This article presents a comprehensive overview of smart contract implementation for automating compensation processes within Workday systems. It explores how blockchain-based smart contracts can transform human resources management by codifying compensation rules and policies into self-executing agreements. The integration enables organizations to automate performance-based bonuses, stock option vesting, and salary adjustments while ensuring transparency, accuracy, and compliance. Through detailed examination of technical requirements, integration architectures, and governance frameworks, the article demonstrates how these implementations deliver substantial benefits across operational efficiency, error reduction, and employee satisfaction. Both quantitative returns on investment and qualitative advantages like increased trust and fairness perception are addressed. The material offers practical insights for organizations considering smart contract adoption for modernizing compensation management.
Book Title: Innovations in Management: Emerging Trends and Practices Editor: Dr. Dattatraya Pandurang Rane ISBN: 978-81-987266-7-4 Chapter: 8 DOI: https://doi.org/10.59646/imC8/358 Author: Dr. Nitin Ranjan, Associate Professor, International Institute of Management Studies, Pune, Maharashtra, India Abstract Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are reshaping traditional banking by facilitating decentralized, secure, and transparent transactions. Cryptocurrencies are based upon decentralized ledgers and peer-to-peer networks that are […]
Flavio Corradini, Alessandro Marcelletti, Andrea Morichetta, Barbara Re
Blockchain technology has been widely adopted to enhance the security and the decentralisation of smart applications in large-scale pervasive systems. In such a context, data extraction is crucial as it provides a better understanding of the system’s behaviours. However, several challenges arise in automatically extracting data, due to the variety of data sources, such as transactions, events, contract storage, and the complexity of the blockchain structure. In particular, retrieving smart contract state changes remains unexplored despite its potential usage for discovering unexpected behaviour. For such reasons, in this work, we propose a novel methodology and a supporting application for extracting smart contract state changes and other execution-related data. The obtained data is then decoded and offered in a standard format to be easily reused. The methodology provides additional functionalities such as transaction filtering and capabilities for querying over extracted data. The effectiveness and the performance of the methodology were evaluated on three real-world projects from different EVM-based blockchains.
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) merupakan salah satu inovasi dalam dunia ekonomi berupa aset digital yang memiliki keunikan dalam aspek identitas dan kepemilikan yang menggunakan teknologi blockchain untuk menyimpan dan memverifikasi data. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk melihat peran NFT dalam ekonomi digital, apakah NFT benar-benar menjembatani kesenjangan dalam digitalisasi ekonomi atau justru menambah lapisan kompleksitas yang kontraproduktif. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode Systematic Literature Review (SLR) untuk mengumpulkan data dari artikel-artikel yang berkaitan dengan topik NFT. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa peran NFT dapat memiliki potensi ganda sebagai jembatan kesenjangan sekaligus sumber kompleksitas kontraproduktif. Teknologi NFT mampu meningkatkan transparansi, memperluas akses ke pasar global, melindungi hak kekayaan intelektual, dan mendukung inovasi di bidang pendidikan, administrasi pertanahan, dan pembiayaan program SDGs. Namun, NFT juga menghadapi tantangan multidimensi seperti ketidakjelasan regulasi yang berpotensi memicu penipuan, pencucian uang, dan ketimpangan akses yang diperburuk oleh volatilitas pasar, spekulasi berlebihan, dan kesenjangan infrastruktur digital di negara-negara berkembang.
