With the overall momentum of the blockchain industry, crypto-based crimes are becoming more and more prevalent. After committing a crime, the main goal of cybercriminals is to obfuscate the source of the illicit funds in order to convert them into cash and get away with it. Many studies have analyzed money laundering in the field of the traditional financial sector and blockchain-based Bitcoin. But so far, little is known about the characteristics of crypto money laundering in the blockchain-based Web3 ecosystem. To fill this gap, and considering that Ethereum is the largest platform on Web3, in this paper, we systematically study the behavioral characteristics and economic impact of money laundering accounts through the lenses of Ethereum heists. Based on a very small number of tagged accounts of exchange hackers, DeFi exploiters, and scammers, we mine untagged money laundering groups through heuristic transaction tracking methods, to carve out a full picture of security incidents. By analyzing account characteristics and transaction networks, we obtain many interesting findings about crypto money laundering in Web3, observing the escalating money laundering methods such as creating counterfeit tokens and masquerading as speculators. Finally, based on these findings we provide inspiration for anti-money laundering to promote the healthy development of the Web3 ecosystem.
Christian Tenkhoff, Philipp Grotkamp, Sylvia Burgess-Tate
Abstract Brands have identified the metaverse, Web3 and NFTs as new means of engaging with their consumer base. Digital fashion, in particular, seems to have a bright future ahead. However, novel forms of virtual counterfeits are also on the rise. Brand owners are concerned that their existing trade mark registrations might not provide sufficient protection against infringements in the virtual space. The present article examines whether a likelihood of confusion within the meaning of Art. 9(2)(b) EUTMR can exist where a trade mark registered for physical goods is used almost identically in respect of their virtual counterparts.
This article explores the technology underpinning the decentralized data revolution and encourages Indigenous Peoples (IPs) to secure their Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) over the Metaverse and Web3. More specifically, this article will survey blockchain technologies, exploring some disturbing colonial uses and providing an international legal framework that IPs can use to advance their IDSov internationally and domestically. This article will consider the role that cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, decentralized oracles, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) might play in advancing IDSov as it relates to western conceptualizations of Web3 and the Metaverse. The worldwide web's global data structure is undergoing a seismic shift that will significantly impact IPs. As inherent sovereigns, IPs are uniquely positioned to use and regulate these technologies in manners consistent with their cultural values and international indigenous human rights instruments. However, the march toward Web3 also looms menacingly over IPs. As such, we intend to examine IPs' novel risks and opportunities with Web3 and the Metaverse. We conclude by encouraging IPs to become fluent in the minutia of these technologies and to exert their inherent sovereignty over these nascent technologies in international and domestic arenas by building culturally informed systems to address their particularized needs. Future research should look toward the specific hurdles, and successes IPs are experiencing as they apply the technologies and principles discussed here.
Relay Mining presents a scalable solution employing probabilistic mechanisms, crypto-economic incentives, and new cryptographic primitives to estimate and prove the volume of Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) made from a client to a server. Distributed ledgers are designed to secure permissionless state transitions (writes), highlighting a gap for incentivizing full non-validating nodes to service non-transactional (read) RPCs. This leads applications to have a dependency on altruistic or centralized off-chain Node RPC Providers. We present a solution that enables multiple RPC providers to service requests from independent applications on a permissionless network. We leverage digital signatures, commit-and-reveal schemes, and Sparse Merkle Sum Tries (SMSTs) to prove the amount of work done. This is enabled through the introduction of a novel ClosestMerkleProof proof-of-inclusion scheme. A native cryptocurrency on a distributed ledger is used to rate limit applications and disincentivize over-usage. Building upon established research in token bucket algorithms and distributed rate-limiting penalty models, our approach harnesses a feedback loop control mechanism to adjust the difficulty of mining relay rewards, dynamically scaling with network usage growth. By leveraging crypto-economic incentives, we reduce coordination overhead costs and introduce a mechanism for providing RPC services that are both geopolitically and geographically distributed. We use common formulations from rate limiting research to demonstrate how this solution in the Web3 ecosystem translates to distributed verifiable multi-tenant rate limiting in Web2.
