Blockchain Papers

한충현

학위논문(석사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 경영대학 경영학과, 2025. 8. 이종섭.

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.

Hanouf Al Ghanmi

Blockchain smart contracts have emerged as a transformative technology, enabling the automation and execution of contractual agreements. These self-executing software programs leverage blockchain’s distributed and immutable nature to eliminate the need for third-party intermediaries. However, this new paradigm of automation and authority introduces a complex environment with technical intricacies that users are expected to understand and trust. The irreversible nature of blockchain decisions exacerbates these issues, as any mistake or misuse cannot be rectified. Current smart contract designs often neglect human-centric approaches and the exploration of trustworthiness characteristics, such as explainability. Explainability, a renowned requirement in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aimed at enhancing human understandability, transparency and trust, has yet to be thoroughly examined in the context of smart contracts. A noticeable gap exists in the literature concerning the early development of explainability requirements, including established methods and frameworks for addressing requirements analysis phases, design principles, evaluation of their necessity and trade-offs. Therefore, this thesis aims to advance the field of blockchain smart contract systems by introducing explainability as a design concern, fundamentally prompting requirements engineers and designers to cater to this concern during the early development phases. Specifically, we provide guidelines for explainability requirements analysis, addressing what, why, when and to whom to explain. We propose design principles for integrating explainability into the early stages of development. To tailor explainability further, we propose a human-centred framework for determining information requirements in smart contract explanations, utilising situational awareness theories to address the ‘what to explain’ aspect. Additionally, we present ‘explainability purposes’ as an integral resource in evaluating and designing explainability. Our approach includes a novel evaluation framework inspired by the metacognitive explanation-based theory of surprise, addressing the ‘why to explain’ aspect. The proposed approaches have been evaluated through qualitative validations and expert feedback. We have illustrated the added value and constraints of explainability requirements in smart contracts by presenting case studies drawn from literature, industry scenarios and real-world projects. This study informs requirements engineers and designers regarding how to elicit, design and evaluate the need for explainability requirements, contributing to the advancement of the early development of smart contracts.

S Abinivesh, Deva Priya Isravel, Julia Punitha Malar Dhas

Blockchain technology is an advanced system centered around the concept of a shared and immutable ledger, emphasizing decentralization, security, and transparency. Transactions on a blockchain are securely linked through cryptographic hashes, forming blocks. A fundamental component of blockchain is the consensus mechanism, which comes in various types, each with its own advantages and limitations. For instance, Proof of Work (PoW) faces challenges related to energy consumption, while Proof of Stake (PoS) is susceptible to certain attacks. This paper proposes a hybrid consensus mechanism that integrates Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and Proof of Stake (PoS) using a quorum-based tier approach. This new hybrid model combines the refined features of both PoS and PBFT to create a hierarchical structure for reaching consensus. Nodes are categorized into high-tier and low-tier groups, with the consensus process primarily involving high-tier nodes. Low-tier nodes serve as backups in situations like network issues or node failures. Through experimentation it is evident that the hybrid consensus mechanism achieves a balance between decentralization and energy efficiency. The results demonstrate that this newly developed mechanism outperforms several existing consensus algorithms in terms of throughput and latency.

Jelena Mišić, Vojislav B. Mišić, Xiaolin Chang

Both Proof of Stake (PoS) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus schemes for permissioned blockchains incur the risk of centralization of voting power in the hands of a small number of wealthy voters. In this work, we present Qualified Proof of Stake (QPoS) scheme which alleviates centralization by rewarding truthful behavior of both voters and leaders, and penalizing their untruthful behavior. Leaders are elected according to the current stake which gives preference to more trustworthy nodes. Nodes with low stake at the end of a round which consists of multiple PBFT voting cycles are excluded from voting in subsequent rounds, while nodes with sufficient stake may leave the network temporarily without losing their stake. We consider multiple node classes with different voting behavior and model them using embedded Markov Chain which corresponds to Semi Markov Process (SMP) in order to determine system performance. Our results show the interaction of class populations, voting behavior, and mobility with round size, and show notable stake-based prioritization among the nodes for selection of PBFT leaders. Moreover, we show that higher proportion of well behaved nodes and shorter voting rounds are needed to achieve consensus with high probability.

