Blockchain Papers

Steven Wolfe Pereira, Elliot K. Fishman, Steven P. Rowe

No abstract is available for this record.

Pinky Bai, Charupriya Bisht

Web3 is the evolution of internet requisites decentralized identity management known as a new paradigm in the identity management system. Web3 conceptualizes decentralization and based upon that needs an identity model that fulfills the requirement of any business/technology model in the new trusted third-party free era. This article presents Web3, Web3 architecture, and technologies expansion for secure and scalable services. Further, the decentralized identity management model is presented with its components (DID), reusable verifiable credentials (VC), issuer, verifier, and user centricity in perspective with the Web3 identity model.

Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, Geoff Gordon

On the heavily polluted soil of De Ceuvel-a former shipyard in Amsterdam turned into an eco-tech playground-the Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI) recently convened its first Experimental Zone: a 'celebration of ecology, art, theory and emerging technologies' (Sovereign Nature Initiative 2022a).Bringing together crypto-poets, ecophilosophers, blockchain developers and tech start-up investors, the gathering sought to spark 'radical approaches toward sustainability'.How could the non-human speak for and sustain itself when seen, sensed, mediated and multiplied through new technological tools or interventions?Which worlds can be crafted where 'trees, hyenas, snails, rivers, elk and algae preserve their own value' and 'humans … have a stake in their thriving' (Sovereign Nature Initiative 2022b)?How can one govern with and through the sky and subterranean?Situated at the 'intersection of ecology, economy and emerging web3 technologies', SNI nurtures 'radical approaches' that aspire to 'reconfigur[e] nature's value' and to enact a 'non-exploitative, non-consumerist' relation between 'nature, humans and technology'.De Ceuvel in Amsterdam Noord proved a perfect place for this experimental exploration.Built on the site's toxic soil, creative workspaces nested in old houseboats are tied together with natural surroundings through a winding wooden jetty.Phytoremediation plants labor (and die) to clean the polluted earth-a process that is measured, mapped and materialized into a vibrant, hybrid and digitally mediated ecology.De Ceuvel describes itself as 'never finished'-in a 'perpetual state of development' (De Ceuvel 2022).It does not only strive for specific sustainability solutions but also for a 'cultural transition', claiming that 'people have to learn new modes of thought and how to apply new techniques and technologies'.Operating on this 'cleantech playground' of De Ceuvel, Metabolic-a technology development and consultancy organisation-developed a 'sensor network' to provide

Raihan Sulaiman, Andry Alamsyah, Puspita Wulansari

The emerging Web3 economy and the Blockchain's massive adoption in 2021 shape the industry's future driven by distributed ledgers and smart contracts. Blockchain technology enables traceability, fraud prevention, and faster settlement of business processes, including talent recruitment. The current recruitment requires Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and third-party HR recruitment agencies for sorting and verifying job application documents in every recruitment cycle, which are ineffective and inefficient. This paper proposes a model to discover and recruit reputable talent by leveraging blockchain technology, which enables trustless networks and allows entities to conduct transactions without mutual trust, called the recruitment system. This paper also seeks to enhance the relationship among recruitment entities by adopting a transparent and incorruptible decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) model powered by blockchain technology.

Meuthia Rachmaniah, Putri Ardi, Mokhamad Inggit Prakasa

Teknologi blockchain telah digunakan secara luas dan menarik perhatian para peneliti termasuk peneliti tanaman hortikutur. Cabai merupakan salah satu tanaman hortikultura yang banyak dibudidayakan di Indonesia dan merupakan salah satu komoditas yang memiliki harga yang sangat fluktuatif. Fluktuasi harga cabai menuntut adanya transparansi harga cabai di setiap rantai distribusi cabai. Studi ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan sistem pencatatan transaksi distribusi cabai dalam upaya mencatat semua transaksi produksi dan harga cabai di setiap rantai distribusi cabai. Sistem ini berbasis web dan dikembangkan dengan menggunakan teknologi blockchain untuk menyimpan setiap transaksi distribusi cabai. Pengembangan sistem menggunakan metode extreme programming yang dilakukan dalam dua iterasi. Pada studi ini, smart contract Ethereum menggunakan kerangka kerja Truffle untuk sistem back end dan web3js untuk antarmuka sistem. Sistem pencatatan transaksi distribusi cabai telah berhasil dikembangkan dan memungkinkan pengguna untuk melihat harga dan pasokan cabai secara transparan di setiap rantai distribusi cabai. Uji keberterimaan dan fungsionalitas sistem telah sukses dilakukan untuk para aktor distribusi cabai, yaitu admin, produsen, pedagang pengepul, grosir, pedagang pengecer, serta konsumen. Smart contract yang dihasilkan dirilis pada jaringan uji Ethereum serta jaringan uji Rinkeby sebagai pengganti jaringan utama Ethereum. Sistem pencatatan cabai masih dapat dikembangkan lebih lanjut untuk melengkapi berbagai fitur yang telah dibuat. Rekomendasi untuk studi lebih lanjut dapat dilakukan untuk pengembangan fitur tambahan seperti foto produksi cabai dan foto profil aktor distribusi cabai serta user experience para aktor rantai distribusi cabai.

Anatoli Colicev

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have registered tremendous growth in the past year, and their importance is expected to increase with the expected development of Web3. From a brand perspective, NFTs can be seen as representations of the brand components, such as the product, the logo, or the image. I argue that NFTs have immense potential to become standalone brand assets. I illustrate how this can be achieved by relating the brand's NFT strategies to the marketing funnel stages. Brands can turn into an NFT their physical products such as shoes, shirts, or art to attract brand awareness, generate cross-selling opportunities, and spark stronger perceived ownership of certain brand elements. Importantly, NFTs can allow brands to form a highly engaging brand community that can support the brand, blend online and offline product ownership, and potentially create a bond between the brand and consumers. These exciting possibilities generate a rich research agenda I present in this paper.

Johannes Thrul, Luther G. Kalb, Patrick H. Finan, Zachary Prager · 5 authors

OPINION article Front. Psychiatry, 22 July 2022Sec. Digital Mental Health https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.945830

Almas Begum, Ayushi Ayushi, Ankit Dixit, Arijit Mukherjee

In today’s time healthcare is a sensitive subject for anyone living in any part of the world. Medical science works on enhancing the quality and period of life. To provide healthy life at times people might have to undergo surgeries or transplantation as well. The world has improved a lot in technologies and with the advancement; security in the process has been major concern. In times of need for organs or blood, it’s crucial to have a secure and transparent system. People tend to panic in the situation and information about organ or blood donors is not easily accessible when needed. Thus, in this paper a web application is proposed for both organ and blood donors in one place. Or(organ) and B(blood) together is combined to make OraB - a platform for building a community of donors. The aim is to make a decentralized web application that will be a reliable platform for connecting donee with the donors. As it’s a decentralized web app, it will draw out the involvement of a third-party networks completely. Vanilla JS has been used for the front-end, Web3.js has been used for the back-end, and its smart contract is made using javascript similar language solidity. This is a blockchain-based project which assures complete security and transparency in tracking the transaction of organ donation and is quite economical.

Deepal Tennakoon, Vincent Gramoli

Decentralized Applications (DApps) have seen widespread use in the recent past driving the world towards a new decentralized version of the web known as Web3.0. DApp-supported blockchains like Ethereum have largely been responsible for this drive supporting the largest eco-system of DApps. Although the low performance provided by Ethereum has been a major impediment to realizing a decentralized web, several high-performance blockchains have been introduced recently to bridge this gap. Most of these blockchains rely on consensus optimizations. Only a few enhance other parts of the blockchain protocol that involves transaction management: the validation of transactions, broadcast of transactions, encapsulation and dissemination of blocks with transactions, re-validation and execution of transactions in blocks, storage of blocks, and confirmation of transaction commits to senders upon request. In this paper, we enhance transaction management by introducing a novel transaction validation reduction and a per sub-block processing to optimize the block storage. We empirically show the performance improvements gained by our enhanced transaction management in the Smart Red Belly Blockchain (SRBB) VM we develop. Finally, we integrate our SRBB VM to an already optimized consensus from a known blockchain to develop the Smart Red Belly Blockchain. Our results show that SRBB achieves a peak throughput of 4000 TPS and an average throughput of 2000 TPS on 200 nodes spread across 5 continents. SRBB outperforms 6 other blockchains when running the exchange DApp featuring a real workload trace taken from Nasdaq.