Web3 grant programs are evolving mechanisms aimed at supporting innovation within the blockchain ecosystem, yet little is known on about their effectiveness. This paper proposes the concept of maturity to fill this gap and introduces the Grant Maturity Framework (GMF), a mixed-methods model for evaluating the maturity of Web3 grant programs. The GMF provides a systematic approach to assessing the structure, governance, and impact of Web3 grants, applied here to four prominent Ethereum layer-two (L2) grant programs: Arbitrum, Optimism, Mantle, and Taiko. By evaluating these programs using the GMF, the study categorizes them into four maturity stages, ranging from experimental to advanced. The findings reveal that Arbitrum's Long-Term Incentive Pilot Program (LTIPP) and Optimism's Mission Rounds show higher maturity, while Mantle and Taiko are still in their early stages. The research concludes by discussing the user-centric development of a Web3 grant management platform aimed at improving the maturity and effectiveness of Web3 grant management processes based on the findings from the GMF. This work contributes to both practical and theoretical knowledge on Web3 grant program evaluation and tooling, providing a valuable resource for Web3 grant operators and stakeholders.
The rapid evolution of InsurTech is transforming the insurance industry through the integration of blockchain technology and smart contracts. This study evaluates how blockchain’s decentralized, transparent, and tamper-resistant ledger enhances policyholder trust while smart contracts automate claims processing, reducing fraud, administrative costs, and processing delays. By leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT), insurers can ensure secure data sharing, streamline underwriting, and enable real-time claim settlements with greater accuracy and efficiency. The research explores key challenges, including regulatory compliance, scalability, and interoperability, while highlighting innovative use cases that demonstrate the potential of blockchain-driven insurance solutions. Additionally, ethical considerations and the role of AI in enhancing blockchain-based automation are discussed. The study concludes that blockchain and smart contracts have the potential to revolutionize InsurTech by improving operational efficiency, fostering transparency, and strengthening trust between insurers and policyholders in an increasingly digital insurance ecosystem.
Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and fintech, have profoundly reshaped the financial sector driving unprecedented innovation and creating transformative opportunities for development. However, they also pose significant challenges to long-term sustainability. While the existing literature provides valuable insights into their influence, a broader scope is necessary to reflect their role in advancing sustainable finance. This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of 2,446 publications from the Web of Science (1996–2024) to map the evolving nexus between emerging technologies and finance. Our findings reveal an expanding research landscape, with key themes including the application of emerging technologies in solving financial problems, the integration of technologies with behavioural and regulatory frameworks, financial innovation for promoting development, risk management and financial stability, digital currencies and blockchain, digital transformation challenges, and sustainable finance. The analysis highlights the dual nature of emerging technologies: while they enhance financial efficiency, transparency, and inclusion, and offer significant opportunities to advance sustainable finance, they also introduce risks such as cybersecurity threats, algorithmic bias, regulatory challenges, and critical barriers to long-term sustainability. To address these challenges, we propose a research agenda prioritizing ethical governance, stress-testing AI models under economic crises, securing decentralized systems, mitigating greenwashing risks, and fostering globally aligned regulatory standards. Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to tackle ethical, security, and inclusivity concerns. It is imperative for policymakers, regulators, and financial institutions to align technological innovation with sustainability objectives to ensure that advancements contribute to the development of an equitable, resilient, and inclusive financial ecosystem.
The article argues for the sociocultural contextualization of Web3 affordances by examining play-to-earn gaming in the Philippines. It first outlines how socioeconomic factors promote blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Against this background, and based on scholarship in cultural communication, anthropology, and critical platform studies, the article illustrates how sociocultural frames shape the interpretation and enactment of blockchain-based gameplay affordances. A Grounded Theory analysis of interviews and documents reveals that players identify persistent access and ownership as technical affordances, performing them through the cultural frame of cockfighting and its digital economy version, the side hustle. The study challenges universalist notions of Web3 adoption, highlighting how technical affordances both support and disrupt sociocultural and economic reproduction through narratives of family, competition, and inclusivity. The research calls for comparative studies on how platform corporations structure societies in emerging economies, how platforms exploit culture as use value, and how adopters strategically utilize Web3 technologies.