Yoshito Watanabe, Ryohei Banno, Takashi Miki

The collaboration among service robots operated by multiple vendors is in demand, but it is difficult to achieve due to issues such as the lack of interoperability among vendor-specific operating systems. To tackle this problem, we propose a crowdsourcing platform leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT), where users can request services by flexibly combining multiple tasks assigned to robots. We also present a solution to avoid collisions of mobile robots by employing a universal space identification technology, called Spatial-ID, and defining a Space of Attention (SoA) as a location that requires attention for navigating robots. Our approach does not require the sharing of navigation maps among vendors unlike conventional methods. As a case study, we compared the transaction approval latency of the Ethereum blockchain and IOTA Tangle using their test networks through computer simulations. We then evaluated the risk of transaction conflicts, concluding that IOTA Tangle is a promising technology for implementing the proposed platform.

Rob McLaughlin, Nir Chemaya, Dingyue Liu, Dahlia Malkhi

This paper introduces a trade ordering rule that aims to reduce intra-block price volatility in Automated Market Maker (AMM) powered decentralized exchanges. The ordering rule introduced here, Clever Look-ahead Volatility Reduction (CLVR), operates under the (common) framework in decentralized finance that allows some entities to observe trade requests before they are settled, assemble them into "blocks", and order them as they like. On AMM exchanges, asset prices are continuously and transparently updated as a result of each trade and therefore, transaction order has high financial value. CLVR aims to order transactions for traders' benefit. Our primary focus is intra-block price stability (minimizing volatility), which has two main benefits for traders: it reduces transaction failure rate and allows traders to receive closer prices to the reference price at which they submit their transactions accordingly. We show that CLVR constructs an ordering which approximately minimizes price volatility with a small computation cost and can be trivially verified externally.

Regan Meloche, Daniel Amyot, John Mylopoulos

SymboleoNLP is a Web-based tool that allows contract authors to make customizations to a legal contract template using a controlled, yet expressive, natural language. The tool also maintains a formal specification of the contract in Symboleo, a formal specification language designed for the legal contract monitoring domain. The controlled customizations allow for the automated formalization of the customized contract, enabling Symboleo-based property verification and code generation of monitoring smart contracts. This work pushes the boundaries of requirements-based contract template customization with a view towards full formalization.

Giampaolo Bella, Giampaolo Bella, Domenico Cantone, Domenico Cantone · 6 authors

Decentralised ledgers are gaining momentum following the interest of industries and people in smart contracts. Major attention is paid to blockchain applications intended for trading assets that exploit digital cryptographic certificates called tokens. Particularly relevant tokens are the non-fungible tokens (NFTs), namely, unique and non-replicable tokens used to represent the cryptographic counterpart of assets ranging from pieces of art through to licenses and certifications. A relevant consequence of the hard-coded nature of blockchains is the hardness of probing, in particular when advanced searchers involving the capabilities of the smart contracts or the assets digitised by NFTs are required. For this purpose, a formal representation for the operational semantics of smart contracts and of tokens has become particularly urgent, especially in economy and finance, where blockchains become increasingly relevant. Hence, we feel the need to tailor Semantic Web technologies to achieve that semantic representation at least for NFTS. This article reports on an ontology that leverages the Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (“OASIS”) towards the semantic representation of smart contracts responsible for managing ERC721-compliant NFTs and running on the Ethereum blockchain. Called Ether-OASIS, the proposed ontology adopts OASIS and tailors its behaviouristic approach to the Ethereum blockchain by conceiving smart contracts as agents running on the blockchain and, consequently, smart contract interactions as agent commitments. Smart contracts are represented in terms of their actions, purposes and tokens that they manage, thus realising a blockchain that is more usable both by users and automated applications. The ontology is evaluated using standard ontological metrics and applied on a case study concerning the minting and transferring of NFTs that digitise batches of wheat.

Geoffrey Ramseyer, David Mazières

Groundhog is a novel design for a smart contract execution engine based around concurrent execution of blocks of transactions. Unlike prior work, transactions within a block in Groundhog are not ordered relative to one another. Instead, our key design insights are first, to design a set of commutative semantics that lets the Groundhog runtime deterministically resolve concurrent accesses to shared data. Second, some storage accesses (such as withdrawing money from an account) conflict irresolvably; Groundhog therefore enforces validity constraints on persistent storage accesses via a reserve-commit process. These two ideas give Groundhog a set of semantics that, while not as powerful as traditional sequential semantics, are flexible enough to implement a wide variety of important applications, and are strictly more powerful than the semantics used in some production blockchains today. Unlike prior smart contract systems, transactions throughput never suffers from contention between transactions. Using 96 CPU cores, Groundhog can process more than half a million payment transactions per second, whether between 10M accounts or just 2.