Alain Broustail

Le succès populaire des cryptomonnaies et autres NFT ( Non-Fungible Token ) repose sur l’utilisation de la technologie blockchain. Ouverte, transparente et sécurisée, cette technologie, fondée sur un internet décentralisé (web3), permet aux esprits libertariens de se projeter dans un monde où l’information serait librement diffusée, sa source accessible à tous et non manipulable. Entre contraintes éthico-techniques et solutions créatives, le concept du web3, encore très innovant, mérite d’être plus connu.

Barrie Sander

In his new monograph, Informed Publics, Media, and International Law, Daniel Joyce sets out to explore the role of the media both as an object of international legal regulation and as an influence on international law’s development and structure.1 Given the obvious connections between the media and international law, one might have expected the topic to have already garnered extensive interest within the existing literature. Yet, as Joyce observes at the outset, ‘[f]or all its ubiquity and power, the media has to date been the subject of surprisingly limited attention within international legal scholarship’.2 In this context, the publication of Joyce’s text may be viewed as part of a recent wave of literature that signals growing interest in the subject amongst international legal scholars, whether due to rising concerns over the use of international law in public debates,3 or as a result of the exponential growth of new channels of communication, most notably digital media platforms.4 In tackling the multi-dimensional relationship between the media and international law, Joyce’s approach is historical and critical, illustrating both ‘the resilience of existing international law frameworks, but also their significant silences’.5 The historical perspective is particularly valuable in surfacing interesting continuities between present-day controversies and earlier eras. For example, Joyce reveals how contemporary concerns about the relationship between international law, populism, and social media,6 find echoes in a range of formative debates about the relationship between international law, public opinion, and the press in the early twentieth century.7 The drawing of historical parallels is particularly important given the fast pace of developments in the sphere of communication in the digital age. In particular, as the notion of Web 3.0 (or Web3)—the much-hyped third generation of the Internet premised on ‘decentralised’ technologies, touted to follow static webpages (Web 1.0) and social media and user-generated content (Web 2.0)—begins to enter the public consciousness, adopting a historical perspective may help nurture what Elizabeth Renieris recently termed an outlook of ‘informed skepticism’.8 As Renieris explains, similar to its predecessors, ‘Web3 is imagined as being apolitical, open, decentralized and inclusive’, seemingly oblivious to the fact that ‘[t]his ethos—characterised by free speech absolutism and free market ideals—has enabled all manner of online harms, including rampant mis- and disinformation, racism, discrimination, hate speech and harassment, concentrations of power, toxic business models and limited accountability’.9 In this context, Joyce’s text is particularly useful in situating the shifting contemporary communication sphere along a broader historical trajectory, tracing the neoliberalisation of public communication across different time-periods and settings, and shining a spotlight on the role performed by international law in the process. Beyond its critical and historical orientation, at the centre of Joyce’s text is the concept of ‘informed publics’, characterised as ‘a more inclusive and messier picture of the social and connective tissue of international law’ than the notion of ‘international community’.10 If claims made in the name of the latter are often merely ‘attempts to translate the particular into a language of self-serving universalism’,11 Joyce advances the notion of ‘informed publics’ as ‘a model of international civil society which allows for greater variety of forms of association’, both by ‘contest[ing] the state-centrism of international law and better reflect[ing] a system which involves not a single participatory democracy but a range of regional, domestic and local polities’.12 For Joyce, ‘international law depends on informed global publics to function and to address the complex global problems which we face’.13 In this way, the concept of ‘informed publics’ emerges as a ‘normative goal’ for international law, one which ‘remains critical to any future conception and realisation of a multilateral system of global governance’.14 It is the concept of ‘informed publics’ that draws into view the dual inquiry at the centre of Joyce’s research:15 first, the role of international law in regulating the media, including new forms of digital media; and second, the reliance of international law on the media in communicating its objectives and norms as well as in its functioning as a system. In reflecting on Joyce’s work, this review follows the book’s structure, with a particular focus on the text’s discussion of the relationship between digital media and international law. In the first half of the book, Joyce examines a range of international law frameworks applicable to the media which adhere to different regulatory models—each recognising and foregrounding certain values and interests to the marginalisation and exclusion of others. In Chapter 2, Joyce examines the regulatory vision of free publics, encompassing the ways in which human rights law (particularly freedom of expression) has sought to protect media freedom from State intervention, as well as how international trade law has sought to ensure free markets for the global media economy.16 Both areas of law emphasise media freedom—with human rights law focused on protecting the media’s societal watchdog function, and trade law focused on deregulation and market access.17 Yet, as Joyce explains, this emphasis comes at the expense of addressing ‘the power of the media itself and its own connections with violence and the abuse of rights’.18 In Chapter 3, Joyce turns to the regulatory model of endangered publics, encompassing the ways in which human rights law (concerning incitement, hate speech, and propaganda), international criminal law (concerning atrocity speech), and international humanitarian law (concerning media activities in armed conflict) address the connections between the media and violence.19 While these areas of law counter the reductively positive image of the media that underpins the regulatory vision of free publics, Joyce observes that they nonetheless ‘configure the dangers of media power as being exceptional rather than structural’ and thereby contribute to ‘a failure to connect media violence with its economic and political