Blockchain technology represents a secure, decentralized solution for transaction and data management. Nonetheless, large-scale blockchain networks continue to face issues regarding security, scalability, and reliability — especially as the volume of transactions grows and cyber threats advance. This study addresses the improvement of security and reliability for blockchain networks using AI- optimized consensus protocols embedded in smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-executing agreements that are written into the code of blockchain networks to automate the process of a transaction, but like all computer programs, they are limited by their deterministic nature and are vulnerable to coding errors and exploits. Using artificial intelligence (AI), more specifically, machine learning (ML) techniques, this study seeks to overcome these shortcomings, and proposes a better protected, more flexible and resilient transaction perimeter. AI consensus algorithms build on existing consensus paradigms like Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), and optimize the decision-making process while providing capabilities against malicious attacks and ensuring real-time efficiency in the verification process. This paper examines how artificial intelligence can contribute to the dynamic enhancement of consensus algorithms, allowing the blockchain environment to better identify anomalies, mitigate attacks, and optimizing resource allocation. In addition, AI-based smart contracts can learn from historical data and dynamically configure their execution parameters to reduce vulnerabilities and improve robustness. AI and blockchain together encourage a safer environment where transactions are more reliable, and networks are more resilient to external threats. These results reveal how the combination of artificial intelligence-backed consensus methods and automated smart contracts enhance transaction integrity, security, and efficiency of blockchain frameworks, potentially leading toward safer, scalable, reliable decentralized networks.
Blockchain has revolutionized various industries by incorporating its powerful security and robust capabilities that are used to securely share asserts. Industries are changing and adapting themselves to utilize this new technology to yield a no middleman management system. Education is one such sector which has been influenced by a lot new technology. Blockchains are security systems that are being primarily used for its decentralization nature that makes a ledger-like system to store responses and maintain context by sharing it all over the network. In this paper Blockchain model integrated with RPA is used to secure & share student academic certificates, final year projects and their works which is aimed to make a trustful profile for the University or college to showcase student’s performance. This project is to create a secure digital platform that helps in sharing the academic and other authorized certificates in a private college network using blockchain that helps in issuing certificates and managing them in a distributed manner and RPA is integrated to automate repetitive processes like issuing and retrieving data. The paper explores the usage of the Blockchain system and the decentralized model method to solve the problem of unauthorized and fake profiles of academic certificates, student data and their work profile in their course period. This paper helps in bringing a web3 technology in the learning society and fixing outdated processes of handling the student data and their years of training certificates. This paper is all about a private blockchain network with Rpa for Education society to handle data securely.
This research explores the developments and challenges in decentralized finance (DeFi) since 2015 and the increasing use of blockchain technology. DeFi provides access to financial services without traditional intermediaries, improving the economic system's efficiency through automated and transparent smart contracts. The bibliometric analysis shows a significant growth in DeFi-related publications, with 1,909 articles identified between 2015 and 2025. The research also highlights the importance of collaboration between authors and stakeholders to build a more secure and sustainable financial ecosystem. Analysis results using VOSviewer identified 173 keywords in 18 clusters, focusing on "digital twin" and "artificial intelligence." This research recommends further exploration into DeFi adoption, blockchain technology innovation, and the application of smart contracts to support the development of an inclusive, efficient, and innovative DeFi ecosystem in the future. In addition, this research aims to bridge existing research gaps and provide deeper insights into the potential of DeFi in the global financial system.
Jiazhen Gan, Jianzhong Su, Kaixin Lin, Zibin Zheng
Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs that run on blockchain technology, capable of managing on-chain assets according to predefined logic, and become immutable once deployed on the blockchain. In recent years, the value of smart contracts on blockchains, notably Ethereum, has been on the rise. However, the hiding vulnerabilities made the substantial value of smart contracts a target of many hackers, leading to numerous attack incidents. Therefore, vulnerability detection in smart contracts before deployment is essential. Currently, many fuzzers for detecting smart contract vulnerabilities can only identify vulnerabilities based on the execution patterns of the underlying opcodes, overlooking the financial semantic properties of the contracts, which leads to many vulnerabilities being difficult to detect or resulting in a high rate of false positives. To this end, we focus on the financial characteristics of contracts, define contract vulnerability patterns starting from the high-level semantic properties of contracts, and combine fuzzers using evolutionary algorithms and symbolic constraint solving to detect vulnerabilities, culminating in the development of FinanceFuzz . Specifically, FinanceFuzz defines invariant and equivalence properties of finance that contracts should satisfy. Utilizing these properties, FinanceFuzz can generate transaction sequences for testing and identify vulnerable contracts that violate the properties. We conducted experiments on a dataset containing 437 smart contracts from the real world, the experimental results demonstrating that our tool outperforms other state-of-the-art tools in detecting vulnerabilities, achieving higher recall rate without false positive.
