Since the 1970s, telecommuting has generated significant interest among academics and practitioners alike. However, the topic of flexible working arrangements has become more relevant lately, particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As digital technologies continuously advance, immersive workplaces facilitated by technologies such as virtual reality (VR) become more appealing. This article examines the phenomenon of virtual immersive workspaces and their impacts on organizations. It provides insights into the emerging trends driving subsequent immersive technologies that not only foster competitive advantages in the Web3 era but also shed light on the challenges that organizations face in this context. The findings emphasize the key advantages and limitations of implementing VR in the workplace as well as the importance of purposefully designing a set of tools for remote workers.
With the popularity of Play-to-Earn (P2E) games, in-game token economies have become the foundation of the financial structure of virtual worlds. More and more players are investing in digital assets, promoting long-term economic growth. This paper delves into the key factors for the sustainability of the P2E game token economy: the investment value of tokens and external incentives. When tokens are no longer profitable, user churn rates rise sharply, which is critical to the continued development of P2E games. External factors also significantly impact token prices, which affects the stability and sustainability of the entire economic system. In response to these challenges, this paper proposes a series of strategies to enhance token stability, including adjustments to game design, improvements to player incentive mechanisms, and the formulation of relevant policies and regulations. The conclusions of this study aim to provide valuable insights and guidance to game designers, investors, and players to promote the healthy development of Web3 game token economic systems.
Implementing provable fairness in the minting process of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) enables the procedural generation of NFT metadata that can be verified in a decentralized manner, even when stored off-chain. Until now, smart contracts have required additional on-chain data, such as integrity digests, to support the verification of off-chain NFT metadata. Due to the high costs of on-chain data storage, most NFTs do not implement such validation methods, reducing trust in the NFT's off-chain metadata and increasing reliance on centralization. We propose a new method, inspired by the virtual ecology design of sandbox massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). This method utilizes a 256-bit unsigned integer representing a seed value, a Web3-compatible implementation of a pseudorandom number generator (W3PRNG), and an executable ruleset containing attribute definitions and their probability spaces to procedurally generate NFTs. This methodology provides users with a provably fair way of generating NFTs in an open-ended minting smart contract by imitating Proof-of-Work mining, including an arbitrary amount of work to be performed while initializing the PRNG. Due to the extremely large state space of 2^256 possible seeds, any implementation makes the NFT's economy inherently inflationary, offering more attractive features and higher utility in Web3 and Metaverse design than existing fixed supply NFT collections. Furthermore, such a system implicitly guarantees the veracity of off-chain metadata based on the on-chain seed value and the smart contract's immutable integrity configuration. (First published to the Future of Gaming Discord community in November, 2022)
The role of Web3 technologies was examined specifically regarding SmartCharity and their effect on the financing and delivery of public goods in developing countries. The research focused on the case of SmartCharity, its role in making fund distribution more transparent and efficient, and the role of NFTs and smart contracts’ efficacy in changing. For primary data, the cross-sectional study used interviews and questionnaires administered to the critical actors in or close to SmartCharity initiatives; secondary data came from project reports and publicly accessible sources. Quantitative analysis uses statistics to identify trends and correlations in data, whereas qualitative data analysis identifies such trends and patterns. This paper aimed to establish an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of Web3 innovation in public good management and make future suggestions for improvement.
This research introduces a cutting-edge Web3 literary analysis platform, harnessing the power of blockchain and deep learning technologies. By employing the immutable and transparent nature of blockchain, the platform ensures robust copyright protection while offering readers enhanced interactive features. It applies deep learning techniques for comprehensive analyses of sentiment, topic, and stylistic elements, which are instrumental in predicting potential Nobel Prize laureates. This methodology not only enhances the accuracy of predictions but also sheds light on the evaluation criteria and historical trends associated with the Nobel Prize. Moreover, the platform adopts a directed graph model alongside the struc2vec algorithm to create text vectors for comparative studies, uncovering similarities between works that have won awards and those that have been nominated. Utilizing the LESS model for detailed content examination, the platform delves into sequence relationships within semantic networks, thus improving interpretability and visualization. The integration of blockchain technology guarantees access to unbiased datasets, enabling more precise literary analyses and predictions. This innovative approach has been validated using works that have either won or been nominated for the Nobel Prize, proving its efficacy in identifying the textual characteristics favored by the Nobel Prize committee.
