Blockchain Papers

Stanley Cho, Bomi Woo, Sung-Ung Kang

DNA-encoded chemical libraries (DECLs/DELs) enable the pooled synthesis and selection of millions to billions of DNA-barcoded small molecules, providing an efficient route to discover binders and early leads against diverse biological targets. As DEL-derived programs advance toward identifying clinical candidates, the asset surface of a DEL platform expands from a small set of optimized hits to include library designs, building-block combinations, DNA tags, selection data, and physical library stocks, thus creating new challenges in registration, traceability, and scalable ownership in transfer practices. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique blockchain-native tokens that can represent digital assets that can be coupled to smart contracts to enable traceable transactions and programmable rights management, which inspire proposals to tokenize intellectual-property (IP) assets such as patents. Here, we review (i) the scientific and commercial value of DEL in modern drug discovery, (ii) NFT/blockchain concepts, specifically in reported biomedical-IP and supply-chain use cases, and (iii) a conceptual architecture for NFT-enabled registration and controlled transfer of DEL libraries or sublibraries using on-chain identifiers with off-chain encrypted metadata and legal agreements.

K R Raghunandan, Dhanya, Avisha V Shetty, A. Bhat · 6 authors

Counterfeiting, increased fake intermediate products, lack of transparency, unauthorized alteration of data, and other related problems throughout the supply chain have made it necessary for the modern pharmaceutical industry to ensure integrity and security. Thus, the above-mentioned problem can be solved by a decentralized blockchain-based system, which ensures security and traceability. In the proposed solution, there are seven stakeholders including manufacturers and consumers. Authorized manufacturers are allowed to store the drugs in the blockchain network, and corresponding QR and bar codes are generated. This generates a reliable record of drug movements by constructing an architecture that is decentralized to avoid alteration of the data by anyone. Consumers have the opportunity to scan QR codes to ensure that their products are genuine and trace their origin. By addressing the challenges of the conventional pharmaceutical supply chain that provides high transparency, minimal counterfeits, and assured data security, this system addresses the aforementioned disadvantages.

Stephan Dübler, Federico Badaloni, Pedro Moreno-Sánchez, Clara Schneidewind

The heterogeneity of the blockchain landscape has motivated the design of blockchain protocols tailored to specific blockchains and applications that, hence, require custom security proofs. We observe that many blockchain protocols share common security and functionality goals, which can be captured by an atomic transfer graph (ATG) describing the structure of desired transfers. Based on this observation, we contribute a framework for generating secure-by-design protocols that realize these goals. The resulting protocols build upon Conditional Timelock Contracts (CTLCs), a novel minimal smart contract functionality that can be implemented in a large variety of cryptocurrencies with a restricted scripting language (e.g., Bitcoin), and payment channels. We show how ATGs, in addition to enabling novel applications, capture the security and functionality goals of existing applications, including many examples from payment channel networks and complex multi-party cross-currency swaps among Ethereum-style cryptocurrencies. Our framework is the first to provide generic and provably secure protocols for all these use cases while matching or improving the performance of existing use-case-specific protocols.

Farhana Javed, Josep Mangues‐Bafalluy

This paper presents a multi-contract blockchain framework for inter-provider agreements in 6G networks, emphasizing performance analysis under a realistic Proof-of-Stake (PoS) setting on Ethereum's Sepolia testnet. We begin by quantifying Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based gas usage for critical operations such as provider registration, service addition, and SLA penalty enforcement, observing that cold writes and deep data structures can each inflate gas consumption by up to 20\%. We then examine block-level dynamics when multiple transactions execute concurrently, revealing that moderate concurrency (e.g., 30--50 simultaneous transactions) can fill blocks to 80--90\% of their gas limit and nearly double finalization times from around 15~seconds to over 30~seconds. Finally, we synthesize these insights into a practical design guide, demonstrating that flattening nested mappings, consolidating storage writes, and selectively timing high-impact transactions can markedly reduce costs and latency spikes. Collectively, our findings underscore the importance of EVM-specific optimizations and transaction scheduling for large-scale decentralized applications in 6G telecom scenarios. The implementation is available online.

