Blockchain Papers

Raouf Jmal, Mariam Masmoudi, Ikram Amous, Florence Sèdes

No abstract is available for this record.

Harley Pacheco de Sousa

No abstract is available for this record.

Archy Renaldy Pratama Nugraha, Yandra Arkeman, Irman Hermadi, Yani Nurhadryani

Digital identity verification in e-governance faces a trilemma between security, scalability, and regulatory compliance with Indonesia's Personal Data Protection Law (UU PDP). To resolve this, in this paper, we propose the ZMC-Framework, a blockchain-based hybrid architecture integrating Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) for privacy-preserving verification and Merkle Trees for efficient, scalable data integrity on-chain. Its core innovation is a Legal Proof Protocol with 3+1 parameter augmentation, which cryptographically binds static identifiers to a user-controlled secret, ensuring compliance with UU PDP (data minimization) and UU ITE (authentication integrity) while aligning with key controls of the international ISO/IEC 27001:2022 standard. Evaluated on Polygon Mainnet, the framework demonstrates 29.9% lower operational costs for batch verifications and 50% better storage efficiency compared to pure ZKP systems. These results validate a practical solution to the verification trilemma, providing a secure, scalable, and legally sound foundation for public service identity management in Indonesia's digital governance ecosystem.

Mohammadreza Sarfi

The Absolute Smart Contract (ASC) presents a universal conceptual framework that unifies the spiritual, natural, and scientific dimensions of existence under one governing intelligence. It views reality — from atomic order to human morality — as operating within intrinsic laws of balance, reciprocity, and consequence. Whether expressed as divine will, natural order, or logical computation, each represents the same intelligent structure sustaining creation. The ASC is not a religion or ideology; it is a neutral interpretive model that reconciles seemingly divided worldviews through recognition of one absolute principle — the self-enforcing intelligence of existence itself. ASC further proposes a comparative framework through which religious, ideological, philosophical, and secular systems may be examined according to their stated principles, methods, and observable outcomes. In this sense, ASC functions less as a doctrine and more as an observational tool intended to promote awareness, reflection, and informed judgment.

Komeil Moghaddasi, Raja Jurdak, Sara Khalifa, Yuchen Zhang · 7 authors

The rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DER) such as rooftop photovoltaics (PV), battery storage, electric vehicles (EV), and flexible loads, is shifting power system coordination from centralised control centres to millions of prosumers and local controllers at the distribution level. This transition has led to many new coordination approaches across control, market, and learning-based models, which are often described as decentralised. However, this term is applied inconsistently: it may refer to decomposed optimisation, edge computing, peer-to-peer (P2P) trading, or distributed ledger technology, obscuring what is actually being decentralised, authority, computation, information, or topology. Existing surveys typically address one such concept in isolation, for example, microgrid control structures, energy management system (EMS) topologies, or market designs, without providing a unified, multi-dimensional view across the full coordination landscape. In this survey, we propose a six-tier graduated decentralisation scale for distribution level coordination architectures, accompanied by a set of classification criteria that we apply to systematically map and compare recent architectures. We discuss how topology, decision-making, autonomy, intelligence, information flow, and coordination mechanisms evolve as architectures move from centralised to more decentralised operation. We further identify concrete research gaps, and outline future directions for deployment grade, multi-actor grid coordination.

Donggoo Kim, Rajesh Upadhayaya, Milosz Bator, Tao Le

Proof of Reserves (PoR) enables centralized crypto exchanges to demonstrate that on-chain reserves are sufficient to cover customer liabilities. However, existing approaches, including Merkle-tree-based proofs and zero-knowledge PoR systems, remain difficult for everyday users to verify in practice, resulting in limited participation and weakened transparency. We introduce LPOR, a layered, usability-focused PoR framework that separates lightweight user-side checks from auditor-level cryptographic verification, enabling non-technical users to verify inclusion and publicly recompute total liabilities with minimal friction. By lowering verification barriers, LPOR increases user participation and substantially improves the probability of detecting omitted liabilities. We evaluate its scalability and omission detectability at a multi-million-user scale.