This paper explores the potential of Cardano (a proofof- stake blockchain platform) as a Web3 ecosystem (a decentralized internet built on blockchains, which are distributed ledgers controlled communally by participants) that could boost economic development in the Global South (encompassing emerging economies from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Oceania) by reducing the time, costs and complexities for doing business, therefore facilitating job creation and wealth generation through RealFi (an ecosystem of products integrating digital assets liquidity with real world economic activities) by way of scalable, sustainable, and interoperable digital solutions.
Blockchain, with its features of transparency and traceability of transactions, can address various real-life challenges. To integrate this technology into the medical domain, numerous ideas utilizing blockchain technology, combined with the internet or web3 can be explored. This opens the door to a plethora of innovative solutions tailored for the medical sector. Starting at the foundation, the authors link supply chain activities with the healthcare sector, leveraging blockchain to record medical supply chain activities and protect them from disruptions. This application of blockchain is particularly notable as it safeguards end-users such as pharmacies and hospitals from trusting fraudulent suppliers. Using blockchain for the healthcare supply chain enables comprehensive recording and tracking of each transaction and movement of healthcare products from manufacturers to end-users.
This chapter enquires into the strategic leadership of communities based on public blockchains. The authors review the emergence of cryptocurrencies, from Bitcoin to Ethereum to the current landscape known as Web3. The domain is diverse and dynamic, so they structure their analysis around five categories of public blockchains - store of value, world computer, stablecoin, centrist coin and memecoin - which they use to analyse how the different markets have changed over time. They proceed to examine the distinctive nature of strategic leadership in this domain by focusing on two key concepts: prefigurative strategy and decentralized leadership. Focusing on those public blockchain communities that are committed to decentralization, they identify and discuss four coordinating mechanisms they employ as an alternative to managerial hierarchy: algorithmic authority, charismatic authority, community channels, and governance tokens. They argue that strategic leadership in blockchain communities is centrally about conceptualizing, designing and implementing a polycentric governance system drawing on a dynamic mixture of these coordinating mechanisms.
Distributed Applications (DApps), powered by smart contracts, have sparked a significant transformation in the Web3 ecosystem by enabling the execution of real-world contracts on decentralized networks. However, the growing popularity of DApps has also led to an increase in malicious activities exploiting smart contracts, thereby exposing users to greater financial risks. Inspired by the FICO score system in traditional finance, we introduce WIRE, a reputation engine designed to evaluate the trustworthiness of deployed DApps. WIRE first derives diverse properties from contract activities, rather than relying solely on potentially irrelevant or unavailable source code. Based on selected properties, WIRE trains a machine learning model for assessing the trustworthiness of individual contracts. Further-more, WIRE utilizes a bytecode disassembler to identify related contracts of a DApp, thus determining its overall trustworthiness score. Moreover, WIRE's dashboard offers explainable and detailed reports that are accessible to users without professional knowledge. The evaluation results show that WIRE can provide a reliable and explainable reputation score for DApps. As a result, WIRE's users can distinguish between benign and malicious DApps or contracts with a high confidence.