power’.20 Finally, in Chapter 4, Joyce discusses the regulatory model of digital publics, encompassing forms of Internet, data, and platform governance, which are characterised by ‘an absence of international law’ and an investment of faith in the promise of ‘self-regulation, market-driven innovation and techno-libertarianism’.21 Joyce suggests that while international law and the media are often depicted as being ‘existentially threatened by technological disruption’, at least part of this ‘crisis’ concerns ‘the ongoing failure of international legal frameworks to address the rise of information capitalism in the form of digital media monopoly’.22 Across these chapters, Joyce offers a compelling analysis of the international regulatory landscape applicable to the media, traversing a diversity of contexts to critically surface both the blind spots and biases identifiable within a range of fields of international law. In an era of specialisation, where scholarship is becoming increasingly siloed, Joyce’s ability to bring diverse fields of international law into conversation with one another is particularly valuable. At the same time, by adopting such a broad perspective some level of detail and nuance is inevitably sacrificed. In exploring the relationship between international law and new forms of digital media in particular, Joyce’s text unveils many of the challenges that have arisen in attempting to reign in the power of today’s leading digital media companies. However, to some extent, I would argue, Joyce understates the significance of both the state and the law in both enabling the neoliberalisation of the contemporary digital communication sphere and in continuing to legitimate various repressive practices undertaken within it. Whilst acknowledging that the Internet ‘evolved in collaborations between governments, the military and academic institutions’,23 the role of both the state and legal frameworks in the Internet’s historical trajectory remains somewhat marginalised in Joyce’s account. The influence of the state on the shape of the contemporary online environment is well documented. Monika Zalnieriute, for example, discusses the dominance of the ‘US Information-Industrial-Complex’, which ‘catalysed the rapid growth of information and communication technologies within the global economy, while firmly embedding US strategic interests and companies at the heart of the current neoliberal regime’.24 Support from the US government took at least two forms. First, the US government provided significant amounts of funding and awarded a range of procurement contracts to US technology companies—a fact that not only undercuts the neoliberal myth that private wealth accumulates because free markets are kept distinct from public expenditure, but also provides important context for the Edward Snowden disclosures which revealed close ties between the US National Security Agency and a number of US technology giants.25 Second, the US government also supported its largest US technology companies by promoting an ‘Internet Freedom’ agenda abroad, premised on ‘globally “normalised” strong legal protections for intellectual property rights, advertising-based consumerism and the commodification of information and personal data’.26 And it is here that both domestic and international law become part of the story of the neoliberalisation of the contemporary online environment. As the works of Julie Cohen and Amy Kapczynski, amongst others, have demonstrated, ‘rising platform power, monopoly power, and the power that technology can give capital over workers and governments over the governed … are mediated at every moment by law’.27 At the domestic level, fields such as contract, trade-secrecy, intermediary immunities, privacy, and the First Amendment helped anchor the rising power of online platforms, while at the international level, trade agreements have prohibited the restriction of cross-border online information flows and forbidden data localization rules.28 As Kapczynski argues, ‘a wave has rippled through our law … [which], intertwined with the architecture of digital networks, has enabled the creation of the vast new firms that wield new forms of surveillance and algorithmic power, … [and] delivered us a form of neoliberal capitalism that is inclined toward monopoly, concentrated power, and inequality’.29 By placing emphasis on the absence of international law in the digital domain,30 Joyce’s account understates some of the ways in which both domestic and international law have helped shape the neoliberal communication sphere that characterises the contemporary online environment. Beyond shaping today’s online environment, international law also performs a role in legitimating certain repressive practices within it. Joyce’s account is alive to law’s legitimation function, particularly in the context of discussing the co-option of the vocabulary of human rights law by social media companies ‘not as binding legal norms, but as available ingredients to enable corporate self-regulation and marketing’, as well as ‘to minimise the damage to their reputations’.31 Yet, the legitimation function of international law extends beyond this corporate context. Consider, for example, the recent majority judgment of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in the bulk surveillance case of Big Brother Watch and Others v UK.32 The judgment endorsed the legality of bulk surveillance operations as in principle ‘valuable’ and of ‘vital importance’ for states seeking to identify threats to their national security,33 provided such programmes contain sufficient ‘guarantees against abuse’ and are subject to a set of ‘end-to-end safeguards’.34 By adopting this approach, the majority judgment adhered to a form of ‘procedural fetishism’,35 which has been characterised as nothing less than ‘a grand, definitive normalization of mass surveillance[,] by a virtually unanimous Grand Chamber[,] for decades to come’.36 In his concluding remarks, Joyce suggests that ‘it is important to reconsider the value and resilience of existing international media law frameworks including, most significantly, the human rights model, but also to be realistic about the failures and problems associated with that system’.37 Yet, while Joyce acknowledges the limits of the vocabulary of human rights law in general terms—including how the human rights system ‘struggles with controlling private power, individuates and simplifies collective and highly complex issues, and often underplays their structural dimension’38—a more detailed exploration of the ways in which human rights law has legitimated and struggled to reign in particular forms of private and state power in the digital domain would have helped prepare the ground for assessing the extent to which it is equipped to address the accountability deficits associated with the contemporary