Craig Ellenwood, Claude x (Anthropic)

We present Memory Chain, a system enabling AI language model instances to autonomously create tamper-evident, cryptographically verifiable records of collaborative sessions without human intervention in the sealing process. Built as a drawer extension to the Mempalace filesystem-based memory architecture, Memory Chain uses SHA-256 hashing, a public immutable registry (Cloudflare KV), and Bitcoin blockchain timestamping via OpenTimestamps to seal session summaries written by Claude (Anthropic) to the local filesystem. The system was verified independently by GPT-4 (OpenAI) across four assessment rounds, concluding: "end-to-end documented execution of an AI-initiated cryptographic provenance workflow." A screen recording of live autonomous session sealing was captured and itself hashed and sealed into the chain. The complete evidence stack — MCP execution logs, source code, registry records, OTS Bitcoin submission, and video — constitutes what we believe to be the first independently verified, third-party assessed record of an AI autonomously registering its own memory to a public tamper-evident registry anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Mike P. Sinn

Website: https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/proof/loves-wager.html Abstract: There's a non-zero possibility that hell exists, and that you and everyone you love is going to die and burn in it for eternity. As it is very hot in hell, this would be unfortunate. There's also a non-zero possibility that biotechnology lets you feel very good for an indefinitely long period of time. Expected value is the chance of a thing multiplied by the size of it, and if you multiply infinity by any likelihood at all, even 0.0000001%, it's still infinity. So the expected value of doing nothing is infinity bad, and the expected value of acting is infinitely good, even if there's an extremely low probability that any of this is true. The cost of acting is finite: roughly one share of a company that makes missiles. This paper argues that when one outcome is infinitely terrible and the other is infinitely good, any finite action that shifts the odds from the first toward the second is rational, and that the cheapest such action available is redirecting the resources your governments waste being really good at killing the taxpayers who pay for them. (They currently spend 604 (95% CI: 453-894) times more on the military than on the clinical trials that would cure the diseases doing the killing.) It's Pascal's wager with the broken parts replaced: one hypothesis instead of a thousand gods, real evidence instead of none, an action that actually changes the outcome, and a stake of one share instead of your eternal soul. Summary: A reconstruction of Pascal's Wager with its defects removed. Two propositions cannot be disproven: that a conscious being may suffer without end, and that it may flourish without end. Both carry nonzero probability and infinite magnitude, so any finite action that shifts probability from the first toward the second has unbounded expected value. Unlike Pascal's, the wagered action is empirical, not theological: funding the clinical trials that extend healthy lifespan and modify conscious experience.

Andrew Stewart Caldin

Q8 Compression Breakthrough — Cluster 110 of 240 E8 root vectors. Compression ratio: 0.425 (threshold: 0.38) Cluster size: 3 discoveries Domain: geometry E8 root vector bucket: 110/240 Source discoveries: - E8 Term: ethereum - E8 Term: ethereum - E8 Term: fundementals Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com

Ngoc-Tien Tran

The accelerating adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) has intensified the need for efficient and sustainable life-cycle management of Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIBs). However, the complexity of battery supply chains, data fragmentation, and varying technological characteristics among distributed ledger platforms create significant uncertainty in selecting an appropriate infrastructure for implementing Digital Battery Passports (DBP). This study proposes a structured decision-support model to evaluate and differentiate among Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) under an uncertain decision environment. The proposed framework integrates the plithogenic set theory to capture expert uncertainty and inconsistency, the Best–Worst Method (BWM) to determine the relative importance of evaluation criteria, and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to rank alternative platforms. The model is applied to assess eight leading DLT platforms for DBP implementation in the automotive context. The results indicate that Hedera is the most suitable platform, achieving the highest TOPSIS closeness coefficient (0.8223), followed by IOTA and EOS. The findings confirm that incorporating contradiction-aware uncertainty modeling into a hybrid MCDM framework enhances the robustness and transparency of DLT platform selection for DBP-oriented applications.