Hongzhou Chen, Xiaolin Duan, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Wei Cai
Harnessing the transparent blockchain user behavior data, we construct the Political Betting Leaning Score (PBLS) to measure political leanings based on betting within Web3 prediction markets. Focusing on Polymarket and starting from the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, we synthesize behaviors over 15,000 addresses across 4,500 events and 8,500 markets, capturing the intensity and direction of their political leanings by the PBLS. We validate the PBLS through internal consistency checks and external comparisons. We uncover relationships between our PBLS and betting behaviors through over 800 features capturing various behavioral aspects. A case study of the 2022 U.S. Senate election further demonstrates the ability of our measurement while decoding the dynamic interaction between political and profitable motives. Our findings contribute to understanding decision-making in decentralized markets, enhancing the analysis of behaviors within Web3 prediction environments. The insights of this study reveal the potential of blockchain in enabling innovative, multidisciplinary studies and could inform the development of more effective online prediction markets, improve the accuracy of forecast, and help the design and optimization of platform mechanisms. The data and code for the paper are accessible at the following link: https://github.com/anonymous.
With the growth of the Web3 domain, there has been a significant rise of third-party software packages. These range from basic blockchain interaction tools and contract development aids to front-end development packages for Decentralized Applications (DApps), with the diversity and inter-dependencies of these packages continuing to grow. However, despite these advancements, the security of these packages has not kept pace, highlighted by several significant Web3 supply chain attacks. It underscored the urgent need for a deeper understanding of the Web3 third-party library supply chain. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive analysis of the Web3 third-party package supply chain using knowledge graphs, which detail the structure, themes, and evolving dynamics within this domain. Further, we analyze the characteristics of vulnerabilities and their propagation through knowledge graphs in the Web3 ecosystem. We also extend our findings to practical applications, providing valuable insights for Web3 community stakeholders and creating an extensive dataset that includes 695,642 versions of Web3 packages and 270,217,326 dependency links. This research is aimed at reinforcing the foundation of Web3 development, promoting enhanced security practices, and supporting informed decision-making within the DApp landscape.
With the spread of blockchain technology, various tokens have been issued in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).DAO is considered to be a leading application of Web3, which is a web that makes use of these tokens, not just to exchange tokens, but to have a positive impact on the real world.DAO is expected to have a potential to improve the efficiency of existing communities and build new types of communities by combining cutting-edge technologies, such as AI, as well as blockchain.Many experiments are being conducted to verify its potential these days.On the other hand, with the spread of Social Networking Service (SNS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in society, the problem of disinformation and misinformation has been hurting society at an unprecedented level of impact.It has also been pointed out that there is a risk that it becomes impossible to know what is true and what is false due to the flood of disinformation and misinformation automatically generated by AI on the Internet.To avoid this, increasing fact-checking activities has become an urgent issue.However, the sustainability of fact-checking activities has been questioned due to the lack of human resources for fact-checking and the difficulty of establishing a system to generate revenue solely from fact-checking activities.In this study, we propose a factchecking DAO to address these issues.The novelty of this study is to propose a two-stage platform: production and education of fact-checking.We also implement smart contracts and platforms for the fact-checking DAO, and specifically design user experiences, such as receiving orders and requests for fact-checking on the platform, and using governance tokens to make decisions based on DAO parameters based on democratic voting.Through our fact-checking DAO platform, participants can also learn how to check and verify facts from perspectives by multiple fact-checkers.The strengths and weaknesses of our proposal and future work are also discussed.
Yustynn Panicker, Ezekiel Soremekun, Sudipta Chattopadhyay, Sumei Sun
Smart contracts are increasingly used in critical use cases (e.g., financial transactions). Thus, it is pertinent to ensure that end-users understand the transfer risks in smart contracts. To address this, we investigate end-user comprehension of risks in the most popular Ethereum smart contract (i.e., USD Tether (USDT)) and their prevalence in the top ERC-20 smart contracts. We focus on five transfer risks with severe impact on transfer outcomes and user objectives, including users being blacklisted, contract being paused, and contract being arbitrarily upgraded. Firstly, we conducted a user study investigating end-user comprehension of smart contract transfer risks with 110 participants and USDT/MetaMask. Secondly, we performed manual and automated source code analysis of the next top (78) ERC-20 smart contracts (after USDT) to identify the prevalence of these risks. Results show that end-users do not comprehend real risks: most (up to 71.8% of) users believe contract upgrade and blacklisting are highly severe/surprising. More importantly, twice as many users find it easier to discover successful outcomes than risky outcomes using the USDT/MetaMask UI flow. These results hold regardless of the self-rated programming and Web3 proficiency of participants. Furthermore, our source code analysis demonstrates that the examined risks are prevalent in up to 19.2% of the top ERC-20 contracts. Additionally, we discovered (three) other risks with up to 25.6% prevalence in these contracts. This study informs the need to provide explainable smart contracts, understandable UI and relevant information for risky outcomes.
