democratic systems in an era of increasing technopolitical polarization.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a rapidly evolving blockchain technology that offers a new perspective on financial services through Web3 applications. DeFi offers developers the flexibility to create financial services using smart contracts, leading to a lack of standardized protocols and challenges in applying traditional finance models for risk assessment, especially in the early stages of adoption. The Maker protocol is a prominent DeFi platform known for its diverse functionalities, including loan services. This study focuses on analyzing the risk associated with Maker's loan portfolio by developing a risk model based on multiple Brownian motions and passage levels, with Brownian motions representing different collateral types and passage levels representing users' collateralization ratios. Through numerical experiments using artificial and real data, we evaluate the model's effectiveness in assessing risk within the loan portfolio. While our findings demonstrate the model's potential for assessing risk within a single DeFi project, it is important to acknowledge that the model's assumptions may not be fully applicable to real-world data. This research underscores the importance of developing project-specific risk assessment models for individual DeFi projects and encourages further exploration of other DeFi protocols.
Adrian Micu, Alexandru Căpățînă, Mihaela Muntean, Mihaela Muntean · 6 authors
This paper explores the matchmaking between augmented reality (AR) and Web3 technologies within the context of ecotourism, providing a bibliometric analysis of the research landscape to understand how these digital innovations are empowering sustainable tourism practices.Using data from the Web of Science Core Collection, we conducted a targeted search that provided the key themes and clusters for the research.The findings reveal four primary clusters: AR and Metaverse in immersive tourism experiences, decentralization and security in community-driven tourism management, AI-enhanced AR for ecotourists' engagement, and blockchain outcomes for ecotourism initiatives.This study contributes to the literature by clarifying the roles of AR and Web3 in promoting responsible tourism, fostering trust, and empowering local communities through decentralized models.
Ethereum, as one of the most active cryptocurrency trading platforms, has garnered significant academic interest due to its transparent and accessible transaction data. In recent years, phishing scams have emerged as a serious criminal activity on Ethereum. Although most studies model Ethereum account transactions as networks and analyze them using traditional machine learning or network representation learning techniques, these approaches often rely solely on the latest static transaction records or use manually designed features while neglecting transaction histories, thus failing to fully capture the dynamic interactions and potential trading patterns between accounts. This article introduces an innovative multiperspective cascaded dynamic graph neural network model named DMPCG, which extracts phishing transaction data from authoritative databases like blockchain explorers to construct transaction network graphs. The model elevates the analysis from the microscopic features of nodes to the macroscopic dynamics of the entire network, integrating the attributes of static snapshot graphs with the evolution of dynamic trading networks, significantly enhancing the accuracy of phishing detection. Experimental results demonstrate that the DMPCG method achieves an impressive precision of 92.6% and an F1-score of 90.9%, outperforming existing baseline models and traditional subgraph sampling techniques.
В статье рассматривается проблема системного разрыва в экосистеме Web3, проявившегося на фоне стремительного роста DeFi и числа пользователей: масштабирование выявило низкое качество пользовательского опыта, выражающееся в высоком оттоке новичков после первой транзакции и связанное с когнитивной перегрузкой интерфейсов, непрозрачностью комиссий и дефицитом персонализированных сценариев. В качестве решения предлагается концепция и архитектура интеллектуального слоя-посредника (AI Middleware), интегрируемого между пользовательским контуром и блокчейн-инфраструктурой. Его ключевая функция – автоматизированная реконструкция и формализация пользовательских намерений в парадигме intent-centric, где управляемым объектом выступает цель операции, а не набор низкоуровневых действий. Для интерпретации намерений предполагается применение методов машинного обучения, включая кластеризацию поведенческих паттернов и графовые нейронные сети для моделирования связей между адресами, протоколами и последовательностями операций. На основе исторических данных, а также результатов исследований российских научных центров (ИТМО, ВШЭ) обосновывается, что внедрение AI Middleware повышает удержание за счет снижения порога входа и неопределенности, и сокращает транзакционные издержки благодаря более точному выбору маршрутов и параметров исполнения с учетом контекста, и типологии намерений.
Contemporarily, blockchain techniques have been developed rapidly. This study describes the development of a blockchain-based website designed to display cryptocurrency information securely and transparently. The site utilizes Ethereum and smart contracts to ensure data immutability and transaction transparency. The front end is developed using the React framework to enhance the user experience, and the back end uses Web3.js for real-time blockchain interaction. A detailed case study of the cryptocurrency demo evaluated the performance of the website and the practical application of blockchain technology. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of blockchain in securely managing and displaying sensitive financial data. In addition, the study highlights blockchain's potential to revolutionize fintech infrastructure by improving security and transparency, which are essential for the dissemination of financial information. These results makes a significant contribution to the use of blockchain in web development, drawing a blueprint for future research directions with a focus on optimizing transaction processes and improving user accessibility. Overall, the study demonstrates the transformative potential of blockchain technology in digital transactions and sets the stage for future innovation in this rapidly evolving field.