Purpose Developing countries are recording high cryptocurrency adoption rates surpassing more advanced economies. Considering that this is the opposite of the realities of most other technologies in these areas, this high uptake is puzzling. With a case study of crypto use for cross-border payments in the Nigerian context, this paper aims to address the paucity of empirical research on the phenomena of cryptocurrency adoption and diffusion in developing countries. We put forward a sociotechnical and empirically grounded innovation translation account of the high rates of crypto transactions in developing countries that overcome criticisms against extant arguments in the literature. Design/methodology/approach We take a case study approach and analyse the use of cryptocurrency for cross-border payments. Data collection involved two rounds of interviews with retailers from Nigeria, suppliers from China, informal exchangers, crypto brokers and mediators. We analysed themes using an approach sensitised by actor–network theory (ANT) constructs. Our methodological approach focuses on ANT’s relational dynamics to examine how human and non-human actors enable cryptocurrency adoption in a developing-country context. Findings We show evidence to suggest that crypto adoption and diffusion in developing countries occurs through an iterative process of technology transformation and appropriation, a strong coalition of the interests of diverse actors and a dynamic relationship between the technical elements of crypto and contextual political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental influences. Findings have implications for crypto-focused companies, development institutions and policymakers who increasingly show interest in the popularity of cryptocurrencies in developing countries. Originality/value This research breaks ground as a sociotechnical and empirically grounded description of the widespread use of cryptocurrencies in developing countries. The study provides an insightful approach to understanding technology adoption as a relational and context-sensitive process. Insights from the framework might be useful for addressing adoption challenges and designing inclusive financial systems in similar contexts.
Mengyuan Cheng, Heap‐Yih Chong, Yongshun Xu, Ming Chi · 5 authors
Purpose Despite the well-documented benefits of blockchain-smart contracts (SC), the effective adoption among the coordination of key stakeholders remains unclear. Limited studies have considered the perspective from complex interactions of key stakeholders for different stages of contract development during the SC adoption process. Therefore, this research developed a tripartite evolutionary game model to analyze the dynamic interplay among government, private owners and general contractors for SC adoption across contract development stages. Design/methodology/approach Resorting to evolutionary game theory, this study develops a theoretical model grounded on the strategic interactions between government and construction stakeholders from the different sectors, whose co-evolving choices influence (and are influenced by) different SC policies. Key factors were numerically modeled their decision-making for each contract stage. This study further examines incentive subsidies, supervision costs and penalties for the key stakeholders. Findings The results reveal the choice of SC adoption strategy is influenced by the different interactive behaviors of participants across contract development stages, revealing a complex interplay where the likelihood of private owners’ development strategies inversely affects government promotion and positively influences general contractors’ application of SC. Originality/value The research contributes to the effective adoption of SC through clarifying key stakeholders’ interactions from the perspectives of distinct evolutionary stages in contract development and government interventions in the decision-making process.