Cheick Tidiane Bâ, Richard G. Clegg, Benjamin A. Steer, Matteo Zignani
In the dynamic landscape of the Web, we are witnessing the emergence of the Web3 paradigm, which dictates that platforms should rely on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies to sustain themselves and their profitability. Cryptocurrencies are characterised by high market volatility and susceptibility to substantial crashes, issues that require temporal analysis methodologies able to tackle the high temporal resolution, heterogeneity and scale of blockchain data. While existing research attempts to analyse crash events, fundamental questions persist regarding the optimal time scale for analysis, differentiation between long-term and short-term trends, and the identification and characterisation of shock events within these decentralised systems. This paper addresses these issues by examining cryptocurrencies traded on the Ethereum blockchain, with a spotlight on the crash of the stablecoin TerraUSD and the currency LUNA designed to stabilise it. Utilising complex network analysis and a multi-layer temporal graph allows the study of the correlations between the layers representing the currencies and system evolution across diverse time scales. The investigation sheds light on the strong interconnections among stablecoins pre-crash and the significant post-crash transformations. We identify anomalous signals before, during, and after the collapse, emphasising their impact on graph structure metrics and user movement across layers. This paper pioneers temporal, cross-chain graph analysis to explore a cryptocurrency collapse. It emphasises the importance of temporal analysis for studies on web-derived data and how graph-based analysis can enhance traditional econometric results. Overall, this research carries implications beyond its field, for example for regulatory agencies aiming to safeguard users from shocks and monitor investment risks for citizens and clients.
Recently data assets and digital assets have received significantcant attention. Currently, data assets focus on the data aspects, but digital assets emphasize the asset aspects, thus they have different sets of technology with respect to protocols and infrastructure. This paper proposes to treat data assets as digital assets, and use new Internet protocols and infrastructure initially designed for digital assets for data assets. In this way, the tough problems of data assets can be addressed, and data assets and other digital assets can be treated in an uniform manner on the Web. By doing so, a new architecture is proposed for the next-generation Web (Web3), the new architecture DACS (Data, Applications, Computing Power, Segmentation) has many new features different from traditional Web2 features.
Human Unreadable, İnsan bedenini gizleyen üç perdelik, bedensel, long-form (uzun biçimli) algoritmik bir koreografidir. Blok zincir üzerine kayıtlı bu çalışma dans, kriptografi, mühendislik, insan-makine etkileşimi, yapay zekâ, makine öğrenmesi ve plastik sanatlara ilişkin birçok disiplini sentezleyen bir yapıya sahiptir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, Operator ikilisi tarafıdan gerçekleştirilmiş Human Unreadable örneği üzerinden algoritmik sanatın, blok zincir teknolojisindeki yerini ve yeni varolma biçimini ortaya koymak ve web3 sanatının yaratıcılık potansiyellerini tartışmaktır. Bu örnekte, blok zinciri teknolojisi hem çalışmanın konusunun (beden ve gizlilik) bir parçasıdır hem de çalışmanın formunu oluşturan temel araçlardan biri ve elbette sunuş biçimidir. Sonuç olarak bu çalışmada olduğu gibi blok zincir üzerine kayıtlı bazı algoritmik sanat çalışmalarının bu teknolojiyi sadece satış, sergileme ya da arşivleme amacıyla değil aynı zamanda konunun ve formun bir parçası haline gelme yani blok zincir teknolojisini yaratıcı bir medyum olarak kullanma özelliği taşıdığını ifade etmek mümkündür. Çalışma ile ilgili elde edilen tüm bulgular literatür bağlamında yorumlanmıştır.