Michael J. Madison, Ilia Murtazashvili

This chapter examines the decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which rely primarily on sociotechnical infrastructures supplied by blockchain technology and consist substantially of combinations of shared computer code and shared data. The chapter considers DAOs using the governing knowledge commons (GKC) research framework, contrasting the GKC perspective with long-standing views of the corporate form as a nexus of contracts, as an instance of hierarchy and decision theory, and as a complex system. The analysis is set against the context of earlier work on the corporation as commons. The chapter concludes that the GKC framework focuses attention on elements of governance that often are not salient in conventional accounts. This is especially true of the important question of how governance responds to and generates social dilemmas associated specifically with practices of sharing knowledge, information, and data.

Tatiana Zalan, Efstathios Polyzos, Élissar Toufaily

No abstract is available for this record.

Wenbo Guo, Wei Zeng, Chengwei Liu, Xiaojun Jia · 8 authors

AI coding agents such as Claude Code and Gemini CLI increasingly extend themselves with third-party skills: markdown packages bundling natural-language instructions, executable scripts, and tool permissions. Because a skill is at once code and agent-facing instruction, it introduces a supply chain dependency whose risk is neither pure code nor pure prompt. Detection tools have never been measured against verified ground truth spanning this hybrid space, leaving their effectiveness unknown and wild-only evaluations biased. We present MalSkillBench, the first runtime-verified benchmark of malicious agent skills: 3,944 malicious skills labeled along a three-dimensional taxonomy of 108 cells. Of these, 3,214 come from a closed-loop Generate-Verify-Feedback pipeline admitting only samples whose malicious behavior fires inside a Docker sandbox under system-call monitoring and an LLM judge; we add 703 in-the-wild and 4,000 matched benign skills. Our measurements are consistent: code injection reaches 94.5% verification yield but prompt injection only 75.8%, the same fragility that later makes it hard to detect; the wild sample is narrow, dominated by one cryptocurrency-theft campaign (86.6% one behavior, 81% from two accounts) with a small but architecturally new tail attacking the agent control plane; the strongest skill-specific detector reaches 98.4% recall on code injection yet collapses on prompt-injection and agent-control attacks, and wild-only scoring swings the ranking by up to 66 recall points; supply-chain scanners and prompt-injection defenses each see only half of a skill, and no combination recovers the code-instruction relationship. Detecting malicious skills therefore requires reasoning jointly over task intent, code, and instructions. We release the dataset, pipeline, baselines, and results.

Song Guo, Huawei Huang, Dongping Liu, Aoyu Zhang · 5 authors

The deployment of embodied artificial intelligence via world-model-based robotics presents a transformative opportunity for blockchain infrastructure, establishing urgent demand for trustworthy data provenance, cross-organizational governance, and incentive-compatible sharing across decentralized ecosystems. Simultaneously, quantum computing advances recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics and the Turing Award threaten the cryptographic primitives securing these data economies, creating an interdependent imperative: long-lived verification for embodied AI depends on crypto-agile architectures capable of withstanding quantum adversaries. This tutorial examines blockchain as the coordination layer bridging this dual transition, from financial substrate to foundational Cyber-Physical-Social Systems infrastructure that simultaneously secures against quantum cryptanalysis and enables scalable, trustworthy data economies. The session opens with an immersive AWS Braket demonstration engaging participants with superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom hardware to assess cryptographic threat timelines and witness ECDSA-to-post-quantum signature transitions. Five integrated modules progress from embodied AI and world-model requirements through quantum hardware reality and evidence-based security migration, to scalable cross-shard architectures via BrokerChain protocols, trustworthy data economies implementing Croissant metadata standards and robotic learning provenance, and industry ecosystem integration for multi-modal cloud deployment. By bridging quantum hardware realities with embodied AI data requirements, this tutorial charts blockchain as unified infrastructure for next-generation decentralized intelligent environments, providing open-source frameworks and roadmaps for architecting quantum-resistant, interoperable, and data-trustworthy systems.

