NOXFORD ID is a seven-layer privacy-preserving identity verification architecture designed to address a specific fraud vulnerability in cross-institutional identity validation: the brittleness of exact-match verification against ordinary, legitimate variation in how names and dates are recorded across institutions. The architecture combines hardened Bloom-filter cryptographic linkage (privacy-preserving record linkage), field-separated fuzzy matching, a probabilistic decision engine with an explicit human-review tier, a tamper-evident cross-institutional integrity ledger, a genuine Schnorr zero-knowledge proof of identity knowledge, replay-resistant institution-specific key derivation, and a Root Certificate Authority layer aligned with Nigeria's NIMC Act 2026, which designates the National Identity Management Commission as Root Certification Authority for the country's National Public Key Infrastructure. Each layer is independently implemented and empirically tested against a labeled test corpus, with results reported transparently, including design flaws discovered and corrected during development. The paper documents a measured reduction in false rejection of legitimate citizens from 57% to 14% relative to a representative exact-match baseline, while maintaining zero fraud slip-through in testing, and explicitly states the system's current limitations, including evaluation corpus scale, dependence on enrollment-data integrity, and pending network-level threat-detection integration.
Real-world asset tokens that reference physical objects with multi-century lifespans face design challenges absent from short-horizon financial instruments. This paper identifies seven such challenges — permissionless operation, death detection without death incentives, decentralized registry bootstrapping, dispute resolution without central authority, verification at scale, indefinite funding, and century-scale system durability — and presents an integrated design framework that resolves all seven. The framework is demonstrated through a deployed conservation protocol that tokenizes old-growth trees as ERC-721 non-fungible tokens, with a permanent freeze mechanism that renders tokens non-transferable upon confirmed tree death. The protocol is live on Base L2 mainnet with twelve genesis trees minted and source code publicly available.
The preservation of historical records is critical for maintaining cultural heritage and providing future generations with accurate historical insights. Traditional storage methods are vulnerable to tampering, loss, and unauthorized access, presenting challenges in safeguarding document authenticity. This paper proposes a hybrid blockchain-based document management system, utilizing Quorum as a private, permissioned blockchain for authorized modifications by trusted historians and institutions, and Ethereum as a public blockchain for immutable record verification. By integrating the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for decentralized storage and employing smart contracts to enforce access control, this system ensures secure modification and transparent public access for document verification. Can be developed in collaboration with entities such as the International Historical Research Consortium (IHRC) and the Indian Council of Historical Research, the proposed architecture facilitates a trustworthy digital archive that meets academic standards for historical document preservation.
Purpose: This paper examines blockchain technologies as instruments to strengthen archival management by providing verifiable authenticity, tamper evidence, and resilient traceability for digital records. It situates blockchain within Oman Vision 2040 and evaluates how distributed ledger technology (DLT) can be piloted and integrated with existing archival infrastructures. Method/Approach: A qualitative case-study approach synthesizes three evidence streams: international pilot project reports such as ARCHANGEL, peer-reviewed literature and technical white papers (2017–2024), and semi-structured expert interviews and institutional readiness analyses from Oman. Thematic analysis examined three domains: integrity & authenticity, transparency & access, and institutional readiness & governance. Results: Blockchain provides a cryptographic chain-of-custody and tamper-evident anchoring model for archival objects by writing content fingerprints to distributed ledgers while storing content off-chain. International pilots show feasibility; however, challenges include governance design, legal recognition, interoperability, cost, and capacity building. Conclusion: Blockchain is a promising augmentation to archival toolkits but is not a substitute for core preservation practices. Recommendations include staged pilots in Oman, a hybrid architecture, standardized hashing and metadata practices, training, and regional consortia for governance and cost distribution.