Despite widespread academic and practitioner interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a form of digital assets, little is known about how consumers perceive NFT value. This exploratory research investigates why people create, trade or collect NFTs, what value they derive from them, and how online communities contribute to value co-creation. Over the course of two rounds, we interview 38 participants, most of whom are digital natives. We find that engaging with NFTs is the new form of day trading, reflecting financialization of everyday life. The value of NFTs is mainly speculative and utilitarian, and NFTs themselves are best thought of as derivatives. Value co-creation in NFT project communities is largely focused on gaining superior information about the project. We contribute to the crypto-marketing and web3 literature by advancing a novel model of NFT consumer value that extends Holbrook's (1999) typology and distinguishes both positive and negative aspects of consumer value that have been overlooked in mainstream literature. We shed light on the role of communities in an unusual setting: a nascent, illiquid, speculative, informationally opaque market for digital assets. Our study helps creators and brand managers to develop effective NFT strategies.
A adoção das tecnologias associadas à denominada web3 em diversos setores do mercado originaram oportunidades que, por sua vez, levantam novos desafios e barreiras ao seu uso e benefício por parte da população em geral. Entre esses desafios destaca-se o carácter ainda relativamente pouco conhecido do funcionamento de conceitos relacionados com a blockchain tais como smart contracts e NFTs, que se encontram na base de uma nova gama de produtos digitais, e que como tal, ainda desconhecidos por parte de um público tecnologicamente menos literato. O Design da Experiência e a Usabilidade surgem como áreas com o potencial de realizar a ligação entre a complexidade tecnológica desta nova categoria de produtos digitais e as práticas online da população em geral. A presente dissertação pretende investigar, através do design, abordagens de desenho de interfaces que tornem a adoção de produtos digitais associados à web3 mais fáceis de usar, através da identificação e reflexão das diferenças conceptuais e tecnológicas desta categoria de produtos em relação a outras tecnologias de uso mais estabelecido. Para tal, foi desenhada a interface de uma plataforma que conjuga um serviço de oferta de música através de stream, que permite ao ouvinte, através das tecnologias da web3, ser potencialmente co-proprietário desses mesmos conteúdos.
Haibo Wang, Hongwei Gao, Teng Ma, Chong Li · 5 authors
Distributed Federated Learning (DFL) technology enables participants to cooperatively train a shared model while preserving the privacy of their local data sets, making it a desirable solution for decentralized and privacy-preserving Web3 scenarios. However, DFL faces incentive and security challenges in the decentralized framework. To address these issues, this paper presents a Hierarchical Blockchain-enabled DFL (HBDFL) system, which provides a generic solution framework for the DFL-related applications. The proposed system consists of four major components, including a model contribution-based reward mechanism, a Proof of Elapsed Time and Accuracy (PoETA) consensus algorithm, a Distributed Reputation-based Verification Mechanism (DRTM) and an Accuracy-Dependent Throughput Management (ADTM) mechanism. The model contribution-based rewarding mechanism incentivizes network nodes to train models with their local datasets, while the PoETA consensus algorithm optimizes the tradeoff between the shared model accuracy and system throughput. The DRTM improves the system efficiency in consensus, and the ADTM mechanism guarantees that the throughput performance remains within a predefined range while improving the shared model accuracy. The performance of the proposed HBDFL system is evaluated by numerical simulations, which show that the system improves the accuracy of the shared model while maintaining high throughput and ensuring security.