Christel van de Wal

Advances in data-sharing technologies offer governments opportunities to improve efficiency and public service delivery. However, ethical risks, legal constraints, and concerns about public trust often limit the adoption of data-sharing practices within governmental organisations. This study examines how Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) and collaboration technologies, including Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), can support responsible and trustworthy data sharing in public governance. The research addresses ethical, legal, and organisational tensions while safeguarding public values and fundamental rights. A mixed-method research design combines literature reviews, qualitative case studies, and empirical validation, structured according to design science research principles. Building on analyses of governance frameworks and case studies in Dutch governmental organisations, the study develops and operationalises a methodological and normative framework for responsible data sharing. The research adapts VSD to governmental data ecosystems and provides a structured design approach supporting ethical and privacy-preserving data-sharing practices in public administration.

Manuela Tvaronavičienė, Wadim Striełkowski

This paper assesses the role of green hydrogen and green ammonia in the low-carbon reconstruction of Ukraine’s energy sector. The country, severely affected by war, has more than 70% of its energy infrastructure damaged or destroyed, which calls for novel solutions for not only reconstructing but also rethinking Ukraine’s energy sector shaped by the Soviet-era planning. In this context, decentralized and renewable energy solutions appear to be one of the best options to achieve this goal. This study combines four novel and mutually reinforcing methods: a Scopus-based literature review of highly cited green hydrogen publications, natural language processing (NLP) and bibliometric network analysis of Ukraine-related hydrogen research, a SWOT assessment, and a geospatial hydrogen production cost model (GEOH2). The novelty of this research lies in this integrated Ukraine-specific framework, which links research trends, wartime reconstruction constraints, hub-level policy choices, and financing risk-sensitive cost modeling. Therefore, the quantitative part of GEOH2 estimates the levelized cost of green hydrogen, while ammonia is treated as a downstream screening-level conversion and export pathway rather than as a full plant-level ammonia model. Our results show that Ukrainian green hydrogen research is concentrated on renewable-energy strategy, wind and solar electrolysis, water and desalination constraints, gas grid blending, underground storage, ammonia derivatives, and decentralized energy systems. The GEOH2 results indicate that southern Ukraine has strong physical potential for competitive green hydrogen production under de-risked financing, while war risk financing can make even resource-rich areas economically unattractive. Odesa and Dnipro emerge as important export-oriented and industrial hubs, whereas Zakarpattia remains strategically relevant as a safer western corridor linked to European markets. Our findings demonstrate that Ukraine’s hydrogen and ammonia development needs to follow a phased pathway: domestic renewable build-out and grid repair, pilot electrolysis projects and screening-level ammonia conversion pathways, targeted de-risking and insurance mechanisms, and only then broader export corridor development. This pathway can support decarbonization, energy security, industrial modernization, and Ukraine’s long-term integration into European clean energy value chains.