Airdrops represent a pivotal strategic instrument for Web3 projects, serving to distribute free tokens and motivate early adoption. However, the popularity of these tokens has fueled the emergence of airdrop hunters—individuals who exploit multiple transactions to acquire disproportionate amounts of tokens unfairly. This phenomenon threatens the integrity and fairness of the Web3 community. Current detection methods struggle with high false-positive rates, harming legitimate users, and require significant computational resources for training. Furthermore, these methods face challenges in adapting to the evolving tactics of airdrop hunters, leading to diminished detection accuracy and efficiency. We introduce ARTEMIX, a community-boosting-based framework that integrates custom-engineered features and community detection techniques to identify airdrop hunters in NFT transactions. Using data from the Blur NFT market, ARTEMIX demonstrates superior accuracy and efficiency, outperforming existing graph-based inference models, achieving an F1 score of 0.898. This approach provides a scalable and effective solution to anomaly detection in the Web3 ecosystem, promoting a more secure and equitable environment for token distributions.
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.
Autonomous AI agents present transformative opportunities and significant governance challenges. Existing frameworks, such as the EU AI Act and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, fall short of addressing the complexities of these agents, which are capable of independent decision-making, learning, and adaptation. To bridge these gaps, we propose the ETHOS (Ethical Technology and Holistic Oversight System) framework, a decentralized governance (DeGov) model leveraging Web3 technologies, including blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). ETHOS establishes a global registry for AI agents, enabling dynamic risk classification, proportional oversight, and automated compliance monitoring through tools like soulbound tokens and zero-knowledge proofs. Furthermore, the framework incorporates decentralized justice systems for transparent dispute resolution and introduces AI specific legal entities to manage limited liability, supported by mandatory insurance to ensure financial accountability and incentivize ethical design. By integrating philosophical principles of rationality, ethical grounding, and goal alignment, ETHOS aims to create a robust research agenda for promoting trust, transparency, and participatory governance. This innovative framework offers a scalable and inclusive strategy for regulating AI agents, balancing innovation with ethical responsibility to meet the demands of an AI-driven future.
The swift progression of Web3 and the proliferation of Decentralized Applications (DApps) have ushered in an era where data services are seamlessly integrated with blockchain technology. Despite this integration, the highly esteemed Quality of Service (QoS) service recommendation methodologies from the Web2.0 era face challenges in achieving seamless compatibility due to their centralized nature. In this paper, we introduce an innovative hybrid approach that bridges the on-chain and off-chain realms for service evaluation and recommendation, which we term as QoBS. This method leverages the power of ring signatures to safeguard identity data, thereby ensuring an efficient and secure framework for decentralized blockchain governance in the Web3 ecosystem. Through rigorous experimentation within the Ethereum environment, we validate the practical viability of our proposed solution, showcasing its robustness and effectiveness in the evolving landscape of decentralized services.
The internet is evolving from Web2's centralized model, dominated by a few tech giants, to Web3's decentralized future. Web3 dismantles walled gardens, distributing data and applications across a peer-to-peer network. Imagine information not on a single server, but replicated across countless computers. This fosters transparency and eliminates censorship. Users, not platforms, own their data. Web3 empowers creators - artists can issue tokens tied to their work, allowing fans to directly support them and even own a piece. Tokens act as the fuel for a new economy, rewarding users for contributing to projects and fostering a more collaborative online experience. This shift towards decentralization has the potential to create a more equitable and user-centric internet, one where power lies not with corporations, but with the users themselves.
The abstract highlights the potential of integrating blockchain into 5G networks and the Metaverse and proposes an enhanced blockchain protocol for various applications. It emphasizes the transformative nature of 5G and blockchain technologies and their ability to revolutionize industries. It also discusses the capabilities of blockchain, such as smart contracts and decentralized storage, and the opportunities it presents for in- novative 5G services. It also addresses the challenges and open research problems in this domain. Furthermore, it explores the application of blockchain in the Metaverse, focusing on security, privacy, and scalability concerns. The proposed innovation aims to improve the blockchain protocol to effectively support 5G, Web3, Edge Computing, Metaverse, and many more applications. It prioritizes immutability, confidentiality, and availability and offers advantages to interaction and digital experiences. The objective is to create a protocol that meets diverse industry requirements while considering different approaches to achieve its goals.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques