Blockchain Community Research Articles

DApps ecosystems: mapping the network structure of smart contract interactions

Decentralized applications (DApps) built on blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and coded in languages such as Solidity, have recently gained attention for their potential to disrupt traditional centralized systems. Despite their rapid adoption, limited research has been conducted to understand the underlying code structure of these applications. In particular, each DApp is composed of multiple smart contracts, each containing a number of functions that can be called to trigger a specific event, e.g., a token transfer. In this paper, we reconstruct and analyse the network of contracts and functions calls within the DApp, which is helpful to unveil vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious attackers. We show how decentralization is architecturally implemented, identifying common development patterns and anomalies that could influence the system’s robustness and efficiency. We find a consistent network structure characterized by modular, self-sufficient contracts and a complex web of function interactions, indicating common coding practices across the blockchain community. Critically, a small number of key functions within each DApp play a central role in maintaining network connectivity, making them potential targets for cyber attacks and highlighting the need for robust security measures.

Semiotokens, Algorithms, and Blockchain Networks: New Possible Patterns in Legal Thought

AbstractThis paper explores the implications of tokens in the legal discourse when it comes to blockchain networks and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In doing so, reference is made to the functioning and requirements of blockchain networks opposite to that of Statehood. Methodologically, the argument is built on the semiotic relationship between signifier and signified as outlined in De Saussure (1916) as further developed in the comprehensive work done by Lacan (Écrits (trans. Alan Sheridan), Routledge, 1977). Apparently, the factors that influence this choice are considered to be of a non-legal nature. More properly, current gaps in regulation and the lack of cooperation at international level require resorting to extra-legal approaches. In contrast, the fact that economic and strategic motives play a role, does not in itself make the legal discourse devoid of any meaning. In what follows, I will concentrate on the study of factors that explain why such approach can be fruitful to establish new strategies to adjust the legal discourse to advances in technology and society. I have three reasons for selecting this topic. The first is a more pragmatic reason, based on my current research of law as a linguistic and societal phenomenon. Secondly, the topic does also touch the existing entanglement between law and economy whereby results intersect with the protection of rights inherent to members of blockchain communities. Lastly, this article relies on a dynamic concept of legal validity as a continuous process of constructing, negotiating, and reconstructing the array of blockchain communities’ interactions and transactions. Overall, these suggested methodological approaches aim at providing non-mutually exclusive reading keys to a prospective evolution of legal thought as of the Fourth Industrial Revolution changes. In contrast, they concur to provide new frames of enquiry instead of approaching these topics as objects of analysis from a sole exegetic standpoint. As a matter of fact, textualism lacks the capabilities to achieve consistent and categorial selections along with methodological exclusions that certain variants of its theories claim to accomplish. When understood against the background of a careful delineation of the choices that legal studies require, their purpose helps to give shape to a fundamental question; given the functioning of legal studies to direct choices among otherwise plausible significance of legal meaning, should they make use of an exclusively legal, or a cross-disciplinary approach? This study advocates the latter method. In this context, reference is made to the relational and representational components of property, contracts, and tokens to frame the contextual rather than the strict textual meaning of tokenisation. In this context, the above elements concur to bridge the gap among referents pertaining to separate realms. Differently put, the recourse to these extra-legal categories corresponds to levels of abstraction (Tanenbaum, 1976) functioning. They refer to the structured representation of information, ranging from detailed specifics to broader concepts. Abstraction aids in comprehending complex phenomena by allowing analysis at varying granularities. Employing multiple levels facilitates a systematic understanding, enabling individuals to delve into intricate systems, discern patterns, and derive insights, thereby fostering a comprehensive grasp of multi-layered phenomena.

Implementation and Mathematical Modelling of Data Sharing and Privacy Preserving Technique in a Blockchain Network by Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Blockchain technology has emerged as a reliable and secure decentralized network with multifaceted applications in banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, and business domains. Recent trends within blockchain communities indicate a growing interest in deploying machine learning models to extract valuable insights from extensive, geographically dispersed datasets owned by individual participants. To enable learning models without centralized data repositories, extensive research has focused on developing machine learning algorithms tailored for blockchain networks. However, despite numerous proposals, privacy and security concerns remain inadequately addressed, revealing vulnerabilities in architecture and operational efficiency limitations. The proposed ensemble machine learning model presents a pioneering solution, aiming to systematically resolve privacy, security, and performance issues within blockchain systems. The novelty of this approach lies in its targeted resolution of critical challenges at the intersection of blockchain technology and machine learning. While prior research has delved into integrating machine learning into blockchain networks, this model stands out by introducing a privacy-centric methodology that systematically addresses the core issues of privacy, security, and performance. Moreover, the proposed model promises enhanced resilience against adversarial attacks compared to other aggregation rules within a differentially private scenario. The innovative ensemble machine learning model for blockchain exhibits a significant 20% improvement in data privacy, a 15% boost in security, and a notable 25% enhancement in operational performance.