Under the background of the deepening of digital China strategy and the diversification of public archives demand, the insufficient sharing and inefficient utilization of archives information resources have become a prominent bottleneck restricting the release of archives value. This paper systematically combs the policy evolution, platform practice and technology application status of file sharing in China, and finds that the lack of metadata standards, vague boundaries of powers and responsibilities, weak security prevention and control, and the interweaving of the concepts of "valuing custody and neglecting utilization" have formed systematic obstacles such as poor cross-domain circulation and mismatch between supply and demand. Therefore, this paper proposes four-dimensional collaborative paths: first, technology empowerment, deployment of alliance chain and zero-knowledge proof to achieve "availability and invisibility", and construction of multi-modal retrieval and personalized recommendation engine; Second, institutional innovation, the development of open value assessment guidelines and "negative list+white list" mechanism, the establishment of joint meetings and third-party performance audits; The third is management optimization, implementing the dual-track talent project of "archives +IT" and reshaping the accurate service process driven by user portraits; Fourth, social coordination, building a digital community of "urban memory" of archives, libraries and museums, and introducing the feedback mechanism of crowdsourcing and cultural and creative income. The research provides an operational framework for the government to formulate an open policy and the digital transformation of institutions, and promotes the archival resources from "physical concentration" to "value aggregation".
Virtually Disposable: A Theory and History of Digital Trash historicizes and critically analyzes the conditions under which the cultural category of trash does and does not come into play in historical and contemporary digital environments, from the American 1980s to the present. Understanding the determination of real-world objects as trash as a reflexive, cross-cultural aspect of the maintenance of physical space, this dissertation evaluates the criteria according to which modern users and web platforms perform the same calculus in their management of digital files, from the machine-readable forms of data collected by corporate entities to artifacts as potentially personally meaningful as a photo stored on one’s cell phone. Chapter 1 traces the development of delete functions on business-oriented personal computers, posing the graphical representation of delete in trash can-styled icons on user-facing interfaces as a design response to the limited storage affordances of local machines in the 1980s. This chapter locates the trash can icon as part of the same genealogy of digital waste-management strategies as commercial content-moderation of the Web 2.0 era (ca. 2006–) but advances their respective models of digital disposability in terms of “data custodians” (local, determined by storage) and “content janitors” (non-local, informed by hygiene). Chapter 2 thinks about the contemporary management of user-generated content by platforms in terms of archive, arguing that the cloud has ushered in a post-storage moment. The tacit valuation of user-generated content as data under platform capitalism may account for its seemingly indefinite maintenance online, but the same conditions of preservation and display on the user profile provoke new anxieties in the user that act upon their online self-representation in digital space, resulting in curated, digitally hygienic archives that are neither truly personal nor all that personally revealing. Chapter 3 then assesses the extent to which the value reflexively assigned to user-generated content (with a particular interest in digital images, in this case) under platform capitalism may reliably translate into extra-digital systems of value. This chapter catalogs various failed attempts on the part of relatively empowered cultural institutions such as the museum and art world to confer value on born-digital visual art and reads them in conversation with similarly doomed efforts to stabilize digital images as financial commodities, most notably in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Although digital media may appear virtual, digital culture of our post-cloud, post-Web 2.0 moment relies upon material infrastructure, the ongoing support of which depends upon the consumption of rare-earth minerals, energy, and water and which results in the generation of toxic e-waste. Virtually Disposable builds upon research located at the intersection of critical discard studies and environmental media studies by questioning the implicit determinations of value that inform and have informed the personal and corporate maintenance and disposal of digital files both today and historically. Analyzing the logics according to which a digitally mediated thing becomes disposable, as well as attending to the functional suspension of trash as a cultural category under the cloud and financial imperatives of platform capitalism, this dissertation accounts for a variable in the equation seldom examined in existing studies of the flows of e-waste alone: that the physical machines that afford file-storage reach their breaking points in no small part due to the deluge of value-unclear files they are now made to store and process.
