DMC: Decentralized Mixer with Channel for Transaction Privacy Protection on Ethereum

Solana is an emerging blockchain platform, recognized for its high throughput and low transaction costs, positioning it as a preferred infrastructure for Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and other Web 3.0 applications. In the Solana ecosystem, transaction initiators submit various instructions to interact with a diverse range of Solana smart contracts, among which are decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that utilize automated market makers (AMMs), allowing users to trade cryptocurrencies directly on the blockchain without the need for intermediaries. Despite the high throughput and low transaction costs of Solana, the advantages have exposed Solana to bot spamming for financial exploitation, resulting in the prevalence of failed transactions and network congestion. Prior work on Solana has mainly focused on the evaluation of the performance of the Solana blockchain, particularly scalability and transaction throughput, as well as on the improvement of smart contract security, leaving a gap in understanding the characteristics and implications of failed transactions on Solana. To address this gap, we conducted a large-scale empirical study of failed transactions on Solana, using a curated dataset of over 1.5 billion failed transactions across more than 72 million blocks. Specifically, we first characterized the failed transactions in terms of their initiators, failure-triggering programs, and temporal patterns, and compared their block positions and transaction costs with those of successful transactions. We then categorized the failed transactions by the error messages in their error logs, and investigated how specific programs and transaction initiators are associated with these errors. We find that transaction failure rates on Solana exhibit recurring daily patterns, and demonstrate a strong positive correlation with the volume of failed transactions, with bots on Solana experiencing a high transaction failure rate of 58.43%. We identify ten distinct error types in the error logs of failed transactions, with price or profit not met and invalid status errors accounting for 67.18% of all failed transactions. AMMs primarily experience invalid status errors among failed transactions, while DEX aggregators are more commonly affected by price or profit not met errors. Among transaction initiators, bots encounter a broader range of errors due to their high-frequency trading and complex interactions with smart contracts. In contrast, human users experience a more limited range of errors. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations to mitigate transaction failures on Solana and outline future research directions.

The sugar industry remains a priority for development in the Indonesian agricultural sector, especially in East Java. However, the performance of the sugar industry in East Java during the two last decades has declined, which is shown in the decreasing volume of production. This study utilized the analysis of transaction cost economics to identify the problems of the sugar mills in East Java – Indonesia. This research compares the transaction costs between state-owned (Ngadiredjo) and privately-owned (Kebon Agung) sugar mills. The study shows that in Kebon Agung Sugar Mill transaction costs are higher than production costs, while in Ngadiredjo Sugar Mill the reverse is true. However, the high transaction costs in Kebon Agung Sugar Mill cannot be attributed directly to inefficient institutions, because Ngadiredjo Sugar Mill incurred high costs for plants, land preparation, and fertilizer, which decreased the proportion of transaction costs. If analyzed in detail, the following facts are revealed: (i) market transaction costs in Kebon Agung Sugar Mill are higher than in Ngadiredjo Sugar Mill. This is because Kebon Agung Sugar Mill has established cooperation with sugarcane farmers in the form of extensions and transport subsidies; and (ii) the political transaction costs proportion in Ngadiredjo Sugar Mill is higher than in Kebon Agung Sugar Mill because of the imposition of many ‘illegal’ fees. There should be management (corporate) reform of sugar mills, both internal and external. Internally, sugar mill management must apply good corporate governance that guarantees the transparency and control of every activity. Nowadays, there is no controlling unit in sugar mill management that supervises corporate activity, so that it is susceptible to manipulation and mark-up. Externally, the relationship between sugar mill management (CEO) and the Board of Directors should be reformulated so that sugar mill management has wide authority to make corporate strategy decisions. Centralization of authority in holding firm (PTPN/PT. RNI) has caused high transaction costs as a result of the long hierarchy in decision-making.