An Analysis of a Cryptocurrency Giveaway Scam: Use Case

A giveaway scam is a type of fraud leveraging social media platforms and phishing campaigns. These scams have become increasingly common and are now also prevalent in the crypto community where attackers attempt to gain crypto-enthusiasts’ trust with the promise of high-yield giveaways. Giveaway scams target individuals who lack technical familiarity with the blockchain. They take on various forms, often presenting as genuine cryptocurrency giveaways endorsed by prominent figures or organizations within the blockchain community. Scammers entice victims by promising substantial returns on a nominal investment. Victims are manipulated into sending cryptocurrency under the pretext of paying for "verification" or "processing fees." However, once the funds have been sent, the scammers disappear and leave victims empty-handed. This study employs essential blockchain tools and techniques to explore the mechanics of giveaway scams. A crucial aspect of an investigation is to meticulously trace the movement of funds within the blockchain so that illicit gains resulting from these scams can be tracked. At some point a scammer wants to “cash-out” by transferring the funds to an off-ramp, for example, an exchange. If the investigator can establish a link to such an exchange, the identity of the owner of cryptocurrency address could be revealed. However, in organised scams, criminals make use of mules and do not use their own identities. The authors of this paper select a use case and then illustrate a comprehensive approach to investigate the selected scam. This paper contributes to the understanding and mitigation of giveaway scams in the cryptocurrency realm. By leveraging the mechanics of blockchain technology, dissecting scammer tactics, and utilizing investigative techniques and tools, the paper aims to contribute to the protection of investors, the industry, and the overall integrity of the blockchain ecosystem. This research sheds light on the intricate workings of giveaway scams and proposes effective strategies to counteract them.

A Distributed Harmonic Mitigation Strategy Based on Dynamic Points Incentive of Blockchain Communities

A Distributed Harmonic Mitigation Strategy Based on Dynamic Points Incentive of Blockchain Communities

CT-GCN+: a high-performance cryptocurrency transaction graph convolutional model for phishing node classification

Due to the anonymous and contract transfer nature of blockchain cryptocurrencies, they are susceptible to fraudulent incidents such as phishing. This poses a threat to the property security of users and hinders the healthy development of the entire blockchain community. While numerous studies have been conducted on identifying cryptocurrency phishing users, there is a lack of research that integrates class imbalance and transaction time characteristics. This paper introduces a novel graph neural network-based account identification model called CT-GCN+, which utilizes blockchain cryptocurrency phishing data. It incorporates an imbalanced data processing module for graphs to consider cryptocurrency transaction time. The model initially extracts time characteristics from the transaction graph using LSTM and Attention mechanisms. These time characteristics are then fused with underlying features, which are subsequently inputted into a combined SMOTE and GCN model for phishing user classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the CT-GCN+ model achieves a phishing user identification accuracy of 97.22% and a phishing user identification area under the curve of 96.67%. This paper presents a valuable approach to phishing detection research within the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystems.

Architectural framework for a United Blockchain Interaction Library

This research addresses the challenges posed by the fragmented nature of blockchain development tools, presenting a comprehensive exploration of the imperative need for a unified architecture. In response to the growing diversity of blockchain networks, a solution in the form of a unified library based on a versatile and interoperable interface that streamlines interactions across various blockchains is proposed. The current state of blockchain development tools, an overview of existing solutions, formulation of design principles, and functions of proposed unified library are provided. By mitigating the complexities associated with disparate tools, the research aims to enhance the accessibility and efficiency of blockchain development, encouraging collaboration and innovation within the blockchain community.

Governance Implications Toward Safer Online Blockchain Communities: A Case Study of Bored Ape NFTs

Governance Implications Toward Safer Online Blockchain Communities: A Case Study of Bored Ape NFTs

A New Smart Contract Anomaly Detection Method by Fusing Opcode and Source Code Features for Blockchain Services

Digital assets involved in smart contracts are on the rise. Security vulnerabilities in smart contracts have resulted in significant losses for the blockchain community. Existing smart contract vulnerability detection techniques have been typically single-purposed and focused only on the source code or opcode of contracts. This paper presents a new smart contract vulnerability detection method, which extracts features from different levels of smart contracts to train machine learning models for effective detection of vulnerabilities. Specifically, we propose to extract 2-gram features from the opcodes of smart contracts and token features from the source code using a pre-trained CodeBERT model, thereby capturing the semantic information of smart contracts at different levels. The 2-gram and token features are separately aggregated and then fused and input into machine-learning models to mine the vulnerability features of contracts. Over 10,266 smart contracts are used to verify the proposed method. Widespread reentrancy, timestamp dependence, and transaction-ordering dependence vulnerabilities are considered. Experiments show the fused features can help significantly improve smart contract vulnerability detection compared to the single-level features. The detection accuracy is as high as 98%, 98% and 94% for the three vulnerabilities, respectively. The average detection time is 0.99 second per contract, indicating the proposed method is suitable for automatic batch detection of vulnerabilities in smart contracts.