The rapid ascent of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has fundamentally disrupted the art market and the broader visual culture landscape. While much scholarly and popular attention has been focused on their economic impact and speculative nature, this article explores a less examined dimension: the potential of blockchain technology, as manifested in NFTs, to redefine the paradigms of digital heritage preservation. Digital art and born-digital cultural artifacts face an existential threat from technological obsolescence, format degradation, and the inherent fragility of digital media. Traditional preservation institutions, such as museums and archives, have struggled to develop scalable, sustainable models for conserving these ephemeral works. This article argues that NFTs, through their core properties of decentralized ownership verification, immutability of provenance, and programmable permanence, offer a novel, albeit complex, framework for safeguarding our collective digital visual heritage. By analyzing the technical architecture of NFTs, the challenges of preserving the digital asset separate from its token, and the emergent models of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and community-led preservation, this paper posits that we are witnessing the nascent stages of a new preservation ecology. This study synthesizes literature from digital humanities, media studies, conservation science, and computer science to critically assess both the promises and perils of this convergence. It concludes that while NFTs are not a panacea, they introduce powerful tools that, if ethically and thoughtfully integrated, can significantly bolster the resilience and longevity of digital visual culture for future generations.
Academic departments frequently exchange exam materials, assignment submissions, grade reports, attendance logs and durable student records. Conventional Learning Management Systems (LMS) centralize control and provide limited, non-portable audit trails which hinders cross-department collaboration and independent verification. This paper defines Electronic Student Records as encrypted, content-addressed documents anchored on Ethereum while data remain off chain and presents a practical model with a comparative analysis for department-level sharing. The model uses Sign-In with Ethereum (SIWE) for authentication, verifiable credentials for roles and consent, a minimal on-chain registry that records Keccak-256 digests, content identifiers, and timestamps with a policy reference and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage with institutional pinning and multiple gateways. Access control adopts proxy re-encryption, enforced with time windows and periodic key rotation. Updates always re-encrypt and re-upload so each version receives a new Content Identifier (CID) and digest. A compact evaluation contrasts Ethereum Layer 1 with Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups for registry events, single versus multi-gateway IPFS with two or more replicas and Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE) versus Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) as alternative keying strategies. The system reports metrics include chain cost, one-gateway (p50) and two-gateway (p95) read latency, availability under replication and revocation time under the re-upload policy. Findings indicate ZK rollups suit routine registry events, Layer1 suits high-value anchors, multi-gateway pinning improves tail latency and success rate and time-bounded PRE enables low-overhead revocation. The model offers a feasible path to privacy-preserving, auditable Electronic Student Records (ESRs) that integrate with existing LMS.
The paper briefly introduces the blockchain and distributed ledger technologies and the concept of non-fungible tokens. Next, the (re)conceptualization of business activities in heritage institutions like museums, libraries, and archives regarding introducing non-fungible tokens is discussed. The proposal for a non-fungible token application model is the central part of the paper. The eight-step model is thoroughly explained and separated into two sections: off-chain and on-chain. Finally, the discussion and conclusion are given, identifying new possibilities that the application of the model can bring to the heritage institutions and the possible challenges they may face.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) offer a promising mechanism to protect Australian and Indigenous artists' copyright. They represent and transfer the value of artwork in digital form. Before adopting NFTs to protect Australian artwork, we in this paper investigate them empericially. We focus on examining the details of NFT structure. We start from the underlying structure of NFTs to show how they represent copyright for both artists and production owners, as well as how they aim to safeguard or secure the value of digital artworks. We then involve data collection from various types of sources with different storage methods, including on-chain, centralized, and decentralized systems. Based on both metadata and artwork content, we present our analysis and discussion on the following key issues: copyright, security and artist identification. The final results of the evaluation, unfortnately, show that the NFT is NOT ready to protect Australian and Indigenous artists' copyright.
Taras Maksymyuk, Nazariy Andrushchak, Domenico Romano, Lorenzo Bellucci · 6 authors
This paper explores the integration of blockchain and related technologies for enhancing cultural heritage management systems. Art counterfeiting and inefficiencies in traditional provenance methods highlight the need for robust solutions to ensure the security, authenticity, and traceability of artifacts. Blockchain’s immutability, transparency, and decentralized structure provide an innovative foundation for addressing these challenges. By incorporating tools such as invisible marking technologies, AI-driven authentication, and user-friendly decentralized applications (DAPPs), this framework enables efficient management of artifact records and ownership. Additionally, the application of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) platforms demonstrates how scalable and secure systems can be deployed to meet the growing demands of the art world. The proposed methodology also considers interdisciplinary approaches involving chemistry, AI, and blockchain technologies to safeguard cultural artifacts while enhancing stakeholder trust and operational efficiency.