Araveti Vineela, Ali Ihsan Alanssari, Imad Ibrahim Dawood, Aqeel Ali · 7 authors

with the current advances in digitalization, people use their personal identity documents on a daily basis, which are shared with third parties without prior authorization and maintained in a number of random places. Government organizations, banks, credit agencies, and other financial institutions maintain such identity information in their databases. The presence of such sensitive information in several places increases the likelihood of vulnerability. For a long time, the financial industry has been looking for solution to such difficulties, and one feasible alternative is blockchain. Completing a single KYC verification process and storing it on the blockchain eliminates the frequent KYC checks that current banks must carry out. As immutability and inalterability are inherent features of blockchain, data queries cannot be modified fraudulently. Blockchain’s decentralized design enables the collection of data from different authoritative service providers into a single immutable, safe, and verified database. To enable quick and completely secure identity verification, the Blockchain KYC solution uses a public, secure digital ledger.

Viktor Valaštín, Dušan Morháč, Kristián Košťál, Ivan Kotuliak

Liquidity is critical for a healthy and thriving blockchain ecosystem, enabling value exchange between participants. However, achieving unified liquidity across heterogeneous blockchain platforms remains challenging due to disparities in architecture, virtual machines, and asset management logic. These disparities force assets to be wrapped into other formats to ensure compatibility with underlying systems, thus fragmenting liquidity into multiple pools. This paper proposes LiquiSpell, a novel protocol that aims to unify liquidity across multiple parachains within the Polkadot ecosystem. By leveraging the cross-chain message passing (XCMP), LiquiSpell introduces the concept of a universal transaction that can be constructed to be compatible with any parachain, regardless of its underlying architecture or asset management pallet. This approach overcomes the obstacles posed by the diverse nature of parachains, enabling seamless asset sharing and enhancing cross-chain interoperability. The proposed solution mitigates liquidity fragmentation within the Polkadot ecosystem. It presents a framework that can be extended to other multichain environments outside Polkadot. Ultimately, LiquiSpell aims to foster a thriving ecosystem by facilitating the introduction of new assets and increasing overall liquidity, thereby driving innovation and adoption within the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape.

Shaoyuan Yu, Jing Yang, Jia Ni, Chun‐Yi Chen · 10 authors

Green and low-carbon development is an important part of global sustainable development. Green power trading provides strong support and assurance for promoting green and low-carbon development. Due to the long cycle of green power data chains and their susceptibility to malicious tampering, the integrity and traceability of data are difficult to guarantee. Therefore, this paper first proposes a security provenance model with enhanced relations based on the core structure of PROV and blockchain technology, which can securely capture provenance records, use the transfer time and number of transactions between various links in the traceability network as reasoning clues, realize the correlation tracing of the green electricity transfer process. Under the model, a traceability mechanism of green electricity is designed based on smart contracts. Trustworthy green electricity data collection is achieved through data filling and data verification techniques. Traceability query technique is adopted to achieve trustworthy traceability of green electricity. And the effectiveness of the proposed solution is demonstrated through simulation experiments.

Damiano Di Francesco Maesa, Francesco Donini, Paolo Mori, Laura Ricci

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are currently used in a large number of scenarios, from digital art to the metaverse, to trace the ownership of assets exchanged between users. However, most NFT defining standards, such as the widely adopted ERC 721 for the Ethereum protocol, have been designed with immutable assets only in mind. As such, they are not suitable for representing assets with features that may need to be updated during their lifetime. To overcome this issue, in the literature have been proposed new models that properly represent and protect mutable assets through NFTs, such as Non Fungible Mutable Tokens, NMTs. In this paper, we expanded the NMT model with a security support meant to protect assets’ features updates through access control policies that are defined by the asset creator and the current asset owner and enforced during the assets’ lifetime. Policing updates is of paramount importance, because it protects the asset from unintended updates that could greatly alter the asset itself and its value. The main contributions of this paper are a detailed description of the NMT smart contracts architecture and internal dependencies, as well as an experimental validation of NMTs by providing the implementation of a NMT representing a wearable (a jacket) in Decentraland, a popular metaverse environment.

