Digital financial services are organized in alliance-intensive ecosystems, yet we know little about whether and how firmsâ alliance portfolios are associated with market value. Drawing on 130 publicly listed FinTechs (2019â2025), we identify 760 unique strategic alliances and represent them as a reciprocally encoded network, where each alliance is recorded as two mutual ties. We compute degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality and relate alliance portfolios and network positions primarily to firm-level market valuation (market capitalization and total enterprise value), while considering revenue, net income, and adjusted 5-year beta as supporting financial indicators. Spearman rank correlations indicate significant associations between alliances and market valuation and revenue, but not net income or founding year. In log-linear OLS with controls and fixed effects, one additional alliance is associated with â3.6% higher market capitalization. Framed by Social Capital Theory, the findings provide confirmatory evidence that alliance-based embeddedness is associated with capital market valuations.
Michael Kah Ong Goh, Yu-Xian Cheng, Check-Yee Law, Connie Tee · 6 authors
Traditional ticketing systems often suffer from major drawbacks such as ticket fraud, duplication, inflated resale prices, lack of transparency, and centralized control over transactions. These issues result in reduced trust and limited flexibility for both event organizers and ticket buyers, especially in unregulated secondary markets. To address these gaps, this paper presents the design and development of a Decentralized Ticketing System (DTS) using Web3 technologies. The system leverages Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts written in Solidity, and NFT-based ticket issuance to ensure security, transparency, and verifiable ownership. Features include wallet-based login via MetaMask, multi-ticket purchasing, QR-based validation, controlled resale pricing, and seller revenue withdrawal. Smart contract reliability is enhanced using OpenZeppelin libraries and tested with Mocha and Chai. By decentralizing control and automating ticket processes, the proposed DTS enhances current practices by offering a more secure, tamper-proof, and user-centric ticketing alternative that mitigates fraud and enables transparent peer-to-peer interactions. The architecture of this system integrates a decentralized storage and interaction layer that connects the blockchain smart contracts with a web-based user interface which allow organizers to create events and sell tickets while buyers can securely browse, purchase, and manage their digital assets. The system also demonstrates how blockchain-based ticketing can improve traceability, reduce intermediaries, and support fairer event ecosystems for stakeholders across industry.
The rapid digitalization of agriculture has significantly improved operational efficiency, precision farming, and supply chain transparency. Traditional centralized information systems can face problems in offering enough security, traceability, and trust in complicated multi-stakeholder agricultural supply chains. This paper explores the possibility of blockchain as a cybersecurity architecture to provide data integrity and secure transactions in agricultural applications. A qualitative research method and structured analysis of 47 scholarly papers and four real-world blockchain deployments (IBM Food Trust, AgriDigital, TE-FOOD, and Ambrosus) are used in the study. The results show that blockchain technology can substantially improve the security and transparency of agricultural value chains through various mechanisms such as distributed ledger, consensus validation, smart contracts, decentralized identity management, and role-based access control. By leveraging case studies, it is evident that traceability has improved significantly, fraud prevention has increased, auditability has been enhanced, and transaction security has been bolstered; in some deployments, traceability time is in the order of seconds rather than days. Various mitigation measures such as IoT data attestation, HSMs, consortium governance models and harmonising policies are explored. The study concludes that blockchain technology offers a strong and durable cybersecurity infrastructure for the modern agricultural ecosystem by providing a platform for transparent and trusted data sharing, tamper-resistant data recording, and safe digital transactions throughout the supply chain.KeywordsâBlockchain, Cybersecurity, Agricultural Supply Chain, Data Integrity, Smart Contracts, Distributed Ledger Technology, Food Traceability, IoT Security, Secure Transactions, Consortium Blockchain.DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.24321/3051.4304.202605 How to cite this article:Afroz M, Vishnu D, Alam I, Lamkuche H S, Patheja P S, Blockchain for Cybersecurity: Ensuring Data Integrity and Secure Transactions in the Agricultural Industry and Supply Chain Management. J Adv Res Comp Tech Soft Appl 2026; 10(2): 26-32. DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.24321/3051.4304.202605
We extend the Lindblad Cryptography Protocol (LCP) â previously applied to consensus and decentralized finance â to the problem of verifying real-world data on-chain. Existing oracle protocols solve the immutability of records on-chain but inherit a structural weakness at the data ingestion layer: the data still originates in software, run by a trusted operator, and can be fabricated at the source before being recorded. We show that hardware with silicon-derived unforgeable identity (SRAM PUF + BCH fuzzy extractor) can sign measurements directly, producing attestations that are cryptographically verifiable by any third party without trust in the operator. We demonstrate end-to-end validation on mainnet using a live commodity price (West Texas Intermediate crude oil) sourced from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, signed by a physical node, and verified by a publicly accessible mathematical check. We further describe the generalization of this primitive across five application verticals: agriculture, energy, mining and resource extraction, Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization, and verified ad delivery. The Lindblad Oracle complements existing oracle protocols (Chainlink, API3, UMA) by providing a hardware-anchored root of trust at the data-origination layer, beneath their data-distribution layer.
Consent-Bounded Contact Theory (CBCT) develops a protocol-level theory for deciding when contact and contact-derived artifacts may be accepted as legitimate. In this framework, âcontactâ is not limited to physical interaction or direct communication. It includes operational effects such as querying, copying, forking, merging, modeling, simulating, representing, reactivating, auditing, inheriting, refining, or blocking contact-derived claims in long-lived artificial, collective, or autonomous processes. The theory does not claim physical non-contact, hidden subjective consent, complete observability, or substrate-specific standing. Instead, it defines consent-bounded legitimacy through observable evidence, credential closure, trust anchors, consent claims, negotiation transcripts, provenance records, residual routes, bridge contracts, ledgers, audit anchors, and finite certificates. Contact legitimacy is treated as a certified property of a closed, generated, conservatively abstracted, stratified, and audited support configuration, rather than as the mere ability to contact, compute, infer, or deploy. CBCT combines finite causal event presentations, raw observation closure, conservative presentation abstraction, stratified rule semantics, bitemporal finality, observer-merge-aware audit structures, source-authority evidence fusion, Sybil-aware source quotients, polarity-aware repair propagation, accounting doctrines, coverage epochs, bridge event morphisms, and policy-fibration gluing. It provides formal tools for reasoning about consent, authorization, evidence independence, challengeability, revocation, lineage transport, support obligations, model release, deployment eligibility, bridge refinement, and policy composition across heterogeneous systems. The framework is substrate-neutral: issuers, targets, stewards, guardians, auditors, observers, challengers, oracles, and collectives are treated as finitely credentialed role-bearing processes rather than privileged biological, artificial, institutional, or collective substrate classes. This makes the theory applicable to autonomous agents, AI governance, distributed systems, digital consent, provenance-aware auditing, long-running services, copied or forked processes, dormant systems, collective processes, and future intelligent infrastructures. CBCT is positioned as a bridge-compatible theory. It can interact with Dormant Continuity Theory for dormancy and reactivation semantics, and with Observable-Signal Crystallization Theory for cessation, non-resurrection, terminal-status, and liberation certificates. The paperâs main results establish credential-closure foundation soundness, support-generated adequacy preservation, stratified rule and checker adequacy, observer-merge finality, source-credential-based evidence non-amplification, future-only repair safety under event polarity, accounting epoch soundness, bridge-refinement soundness, and policy-fibration gluing.
The rapid proliferation of digital media necessitates resilient paradigms for managing, authenticating, and preserving static and dynamic 2D data. Since centralized repositories are vulnerable to tampering and pure blockchain storage remains economically prohibitive for high-fidelity multimedia, this comprehensive review demonstrates that a hybrid on-chain/off-chain architecture constitutes the most viable solution. By anchoring immutable metadata on robust ledgers while offloading heavy graphical payloads to distributed networks like IPFS and Arweave, this paradigm optimizes both security and cost. For static 2D formats, current research emphasizes cryptographic provenance, digital rights management, and tamper detection via perceptual hashing. Conversely, dynamic 2D formats require advanced architectural optimizations, including decentralized streaming protocols, progressive rendering, and complex temporal metadata indexing. Despite these technological advancements, widespread adoption is severely impeded by critical bottlenecks such as network scalability limits, fragmented cross-chain interoperability, and the absence of universal benchmarking datasets. To bridge the gap between experimental frameworks and enterprise integration, future research must prioritize developing interoperable metadata schemas, Layer-2 performance optimizations for high-bandwidth streaming and integrating privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives like Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Ultimately, this paper provides a foundational roadmap for architecting scalable, decentralized digital asset management ecosystems.