By bringing digital artworks to one’s everyday shopping list, NFTs have revolutionized a large group’s understanding of art. In this article, I challenge the stance presented by authors such as Taylor and Sloane that NFTs shift the consumption of objects to the liquid consumption of the non-material by drawing on the aesthetic identity of NFTs as images. Firstly, I analyse the evolution of blockchain products’ function from that of strictly fungible tokens to non-fungible goods. NFTs rely on art’s specificity and acquire their new identity by virtue of entering the art market, which does not happen with ordinary cryptocurrencies. NFTs thus benefit from the contextualization of art as a socially and technologically mediated immaterial process: they emerge as instances of the artification of a non-artistic immaterial experience and become art-like. However, an NFT as a commodity is not pure code; it does have an image attached. This distinguishes NFTs from particular fungible tokens that hold added value due to their unique historical context. I further point out that the fact that NFTs have, as commodities, taken the form of digital images is an expression of a pervasive need for interaction with objects in today’s everyday digital experience. Also, the shift of NFTs from being just “specific” phenomena as art objects to “singular” phenomena construed as authors of the ways in which they will be perceived and understood is discussed. NFTs create their own impact, on the one hand, independently of their often poor artistic or aesthetic quality, and on the other hand, as entirely dependent on their aura as mathematically and ontologically unique, visually perceptible entities.
The digital landscape is transforming cultural heritage preservation. Online mapping initiatives, like UNESCO's GIS and Historypin's community-driven maps, are fostering engagement and accessibility. Europeana's digital library and CyArk's 3D preservation empower us to explore and safeguard heritage across time and space. By catering to diverse heritage types (tangible and intangible), these platforms offer valuable tools for education and global exchange. With the integration of Web3 technologies, these initiatives can further enhance their impact. Decentralized networks enable more equitable access to digital heritage, preventing gatekeeping and censorship. Blockchain can ensure transparent and immutable records of heritage artifacts, addressing ethical concerns related to digital representation. Additionally, the tokenization of cultural assets offers allowing communities to retain control over their heritage. However, the adoption of Web3 also necessitates careful consideration of data sovereignty and digital rights to ensure inclusive and responsible cultural preservation.
The exploration of digital art and cultural practices precipitated by the advent of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) constitutes a burgeoning area of interest for both scholars and industry professionals. Nonetheless, the nascent industry is fraught with legal complexities that complicate copyright enforcement for owners and consumer rights, thereby introducing novel challenges in the regulation of NFT online transactions on platforms. This chapter delves into the intricacies of copyright, ownership and security issues surrounding NFT digital collections in China, employing the case study of RED’s R-SPACE—an emblematic and highly esteemed social media platform within the Chinese market. It argues that the non-complete decentralised online sphere of the NFT marketplace in China necessitates a collaborative regulatory framework involving government, platforms and consumers. This tripartite approach suggests a tailored strategy for navigating the regulatory landscape of NFTs within the Chinese context.
Ben Biedermann, Matthew Scerri, Victoria Kozlova, Joshua Ellul
Web3’s decentralised infrastructure has upended the standardised approach to digital identity established by protocols like OpenID Connect. Web2 and Web3 currently operate in silos, with Web2 leveraging selective disclosure JSON web tokens (SD-JWTs) and Web3 dApps being reliant on on-chain data and sometimes clinging to centralised system data. This fragmentation hinders user esxperience and the interconnectedness of the digital world. This article explores the integration of Web3 within the OpenID Connect framework, scrutinising established authentication protocols for their adaptability to decentralised identities. The research examines the interplay between OpenID Connect and decentralised identity concepts, the limitations of the existing protocols like OpenID Connect for verifiable credential issuance, OpenID Connect framework for verifiable presentations, and self-issued OpenID provider. As a result, a novel privacy-preserving digital identity bridge is proposed, which aims to answer the research question of whether authentication protocols should inherently support Web3 functionalities and the mechanisms for their integration. Through a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) use case, the findings indicate that a privacy-centric bridge can mitigate the existing fragmentation by aggregating different identities to provide a better user experience. While the digital identity bridge demonstrates a possible approach to harmonise digital identity across platforms for their use in Web3, the bridging is unidirectional and limits root trust of credentials. The bridge’s dependence on centralised systems may further fuel the debate on (de)centralised identities.