Do lower transaction costs induce innovation? We exploit the variation in transaction costs across firms and countries to explain the firm-level propensity to innovate. Drawing on a large dataset from European Patent Office (EPO) covering over 15,000 firms from 100 countries over the period 1991-2015, we compute the conditional probabilities of individual firms to acquire a valid based on the validation outcomes and examine whether lower transaction costs encourage firm-level innovation. Our empirical strategy addresses firm-level idiosyncrasies, country-level unobserved effects and common technology shocks that potentially invoke omitted variable bias in the effects of transaction costs on the propensity to patent. Numerous indicators of transaction costs are clustered into four specific categories: (i) Shleifer-La Porta (administrative), (ii) Northian (cross-border), (iii) Coasean (procedural & contractual) and (iv) Williamsonian (intra-firm). Our investigation reveals that higher transaction costs systematically account for the failure of firms to acquire a valid patent and to innovate. The results plausibly indicate that higher costs across firms and countries are associated with a marked drop in firm-level propensity to patent. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across firms, we employ the negative binomial model to examine the contribution of transaction costs to firm-level patenting propensities. The evidence suggests that not all transaction costs are created equal. Higher administrative transaction costs are associated with persistently higher number of valid patents as such costs tend to address moral hazard, opportunistic behavior and other sources of asymmetric information and potentially deter copy-cat imitating firms from entry. On the other hand, decreasing cross-border, procedural and intra-firm transaction costs leads to consistently higher number of valid patents being granted. The estimated propensities to patent are further tested using extreme bounds analysis by running more than 13 million combinations of the core regression model which confirms the importance of transaction costs in explaining differential propensities to patent across firms and countries.

We investigate measurement of market integration of staple food markets in developing countries. The analysis takes the Parity Bound Model as starting point and modifies this model by parameterizing and estimating transaction costs. The specification of transaction costs takes account of transport costs, fixed source costs, fixed destination costs, ad valorem taxes & levies and seasonality an is implemented on the basis of a specific sub-sample of price differentials. Price differentials combined with predicted transaction costs enable the measurement of market integration for each location and each period. The proposed method is applied to the Malawi maize market with monthly data from June 1999 to October 2009 for 26 districts. This period covers two major food shortages (2001-2003 and 2005-2006) as well as the impact of the global rise in food prices in 2008. Predicted transaction costs are shown to be in the same order of magnitude as survey observations of transaction costs of domestic maize trade in Malawi. The evidence indicates that markets are particularly well integrated during food shortages and substantially less in periods without food shortage. However, this result is largely due to high transaction costs during food shortages that make trade economically unattractive. Market integration develops markedly different between regions and districts: various districts in the south show signs of barriers to trade while districts in the north suffer from frequent high transaction costs. Low levels of market integration observed outside periods of food shortages, as well as high transaction costs during food shortages both suggest that trading infrastructure is not sufficiently developed.

The digital fashion industry is undergoing a major transformation with the integration of technologies such as blockchain and smart contracts, which offer solutions to key challenges such as product authenticity, intellectual property protection, and supply chain efficiency. This research focuses on the application of blockchain technology and smart contracts in digital fashion entrepreneurship, with the aim of increasing transaction efficiency, product security, and business sustainability. Method used in this study is a quantitative approach with a structural model based on Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the influence between smart contract adoption, digital transaction efficiency, product security, and fashionpreneurship sustainability. Data were collected from digital fashion actors involved in the blockchain-based ecosystem. Research result shows that the adoption of smart contracts has a positive effect on transaction efficiency and product security. In addition, blockchain has been shown to increase supply chain transparency that supports the sustainability of digital fashion businesses. Although this technology faces technical challenges such as high transaction speed and costs, solutions such as layer-2 technology can improve blockchain performance. The conclusion blockchain and smart contract technology can be an effective solution in increasing efficiency, security, and sustainability in the digital fashion industry. Although there are technical challenges that need to be overcome, the application of this technology has great potential to create a more environmentally friendly and transparent digital fashion ecosystem.

Blockchain is an emerging technology which works on decentralized peer-to-peer network and allows to make transactions securely by eliminating the need of a central authority. Blockchain is renowned for exchange of crypto-currencies but with the advent of smart contracts it is now widely used in other applications such as smart supply chain, healthcare, smart transportation, online voting, public donations, will management, buying and selling property and insurance sector. The smart contracts are digitally signed and make applications immutable and transparent. This paper is aimed at unveiling Blockchain technology, smart contracts and its applications. This paper is also disclosing the barriers in adopting Blockchain and smart contracts. The recent literature was reviewed to find the answers to the research questions. Huge power consumption, slow transaction rate, complex architecture and lack of awareness and expertise are identified as the barriers in Blockchain adoption whereas legal issues and high transaction cost are the main barriers in adopting smart contracts.