Marco Bellucci, Damiano Cesa Bianchi, Luca Bagnoli, Giacomo Manetti
Purpose This study aims to understand the impacts of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on business models (BMs), particularly in terms of enabling decentralization and digitalization through innovations in products, customer interfaces, infrastructure management and financial aspects. Design/methodology/approach By adopting a conceptual approach based on the BM framework proposed by Osterwalder and Pigneur, this study adopts a qualitative methodology based on multiple case studies such as those of Christie’s, OpenSea, Uffizi Gallery and Ticketmaster. Findings Despite the bursting of the speculative bubble, the exploratory findings suggest that NFTs can foster digitalization and decentralization within existing BMs while also presenting opportunities for new BMs that focus on simplifying and securing technology for customers to serve as intermediaries. Originality/value This study contributes to the specialized literature on the relationship between digital NFT innovation and related BM changes in different market niches within the digital marketplace ecosystem. Furthermore, this study of NFTs also contributes to the growing body of research on accounting and finance related to cryptoassets and digital innovation.
Efficient contract management is essential for ensuring sustainable and reliable supply chains; yet, traditional methods remain manual, error-prone, and inefficient, leading to delays, financial risks, and compliance challenges. AI and blockchain technology offer a transformative alternative, enabling the establishment of automated, transparent, and self-executing smart contracts that enhance efficiency and sustainability. As part of AI-driven smart contract automation, we previously implemented contractual clause extraction using question answering (QA) and named entity recognition (NER). This paper presents the next step in the information extraction process, relation extraction (RE), which aims to identify relationships between key legal entities and convert them into structured business rules for smart contract execution. To address RE in legal contracts, we present a novel hierarchical transformer model that captures sentence- and document-level dependencies. It incorporates global and segment-based attention mechanisms to extract complex legal relationships spanning multiple sentences. Given the scarcity of publicly available contractual datasets, we also introduce the contractual relation extraction (ContRE) dataset, specifically curated to support relation extraction tasks in legal contracts, that we use to evaluate the proposed model. Together, these contributions enable the structured automation of legal rules from unstructured contract text, advancing the development of AI-powered smart contracts.
The rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) has driven the demand for secure and efficient cross-chain transfers, enabling assets to seamlessly flow across different blockchain ecosystems. At the core of these innovations lie smart contracts, which facilitate trustless trading by automating transactions without relying on intermediaries. This paper explores the pivotal role that smart contracts play in enabling secure and transparent cross-chain transfers. We examine how these self-executing contracts eliminate counterparty risks, ensuring that transactions are immutable, verifiable, and executed only when predefined conditions are met. Furthermore, we investigate the challenges associated with cross-chain interoperability, including the complexities of maintaining security across different blockchain protocols. Through case studies of existing cross-chain protocols such as Polkadot, Cosmos, and Layer 2 solutions, we demonstrate how smart contracts are utilized to bridge disparate blockchains, fostering a more inclusive and accessible financial ecosystem. By providing a decentralized and trustless environment for asset transfer, smart contracts not only enhance security but also promote broader adoption of blockchain technology.
We provide a thorough and succinct analysis of the creation and use of a block- chain-based crowdfunding platform, primarily concentrating on resolving the current issues and inefficiencies with the conventional crowdfunding platform. To increase public awareness of the newest advancements and innovations, the purpose of this research paper is to present and use Ethereum blockchain technology. The study examines the main problems with the crowdfunding platforms in use today and offers a fix that combines strong security measures with user-friendly functionality, with the goal of implementing smart contracts. Our suggested solution incorporates blockchain technology, which is fundamentally transparent, decentralized, and secure. It also incorporates smart contract technology, which guarantees that the fundraisers will get their funds when they meet their deadlines and milestones. This learning helps to fundamentally change the operational usability for both the fundraisers and investors on a condition of more secure and efficient working conditions.