Dominic Deuber, Jan Gruber, Merlin Humml, Viktoria Ronge · 5 authors

Cryptocurrency forensics have become standard tools for law enforcement. Their basic idea is to deanonymise cryptocurrency transactions to identify the people behind them. Cryptocurrency deanonymisation techniques are often based on premises that largely remain implicit, especially in legal practice. On the one hand, this implicitness complicates investigations. On the other hand, it can have far-reaching consequences for the rights of those affected. Argumentation schemes could remedy this untenable situation by rendering the underlying premises more transparent. Additionally, they can aid in critically evaluating the probative value of any results obtained by cryptocurrency deanonymisation techniques. In the argumentation theory and AI community, argumentation schemes are influential as they state the implicit premises for different types of arguments. Through their critical questions, they aid the argumentation participants in critically evaluating arguments. We specialise the notion of argumentation schemes to legal reasoning about cryptocurrency deanonymisation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the applicability of the resulting schemes through an exemplary real-world case. Ultimately, we envision that using our schemes in legal practice can solidify the evidential value of blockchain investigations, as well as uncover and help to address uncertainty in the underlying premises—thus contributing to protecting the rights of those affected by cryptocurrency forensics.

Stuart Harshbarger, Rosa Heckle, Michael P. Collins

International Test & Evaluation Association (ITEA) For 45 years, we’ve been the catalyst for excellence in T&E – empowering professionals through education, fostering collaboration, and driving innovation that matters. Advance Your T&E Career What We Do Uniting global T&E leaders and experts to address technological challenges collaboratively.[2024

Christian Ziegler, Marcos Luiz Cavalcanti de Miranda, Guangye Cao, Gustav Arentoft · 5 authors

Our study demonstrates the effective use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automating the classification of complex datasets. We specifically target proposals of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), as the clas-sification of this data requires the understanding of context and, therefore, depends on human expertise, leading to high costs associated with the task. The study applies an iterative approach to specify categories and further re-fine them and the prompt in each iteration, which led to an accuracy rate of 95% in classifying a set of 100 proposals. With this, we demonstrate the po-tential of LLMs to automate data labeling tasks that depend on textual con-text effectively.

Yassine Ait Hsain, Naziha Laaz, Samir Mbarki

In recent years, particularly with the Ethereum blockchain’s advent, smart contracts have gained significant interest as a means of regulating exchanges among multiple parties via code. This surge has prompted the emergence of various smart contract (SC) programming languages, each possessing distinct philosophies, grammatical structures, and components. Conse-quently, developers are increasingly involved in SC programming. However, these languages are platform specific, implying that a transition to another platform necessitates the use of different languages. Additionally, developers require a certain level of control over SCs to address encountered bugs and ensure maintenance. To address these developer-centric challenges, this paper presents SCEditor, a novel Eclipse Sirius-based prototype editor designed for the visualization, design, and creation of SCs. The editor proposes a means of standardizing the usage of SC programming languages through the incorporation of graphical syntax and a metamodel conforming to Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) principles and SC construction rules to generate an abstract SC model. The efficacy of this editor is demonstrated through testing on a voting SC written in Vyper and Solidity languages. Furthermore, the editor holds potential for future exploitation in model transformation and code generation for various SC languages.

Francesco Santoro

This article explores the concept of autopoiesis and its application to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Autopoiesis describes the self-producing and self-maintaining characteristics of living systems, a concept that has been applied in various fields beyond biology. DAOs, operating on blockchain technology, exhibit a level of autonomy, transparency, and democratic governance. They are self-governing and self-sustaining systems that operate based on coded rules and protocols. The article suggests that DAOs align with the concept of autopoiesis, making them a specific type of complex system. Diverse case studies demonstrate the resilience and autopoietic features of these organizations. All things considered, the concept of autopoiesis could provide a valuable lens for understanding DAOs.

YU, Liuwen

Distributed argumentation technology is a computational approach incorporating argumentation reasoning mechanisms within multi-agent systems. For the formal foundations of distributed argumentation technology, in this thesis, we conduct a principle-based analysis of structured argumentation as well as abstract multi-agent and abstract bipolar argumentation. The results of the principle-based approach of these theories provide an overview and guideline for further applications of the theories. Moreover, in this thesis we explore distributed argumentation technology using distributed ledgers. We envision an Intelligent Human-input-based Blockchain Oracle (IHiBO), an artificial intelligence tool for storing argumentation reasoning. We propose a decentralized and secure architecture for conducting decision-making, addressing key concerns of trust, transparency, and immutability. We model fund management with agent argumentation in IHiBO and analyze its compliance with European fund management legal frameworks. We illustrate how bipolar argumentation balances pros and cons in legal reasoning in a legal divorce case, and how the strength of arguments in natural language can be represented in structured arguments. Finally, we discuss how distributed argumentation technology can be used to advance risk management, regulatory compliance of distributed ledgers for financial securities, and dialogue techniques.