Asparagus: Automated Synthesis of Parametric Gas Upper-Bounds for Smart Contracts

Modern programmable blockchains have built-in support for smart contracts, i.e. ‍programs that are stored on the blockchain and whose state is subject to consensus. After a smart contract is deployed on the blockchain, anyone on the network can interact with it and call its functions by creating transactions. The blockchain protocol is then used to reach a consensus about the order of the transactions and, as a direct corollary, the state of every smart contract. Reaching such consensus necessarily requires every node on the network to execute all function calls. Thus, an attacker can perform DoS by creating expensive transactions and function calls that use considerable or even possibly infinite time and space. To avoid this, following Ethereum, virtually all programmable blockchains have introduced the concept of “gas”. A fixed hard-coded gas cost is assigned to every atomic operation and the user who calls a function has to pay for its total gas usage. This technique ensures that the protocol is not vulnerable to DoS attacks, but it has also had significant unintended consequences. Out-of-gas errors, i.e. ‍when a user misunderestimates the gas usage of their function call and does not allocate enough gas, are a major source of security vulnerabilities in Ethereum. We focus on the well-studied problem of automatically finding upper-bounds on the gas usage of a smart contract. This is a classical problem in the blockchain community and has also been extensively studied by researchers in programming languages and verification. In this work, we provide a novel approach using theorems from polyhedral geometry and real algebraic geometry, namely Farkas’ Lemma, Handelman’s Theorem, and Putinar’s Positivstellensatz, to automatically synthesize linear and polynomial parametric bounds for the gas usage of smart contracts. Our approach is the first to provide completeness guarantees for the synthesis of such parametric upper-bounds. Moreover, our theoretical results are independent of the underlying consensus protocol and can be applied to smart contracts written in any language and run on any blockchain. As a proof of concept, we also provide a tool, called “Asparagus” that implements our algorithms for Ethereum contracts written in Solidity. Finally, we provide extensive experimental results over 24,188 real-world smart contracts that are currently deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. We compare Asparagus against GASTAP, which is the only previous tool that could provide parametric bounds, and show that our method significantly outperforms it, both in terms of applicability and the tightness of the resulting bounds. More specifically, our approach can handle 80.56% of the functions (126,269 out of 156,735) in comparison with GASTAP’s 58.62%. Additionally, even on the benchmarks where both approaches successfully synthesize a bound, our bound is tighter in 97.85% of the cases.

Afrofemtrism: a critical examination of the relationship between gender, technology, and society

Abstract Existing theories in technology and society studies do not comprehensively address the realities of people of African descent, including factors such as their histories, evolving cultures, and power dynamics. The article addresses this gap by constructing afrofemtrism, a gender justice theory which interrogates gender realities in the context of a society’s peculiar interaction with technological advancements. A salient feature of afrofemtrism’s development is the iterative interaction with empirical data from the Ghana blockchain community wherein participants in this study encountered conflicts and congruity between their information and communications technology (ICT) careers and their deeply traditional but cosmopolitan Global South setting. Ultimately, the study critically investigates digital technologies which present inequitable experiences for women in Ghana.

Trustworthiness Requirements in Information Systems Design: Lessons Learned from the Blockchain Community

Trustworthiness Requirements in Information Systems Design: Lessons Learned from the Blockchain Community

Ghana’s blockchain scene on WhatsApp

Social media sites with global reach like Twitter and WhatsApp are playing a paramount role in the communication, socializing, and business practices of Ghana’s blockchain community. Specifically, WhatsApp has become the platform powering the principal instantiation of blockchain in Ghana, which is trading and investing in cryptocurrencies. Considering the country’s high internet fees and sometimes unreliable network access, WhatsApp is a particularly endearing platform to facilitate the blockchain scene due to the low internet data usage that it requires. Drawing on empirical research data from 33 semi-structured interviews with blockchain enthusiasts in Ghana, this paper analyzes the particularities of blockchain’s adoption and spread in its primarily virtual scene. Key to this examination is the consideration of the affordances and constraints of WhatsApp as the primary spatial frame driving and shaping blockchain’s adoption and use in Ghana. As coagents with the digital sphere they transact and interact on, members of the blockchain community are collectively and individually perpetuating processes of knowledge creation and communal exchanges interspersed with values of competitive innovating. Keywords: Ghana, blockchain scene, WhatsApp, cryptocurrency trading and investment

Designing a cross-organizational identity management system: Utilizing SSI for the certification of retailer attributes

The introduction of blockchain offers new opportunities to rethink enterprise identity management. Recently, a new concept has emerged in the blockchain community called self-sovereign identity. Self-sovereign identity combines several existing decentralized identity management approaches, promising new ways to promote more convenient, connected, and secure identity services for the private and public sector. Nevertheless, research in this area is still in its infancy. Most of the very few articles focus either on the opportunities self-sovereign identity might offer or on very specific technical features. Studies on real-world applications of organizations using modern self-sovereign identity implementations and design theory are very rare. To fill this gap, we follow the design science research approach to design, implement, and evaluate a self-sovereign identity system to present tax attributes of online retailers. We present four design principles and conclude that the use of self-sovereign identity and blockchain offers opportunities to improve verification processes.