Healthcare has found several applications for smart contracts, including the safe and decentralized management of patient data, the tracking of drug adherence, and the automatic filing of insurance claims. Innovations in blockchain-based healthcare applications have the potential to radically alter the healthcare system as we know it. Quality of service (QoS) is a metric of how well a system meets the needs of its customers. Availability, dependability, performance, and security are all examples of QoS concerns that arise in the healthcare industry. However, the success of these applications depends heavily on the QoS of smart contracts. Recent researchers have considered traditional healthcare solutions and service quality while thinking about smart contracts. In this chapter, the authors provide a new method for improving QoS in smart contracts in healthcare. Toward the aim of building a smart contract that would provide a more scalable, flexible, efficient, and high-performance mechanism for secure transaction, the authors performed the following steps: literature review, defining objectives, selecting relevant datasets, data preprocessing, choosing a suitable Blockchain platform, developing smart contracts, integrating the datasets, testing and evaluating the solution, addressing ethical considerations, and documenting the research methodology. This approach aimed to improve data integrity, streamline healthcare transactions, and enhance patient privacy while addressing healthcare challenges.
This study explores the integration of blockchain technology into lottery systems to enhance transparency, security, and fairness. Our proposed system uses smart contracts for ticket generation, distribution, and winner selection, leveraging blockchain&s;s decentralization to automate processes and ensure tamper-proof records. Blockchain&s;s immutability boosts participant trust by safeguarding lottery integrity. Technical insights show blockchain&s;s efficacy in addressing issues in traditional lotteries, highlighting its potential to create a more transparent and trustworthy lottery environment, reducing fraud and manipulation. This work advances blockchain applications, offering a new standard for secure and reliable lottery operations.
The convergence of blockchain technology and cloud computing has transformed traditional financial infrastructures, addressing critical scalability challenges that previously hindered widespread adoption. Cloud-native distributed ledger technology (DLT) emerges as a promising solution that leverages elastic computing resources, scalable storage solutions, and serverless architectures while preserving immutability and transparency. This integration creates hybrid architectures that balance decentralization benefits with cloud computing performance advantages, enabling financial institutions to process high-volume transactions efficiently. Major cloud providers have developed specialized blockchain-as-a-service offerings that reduce implementation barriers while ensuring regulatory compliance. These technologies revolutionize multiple financial domains: cross-border payments become faster and less expensive, trade finance processes transition from paper-based to digital workflows, and traditional assets gain unprecedented liquidity through tokenization. Despite remaining challenges in data privacy, regulatory compliance, and interoperability, cloud-native DLT represents a significant evolutionary step in financial infrastructure development, creating more inclusive, efficient systems that reshape global financial services and expand access beyond traditional banking relationships.
This chapter outlines and examines headwind discourses of ownership. First, it delves into the post-ownership discourse and cautions against overblown portrayals of contemporary times as the “age of access”. The fact that digitalization has been an important driver of the shift from ownership to access-based consumption, should not blind us from noting the emergence of new technologies and digital goods, such as blockchains and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), that speak to the continued relevance of ownership and the intricate relationship between access and ownership in digital consumption. Second, drawing on extant reviews and commentaries, this chapter examines the discourse on inferior ownability of digital stuff, explicating the potential limitations of digital goods as candidates for ownership as well as how market actors constantly find new ways to make digital stuff ownable. The final section examines the critical discourse expounding the limitations of emergent forms of digital ownership, NFT ownership in particular. These critiques not only help identify important risks that the shifting arrangements of ownership pose in terms of eroding ownership rights but also leave considerable room for examining these re-arrangements on their own merit.
Blockchain technology represents a revolutionary concept in the field of digital economy, enabling security, transparency, and decentralization of data and transactions. This paper explores the fundamental principles of blockchain technology, the role of cryptocurrencies, and the development of decentralized finance (DeFi). It analyzes key differences between centralized and decentralized exchanges, as well as the significance of DeFi applications in the modern financial ecosystem. Additionally, through a case study, the paper presents the process of creating a new cryptocurrency—ELAB—including the implementation of a smart contract on the Binance Smart Chain network and token distribution. The main goal of the paper is to provide both theoretical and practical insights into the fundamental concepts of blockchain and its application in real-world systems. The study’s results demonstrate how cryptocurrencies can be utilized in various contexts, including the educational system, where gamification through digital tokens can enhance student engagement.