Dani Mertens, Jeha Kim, Jingren Xu, Eunsam Kim · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Ray Neiheiser, Arman Babaei, Giannis Alexopoulos, Marios Kogias · 5 authors

Blockchain performance has historically faced challenges posed by the throughput limitations of consensus algorithms. Recent breakthroughs in research have successfully alleviated these constraints by introducing a modular architecture that decouples consensus from execution. The move toward independent optimization of the consensus layer has shifted attention to the execution layer. While concurrent transaction execution is a promising solution for increasing throughput, practical challenges persist. Its effectiveness varies based on the workloads, and the associated increased hardware requirements raise concerns about undesirable centralization. This increased requirement results in full nodes and stragglers synchronizing from signed checkpoints, decreasing the trustless nature of blockchain systems. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces Chiron, a system designed to extract execution hints for the acceleration of straggling and full nodes. Notably, Chiron achieves this without compromising the security of the system or introducing overhead on the critical path of consensus. Evaluation results demonstrate a notable speedup of up to 30%, effectively addressing the gap between theoretical research and practical deployment. The quantification of this speedup is achieved through realistic blockchain benchmarks derived from a comprehensive analysis of Ethereum and Solana workloads, constituting an independent contribution.

Rahul Konapure, Shankar Nawale

This paper introduces a cutting-edge smart logistics solution for Pharma Supply Chain Management (PSCM) by integrating smart contracts, logistics planning, and asset condition monitoring using Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Focused on enhancing accountability, traceability, and liability across the entire supply chain, the proposed model demonstrates realtime visibility as products move from the drug’s manufacturer to patients. In the PSCM, a critical concern is the safe and efficient delivery of medicines, particularly in maintaining precise temperature conditions. Addressing this challenge, the solution integrates blockchain, smart contracts, IoT sensors, and gas-efficient implementations. The system employs Radio Frequency (RF) sensors to collect accurately timestamped data, ensuring transparency and reliability in drug movement. Gas-efficient smart contracts streamline processes, revolutionizing pharmaceutical supply chain management and improving patient outcomes through real-time IoT monitoring, countering counterfeit drugs, and ensuring data integrity.

Damiano Di Francesco Maesa, Frank Tietze

Intellectual Property license agreements management is a business process that has still to be fully digitized and benefit from the derived advantages. To close this gap, in this paper we show how license agreements can be modernized and improved by Distributed Ledger Technology. We implement and refine the idea of representing a license agreement's logic with a smart contract. The obtained “Smart License” is executed by a DLT network following the contract specified logic, so without the possibility of being tampered with by its interested parties. This allows for licensing royalties to be computed in a transparent, trustworthy, and accurate way. The proposed approach further improves the IP licensing field by removing the need for audits, enabling novel business models too complex for traditional solutions, and reducing licensing costs, thus allowing for cheaper and wider participation to IP licensing markets. Beside studying the main concept of Smart License, we provide a possible architecture for its implementation and present an evaluation of a proof of concept implementation on Ethereum.

Sarmistha Sarna Gomasta, Aditi Dhali, Tahlil Tahlil, Md Musfique Anwar · 5 authors

Over the last decade, pharmaceutical businesses have battled to standardize product traceability across the supply chain process, enabling counterfeiters to enter the market with counterfeit pharmaceuticals. As a result, an end-to-end product tracking system is crucial for ensuring product safety and eliminating counterfeit products across the pharmaceutical supply chain. In this paper, we introduce PharmaChain, a decentralized hyperledger fabric framework that leverages confidentiality, accountability, and interoperability. This system enables on-chain and off-chain storage for secured, rapid transactions, along with smart contracts establishing data provenance. To demonstrate security, we have provided double signing through the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm, hash data encryption, and 33% node attack. The purpose of this suggested framework is to engage particular governance disciplines to assess its effectiveness in improving drug traceability across the pharmaceutical supply chain to preserve public health by preventing counterfeit pharmaceuticals.

Shannan Liu, Ronghua Zhang, Changzheng Liu, Du Shi

To solve the problems of high latency, high system overhead, and small supported scale in the current application of pharmaceutical traceability combined with blockchain technology, an algorithm called Pharmaceutical-Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (P-PBFT) based on PBFT, grouping, and credit voting is proposed. The algorithm combines the characteristics of a pharmaceutical supply chain, optimizes the consistency protocol in the original algorithm, divides large-scale network nodes into different consensus sets by response speed, and performs grouping consensus. The algorithm's credit model and voting mechanism dynamically updates user status according to the behavior of nodes in consensus, evaluates the reliability of users, and also serves as a basis for electing management nodes. Experimental results show that the improved P-PBFT consensus algorithm provides smaller latency and higher throughput for pharmaceutical traceability systems, supports larger-scale traceability, effectively alleviates the dramatic increase in communication among network nodes, and reduces the influence of malicious nodes.