Blockchain and smart contracts in supply chain management: A game theoretic model

Under the effect of the globalization, a manufacturer has to use global supply chain to reduce cost further to gain competitive advantage. Therefore, it is important to build up a close trading relationship with logistic service providers to speed up distribution channel. Not only is it expensive but also time lasting to develop good trading relationship under environmental uncertainty. Performance is a indicator to measure increase partnership to make maxization of enterprise value. This study is based on by Williamson’s (1975) Transaction Cost Theory to investigate the relationships among transaction characteristics, transaction costs and partnership between manufacturers and logistic service providers. The research adopts questionnaire survey method. The findings suggest that the higher human asset specificity a logistic service provider invest, the higher transaction costs a manufacturer and closer partnership it has with the major logistic service provider. The higher environmental uncertainty a manufacturer has the higher transaction costs and lower partnership it has. Furthermore, trading frequencies with major logistic service provider is not impact transaction costs and partnership. Finally, the ex-ante transaction costs a manufacturer has to build up relationship with the major logistic service provider have significantly positive impacts on their trading partnership. The closer trade partnership with the logistic service provider has lower ex-post transction costs. Beside, transaction costs have significantly positive impacts on logistic performance more than trade partnership.

Ethereum is a promising but revolutionary blockchain approach to support rich computational services enabled by Turing-complete instructions, also known as smart contract. Using smart contract as back-end, any party can publish its Decentralized Applications (DApps) available to all Internet users. In other words, blockchain and smart contract enable evolving existing Internet services and applications to decentralised versions. With the developments of versatile Internet applications, the QoS requirements can be very different. For example, new-age applications such as AR/VR can be quite sensitive to even millisecond delays. End-to-end transaction latency in blockchain is a critical factor that affects the performance of DApps. It is the time duration from sending out a transaction (from the client) to having the transaction recorded on the chain. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the end-to-end latency in Ethereum and discuss the factors that may affect latency on the Ethereum main-net. It has a particular focus on the gas price because it is a key parameter controlled by users. The experiment results demonstrate some counter intuitive finding, e.g. increasing gas price does not reduce the Ethereum end-to-end latency significantly for a certain range of gas prices.

Blockchain technology holds significant promise for healthcare by enhancing the security and integrity of patient health records (PHRs) through decentralized storage and transparent access. However, it has substantial limitations, including problems with scalability, high transaction costs, privacy concerns, and intricate stakeholder access management. This study presents PHR-NFT, a novel framework that strengthens PHR privacy by utilizing Hyperledger Fabric and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to address these issues. PHR-NFT improves privacy and communication by letting patients keep control of their medical records while permitting temporary, permission-based access by medical professionals. PHR-NFT offers a transparent solution that increases trust among healthcare stakeholders through the robust and decentralized architecture of the Hyperledger Fabric. This study demonstrates the viability and effectiveness of the PHR-NFT framework through performance evaluations focused on transaction latency, throughput, and security. This research has valuable implications for enhancing data privacy and security in healthcare practices and insightful information about blockchain-based healthcare systems.

This paper examines the effect of transaction costs on the post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). Using standard market microstructure features we show that transaction costs constrain the informed trades that are necessary to incorporate earnings information into price. This leads to weaker return responses at the time of the earnings announcement and higher subsequent returns drift for firms with high transaction costs. Consistent with this prediction, we find that earnings response coefficients are lower for firms with higher transaction costs. Using portfolio analyses, we find that the profits of implementing the PEAD trading strategy are significantly reduced by transaction costs. In addition, we show, using a combination of portfolio and regression analyses, that firms with higher transaction costs are the ones that provide the higher abnormal returns for the PEAD strategy. Our results indicate that transaction costs can provide an explanation not only for the persistence but also for the existence of PEAD.