Nilesh P. Sable, Rahul Ganpatrao Sonkamble, Vijay U. Rathod, Swati Shirke · 6 authors
Web3 is the next evolution of the internet, which uses blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs to return ownership and authority to the consumers. The potential of Web3 is highlighted by the creation of decentralized applications (dApps), which are more secure, transparent, and tamper-proof than their centralized counterparts, allowing for new business models that were previously impossible on the traditional internet.Web3 also focuses on user privacy, where users have more control over their personal data and can choose to share only what they want. The emergence of Web3 represents an exciting new frontier in blockchain technology, and its focus on decentralization, user privacy, and trustless systems has the potential to transform the way we interact with the internet.Web3 authentication is required for enhanced security, increased privacy, and simplified user interface. Traditional login procedures and an authorization flow using web3 authentication work together seamlessly. However, there are several challenges associated with Web3, including scalability and regulatory issues. Chain Authentication and Authorization (CAA) is a multi-layer security mechanism that allows users to choose the security layer that suits them, just like a heavy iron chain, where the user and CAA developers act as blacksmith and form their security protocol that suits them. CAA is a solution to the challenges associated with Web3 authentication and authorization, and it focuses on creating a secure and decentralized authentication and authorization system that is scalable, flexible, and user-friendly.
The new generation of digital intelligence technology enables knowledge creation, dissemination, and application to undergoing parallel changes. Scientific systems face an increasingly uncertain, diverse, and complex environment, making adopting multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to research issues inevitable. Existing scientific systems follow linear value streams, leading to problems, such as inefficiency, unfairness, and knowledge monopoly. Decentralized science (DeSci) is a new scientific development paradigm based on Web3, Metaverses, and decentralized autonomous organizations and operations (DAOs) technologies, that can solve organizational and management problems in scientific systems through organizing, coordinating, and executing techniques. However, new economic theories and methods are still needed to effectively solve the problem of linear value flow in scientific systems. Metaeconomics based on the parallel intelligence theory, also known as decentralized economics (DeEco), provides a new approach and idea for redesigning the economic system of scientific markets. Thus, this article proposes a research framework and core mechanisms of DeSci MetaMarkets based on parallel economic theory to provide effective and practical methodologies for scientific system governance.
The first cryptocurrency was invested in 2008/09, but the Blockchain-Web3 concept is still in its infancy, and the cyber risk is constantly changing. Our cybersecurity should also be adapting to these changes to ensure security of personal data and continuation of business for organisations. This review paper starts with a comparison of existing cybersecurity standards and regulations from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) - ISO27001, followed by a discussion on more specific and recent standards and regulations, such as the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures and the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (CPMI-IOSCO), and more general cryptography and post-quantum cryptography, in the context of cybersecurity. These topics are followed up by a review of recent technical reports on cyber risk/security and a discussion on cloud security questions. Comparison of Blockchain cyber risk is also performed on the recent EU standards on cyber security, including European Cybersecurity Certification Scheme (EUCS) â cloud, and additional US standards â The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). The study includes a review of Blockchain endpoint security, and new technologies e.g., IoT. The research methodology applied is a review and case study analysing secondary data on cybersecurity. The research significance is the integration of knowledge from the United States (US), the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom (UK), and international standards and frameworks on cybersecurity that can be alighted to new Blockchain projects. The results show that cybersecurity standards are not designed in close cooperation between the two major western blocks - US and EU. In addition, while the US is still leading in this area, the security standards for cryptocurrencies, internet-of-things, and blockchain technologies have not evolved as fast as the technologies have. The key finding from this study is that although the crypto market has grown into a multi-trillion industry, the crypto market has also lost over 70% since its peak, causing significant financial loss for individuals and cooperationâs. Despite this significant impact to individuals and society, cybersecurity standards and financial governance regulations are still in their infancy.
Mr. Rugved Bahadure, Ms. Riya Khasare, Ms. Sakshi Mahure, Mr. Lakhan Rathod · 6 authors
Abstract: Blockchain has the potential to shake the foundation of e-commerce by enabling exchange relations that are trustless and operate without dedicated intermediaries or even central authorities in the case of permissionless blockchains. Furthermore, the exchange of information and value between companies and consumers might change considerably by enabling unified access to immutable data along the entire supply chain. In this paper, we build a Dapp called Thr3ebay which offers buyers and sellers a secure and transparent platform where transactions are conducted directly between participants, without the need for intermediaries. The platform also provides a userfriendly interface for managing wallets and identities, making it easy for users to buy and sell products on the blockchain. We then examine the potential benefits of building a Web3 e-commerce platform, such as increased security, transparency, and trust, as well as the challenges in terms of scalability, user adoption, and interoperability. Key feature of the Thr3ebay Dapp is its integration with various web3 technologies, including IPFS for decentralized file storage, and the Third-web SDK for user authentication and wallet management. The P2P Decentralized app has also developed a custom front-end for the platform using React, making it easy for users to interact with the marketplace. The purpose of building a Web3 e-commerce app is to create a more secure, transparent, and democratic platform for buying and selling goods and services online, while also providing greater trust and confidence for buyers and sellers
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts mechanism design in scenarios in which agents can absolutely commit to strategies. Absolute commitments allow the strategy of an agent to depend on the commitments made by the other agents. This changes fundamental game-theoretic assumptions by inducing a meta-game in which agents choose which strategies they commit to. We say that a game that is unaffected by such commitments is Stackelberg resilient and show that computing it is intractible in general, although it can be computed efficiently for two-player games of perfect information. We show the intuitive, but technically non-trivial result, that, if a game is resilient when some number of players have the capacity to make commitments, it is also resilient when these commitments are available to fewer players. We demonstrate the non-triviality of Stackelberg resilience by analyzing two escrow mechanisms from the literature. These mechanisms have the same intended functionality, but we show that only one is Stackelberg resilient. Our model is particularly relevant in Web3 scenarios, where these absolute commitments can be realized by the automated and irrevocable nature of smart contracts. Our work highlights an important issue in ensuring the secure design of Web3. In particular, our work suggests that smart contracts already deployed on major blockchains may be susceptible to these attacks.