Mariem Turki, Saoussen Cheikhrouhou, Bouthaina Dammak, Mouna Baklouti · 6 authors

The public’s health depends on a reliable drug supply chain. Recently, the number of drug counterfeit has increased drastically, resulting in thousands of victims suffering from poisoning and/or treatment failures, which have resulted in new expectations on drug supply chain traceability. Indeed, the drug supply chain involves many parties having heterogeneous interests and are usually reluctant to share traceability data with each other. Furthermore, existing traceability and provenance systems for drug supply chains suffer from separated data storage, lack of information sharing transparency, and trust. Decentralized blockchain-based solutions are advocated to address these limitations by realizing decentralized trustless systems. In this work, we present a fully decentralized, blockchain-based drug traceability solution, worthy of seamless integrating IoT devices throughout the chain. It uses both smart contracts and decentralized off-chain storage to remove the need for middleman and to provide trusted, secure and immutable transaction history. Moreover, to preserve the traceability of drugs, it ensures and enforces data provenance and data integrity in the proposed IoT environment by using blockchain Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). We give a test and validation of the approach’s effectiveness in enhancing drug traceability supply chains, as well as an analysis of the approach’s costs and security.

Yong Shi, Hossain Shahriar, Dan Lo, Hongmei Chi

As an emerging technology that has already impacted various sectors including finance, energy, education, and more, blockchain provides a decentralized ledger system that ensures the integrity of the recorded transactions. With its wide application comes the huge demand for blockchain researchers and engineers, however, most schools have not offered courses related to blockchain research and development. To fill the gap between the increasing needs for blockchain professionals and shortage of blockchain curriculum, we propose a portable labware that covers the complete cycle of blockchain development. In this labware we apply active learning strategies to engage students in learning the blockchain knowledge more efficiently and effectively.

Magnus W. D. Hanson‐Heine, Alexander P. Ashmore

Abstract Simulations of molecules have recently been performed directly on a blockchain virtual computer at atomic resolution. This tutorial review covers the current applications of blockchain technology for molecular modeling in physics, chemistry, and biology, and provides a step‐by‐step tutorial for computational scientists looking to use blockchain computers to simulate physical and scientific processes in general. Simulations of carbon monoxide have been carried out using molecular dynamics software on the Ethereum blockchain in order to facilitate the tutorial.

Raiane Coelho, Regina Braga, José David, Victor Ströele · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

K. Varaprasada Rao, Sandeep Kumar Panda

No abstract is available for this record.

Michael Sammeth, Nicu-Cosmin Ursache, Sînică Alboaie

Introduction: Distributed ledger networks, chiefly those based on blockchain technologies, currently are heralding a next-generation of computer systems that aims to suit modern users’ demands. Over the recent years, several technologies for blockchains, off-chaining strategies, as well as decentralised and respectively self-sovereign identity systems have shot up so fast that standardisation of the protocols is lagging behind, severely hampering the interoperability of different approaches. Moreover, most of the currently available solutions for distributed ledgers focus on either home users or enterprise use case scenarios, failing to provide integrative solutions addressing the needs of both. Methods: Herein, we introduce the OpenDSU platform that allows to interoperate generic blockchain technologies, organised–and possibly cascaded in a hierarchical fashion–in domains. To achieve this flexibility, we seamlessly integrated a set of well conceived components that orchestrate off-chain data and provide granularly resolved and cryptographically secure access levels, intrinsically nested with sovereign identities across the different domains. The source code and extensive documentation of all OpenDSU components described herein are publicly available under the MIT open-source licence at https://opendsu.com . Results: Employing our platform to PharmaLedger, an inter-European network for the standardisation of data handling in the pharmaceutical industry and in healthcare, we demonstrate that OpenDSU can cope with generic demands of heterogeneous use cases in both, performance and handling substantially different business policies. Discussion: Importantly, whereas available solutions commonly require a pre-defined and fixed set of components, no such vendor lock-in restrictions on the blockchain technology or identity system exist in OpenDSU, making systems built on it flexibly adaptable to new standards evolving in the future.