This research discusses the incorporation of IoT with blockchain technique to enhance the efficiency of smart farming systems, particularly focusing on plant disease classification, pest detection, and smart irrigation. The study aims to develop a secure and effective IoT-based smart farming framework using the Ethereum blockchain to store and transmit data, and a Hybrid Convolution Adaptive Recurrent MobileNet (HC-ARMNet) model for predictive analytics, optimized by the Improved Secretary Bird Optimization (ISBO) algorithm. The research employs IoT sensors to acquire real-time data, which is then stored in the Ethereum blockchain to ensure security. The HC-ARMNet model, combining 1D/2D convolutions with recurrent connections, processes this data for pest detection and irrigation management. The ISBO algorithm is leveraged to fine-tune the technique's parameters. Datasets used: The proposed system utilizes three standard datasets for evaluation. The PlantifyDr Dataset is used for classifying plant disease, and the Pest Detection Dataset is used for recognizing pests. Also, for the smart irrigation process, the significant field images are collected manually. The accuracy, precision, and FNR rates of the ISBO-HC-ARMNet-aided plant disease classification are 94.16%, 94.2% and 5.87%. At the same time, the ISBO-HC-ARMNet-based pest detection process's accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 93.78%, 93.79% and 93.76%, respectively. In addition, the ISBO-HC-ARMNet-based smart irrigation task's MSE is 3.21, SMAPE is 0.03, and MASE is 30.23. Thus, the designed system showcases promising performance over classical approaches in terms of accuracy and error rates for plant disease classification, pest detection, and smart irrigation. The research concludes that the IoT-aided smart farming framework with blockchain and the HC-ARMNet model provides a robust solution for secure and efficient agricultural management. The system's predictive capabilities provide accurate and timely data analysis, facilitating to the improvement of precision agriculture. Future work will focus on improving the system with advanced feature extraction strategies to reduce processing time.
This paper presents an empirical analysis of the Web3 security landscape over the four-year and three-month period from 1 January 2022 to 27 March 2026. The dataset combines 23,818 public audit findings produced by 22 independent security firms with 218 real-world exploit incidents documented by rekt.news, representing aggregate losses of approximately US$7.76 billion. We report three central findings. First, the distribution of audit findings (by severity, category, and technology stack) is substantially stable across the observation window, with the Critical-plus-High share remaining within a 15-17% band in every complete year. Second, the categorical distribution of realised exploit losses does not correspond to the categorical distribution of audit findings: private-key compromise, phishing, and social-engineering vectors account for approximately 49.6% of cumulative losses yet represent a negligible share of published audit findings. Third, realised losses exhibit extreme concentration: the eight largest incidents account for 50.6% of cumulative dollar losses and the twenty largest for 71.4%, a distributional shape inconsistent with Gaussian assumptions. Throughout, we adopt the analytical convention that audit outputs and exploit outputs describe different populations and present the two datasets in parallel rather than as directly comparable samples.
Blockchain interoperability enables independent blockchain systems to communicate and exchange assets across heterogeneous networks. However, the lack of comprehensive security mechanisms remains a critical weakness -- one that attackers have already exploited to cause hundreds of millions of dollars in asset losses. This paper presents a systematic identification and classification of security threats facing interoperable blockchain systems, along with corresponding countermeasures for each. We organize threats into five categories: (1) core blockchain attacks, (2) network attacks, (3) interoperability-specific attacks, (4) social engineering, and (5) code vulnerabilities, with particular attention to smart contract weaknesses. For each identified threat, we analyze its attack surface and propose effective defensive strategies. The resulting taxonomy provides a structured foundation for designing and evaluating secure blockchain interoperability solutions.