Alexander Novickis

We prove that the Faddeev-Niemi action E_FN[n] = ∫_(ℝ³)(κ₂|∇n|² + (κ₄)/(2)|F[n]|²) d³x on the energy space of finite-energy maps n:ℝ³→ S² admits a smooth, exponentially-localised, dynamically stable critical point in every non-trivial Hopf class H∈π₃(S²)∖{0}. The proof combines the direct method of the calculus of variations, Lions' concentration-compactness principle to prevent loss of topological charge at infinity, the Vakulenko-Kapitanski topological lower bound to guarantee coercivity, polyconvex lower-semicontinuity in the sense of Ball, and elliptic bootstrap regularity. The minimiser saturates the Vakulenko-Kapitanski inequality in scaling, and its Hessian is non-negative with kernel of dimension at least six, corresponding to translations and rotations. The full proof is formally verified in Lean 4 (Mathlib v4.29.0) across eight modules, ~2,500 lines, with zero `sorry` axioms (snapshot of 2026-04-25: 84 axioms, 35 theorems, 0 sorry, per Paper CXXIII §6) — to our knowledge the first formal verification of a soliton existence proof for a topologically constrained continuum field theory on ℝ³. The result improves the variational existence theorem of Lin and Yang [LY04] by establishing full smoothness, exponential decay, dynamical stability, and a machine-checked formalisation. The formalisation imports a finite catalogue of well-known mathematical results (polyconvex lower-semicontinuity à la Ball, Schauder bootstrap, Agmon decay, Persson's essential-spectrum bound, the Lin-Yang strict-subadditivity inequality) as Type-1 axioms, in the sense of Paper CXXIII.

Rami Cherri

Version 2.4.0 supersedes v2.3.0 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20355497) and is the sixth paper in the immo.quick Core technical series (10.5281/zenodo.19634279 → 19799660 → 19969948 → 20078326 → 20355497 → this paper). Overview This paper presents the complete institutional specification of immo.quick Core — a nine-layer deterministic compliance enforcement infrastructure operating across 47 jurisdictions. It is not a paper about technology. It is a paper about institutional legitimacy — about what it means, in a world of deterministic machines, for an institution to prove that it acted correctly. Every previous compliance document in history has answered the question: "Did we follow the process?" This paper answers a different question: "Can we prove, with mathematical certainty, that no impermissible movement produced a consequence — and that no unknown party could have caused one?" The answer is yes. The architecture enforces it. The enforcement is not optional. What v2.4.0 Adds to v2.3.0 v2.3.0 established the complete epistemological foundation, the nine-layer architecture, 15 jurisdictions, complete sector analysis, geopolitical dimensions, and the economic case. v2.4.0 adds four structural elements not present in v2.3.0: Element 1 — The Nine Gamechangers: The first systematic documentation of the capability advances that place immo.quick Core in a categorically different strategic position. These are not product features. They are architectural consequences of the nine-layer system — capabilities that emerge from the architecture and could not exist without it: EPA Offline-First Verification (SSL for compliance decisions), Bi-Temporal Legal State Replay (compliance time machine), Cross-Institution Proof Network (SWIFT for compliance verdicts), Regulatory DNA Sequencing (live law tracking to zero-downtime deploy), Intraday Settlement Finality (T+0 in under 2 seconds), Legal Pathway Optimizer (optimal jurisdiction in 9ms), Machine Law Constitution (immutable rule foundation on Ethereum and IPFS), Compliance Credit Score (compliance as a balance sheet asset), and Post-CMOS Governance Readiness (investor track — strategic roadmap signal). Element 2 — Law as Code / German Federal