The increasing demand for transparency, security, and efficiency in asset management has catalyzed the exploration of blockchain technologies for real-world asset tokenization. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for building scalable blockchain applications by integrating Solidity-based smart contracts with AWS Lambda, enabling decentralized and serverless execution of core business logic. The framework addresses key challenges associated with real-world asset tokenization, including compliance, immutability, transaction throughput, and system scalability. By leveraging Ethereum's programmable environment, Solidity allows for the creation of secure and customizable smart contracts, while AWS Lambda ensures cost-effective, event-driven interactions and seamless integration with cloud-based services such as Amazon S3, DynamoDB, and API Gateway. The proposed architecture facilitates a hybrid model that combines on-chain and off-chain components, promoting both transparency and operational efficiency. On-chain components handle ownership verification, transfer of tokenized assets, and smart contract governance. In contrast, off-chain components managed by AWS Lambda handle metadata processing, compliance checks, and communication with third-party services. This separation of concerns significantly improves scalability and flexibility, making the system adaptable to various asset classes, including real estate, commodities, and financial instruments. To demonstrate real-world applicability, the paper presents a prototype implementation involving the tokenization of a physical asset—real estate—showing how smart contracts can be seamlessly invoked via Lambda triggers to validate ownership, process payments, and update asset states. Performance benchmarks indicate significant improvements in transaction latency and system responsiveness, with the added benefit of dynamic scaling enabled by AWS Lambda. Furthermore, the paper explores key considerations for secure smart contract development, identity management, legal compliance, and user authentication. The research concludes by outlining future enhancements, including AI integration for automated asset valuation and machine learning-based fraud detection. This framework provides a replicable and scalable model for developers and enterprises seeking to unlock the transformative potential of blockchain in real-world asset management.

With their transparency and smart contract features, blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) can pave the way toward a decentralized marketplace for multi-administrative domains. An open and decentralized marketplace can aid 6G use cases such as inter-provider agreements, where multi-administrative domains can lease or buy resources to meet the needs of consumers. These agreements between multi-administrative domains can be performed using blockchain, increasing trust and transparency for Service Level Agreement (SLA) management, penalty, or billing. In this demonstration, we present the use of the Ethereum smart contract for a use case where the consumer can buy resources from a provider. However, Ethereum suffers from high transaction costs and latency; therefore, we aim to leverage IOTA Tangle to reduce the cost of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain and minimize the latency. In particular, we show the process of domains registered on an Ethereum blockchain network, consumers selecting a service from the list of available services to buy, and finally, transferring the agreed amount after the services are delivered.

Water markets increasingly facilitate adaptation to water scarcity, but transaction costs can be barriers to expanded water marketing, particularly under water rights law in the western United States. However, transaction costs are rarely measured, and existing research commonly overlooks how transaction costs differ across individual water transfers and uncertainty in those costs. We collected hundreds of estimates of procedural transaction costs—costs incurred by transfer proponents for legal and hydrologic experts—by surveying 100 water professionals in the state of Colorado. There, water markets are among the most active in the United States, convey perhaps the most clearly defined private property rights of any state, and, unique to Colorado, require approval from specialized water courts. We elicited costs for water transfers with differing physical and legal characteristics, and we elicited separate assessments of (i) probabilities of legal outcomes for water transfers and (ii) transaction costs conditional on those outcomes. Then, we estimated expected transaction costs with a statistical model that combines (i) with (ii). The model reveals systematic differences in transaction costs, with scale economies and higher transaction costs for water‐scarce regions, senior water rights, and higher‐conflict legal outcomes. It also shows substantial transaction cost uncertainty, which itself can discourage trading. Our novel survey and estimation procedure develops a replicable approach for measuring transaction cost heterogeneity and uncertainty. Additionally, qualitative survey data we collected indicate transaction costs have increased over time due to growing competition for scarce water and that, despite high transaction costs, specialized water courts offer unique benefits.

One of the building blocks of our legal and economic systems in society is the indispensable reliance on contracts and trust systems to protect individual rights. Recently smart contracts are becoming prominent parts of various blockchain platforms. The goal of smart contracts is to eliminate the third party and centralized trust systems. Due to recent emergence of smart contracts, there is no well-defined framework that researchers can use to evaluate smart contracts under various blockchain platforms and differentiate between them. In this work, a survey on the prominent smart contract landscape specially those based on blockchain have been conducted. Based on the survey, an evaluation framework to assess smart contracts has been proposed. The framework is a set of criteria based on two major aspects; infrastructure related and development related criteria. The evaluation framework was peer-reviewed for reliability and validity. To measure the applicability of the proposed framework, it has been used to empirically evaluate some of the most prominent smart contract platforms. The results of the empirical evaluation have shown that the Ethereum blockchain smart contract exceeds the others in terms of development tools, resources, and community support. EOS blockchain smart contracts have the best execution speeds, and transaction costs. Lastly, Stellar blockchain has predictability and the best transaction builder to use in smart contract development concerning user friendliness. Recommendations for smart contract developers are provided in light of the research.