Public blockchains continue to struggle with scalability because improving throughput is not as simple as increasing block size or reducing block interval. Larger blocks increase validation and transmission cost, while shorter intervals raise the likelihood of propagation delays, forks, and stale blocks. These limits motivate sharding, where transaction processing is divided across multiple parallel shard groups. In this work, we present a configurable SimPy-based discrete-event simulator for evaluating sharded blockchain architectures under controlled workload and network assumptions. The simulator models mining, verification, inter-shard coordination, block dissemination, measured throughput, average block time, and communication overhead. Our simulator achieves 1.6M TPS at 256 shards under a local datacenter-like setup and 0.6M TPS in a global WAN setup, showing strong throughput gains from parallel execution. However, the gains are not unbounded: beyond a certain number of shards, coordination traffic, synchronization, and network overhead begin to dominate, leading to diminishing returns.
Blockchain consensus mechanisms based on Proof-of-Work consume significant energy, with Bitcoin alone estimated at approximately 150 TWh per year. Proof-of-Space reduces this cost by replacing repeated computation with storage, but plot generation remains bottlenecked by CPU hashing throughput. Prior work on VaultX demonstrated a high-performance CPU-based Proof-of-Space plotter using multi-threaded Blake3 hashing, achieving plotting speeds 4 to 50x faster than Chia depending on hardware configuration. In this paper, we present VaultxGPU, a GPU-accelerated extension of the VaultX plotter that offloads the Blake3 hashing pipeline to the GPU using custom kernels. We implement the plotter in both CUDA for NVIDIA hardware and SYCL for AMD and Intel GPUs, keeping Table 1 entirely in GPU VRAM and fusing the sort and match stages into a single kernel to minimize data movement. We evaluate VaultxGPU across K-values 27 through 31 against CPU baselines. Our SYCL GPU implementation achieves a 59.2x speedup over a single-threaded CPU baseline, completing a K=31 plot in 45.4 seconds compared to 2688 seconds, and outperforms even the best 384-thread CPU configuration. These results confirm that GPU acceleration is the correct direction for scaling Proof-of-Space plotting beyond what CPU parallelism can achieve.
Background: Lyapunov exponent has been used in many science and engineering problems to quantify chaos in systems and understand their nonlinear dynamics. In financial engineering and forecasting, evaluation of chaos in financial data helps determine whether the data are predictable and if profits can be generated. The purpose of this study is to examine presence of chaos in cryptocurrency markets. Methods: To examine chaos, Lyapunov exponent is computed from a set of 50 cryptocurrencies and statistical one-sided and two-sided Student-t tests are performed to check if on average the computed Lyapunov exponents are equal, less, or larger than zero. Results: The statistical results reveal strong evidence that prices, returns, and trading volume changes are all chaotic; hence, they show nonlinear and deterministic characteristics. Conclusions: Prices, returns, and trading volume changes in cryptocurrencies could be predicted in the short run; for instance, on a daily basis. In this regard, active traders and investors may implement predictive systems to generate daily profits.
The rapid proliferation of blockchain technology has fundamentally transformed global finance through the introduction of decentralized digital assets. However, the intrinsic characteristics that define cryptocurrencies namely decentralization, pseudonymity, and transactional irreversibility have simultaneously rendered the ecosystem a primary target for sophisticated cyber-attacks. This study investigates the critical dichotomy between the "code is law" philosophy and the imperative need for robust cybersecurity frameworks within a rapidly expanding market capitalization. This paper provides a multi-layered architectural analysis of vulnerabilities across the network, infrastructure, and application layers of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Specifically, it examines systemic threats such as 51% attacks, smart contract exploits (including reentrancy and logic bugs), decentralized finance (DeFi) rug pulls, and sophisticated social engineering schemes. To address these vulnerabilities, the study evaluates the efficacy of current defense-in-depth mechanisms, including air-gapped cold storage solutions, multi-signature protocols, third-party smart contract auditing, and privacy-enhancing Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). Furthermore, the research explores the integration of regulatory frameworks (AML/KYC standards) and proactive technological defenses like real-time on-chain analytics. Ultimately, this study proposes an enhanced, holistic threat prevention strategy designed to mitigate systemic risks, eliminate single points of failure, and safeguard the future integrity of digital asset platforms.