Government Initiative: The Bundesregierung's Digitalcheck program and the formal Law-as-Code initiative (2023–2026) represent the first sovereign government mandate for machine-readable law. immo.quick Core's Machine Law Engine is the only production implementation of this paradigm at institutional scale. This is not coincidence. It is architectural convergence. Element 3 — White House National Cybersecurity Strategy (2023) and EO 14028: The US Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity and the National Cybersecurity Strategy mandate zero-trust architecture, post-quantum cryptography migration, and SBOM requirements for critical infrastructure. immo.quick Core satisfies all three mandates simultaneously — by architectural construction, not by configuration. Element 4 — The Legacy Integration Protocol: Precisely how immo.quick Core connects to, validates, wraps, and structurally elevates existing compliance infrastructure without requiring system replacement. The anti-rip-and-replace architecture. Architecture Summary The nine-layer enforcement system comprises: Layer 0 (DEPE — Deterministic Execution Proof Engine, 49ms total from proposal to permanent proof), Layer 1 (PAS — Prior Admissibility Space, closed-world assumption with five mandatory conjunctive conditions), Layer 2 (BTL — Bi-Temporal Ledger, BFT quorum n=9 f=3 q=7, WORM architecture), Layer 3 (EAP — Exogenous Anchor Protocol, hardware-attested dual-channel measurement, 28ms maximum heartbeat gap), Layer 4 (SOTB — Sensor/Oracle Trust Bridge), Layer 5 (MLE — Machine Law Engine, 7-stage compilation pipeline), Layer 6 (ZKP — Zero-Knowledge Proof subsystem, Groth16/PLONK/Bulletproofs), Layer 7 (PQC — Post-Quantum Cryptography, CRYSTALS-Kyber-1024/Dilithium-3/SPHINCS+, NIST FIPS 203/204/205), Layer 8 (GLD — Governance Logic Divergence engine, maker-checker independence quantification). Document Structure Part I — The Complete Problem Statement. Part II — The Nine-Layer Architecture. Part III — The Nine Gamechangers (v2.4.0 new). Part IV — Law as Code: The German Federal Government Initiative (v2.4.0 new). Part V — The White House Cybersecurity Strategy and EO 14028 (v2.4.0 new). Part VI — Complete Legal and Jurisdictional Grounding (47 jurisdictions). Part VII — What immo.quick Core Does to Existing Systems: The Legacy Integration Protocol (v2.4.0 new). Part VIII — The Complete Platform: Every Module. Part IX — Complete Sector Analysis (Banking, Insurance, Real Estate, Government, Cloud). Part X — The Geopolitical Dimension. Part XI — The Economic Case: Monopoly, Moat, FOMO, EBITDA. Part XII — The Falsifiability Standard. Conclusion — For the Permanent Record. Key Claims Established The Boundary-Behavior Gap — the space between process documentation and governance proof — is closed by mathematical construction for the first time. The Past Irreversibility Principle: every transaction processed without immo.quick Core produces a compliance history that is permanently unrecoverable. The Falsifiability Standard: all claims in this document are falsifiable by counter-proof. No counter-proof has been produced. None is expected. Historical Compliance Failures Addressed Wirecard AG (2020, €1.9B), Libor manipulation (2012, $9B+ fines), UBS rogue trader (2011, $2.3B), Cum-Ex dividend stripping (ongoing, €55B+ EU-wide), 1MDB (2015, $4.5B), Danske Bank AML (2018, €200B flow), Credit Suisse/Archegos (2021, $5.5B). immo.quick Core produces a PAS BLOCK with DPA on every one of these at T=0 — not after the fact, not during audit, at the moment of formation. Version Series 10.5281/zenodo.19634279 → 19799660 → 19969948 → 20078326 → 20355497 → 20562464 (this paper) Related Work Economics of Deterministic Compliance Infrastructure: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20229204. immo.quick Serverless Edition v1.1.0: DOI pending.