Adam Welc, Sam Blackshear

This paper presents Sui Move, a new smart contract language for programming blockchains using objects as an abstraction.

Lior Ashkenazy, Nimrod Talmon

Attention-Aware Social Choice tackles the fundamental conflict faced by some agent communities between their desire to include all members in the decision making processes and the limited time and attention that are at the disposal of the community members. Here, we investigate a combination of two techniques for attention-aware social choice, namely Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Sampling. Essentially, we propose a system in which each governance proposal to change the status quo is first sent to a trained NLP model that estimates the probability that the proposal would pass if all community members directly vote on it; then, based on such an estimation, a population sample of a certain size is being selected and the proposal is decided upon by taking the sample majority. We develop several concrete algorithms following the scheme described above and evaluate them using various data, including such from several Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

Ilham Qasse, Shailesh Mishra, Björn Þór Jónsson, Foutse Khomh · 5 authors

The potential of automatic code generation through Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) frameworks has yet to be realized. Beyond their ability to help software professionals write more accurate, reusable code, MDE frameworks could make programming accessible for a new class of domain experts. However, domain experts have been slow to embrace these tools, as they still need to learn how to specify their applications' requirements using the concrete syntax (i.e., textual or graphical) of the new and unified domain-specific language. Conversational interfaces (chatbots) could smooth the learning process and offer a more interactive way for domain experts to specify their application requirements and generate the desired code. If integrated with MDE frameworks, chatbots may offer domain experts with richer domain vocabulary without sacrificing the power of agnosticism that unified modelling frameworks provide. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of integrating chatbots within MDE frameworks and then examine a specific application: the auto-generation of smart contract code based on conversational syntax. We demonstrate how this can be done and evaluate our approach by conducting a user experience survey to assess the usability and functionality of the chatbot framework. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the potential benefits of leveraging Language Models (LLMs) in this context.

Fei Song, Yuyin Ma, Zhenhui Yuan, Ilsun You · 6 authors

The Internet of Things (IoT) is supposed to bridge diversiform service functions and heterogeneous network components. Although the Web3 and blockchain have been regarded as pioneers to retrieve the power and rights from current and future Internet giants, there are still many serious integration issues if information centric mechanisms are enabled. In this article, we establish a system for Reliable Decentralized Networks (RDN) to enhance the capability of content privacy protection based on smart collaborative theory. Possible solutions are explored to create compatible IoT environment when massive data packets have been exposed and shared in complex scenarios. Specifically, we first present common cyberattack approaches inspired by well-known service patterns and typical network characteristics. The information centric requirements are investigated to reduce the leakage risk of existing procedures, which provides necessary repertoire for implementations. The details of RDN design and deployment include target content classifications, representative combination analysis, caching pattern identifications, and so on. Finally, we validate the RDN prototype to illustrate endogenous advantages and potential utilities.

Jiahao Zeng, Xiuhuan Zang, Chang Liu, Zhiyi Chen · 7 authors

Asset digitization is an important part of digital society. However, there are many problems in existing centralized asset trading platforms, for example, the platform has the dominant power in the transaction process and holds a large amount of user data, which is detrimental to users’ interests. To solve these problems, we propose a distributed asset trading mechanism based on automated negotiation. Firstly, we propose a distributed asset trading framework based on the consortium blockchain, which provides trust guarantees for trading through the access control of the consortium blockchain, represents the ownership of assets through non-fungible tokens (NFT), and reduces the blockchain burden by moving the negotiation process off the blockchain through the state channel technology. Then, to reduce the negotiation cost and improve the negotiation results, we propose a bilateral automated multi-issue negotiation model for asset trading. The experimental results show that the negotiation model performs well in terms of success rate and negotiation time, and can achieve win-win agreements.

Adrian Delchev, Ioannis Sfyrakis, Ellis Solaiman

A smart contract is a translation of a standard paper-based contract that can be enforced and executed by a contract management system. At a high level of abstraction, a contract is only a document that describes how the signing parties are to behave in different scenarios; nevertheless, the translation of a typical paper-based contract to its electronic counterpart has proved to be both time-consuming and difficult. The requirement for a language capable of capturing the core of a contract in simple phrases and definitions has been a focus of study for many years. EROP (Events, Rights, Obligations, Prohibitions) is a contract specification language that breaks a contract down into sets of events, rights, obligations, and prohibitions.

Marco Ortu, Giacomo Ibba, Claudio Conversano, Roberto Tonelli

No abstract is available for this record.

Nilson Mori Lazarin, Igor Machado Coelho, Carlos Eduardo Pantoja, José Viterbo

No abstract is available for this record.