A Metaverse as a point cloud for visual photometry is generated from a combination of drone, telescope and mobile images using VSLAM telemetry and photometry technologies, to create a Metaverse with many applications, ranging from public data sets for data mining phenomenological models to navigational uses and dark sky maps.<br> Images are saved as NFTs to generate a Metaverse, and mined to create a point cloud stored on a blockchain web3 and web2 storage systems, commonly called cloud storage as publicly published data sets,<br> In this paper we propose two such observational schedules using naked eye observation, drone imaging and observation on various telescopes in the Indian subcontinent.<br> The first schedule consists of imaging possible exoplanet candidates from the TESS database, and the second schedule of Supernovae candidates based on a filter using a decision tree on the linear sky survey data and published information on Supernovae predictions.<br> Keywords: VSLAM, Point Cloud, Photometry, Metaverse, 3D Point Cloud, IPFS, FileCoin, Azure, Supernovae, NFT, drone, mobile.
Gurpriya Kaur Bhatia, Venkatesh K. Subramanian, Satyasai Srinivas Abbabathula
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is the basic building block of Web3, which is gradually surpassing Web 2.0. Organizations worldwide whose key business requirements are immutability, traceability, and transparency are transforming their business to provide solutions that are built on DLT. Recently, the usage of it to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) are extensively talked about in the industry as well as academia. However, the current focus is on solving the problem assuming reasonable constraints. But there are scenarios where the participating user base is severely constrained. In this paper, we explore the existing standard and non-standard techniques and provide recommendations that can be useful when building solution architecture for such extreme scenarios.
The key to the roaring success of the Web 2.0 platforms has been the way they have inserted themselves between traditional broadcasters and networks of friends through activities of the influencers with high follower counts. Though they are constantly at risk of being booted off the platforms, they were able to build up large audiences without bearing the cost of server and network bandwidth, choosing to take a small royalty instead once they have reached a threshold. If influencers can build networks of equivalent size on the decentralised systems, that may bring Web 2.0 to an early finish. However, those platforms can do a lot to prevent a kind of disruption they are unlikely to favour. If that is the case, Web3 may remain a niche interest for the average user if they see entertainment as a greater priority than social network control. As it was in the days of Web 1.0, it's not hard to wind up shuffled off to an unseen corner of the internet; you just have to be someone who does not get promoted by a search engine or social-network provider. Decentralisation may do little to change the power-law dynamics of social networks.
A growing body of research suggests that decentralization is the next step in organizational evolution. However, models on how Web3 organizations live, survive, and die remain overly simplified. We develop a theoretical framework for understanding the survival and failure of Web3 organizations through the lens of institutional theory. We argue that isomorphism encourages Web3 entities to become more centralized and that the organizational hybridity generated from centralization decreases the survival rates of Web3 organizations.
In recent years, Blockchain-based Online Social Media (BOSM) platforms have evolved fast due to the advancement of blockchain technology. BOSM can effectively overcome the problems of traditional social media platforms, such as a single point of trust and insufficient incentives for users, by combining a decentralized governance structure and a cryptocurrency-based incentive model, thereby attracting a large number of users and making it a crucial component of Web3. BOSM allows users to downvote low-quality content and aims to decrease the visibility of low-quality content by sorting and filtering it through downvoting. However, this feature may be maliciously exploited by some users to undermine the fairness of the incentive, reduce the quality of highly visible content, and further reduce users' enthusiasm for content creation and the attractiveness of the platform. In this paper, we study and analyze the downvoting behavior using four years of data collected from Steemit, the largest BOSM platform. We discovered that a significant number of bot accounts were actively downvoting content. In addition, we discovered that roughly 9% of the downvoting activity might be retaliatory. We did not detect any significant instances of downvoting on content for a specific topic. We believe that the findings in this paper will facilitate the future development of user behavior analysis and incentive pattern design in BOSM and Web3.