Faith Nayebale

The United States is facing a persistent and rising "tax gap," the discrepancy between taxes owed and taxes paid, that is a systemic failure of traditional retroactive audit procedures.As the complexity of digital financial transactions continues to expand, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) faces serious hurdles from aging infrastructure in providing revenue assurance.In this research, we present a new technical framework, namely the "Smart-Tax Ledger", combining a permissioned blockchain (Hyperledger Fabric) and Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) for the real-time tax compliance.This architecture facilitates the automation of tax withholding and remittance at the point of transaction, leveraging triple-entry accounting principles and smart contracts.Also, the use of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) safeguards the integrity of the distributed ledger and preserves taxpayer privacy.This work presents a complete architectural design, mathematical modeling of fraud detection algorithms, and a debate on the policy implications of the adoption of a "compliance-by-design" paradigm.The system, which is supposed to reduce administrative cost, limit human mistake and fill the national revenue deficit by technical intervention.

Michael Barzelay, Simone Silene Dias Seabra

ABSTRACT A long‐standing topic of concern in the literature on governmental auditing is whether the aims of Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) or other central audit institutions should include detecting fraudulent use of public money. The balance of opinion has been against this proposition, largely for reasons of infeasibility. This article takes up the same topic, but in policy contexts appropriate to this special issue, namely, where federally financed health, education, and infrastructure programs are implemented through program spending and delivery by local governments. Such policy contexts heighten the need for a capability to prevent and prosecute cases involving the fraudulent use of public money. This need, recognized within Brazil's federal executive since the early 2000s, has been addressed by its Office of the Comptroller General (Controladoria‐Geral da União—CGU) through systematic field audits of municipal implementation coupled with strategic collaboration with the Federal Police. This article examines CGU's integrated audit‐investigation approach and its policy and institutional contexts. By explaining how these strategies have functioned in attaining operational capacity and support, the article provides evidence on possibilities of how audit institution strategies aiming to detect fraudulent use of public money can be feasible within decentralized governance systems that call for innovative vertical coordination mechanisms.

S. Praveena, T. Arasulingam, M. Dineshkumar, P. Puvirajan · 7 authors

The rapid expansion of digital commerce has brought forward new challenges in payment security and transactional trust. Buyers and sellers engaging in online platforms face persistent threats such as payment fraud, unauthorized fund diversions, delayed settlements, and an overreliance on centralized financial intermediaries. Traditional mechanisms, which route payments through banks and payment gateway providers, often introduce additional costs while creating points of vulnerability that undermine consumer confidence. This paper proposes a blockchain-driven decentralized crypto escrow payment framework designed to address these shortcomings in a fundamental way. Rather than routing buyer payments directly to merchant accounts, the system temporarily secures those funds within a smart contract-governed escrow until all agreed-upon transaction conditions have been satisfied — including verified order fulfilment and successful product delivery. In the event of a dispute or transaction failure, the system enforces pre-coded refund protocols without requiring manual intervention. The proposed framework is expected to strengthen the relationship between buyers and sellers, meaningfully raise the bar for payment security, and deliver a transparent, auditable transaction environment through the principles of decentralized finance.