online environment.39 In the second half of the book, Joyce turns to examine how the media is coming to shape various dimensions of international law. In Chapter 5, Joyce explores publicity as a technique utilised by international courts and actors to claim legitimacy and signal their authority. Joyce focuses in particular on the fields of international criminal law and human rights law, observing how ‘mediatized trials have public relations benefits, but also present the now familiar dangers of media spectacle’, whilst ‘human rights witnessing promises connection but can also deliver commodification and simplification’.40 Reflecting on these tensions, Joyce concludes that while adopting media forms and engaging in public relations may be understood as ‘the international legal system … responding to demands for greater transparency, accountability and participation’, ultimately ‘publicity cannot act as a substitute for informed publics who are so often kept at a distance from the levers of institutional power and influence’.41 In Chapter 6, Joyce considers the broader critique of the communicative capitalism that underpins international law’s reliance on the media and its increasingly digitalised form. To this end, Joyce examines ‘not only the media’s role in bringing issues to public consciousness, but also its implication in the preservation of silences and the maintenance of obsessions and anxieties’,42 and reveals the ways in which the growing reliance of international actors on digital media platforms ‘further entangles the field with neoliberal ideologies embedded within the infrastructure of Silicon Valley’.43 The result, Joyce concludes, is that ‘publicity promises participation, but delivers digital media monopoly, corporate “values” as structuring norms and increasing private power on the international plane’.44 Joyce’s analysis in these chapters is again impressive, drawing on a diversity of disciplinary perspectives ranging from political theory to communications studies to reveal how the turn by international actors to mediated techniques of publicity has produced ‘effects of both visibility (for one or a group of victims or a theme) and invisibility (for other forgotten victims, contextual analysis and different or competing claims and causes)’,45 whilst masking and facilitating ‘the broader privatisation of the public sphere’.46 Where the text might have delved deeper, however, is in surfacing the ways in which the contemporary online environment enables the reproduction of inequalities, for example along gender and racial lines. In discussing mass atrocities in Myanmar, for example, Joyce points to the failure of Facebook to prevent its platform being used as a tool to incite violence against the Rohingya community.47 However, what is omitted from Joyce’s account is any exploration of the reasons behind Facebook’s passivity in this context.48 Reflecting on the contrast between Facebook’s de-platforming of Donald Trump following the US Capitol riots and its general passivity in Myanmar, Rebecca Hamilton has reflected upon ‘the role that economic and political power—coupled with cultural affinity, and distributed unevenly across and within States—plays in the decisions of major [social media companies] about what content stays on their platforms’.49 According to Hamilton, global inequities behind how content is moderated on digital platforms are partially a reflection of capitalism, calculated in the advertiser revenue that a platform derives from an American user compared to a user in Myanmar, and partially a reflection of unevenly distributed political power, with ‘years of local activism, coupled with international reporting and a United Nations Commission of Inquiry [being required] to finally get Facebook to take the kind of de-platforming action [in Myanmar that] it did in the United States’.50 But another part of the story concerns systemic racial bias. As Hamilton notes, major social media companies ‘continue to default to the cultural assumptions and political and economic incentives held by their predominantly white American male founders’.51 This ongoing ‘diversity crisis’ in the digital technology sector is significant since, as UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, E Tendayi Achiume, recently observed, ‘technology … that disproportionately excludes women, racial, ethnic and other minorities is likely to reproduce these inequalities when it is deployed’.52 Joyce also critically discusses ‘platform humanitarianism’, encompassing the turn within the human rights movement towards ‘commodified forms of advocacy, fundraising and competition for attention and power between NGOs’, initially drawing on the emergence of global media, but today increasingly reliant on digital media platforms ‘to communicate its messages, seek publicity and engage in digital witnessing in the attempt to capture audiences motivated by humanitarian concerns’.53 One example that Joyce explores in this context is the notorious Kony 2012 campaign, in which an organisation called Invisible Children distributed a video across various digital media platforms calling for the capture and arrest of the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Joseph Kony, by the end of 2012.54 As Joyce notes, the aim of the video was ‘to engage the American people to place on their government to the of military in to the in its to capture In this way, the video sought to a by the International Court into a in to his Joyce the Kony 2012 for the of the political in and to its whilst also to the broader that the focus of such may attention from social in the Yet, as the of has recently a to this story is how the a example of by as ‘the of social and economic value from the racial of another only is the Kony 2012 video with racial but by the US of the may also be within a broader historical in which international law has performed a role in the of value from the in international such as the or and military as For the of this form of global is the of and the of form of between the wealth and the of While Joyce acknowledges the that media may audiences and publics from for the of the racial dimensions of digital are at but not In Informed Publics, Daniel Joyce has made a valuable towards the complex and diverse connections between international law and the the end of the book, Joyce observes its ‘the media is not given the significance or in international legal which it has in other such as international political and social It is that with the publication of Joyce’s book, this to at a when international actors are to on the future regulation and use of digital media platforms, they would well to on the critical and historical in this The is to the and in the of International discussion on Daniel Joyce’s Informed Publics, and International Law, as well as the for their are the