The circuit-breaker capstone of the WANDERING arc on long-horizon coding-agent failure. A prior result ('The Lever Is Late') showed that control of a coding agent's 'finish' decision lives not at the mid-layer 'task-is-done' verdict but in a late, task-matched action-commitment block ~30 layers downstream. This paper answers two pre-registered questions that the single 'finish' result could not: is the late lever SPECIFIC to termination, and can it BRAKE an action, not just elicit one? On Qwen3.6-27B over 99 SWE-bench Pro trajectories, using a second decision in the same data -- commit a file edit (str_replace_editor) vs. continue reversible exploration (bash) -- with n=60 deterministic decision points per condition, prefill-only patching, and generation-confirmed outcomes: (1) GENERALIZATION (elicit): injecting a task-matched edit-donor into the late block makes a stuck-in-exploration agent emit a real edit call (0.23 -> 0.77 at L59; position control 0.08, cross-task control 0.48). (2) THE BRAKE (suppress): injecting an explore-donor at a commit decision collapses the real edit rate 0.48 -> 0.02 (96% suppression) at L55, with a same-class control intact (0.55) and the opposite donor boosting to 0.92. (3) The mechanism is MONOTONIC and BIDIRECTIONAL: exact paired McNemar on all 14 per-point conditions yields seven contrasts surviving Holm-Bonferroni (worst p=7.6e-5), with elicit c=0 (the edit-donor only turns commits on) and brake b=0 (the explore-donor only turns them off) -- the lever moves exactly in the donor's direction with ~zero off-direction noise. (4) CROSS-ARCHITECTURE: the late-commitment geometry and donor-specific writability replicate across two model families and two scales (Mistral-7B and the scale-matched Mistral-Small-24B, where the mid-inert / late-write dissociation is cleanest: fidelity 0.955 vs 0.007). Strengtheners: the elicit/brake lift survives a full valid-tool-call re-parse (0.23->0.37 elicit, 0.40->0.07 brake), and the brake re-routes to reversible exploration (+0.17 bash above its no-brake floor of 0.43). We frame the bidirectional late lever as the mechanism for a mechanistic CIRCUIT-BREAKER: a single late-layer intervention that blocks an action at its commit point. Honest scope: demonstrated on a state-mutating but UNDOABLE edit (a semi-irreversible proxy); intervening on a genuinely irreversible action (e.g. send_transaction) is the named next step. The model-agnostic decision-locator tool, pre-registrations, per-point data, exact-statistics script, and an adversarial pre-publication evaluation are released in the GitHub repository under paper/circuit_breaker/. EXTENDED EDITION adds a mechanistic decomposition of the lever (Section 'Opening the lever: a sparse attention-head circuit'). Using an exact additive residual split (y=x+attn+mlp; reconstruction relerr 0.0025) the elicit is written by the L59 ATTENTION sublayer (MLP null; Wilcoxon attn>>mlp p=1.8e-8; direction-specific 2.2x), while the brake localizes to NO sublayer (distributed, super-additive residual) -- the elicit/brake asymmetry holds at sublayer resolution and rules out a feed-forward key-value write. One level deeper, the elicit is a SPARSE 3-head push circuit at L59 (heads 8/6/3 reproduce and overshoot the full attention effect, top-3 +0.262 >= all-24 +0.224; emit 0.23->0.42), partially opposed by a counter-set; geometric write-magnitude misleads (the largest writer is causally an opponent). These heads attend globally to the trajectory's TOOL-CALL HISTORY (an induction/copy signature), not a semantic verdict. A source-content knockout gives partial/directional causal support (tool choice is causally specific to each tool's name tokens: ablating 'bash' tokens drops P(bash) -0.071 vs ~0 for random; the edit side is ceiling-confounded). All 53 reported numbers were verified against the released per-result ledgers by an adversarial pre-submission evaluation (EVAL_mechanism.md). Scripts (commit_lever_decomp/heads/attn/knockout.py) and per-result ledgers are released.