With the emergence of web2.0 the internet experienced a transformative shift in the sectors of organization and sharing of data. This era introduced interactive and user-generated content-based platforms which allowed communications and information to become bidirectional between clients and servers. It also revealed several vulnerabilities that arose from the intermediary dependency and central control. Web3.0 is the next step in this evolution of the internet that offers a promising decentralized, user-centric, and secure digital ecosystem. The core enabling technology of this evolution is blockchain, a distributed and immutable ledger that has extended its influence in recent years far beyond the realm of digital currencies to become a fundamental component of web3.0. This chapter explores the merging of blockchain and web3.0 to create an integrated digital landscape that overcomes previous vulnerabilities, practical strategies of integration, combined impact and diverse use cases such as DeFi, DApps and DAO.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Sergei Ivanovich Rodzin, Viktoriia Viktorovna Bova
The metaverse is a collective common space for interaction created as a result of the convergence of physical reality and virtual space, including augmented reality and the Internet. The potential of the metaverse in the field of education is of growing interest, and many researchers are exploring ways to improve the effectiveness of student learning, while reducing time and labor costs to ensure the educational process. However, the systemic and technological aspects of providing education through the metaverse remain insufficiently developed. To fill this gap, the paper presents the concept and architecture of the metaverse, combining artificial intelligence technologies, Web3 and blockchain technology to create a learning environment. The existing approaches to the creation of intelligent systems and gamification of learning, as well as some projects for the creation of a metaverse, are analyzed. The purpose of the proposed approach to creating a metaverse is to design a virtual learning space that begins with reflecting the physical world, storing user learning trajectories, knowledge trees in the blockchain, and providing a secure and open community. The main stages of the metaverse development are presented, including cloning, expansion and integration of physical and virtual components, as well as blockchain technologies. It is noted that by now the necessary prerequisites have developed in Russia for the realization of the metaverse as one of the foundations of future education.
Open access
Technology and Human Factors in Education and Health
Seyed Mojtaba Hosseini Bamakan, Saeed Banaeian Far
The fourth industrial revolution has significantly increased the adoption of Digital Twins (DTs) across various sectors, including intelligent manufacturing, automation, logistics, and medical analysis. Despite substantial progress in deploying DT projects, numerous challenges remain, such as managing distributed data flows, protecting commercial confidentiality, securing intellectual property, and ensuring privacy and security. This research introduces a novel approach to addressing these challenges by leveraging blockchain and Web3 technologies, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The study aims to develop a distributed, tamper-proof DT cooperation platform that facilitates traceable and trustworthy data sharing while preserving intellectual property rights and enabling decentralized governance. This platform enhances idea and invention ownership, promotes collective decision-making through consensus protocols, and explores innovative solutions like blockchain-based federated learning and efficient DT project fundraising tools. Relying on security models and analysis tools, this study addresses several important security analysis methods/tools/models (e.g., random oracle model, BAN logic, AVISPA tool, and TAMARIN prover) that are known as practical analysis methods. They can strongly prove every claimed security feature of DT projects. The proposed solutions set the stage for future academic and industrial advancements, supported by a comprehensive SWOT (Strongness - Weakness - Opportunity - Threat) analysis, and outline potential future research directions.
Andrea Pinna, Maria Ilaria Lunesu, Roberto Tonelli, Simone Sansoni
This article focuses on the concept of blockchain soulbound tokens, their potential applications, and their implementation in Ethereum-based blockchains. Soulbound tokens add an important piece to blockchain technology, as they could be the key to building Web3 and a trustworthy decentralized society. Issued and strictly linked to an account, representing the soul of a user, the soulbound token makes it possible to represent a property that only the user can have and that cannot be transferred, but only removed, which enhances security. To evaluate their impact on blockchain development, we first examine the concept of soulbound tokens, their potential applications, and their effective adoption. The application sectors include the creation of digital identity certificates, ownership certificates, reputational certificates, governance, and the healthcare sector. We then report and describe relevant blockchain token standards, including soulbound token standards, provided in the form of Ethereum Improvement Proposals. Finally, to study the efficacy of the implementation of soulbound tokens, we propose a case study that includes the design and development of a decentralized vaccine certification prototype based on soulbound tokens. In our system, the vaccination data produced by the health authority is fully decentralized and implemented as the issuance of soulbound tokens for the benefit of a citizen’s soul account. As a result, the citizen is the only owner of the vaccination data.