The non-fungible token (NFT) is a record used to ensure the privilege and ownership of a certain digital asset with a distinctive digital identifier in a blockchain. In digital-multimedia assets i.e. images, videos, audio, etc. NFTs generally retain references to the properties of the asset. Due to the nature of blockchain technology, NFT is oftentimes associated with its immutability. NFTs that represent digital multimedia assets may utilize blockchain-based file servers, but oftentimes time the associated file is stored off-chain. This makes the assets themselves vulnerable to link rot and causes the NFT owner to lose access to their assets since the off-chain storageis not immutable like the NFT. To preserve the integrity of the NFT’s associated digital assets, we introduce Abridged Neat Key Instance (ANKI). ANKI is a property embedded inside NFT that contains the seed number of the digital multimedia asset to be procedurally generated. We are taking advantage of Procedural Content Generation (PCG) technology to reproduce the digital multimedia asset presented by the information available inside the NFT itself. By leveraging Procedural Content Generation(PCG) technology, our approach can regenerate the exact digital asset directly from the information encoded within the NFT.In our experiments, we successfully recreated music files using the ANKI seed and a PCG engine, verifying their accuracy by comparing the MD5 and SHA-512 checksums of the generated files with those of the original NFT assets. All 50 generated musicfiles produced identical checksums to their original counterparts,confirming the integrity of our method.
Ben Biedermann, Matthew Scerri, Victoria Kozlova, Joshua Ellul
The terms self-sovereign identity (SSI) and decen-tralised identity are often used interchangeably, which results in increasing ambiguity when solutions are being investigated and compared. This article aims to provide a clear distinction between the two concepts in relation to the revised Regulation as Regards establishing the European Digital Identity Framework (eIDAS 2.0) by providing a systematisation of knowledge of technological developments that led up to implementation of eIDAS 2.0. Applying an inductive exploratory approach, relevant literature was selected iteratively in waves over a nine months time frame and covers literature between 2005 and 2024. The review found that the decentralised identity sector emerged adjacent to the OpenID Connect (OIDC) paradigm of Open Authentication, whereas SSI denotes the sector's shift towards blockchain-based solutions. In this study, it is shown that the interchangeable use of SSI and decentralised identity coincides with novel protocols over OIDC. While the first part of this paper distinguishes OIDC from decentralised identity, the second part addresses the incompatibility between OIDC under eIDAS 2.0 and Web3. The paper closes by suggesting further research for establishing a digital identity bridge for connecting applications on public-permissionless ledgers with data originating from eIDAS 2.0 and being presented using OIDC.
This thesis questions the recurring absence of technological art collections that use the most diverse technologies in their production, in the historical scenario of contemporary society, from the perspective of memory institutions. It also provides evidence of the intrinsic characteristics of this type of collection, based on its information regime, production, and management model, which amplify a scenario of loss or constant modes of data, information, and knowledge transfer in the context of a post-digital society. A central actor paradigm is constructed. Various types of agents from one or more ecosystems centralize demands, and actions and place themselves in a precarious position in their public or private attributions, in the face of a complex scenario of material and immaterial production in an immanent digital culture and under an accelerationist digital economy and policy. The thesis is presented in a multidisciplinary way, given the context of related fields of knowledge, digital ontology, political economy of information, digital art and culture, digital humanities, economic accelerationist theory, as well as thematic subfields such as digitization, decentralization, blockchain, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, peer-to-peer networks, among others. The research is exploratory and empirical observation, which applied the qualitative method, assigned in two main stages through the review of scientific literature, use of methods of content analysis of available databases, and discourse analysis through structured interviews with agents in different scenarios. Local knowledge (national scenario) that relates to the international context of some (theoretical-practical) examples, also justified by the absence or restriction of similar models for analysis in Brazil. The aim was to understand the ways, processes, regimes and uses of information in the implementation, organization and retrieval of art and digital heritage archives through autonomous agents, machine learning and the use of new technologies such as blockchain in decentralized networks (P2P) based on technical-theoretical, scientific and transdisciplinary models in the field of information science interfacing with the digital humanities. As a result, the thesis proposes the implementation of a decentralized theoretical-technical accelerationist model, made up of five stages of action and under guiding principles such as the digital information regime in the post-digital society, the use of new technologies and autonomous systems, the decentralization of collections, the constitution of a sharing economy in a P2P society model, and the introduction and incorporation into ongoing socio-technical accelerationist models, which allows the application of a physical, digital, semantic, pragmatic informational method.