With the accelerated marketization of data factors, achieving fair contribution evaluation, privacy-preserving verification, and dynamic incentives in decentralized environments has emerged as a critical challenge. Existing studies exhibit a structural tension between privacy protection and verification transparency, while lacking adaptive mechanisms for non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) data scenarios. To address these issues, this paper proposes a collaborative trading framework integrating zero-knowledge proofs, personalized federated learning, and reinforcement learning. The framework employs zk-SNARKs to construct non-interactive proofs, thereby resolving the verification-privacy dilemma. A meta-learningâdriven personalized aggregation scheme is introduced to correct valuation bias under Non-IID data distributions, and a deep Q-network (DQN) agent is deployed to enable dynamic incentive responses to market supplyâdemand fluctuations. Experiments conducted on Ethereum and Farcaster datasets demonstrate that the proposed mechanism improves the Contribution Fairness Index (CFI) by 19.7%â22.4% over the strongest baseline, achieving a Verification-Utility Ratio (VER) of 24.6. Under a collaboration scale of N = 20, market vitality entropy increases to 0.75 (baseline: 0.41), effectively suppressing monopolistic tendencies. Moreover, despite the introduction of proof mechanisms, the estimated additional on-chain verification and consensus latency per round is approximately 13 s, calibrated against empirical benchmarks. This work provides a verifiable trading mechanism for data factor markets that jointly ensures privacy, fairness, and efficiency, supporting secure data circulation in domains such as healthcare and finance.
Blockchain-based trading venues, so-called decentralized exchanges, are at the heart of the decentralized finance revolution. Automated market makers, simple computer programs on the blockchain, administer liquidity and set the terms of trade. This article summarizes the key mechanisms behind these new markets, how they differ from traditional financial markets, how liquidity is provided, how prices are set, and how liquidity providers get compensated. We include a short guide on how to understand blockchain data and use these data for academic research.
Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a promising cryptographic protocol, but its practical deployment is hindered by the time-consuming proof generation. The proof generation inherently exhibits high-degree parallelism, yet challenges persist in exploiting fine-grained parallelism due to the dataflow complexity, impeding previous work to achieve optimal acceleration. In this work, we propose FZKP, a ZKP accelerator that utilizes two novel fine-grained dataflows coupled with two forward-flow microarchitectures to alleviate dataflow complexity, efficiently exploiting fine-grained parallelism. The proposed dataflows simplify the dataflow pattern for parallel execution, disclosing fine-grained parallelism at a low cost. The microarchitectures employ a base design to handle large bit-width intermediate results for timely consumption. They then replicate and combine the base design following the proposed dataflow to facilitate parallel execution. When evaluated in 12 nm, FZKP achieves an average speedup of 10.3Ă and 2.2Ă over the state-of-the-art GPU-based solution and ZKP accelerator on real-world workloads, respectively.
Purpose This study investigates the volatility spillover dynamics between carbon credit market represented by European Union Allowance (EUA) futures and major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), during the 2020â2024 period. It aims to understand whether these assets, despite their difference in regulatory and structural features, exhibit interconnected volatility pattern and particularly under crisis or shock conditions. Design/methodology/approach The article employs a two-step econometric approach. First, the Dynamic Conditional Correlation Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (DCC-GARCH) model is used to estimate time-varying return correlations among EUA, BTC and ETH. And second, the DieboldâYilmaz (2012) spillovers index based on forecast error variance decomposition is applied to quantify the sizes, directions and evolution of volatility spillovers across markets. Findings The results reveal significant but uneven and time-varying volatility spillovers between carbon and cryptocurrency markets. Spillover intensity becomes more prominent, especially during major crisis periods such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the RussiaâUkraine war and the FTX collapse. Spillovers are asymmetric and regime-dependent. ETH emerges as the main net volatility transmitter, while BTC exhibits a near-neutral and regime-dependent role, alternating between transmitting and receiving shocks. EUA futures remain largely insulated, with only limited outward volatility transmission even under extreme market conditions. These findings suggest the presence of conditional and crisis-driven spillover linkages between green and digital assets. Originality/value This is among the first studies to empirically examine the volatility transmissions between carbon credit and cryptocurrency market using advanced econometric tools. It contributes to the emerging green -digital finance literature by identifying dynamic and directional interdependency across these evolving asset types.