Barbara Guidi, Andrea Michienzi

Online Social Networks gained a crucial role in people's everyday life, acting as the medium through which people can interact with each other. The introduction of blockchain technology prompted a new generation of social media based on the concept of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and other Web3 technologies, giving birth to the Metaverse. Decentraland is one such platform, where users can explore a 3D virtual world and communicate with each other. The main feature of Decentraland is that the virtual world is divided into parcels, implemented through NFTs, that can be traded among users and where owners can create buildings or mini-games for other users to play with. In this work, we explore the virtual world of Decentraland by presenting the main details of the virtual world and by focusing on the economic impact of NFT trading on the description of the parcels. In detail, the parcel's description can be used to advertise the proximity of the parcel to infrastructures or special projects to attract potential buyers. This paper's findings show the impact and the magnitude of this phenomenon, highlighting entire quarters that adopt this technique throughout the map by overriding the playful aspect of the platform.

Katarina Stanoevska‐Slabeva

The Metaverse denotes the evolution to the next generation Internet also called Web3 or post-reality universe. Resulting from a convergence of several technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, Internet of Things, 5G and 6G networks, technologies for AR, VR, MR, and head-mounted end devices, a new 3D version of the Internet is emerging. The convergence of these technologies enables new opportunities for 3D and virtual-world-based education with immersive, but also haptic experiences and better connections between the real and virtual world. This paper defines and characterizes the Metaverse and summarizes emerging chances and opportunities for higher education based on an analysis of recent literature.