Élton Carneiro Marinho, Éber Assis Schmitz, Sérgio Manuel Serra da Cruz

Blockchain technology combined with Data provenance is one way to make soil data more trustworthy and traceable by providing tamper-proof information about the origin, transformations, and history of pieces of data. We present Hyperledger Fabric of FAIRCHAIN, a computational infrastructure that manages smart contracts that uses soil data. We aim to mitigate the open challenges of the agricultural food supply chain, specifically in the difficulty of traceability of soil data. In this work, we present the mechanism to structure a smart contract using soil data enriched with retrospective provenance metadata. The infrastructure can hold workflow implementations.

Faisal Albalwy, John McDermott, William G. Newman, Andy Brass · 5 authors

The successful implementation of pharmacogenetics (PGx) into clinical practice requires patient genomic data to be shared between stakeholders in multiple settings. This creates a number of barriers to widespread adoption of PGx, including privacy concerns related to the storage and movement of identifiable genomic data. Informatic solutions that support secure and equitable data access for genomic data are therefore important to PGx. Here we propose a methodology that uses smart contracts implemented on a blockchain-based framework, PGxChain, to address this issue. The design requirements for PGxChain were identified through a systematic literature review, identifying technical challenges and barriers impeding the clinical implementation of pharmacogenomics. These requirements included security and privacy, accessibility, interoperability, traceability and legal compliance. A proof-of-concept implementation based on Ethereum was then developed that met the design requirements. PGxChain's performance was examined using Hyperledger Caliper for latency, throughput, and transaction success rate. The findings clearly indicate that blockchain technology offers considerable potential to advance pharmacogenetic data sharing, particularly with regard to PGx data security and privacy, large-scale accessibility of PGx data, PGx data interoperability between multiple health care providers and compliance with data-sharing laws and regulations.

Mostefa Kara, Abdelkader Laouid, Mohammad Hammoudeh, Muath AlShaikh · 5 authors

This article is to propose a consensus algorithm, called Proof of Chance (PoCh), which is designed for the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The PoCh protocol is designed to be scalable and extensible, with a controllable conformance delay and low hardware and computation requirements. To reach a consensus, PoCh uses chance rather than computing power: “if condition$_{1}$, I am a candidate; if condition$_{2}$, I am the miner.” During every consensus iteration, the condition$_{1}$is updated, and a single miner is chosen using condition$_{2}$. Those conditions are randomized without the node generating any value and without assigning any weight to such value. The fault tolerance of PoCh is$5f/3 + 1$, meaning that PoCh can successfully achieve consensus as long as more than 40% of nodes are functioning properly, compared to 50% in the Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol.

Hayes Kathleen

Substandard and falsified (SF) pharmaceuticals account for an estimated 10% of the pharmaceutical supply chain in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where a lack of regulatory and laboratory resources limits the ability to conduct effective post-market surveillance and allows SF products to penetrate the supply chain. The Distributed Pharmaceutical Analysis Laboratory (DPAL) was established in 2014 to expand testing of pharmaceutical dosage forms sourced from LMICs; DPAL is an alliance of academic institutions throughout the United States and abroad that provides high quality, validated chemical analysis of pharmaceutical dosage forms sourced from partners in LMICs. Results from analysis are reported to relevant regulatory agencies and are used to inform purchasing decisions made by in-country stakeholders. As the DPAL program has expanded to testing more than 1000 pharmaceutical dosage forms annually, challenges have surfaced regarding data management and sample tracking. Here, we describe a pilot project between DPAL and ARTiFACTs that applies blockchain to organize and manage key data generated during the DPAL workflow, including a sample’s progress through the workflow, its physical location, provenance of metadata, and lab reputability. Recording time and date stamps with this data will create a permanent and verifiable chain-of-custody for samples. This secure, distributed ledger will be linked to an easy-to-use dashboard, allowing stakeholders to view results and experimental details for each sample in real time and verify the integrity of DPAL analysis data. Introducing this blockchain-based system as a pilot will allow us to test the technology with real users analyzing real samples. Feedback from users will be recorded and necessary adjustments will be made to the system before the implementation of blockchain across all DPAL sites. Anticipated benefits of implementing blockchain for managing DPAL data include efficient management for routing work, increasing throughput, creating a chain of custody for samples and their data in alignment with the distributed nature of DPAL, and using the analysis results to detect patterns of quality within and across brands of products and develop enhanced sampling techniques and best practices.