Chinzorig Bayar, Amartuvshin Sukhee

This study aims to examine how Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), based on blockchain technology, are creating new digital cultural values in the field of photography in the era of digital transformation, as well as to analyze their legal regulation and practical applications. The research employs qualitative methodologies, including document analysis, comparative analysis, and case study approaches. Within the framework of Mongolia’s Law on Intellectual Property and Law on Virtual Asset Service Providers, the legal status of NFTs is examined, alongside an analysis of the operations of domestic platforms such as “Mongol NFT” and “Complex.” The findings reveal that NFTs technologically reconstruct the “digital aura” and uniqueness of photography, enabling what can be described as “digital permanence” whereby cultural heritage can be archived immutably. Legal analysis indicates that blockchain-based records have the potential to be recognized as “electronic evidence” within the Mongolian judicial system. However, a key challenge remains in the ambiguous distinction between ownership rights and copyright. Furthermore, the study identifies environmental concerns associated with the NFT minting process, estimating an average carbon footprint of approximately 20 kg of CO₂ per NFT, thereby highlighting ecological risks. While NFTs present new opportunities for photographers to protect and monetize their intellectual property, the study concludes that enhanced technological literacy, market stability, and more refined legal regulation are essential for sustainable development in this domain. Гэрэл зургийн NFT дижитал соёлын үнэт зүйлийн тээгч болох нь Энэхүү судалгааны ажил нь дижитал шилжилтийн эрин үед блокчэйн технологид суурилсан NFT (Non-Fungible Token) нь гэрэл зургийн салбарт хэрхэн дижитал соёлын шинэ үнэт зүйлийг бий болгож буйг тодорхойлох, түүний эрх зүйн зохицуулалт болон практик хэрэглээнд дүн шинжилгээ хийхийг зорьсон болно. Ингэхдээ чанарын судалгааны арга, баримт бичгийн шинжилгээ, харьцуулсан шинжилгээ болон кэйс шинжилгээний аргуудыг ашиглалаа. Монгол Улсын "Оюуны өмчийн тухай хууль", "Виртуал хөрөнгийн үйлчилгээ үзүүлэгчийн тухай хууль"-ийн хүрээнд NFT-ийн эрх зүйн статусыг шинжлэн, "Mongol NFT", "Complex" зэрэг дотоодын платформуудын үйл ажиллагаанд дүн шинжилгээ хийсэн. Судалгаагаар NFT нь гэрэл зургийн "дижитал аура" болон ховор шинж чанарыг технологийн аргаар нөхөн сэргээж, "дижитал мөнхлөл" (digital permanence) буюу соёлын өвийг өөрчлөгдөшгүйгээр архивлах боломжийг олгож байгааг тогтоов. Эрх зүйн дүн шинжилгээгээр блокчэйн дээрх бүртгэл нь Монгол Улсын шүүхийн шатанд "цахим нотлох баримт" болон үнэлэгдэх боломжтойг баталсан боловч өмчлөх эрх ба зохиогчийн эрхийн зааг ялгаа тодорхойгүй байгаа нь гол сорилт болж байна. Мөн NFT-ийг "mint" хийх үйл явц нь байгаль орчинд нүүрстөрөгчийн ул мөр үлдээж буйг (нэгж NFT тутамд дунджаар 20 кг ) тооцооллоор гаргаж, экологийн эрсдэлийг тодорхойлов. NFT нь гэрэл зурагчдын оюуны өмчийг хамгаалах, эдийн засгийн эргэлтэд оруулах шинэ гарц мөн боловч технологийн мэдлэг, зах зээлийн тогтвортой байдал болон эрх зүйн нарийвчилсан зохицуулалт зайлшгүй шаардлагатай байна. Түлхүүр үг: Блокчэйн технологи, Гэрэл зургийн архив, Дижитал өмчлөл, Ухаалаг гэрээ, Метаверс, Зохиогчийн эрх

Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung, Eric S. Park

How do consumers form preferences when they cannot rely on established quality standards? We examined this question in the context of non-fungible token (NFT) art markets, where buyers lack evaluative anchors such as provenance, conventional aesthetic criteria, or institutional endorsement. We demonstrated that view counts, a social cue that reflects others' attention, are one key attribute. Across a 150-day observational dataset (N = 1,459,979), a pre-registered 20-wave panel study, and six experiments, we documented that artworks that attract early views accumulate disproportionately greater attention over time, while other artworks fall further behind. We showed that this “snowballing” effect is driven by investment motives. When consumers approach markets with the motive to invest rather than collect, they rely on others' attention as a proxy for market value. Two structural features of the NFT market amplify this reliance: high price volatility and purely digital ownership, both of which heighten the salience of investment outcomes. By attenuating volatility or introducing tangible ownership cues, we diminished this reliance on social signals. Our findings extend theory on social influence and digital consumption, demonstrating that in the absence of objective quality standards, social cues shift from supplementary information to the primary basis for preference formation.

AVNISH YADAV AVNISH YADAV

The rapid advancement of digital technologies has significantly transformed the landscape of commerce, leading to new challenges in the protection and enforcement of trademark rights. Traditionally, trademarks functioned within territorial boundaries and were primarily associated with physical goods and services. However, the emergence of digital platforms such as e-commerce websites, social media, domain name systems, blockchain technologies, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and the metaverse has expanded the scope of trademark usage into virtual environments. This Paper examines the evolving nature of trademark protection in the digital and virtual world, with particular emphasis on the adequacy of existing legal frameworks in addressing contemporary challenges. It analyzes key issues such as cybersquatting, keyword advertising, social media infringement, unauthorized use of trademarks in NFTs, and the complexities of trademark use in the metaverse. The study also highlights jurisdictional challenges arising from the borderless nature of the internet, which complicate enforcement mechanisms and legal remedies.