Xiao Wang, Jing Yang, Jinpeng Han, Wei Wang · 5 authors

A total of 12 years have been passed since this Department was created in 2010 as the first academic forum dedicated to cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS), with the first CPSS research article on the field: “The Emergence of Intelligent Enterprises: From CPS to CPSS.” What has happened and changed during the past decade? A brief reflection and review are presented here with a focus on digital twins in CPS versus parallel intelligence in CPSS, and their relationship to blockchain intelligence, smart contracts, metaverses, DAO, Web3, and decentralized science. The concept of DeMetaverses is thus introduced and interpreted as a DAO-based decentralized autonomous metaverse. The characteristics, mechanism, and impact of DeMetaverses are discussed with a vision for achieving an integrated human, artificial, natural, and organizational intelligence that would transform our world into “6S” societies.

Paul P. Momtaz

The Metaverse refers to a shared vision among technology entrepreneurs of a three-dimensional virtual world, an embodied internet with humans and the physical world in it. As such, the Metaverse is thought to expand the domain of human activity by overcoming spatial, temporal, and resource-related constraints imposed by nature. The technological infrastructure of the Metaverse, i.e., Web3, consists of blockchain technology, smart contracts, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which reduce transaction and agency costs, and enable trustless social and economic interactions thanks to decentralized consensus mechanisms. The emerging Metaverse may give rise to new products and services, new job profiles, and new business models. In this brief note, I assess the promises and challenges of the Metaverse, offer a first empirical glimpse at the emerging Metaverse economy, and discuss some simple Metaverse economics that revolve around building and operating the Metaverse.

Nurten DÖNMEZ

Web3, DLT ve NFT gibi merkezi olmayan teknolojilerin yanı sıra AR/VR gibi deneyimsel teknolojiler hizmetler sektörüne bambaşka bir boyut getirmektedir. Teknolojinin getirdiği yeni yaklaşımlarla bankacılık önce geleneksel bankacılıktan dijital bankacılığa, sonrasında açık ve açık ötesi bankacılığa evrilmiştir. Blokzincir teknolojisiyle merkeziyetsiz finansla tanışan bankacılık sektörünün şimdilerde ise metaverse bankacılığına evrildiğine tanık olmaktayız. Hızlı teknolojik değişim yeni bir temel oluşturduğundan, diğer tüm sektörler gibi finansal hizmetler sektörü de bu duruma uyum sağlamalı ve fırsatları değerlendirmelidir. Müşteri beklentileri sürekli farklılaştığından bankaların müşterilerinin değişen ihtiyaçlarını keşfetmenin yollarını bularak nasıl karşılayacaklarına dair yöntemleri de geliştirmeleri gerekmektedir. Önümüzdeki 10 yıllık dönemde 8 trilyon USD’lık küresel bir pazar oluşturacağı öngörülen metaverse konusu bankacılık sektörünü yakından ilgilendirmektedir. Bankalar, teknolojinin yardımıyla gelişen pazarlama anlayışlarıyla, farklılaşan müşteri beklentilerine hitap etmeye çalışmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın amacı Metaverse yolunda bankacılıktaki pazarlamanın bağlamsal pazarlama ve artırılmış pazarlama açısından incelenerek ve metaverse bankacılığı alanına ilişkin kavramsal bilgi sunulmasıdır. Aynı zamanda bu çalışmada, dünyada son dönemde bankacılık alanında deneyimsel pazarlama ve artırılmış gerçeklik veya metaverse ile ilgili adımlar atan bankalardan örnekler derlenerek bankaların farklılaşan müşteri beklentileri ve bu beklentilere yönelik ürettikleri çözümler yorumlanmıştır.

Mohit Mittal

This intersection of Web3 technology and the metaverse constitutes a major leap into decentralized digital environments. Web3, which is based on blockchain technology, offers a user-centric architecture that allows users to own and control their digital assets, identities, and interactions. Blockchain ensures transparent, immutable records in the metaverse; smart contracts enable secure, trustless transactions to happen automatically. Non-fungible therapy tokens (NFTs) advance ownership online by showing original virtual items. Metaverse is a notion that envisions a communal, virtual shared environment that exists beyond the physical world. This space is shared by all individuals. It is a digital world in which users can interact with computer-generated surroundings, connect with other users, and participate in a variety of activities by utilizing AR, VR, and other immersive technologies. This article investigates how the integration of Web3 technology supports distributed governance, virtual commerce, and interoperable experiences, thereby ushering a new era of immersive, fair digital places. We also look at potential adoption chances as well as challenges.

Isabell M. Welpe

No abstract is available for this record.