Konstantin D. Pandl, Chun-Yin Huang, Ivan Beschastnikh, Xiaoxiao Li · 6 authors
Existing research on data valuation in federated and swarm learning focuses on valuing client contributions and works best when data across clients is independent and identically distributed (IID). In practice, data is rarely distributed IID. We develop an approach called DDVal for decentralized data valuation, capable of valuing individual data points in federated and swarm learning. DDVal is based on sharing deep features and approximating Shapley values through a k-nearest neighbor approximation method. This allows for novel applications, for example, to simultaneously reward institutions and individuals for providing data to a decentralized machine learning task. The valuation of data points through DDVal allows to also draw hierarchical conclusions on the contribution of institutions, and we empirically show that the accuracy of DDVal in estimating institutional contributions is higher than existing Shapley value approximation methods for federated learning. Specifically, it reaches a cosine similarity in approximating Shapley values of 99.969 % in both, IID and non-IID data distributions across institutions, compared with 99.301 % and 97.250 % for the best state of the art methods. DDVal scales with the number of data points instead of the number of clients, and has a loglinear complexity. This scales more favorably than existing approaches with an exponential complexity. We show that DDVal is especially efficient in data distribution scenarios with many clients that have few data points - for example, more than 16 clients with 8,000 data points each. By integrating DDVal into a decentralized system, we show that it is not only suitable for centralized federated learning, but also decentralized swarm learning, which aligns well with the research on emerging internet technologies such as web3 to reward users for providing data to algorithms.
In recent years, permissionless blockchains have gained significant attention for their ability to secure and provide transparency in transactions. The development of blockchain technology has shifted from cryptocurrency to decentralized finance, benefiting millions of unbanked individuals, and serving as the foundation of Web3, which aims to provide the next generation of the internet with data ownership for users. The rise of NFTs has also helped artists and creative workers to protect their intellectual property and reap the benefits of their work. However, privacy risks associated with permissionless blockchains have become a major concern for individuals and institutions. The role of blockchain in the transition from Web2 to Web3 is crucial, as it is rapidly evolving. As more individuals, institutions, and organizations adopt this technology, it becomes increasingly important to closely monitor the new risks associated with permissionless blockchains and provide updated solutions to mitigate them. This paper endeavors to examine the privacy risks inherent in permissionless blockchains, including Remote Procedure Call (RPC) issues, Ethereum Name Service (ENS), miner extractable value (MEV) bots, on-chain data analysis, data breaches, transaction linking, transaction metadata, and others. The existing solutions to these privacy risks, such as zero-knowledge proofs, ring signatures, Hyperledger Fabric, and stealth addresses, shall be analyzed. Finally, suggestions for the future improvement of privacy solutions in the permissionless blockchain space shall be put forward.
The development of effective recommender systems for Web3 assets, such as the Non-Fungible Token (NFT), requires concentration along with the growth of popularity and heterogeneity in many potential applications such as Web3 gaming and NFT rental markets, the requirements of predicting rNFT classification desire a practical solution. In this paper, we make use of the referable NFT (rNFT11In this work, rNFT mainly refers to the EIP-5521 protocol and corresponding formed network/topology [1], while NFT is used in the context of a single node, node sets, or products that align with the EIP-5521 protocol.) standard [2], indexed EIP-5521, to construct an rNFT classification framework leveraging Graph Neural Network (GNN), an emerging branch of Deep Learning (DL), which learns on the inherent topology of graph-based data. In particular, we first transform the rNFT backward and onward reference relationship to a Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) and model appropriate node and edge features from rNFT metadata and associated token transactions. Next, a multi-layer GraphSage model is designed to include the collected features for the learning process. In this way, the model takes into account graph topology together with features to classify both the existing and incoming NFT nodes in a supervised way. We also give comprehensive elaboration on the architecture of the new GNN-based recommender system with discussions in regard to its characteristics and challenges. Furthermore, we expect to conduct extensive experiments, by presenting an initial plan, to show the feasibility and efficacy of our system.
Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Nour Diallo, Lin Chen · 5 authors
Function-as-a-service (FaaS) is an emerging computation architecture, which provides high scalability and flexibility. All the existing F aaS systems are owned and managed by a single cloud service provider. While this is not an issue for most existing enterprise applications, such character is not compatible with the decentralization principle of dApp/Web3 applications, more of which are being deployed in the cloud environment. Therefore, there is an urgent need to build a decentralized FaaS, which is managed by multiple cloud service providers and allows a decentralized application to take advantages of FaaS. In this research paper, we propose DeFaaS, a novel system for managing decentralized FaaS using blockchain technology and decentralized API management, where functions are executed on a distributed network of nodes by multi-cloud data centers, rather than on a centralized server. This allows for greater scalability and flexibility, as well as improved security and reliability.
Decentralization promises to remedy the drawbacks of the web by executing decentralized applications (DApps) on blockchains. Unfortunately, modern blockchains cannot support realistic web application workloads mainly due to congestion.We introduce the Smart Redbelly Blockchain (SRBB), a provably correct permissionless blockchain that reduces congestion by (1) avoiding redundant propagation and validations of transactions with Transaction Validation and Propagation Reduction (TVPR) and (2) mitigating the propagation of invalid transactions within blocks by Byzantine nodes with a dedicated Reward-Penalty Mechanism (RPM). Our comparison of SRBB against Algorand, Avalanche, Diem, Ethereum, Quorum, and Solana, using the DIABLO benchmark suite, indicates that SRBB outperforms all these blockchains under real application workloads. Moreover, SRBB is the only blockchain to successfully execute real workloads of NASDAQ and Uber on a DApp without losing transactions. To demonstrate that TVPR and RPM are the causes of the improved performance, we compare SRBB with its naive baseline, which does not contain TVPR and RPM. Our results show that TVPR increases the throughput by 55Ă and divides the latency by 3.5, while RPM increases the throughput by 7% under flooding attacks. Finally, TVPR helps reduce transaction losses in the normal scenario while RPM goes further and mitigates transaction losses under flooding attacks.
Web3, the next generation of the Internet, represents a decentralized and democratized web. Although it has garnered significant public interest and found numerous real-world applications, there is a limited understanding of people's perceptions and experiences with Web3. In this study, we conducted an empirical study to investigate the categories of Web3 application and their popularity, as well as the potential challenges and opportunities within this emerging landscape. Our research was carried out in two phases. In the first phase, we analyzed 200 popular Web3 projects associated with 10 leading Web3 venture capital firms. In the second phase, we collected and examined code-related data from GitHub and market-related data from blockchain browsers (e.g., Etherscan) for these projects. Our analysis revealed that the Web3 ecosystem can be categorized into two groups, i.e., Web3 infrastructure and Web3 applications, with each consisting of several subcategories or subdomains. We also gained insights into the popularity of these Web3 projects at both the code and market levels and pointed out the challenges in the Web3 ecosystem at the system, developer, and user levels, as well as the opportunities it presents. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of Web3 for researchers and developers, promoting further exploration and advancement in this innovative field.
G Sairam, Sankalp Kumar, Sheifali Gupta, Syed Sharique Haider
Abstract: The current healthcare system has traditionally relied on paper-based medical records or electronic medical records (EMRs) that are stored in centralized databases. This method, however, has shown to be ineffective and unreliable, causing major delays in patient care. Medical documents are frequently sent over email as a temporary fix; however, this approach is unsafe and unreliable. Data breaches or unauthorised access to sensitive patient information pose a serious danger and may have far-reaching repercussions for both patients and healthcare providers. Blockchain technology can provide a more secure, decentralized, and efficient way to store and share medical records. Blockchain offers a tamper-proof and auditable method to trace transactions while using cryptographic methods to secure the integrity and confidentiality of data, access to patient data and modifications. Patients, physicians, and hospitals may easily, anytime, anywhere, and with total safety and security, access medical records via a decentralised blockchain network. Patients have discretion over who gets access to their information and can allow healthcare professionals and organisations access to their medical records. We are employing a number of technologies, like MetaMask, Ganache, Web3JS, and Solidity, to develop a blockchain-based solution. Users may connect with blockchain networks via the browser plugin MetaMask, and a local blockchain development tool called Ganache offers a testing environment for blockchain-based apps. Programmers may interface with the Ethereum blockchain using Web3JS, a JavaScript framework, and Solidity, a language used to create smart contracts the blockchain of Ethereum. A centralised blockchain network that can safely store and distribute patient data is the predicted result of a blockchain-based system for medical record sharing. The system's interoperability and scalability may be ensured via integration with already-existing healthcare systems and databases. Medical record sharing may be automated with smart contracts, allowing for safe and auditable access based on predefined criteria and permissions.