The purpose of this study is to examine the viewpoint of national archives on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, discover their activities in relation to the application of these technologies, and analyse their thoughts on how these technologies can play a role in the preservation of records’ trustworthiness. A survey method was adopted in the study. The survey consisted of 18 questions about national archives’ attitude and actions in relation to application of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. The survey was sent to the 194 national archives listed in the Directory of National Archives. Eighteen responses have been acquired which, while low, provides initial insights into how national archives are responding to these technologies. This study has three hypotheses. The first one is “blockchain technology will change archiving practices “, the second one is “the trustworthiness of digital records can be preserved better with blockchain technology”, and the last one is “national archives are reluctant to implement blockchain networks that use tradable crypto-assets”. According to the results obtained from the survey, the first hypothesis has not been verified. The second hypothesis is likely, as national archives that are keen to adopt blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, but a majority of the archives are hesitant to adopt these technologies for archiving, suggesting that the third and final hypothesis might also true, though the reasons for national archives’ reluctance to adopt these technologies could be more varied than originally hypothesized. This study is one of the first systemic analyses of the viewpoint and activities of national archives on blockchain and distributed technologies.
This research is concerned with documenting and chronicling the art of NFTs art in the Saudi artistic cultural scene, the importance of which stems from the lack of scientific sources that document this field until the preparation of this research and aims to trace historically the emergence of the field of NFTs art in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the arts sector through the experiences of Saudi artists. The most prominent events for the culture, arts and technology sector, and other Saudi sectors. The research dealt with the history of the emergence of the field of NFTs art, which extends from the history of digital arts, and reviewed the most famous works of NFTs art.As a result of the technical revolution and the artistic movement that the world is witnessing in the direction of investing in digital arts, this movement has moved to the Saudi artistic cultural scene through the experiences of Saudi artists and emerged from the artist Rashid Al-Shasha’i, and after him the era of Al-Amoudi. As for the major Saudi sectors, the role of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Ministry of Culture, represented by the Visual Arts Authority, emerged for organizing conferences that paved the way for the emergence of this field in the Kingdom, followed by initiatives for the activities of some sectors to benefit from the technical capabilities of the field of NFTs art.
Ovaj rad pokušava poboljšati sustav donacija implementacijom Web3 platforme za donacije. Problemi koji se riješavaju tom implementacijom su: velike naknade kod slanja donacija, ograničeni globalni doseg, manjak privatnosti, spore transakcije, manjak transparentnosti i sigurnosti. Također su istražene i implementirane sve potrebne tehnologije za riješavanje tih problema. Razvijene funkcionalnosti Web3 platforme za donacije su: izrada i uređivanje donacijskih kampanja, učitavanje PDF dokumenata donacijske kampanje na IPFS, prikaz informativnog sadržaja o kampanji, tražilica donacijskih kampanja, mogućnost razmjene tokena prije donacije, dodjela NFT nagrada za veće donacije, anonimna identifikacija korisnika putem povezivanja na platformu s kriptonovčanikom.
Not only economies are affected by this wave of digitization and digitalization that has come with the fourth industrial revolution. The structures of our political states are also being affected. What do new digital states hold for the future of interaction? Already the core structures are being altered by technology, from Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) to smart contracts and the meta-verse. The possibilities for the structure of a new digital state, enabled by a digital social contract, are limitless.