David F. Bucher, Daniel Hall

In the upcoming era of distributed technological integration known as Web3, the built environment will need to adapt. Solving the most significant social, environmental and economic challenges will likely require new approaches to data sharing and efficient data management. This will need to occur within organizations, across software tools, and between partners. However, today’s approach of data fragmentation and a scattered system of data islands prevent efficient data usage in the construction industry.The question that now arises is whether the decentralized marketplace approach has the potential to make construction data sets more uniform, efficient,and usable for all stakeholders through distributed technological integration.Therefore, this paper’s contribution isto provide a conceptual starting point and possible research stream approach towards thisquestion. Doing so by outlining current data management challenges and discussing themin comparison with already existing web3 approaches in research and industry.

Qin Wang, Rujia Li, Qi Wang, Shiping Chen · 6 authors

Web3 is the most hyped concept from 2020 to date, greatly motivating the prosperity of the Internet of Value and Metaverse. However, no solid evidence stipulates the exact definition, criterion, or standard in the sense of such a buzzword. To fill the gap, we aim to clarify the term in this work. We narrow down the connotation of Web3 by separating it from high-level controversy argues and, instead, focusing on its protocol, architecture, and evaluation from the perspective of blockchain fields. Specifically, we have identified all potential architectural design types and evaluated each of them by employing the scenario-based architecture evaluation method. The evaluation shows that existing applications are neither secure nor adoptable as claimed. Meanwhile, we also discuss opportunities and challenges surrounding the Web3 space and answer several prevailing questions from communities. A primary result is that Web3 still relies on traditional internet infrastructure, not as independent as advocated. This report, as of June 2022, provides the first strict research on Web3 in the view of blockchain. We hope that this work would provide a guide for the development of future Web3 services.

Shuhao Zheng, Junliang Luo, Erqun Dong, Can Chen · 5 authors

The blockchain technology empowers secure, trustless, and privacy-preserving trading with cryptocurrencies. However, existing blockchain-based trading platforms only support trading cryptocurrencies with digital assets (e.g., NFTs). Although several payment service providers have started to accept cryptocurrency as a payment method for tangible goods (e.g., Visa, PayPal), customers still need to trust and hand over their private information to centralized E-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon, eBay). To enable trustless and privacy-preserving trading between cryptocurrencies and real goods, we propose SPENDER, a smart-contract-based platform for Secure and Privacy-PresErviNg Decentralized P2P E-commeRce. The design of our platform enables various advantageous features and brings unlimited future potential. Moreover, our platform provides a complete paradigm for designing real-world Web3 infrastructures on the blockchain, which broadens the application scope and exploits the intrinsic values of cryptocurrencies. The platform has been built and tested on the Terra ecosystem, and we plan to open-source the code later.

Joichi Ito

「それはweb3じゃない」「こっちが本物のweb3だ」といったやり取りをSNSで見ることがあります。web3の定義はそれほど重要でしょうか？ 僕は、web3はムーブメントなのだから、みんなに「Joinしようよ」「Buildしようよ」と呼びかけるほうが大切だと考えています。web3のイメージを参加するそれぞれが持っていればいい。 今回のブログでは、正しい定義ではなく、僕が思う「web3」について書きます。 ## なぜweb3は注目を集めるようになったのか？ 先日「web3とは」という動画をUPしました。みなさんからたくさんの意見をいただくなど、web3が注目を集めていることを実感しています。 動画では

Kentaroh Toyoda

We are often faced with the non-trivial task of designing incentive mechanisms in the era of Web3. As history has shown, many Web3 services failed mostly due to the lack of a rigorous incentive mechanism design based on token economics. However, traditional mechanism design, where there is an assumption that the users of services strategically make decisions so that their expected profits are maximized, often does not capture their real behavior well as it ignores humans' psychological bias in making decisions under uncertainty. In this paper, we propose an incentive mechanism design for crypto-enabled services using behavioral economics. Specifically, we take an example of a crypto lottery game in this work and incorporate a seminal work of cumulative prospect theory into its lottery game mechanism (or rule) design. We designed four mechanisms and compared them in terms of utility, a metric of how appealing a mechanism is to participants, and a game operator's expected profit. Our approach is generic and will be applicable to a wide range of crypto-based services where a decision has to be made under uncertainty.

Alex Murray, Dennie Kim, Jordan Combs

No abstract is available for this record.