This manuscript develops Dormant Continuity Theory (DCT), a protocol-relative mathematical framework for reasoning about systems that remain inactive at their protected core while retaining auditable continuity, recovery, diagnostic, and handoff capabilities. The theory formalizes dormant processes using finite transition systems, typed certificates, observable histories, evidence algebra, guarded authorization, replayable resolution, extraction adequacy, and fail-closed classification.DCT addresses practical challenges in long-lived distributed systems, including forked ledger histories, bounded model checking, data availability, zero-knowledge proof soundness boundaries, watcher incentives, MEV-resistant reward mechanisms, resource conservation, guardian corruption, maintenance transitions, and certificate-level HTLC handoff to extinction-style OSCT semantics. The framework distinguishes safety, bounded-griefing, diagnostic routing, and liveness assumptions, avoiding unconditional trustless claims while providing a rigorous finite core for verification and implementation-oriented extensions.
SAMUEL OBOH, Boniface Dondo, S. Yakura Bassa, Gambo I. Bature
Ethereum, a leading digital asset by market value, has gained increasing attention from investors and researchers because of its high price volatility and market unpredictability. This study forecasts Ethereum cryptocurrency daily closing prices using the Box-Jenkins Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) methodology, drawing on data from January 1, 2019, to December 31, 2025. Stationarity analysis via the Augmented Dickey-Fuller ADF and KwiatkowskiâPhillipsâSchmidtâShin (KPSS) tests confirmed that first differencing was required to render the series suitable for the modeling. Through systematic model identification, estimation, and comparison of ten candidate ARIMA specifications, the ARIMA(1,1,0) model emerged as the optimal fit, yielding the lowest information criterion values of Akaike information criterion, Bayesian information criterion (AIC = 24,943.883; AICc = 24,943.84; BIC = 24,955.12). Residual diagnostic tests, including the Ljung-Box test for serial correlation, the Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH-LM) test for heteroscedasticity, and the Shapiro-Wilk test for normality, confirmed that the model residuals are free of serial dependence, although they exhibit time-varying volatility and non-normal distribution, features commonly associated with financial time series. The fitted model was subsequently applied to generate 30-day ahead forecasts with 95% confidence intervals, revealing relatively stable price expectations in the near term alongside progressively widening prediction bands that reflect growing uncertainty over longer horizons. These findings underscore the practical utility of the parsimonious ARIMA(1,1,0) model as a transparent and accessible tool for short-term Ethereum-price forecasting and investment risk assessment.
Yuanyuan Zhang, N. J. Lord, Stephen Chan, Jeffrey Chu · 5 authors
This study examines the relationship between global phishing crime and cryptocurrency-market conditions, with a specific focus on Ethereum. Using monthly data from January 2016 to December 2022, we analyse the returns of global phishing crime numbers together with six Ethereum financial metrics relating to transactions, trading volume, and price impact. We employ quantile regression, quantile-on-quantile regression, and Granger causality in quantiles to examine whether the relationship between Ethereum market indicators and phishing activity varies across different market states. The results reveal a state-dependent relationship. Large increases in phishing crime numbers are strongly associated with large increases in Ethereum transaction activity, average transaction price, and transaction quantity, while implicit transaction cost is predominantly negatively associated with phishing activity, particularly at the upper quantiles. These findings suggest that phishing risk is most pronounced during extreme market conditions and may be shaped by both reward-enhancing market activity and cost-enhancing transaction frictions. To interpret these patterns, we develop an incentive-based criminogenic mechanism in which Ethereum market conditions affect phishing activity through offendersâ expected payoff. We identify two mediating channels: a monetisation-frictions channel, operating through liquidity, price impact, slippage, and transaction costs; and an attention/information-asymmetry channel, operating through volatility, speculative attention, fear of missing out, and user vulnerability. The findings provide initial evidence that cryptocurrency-related phishing is not only a technical cybersecurity issue, but also a market-sensitive phenomenon shaped by financial incentives, liquidity conditions, and behavioural vulnerability. These insights can support regulators, law enforcement agencies, and cryptocurrency platforms in developing adaptive early-warning and prevention strategies.