A survey on security and policy aspects of blockchain technology

This survey talks about the problem of security and privacy in the blockchain ecosystem which is currently a hot issue in the blockchain community. The survey intended to study this problem by considering different types of attacks in the blockchain network with respect to algorithms presented. After a preliminary literature review it seems that some focus has been given to study the first use case while, to the best of my knowledge, the second use case requires more attention when blockchain is applied to study it. The research is also interested in exploring the link between these two use cases to study the overall data ownership preserving accountable system which will be a novel contribution of this work. However, due to the subsequent government mandated secrecy around the implementation of d ata encryption standard ( DES), and the distrust of the academic community because of this, a movement was spawned that put a premium on individual privacy and decentralized control. This movement brought together the top minds in encryption and spawned the technology we know of as blockchain today. This survey explores the genesis of encryption, its early adoption, and the government meddling which eventually spawned a movement which gave birth to the ideas behind blockchain.

Antitrust Live

The reports of antitrust’s death at the hands of decentralized blockchains were an exaggeration. The premise is logical: decentralized markets should mitigate the need for antitrust laws, which typically address abuses of power by, and secret collusion among, centralized firms in concentrated markets. Indeed, blockchains strive to prevent market structures that facilitate collusion and monopolization in the first place through decentralization, a form of antitrust self-regulation. And blockchain communities are debating and deciding how to effect this self-regulation, with the potential for autonomous implementations of market constraints designed to preserve decentralization, in real time and in public. All of this means that antitrust principles are very much alive on the blockchain. However, there exists a conflict: recent efforts to self-regulate antitrust may constitute per se violations of the very laws that such efforts are intended to preempt. The first to identify this conflict, this Article proposes that antitrust is entering a new blockchain era, one that is self-regulated and transparent, but not without risks. This Article then argues that self-regulation efforts in the blockchain context that would normally receive per se condemnation by U.S. courts, like price fixing, should instead receive more fulsome reviews under the rule of reason. The procompetitive potential of such self-regulation, combined with judicial inexperience in complex blockchain markets, warrants such an approach.

Research on information dissemination of blockchain network community under the action of negative incentive mechanism

Traditional online communities suffer from false, repetitive or low-level content, with blockchain technology able to solve these problems. Specifically, the incentive mechanism is the blockchain’s core value, including positive and negative incentive mechanisms. The former strengthens people’s behaviour positively, while the latter, on the contrary, adopts mandatory methods such as punishment to eliminate the occurrence of certain types of behaviour. The negative incentive mechanism is the key factor to solve the problems presented above that traditional online communities face. Specifically, this article develops a solution that utilises the negative incentive mechanism, based on the classic infectious disease model (SIR model), introduces smart nodes, puts forward the SSIR model of information dissemination in the blockchain network community, and establishes a set of differential equations reflecting the information dissemination rules. Based on the parameter assumption and solving the equations with MATLAB, this article compares and reveals the changes of different user types on the SIR and SSIR models. Furthermore, we utilise the data collected from the Steemit blockchain community and Sina Weibo platform and apply the Social Network Analysis method to compare and analyse the information dissemination between the blockchain and the traditional network community. The research results highlight that the negative incentive mechanism in the blockchain network community affords a more rational behaviour of user information dissemination, a simpler interaction between users, and reducing to a certain extent the dissemination of ‘distorted’ or ‘uncertain’ information.

Imagineering a new way of governing: the blockchain and res publica

ABSTRACT Blockchain technologies loom large among the controversial topics of public debate. Like any technology, blockchain offers various ways to imagine alternative models of politics and society. Arguably, the most common interpretation treats it as the technology for techno-anarchism and a tool for total decentralization. This paper focuses on an overlooked genealogy of the politics of the blockchain – the classic republican theory. We consider whether republican practices could shed light on certain aspects of blockchain communities and understand their governance better. Our paper offers a historical analysis of governance visions inscribed in Bitcoin and Ethereum, arguably the most influential applications.

Visual Analysis Method of Blockchain Community Evolution Based on DPoS Consensus Mechanism

Visual Analysis Method of Blockchain Community Evolution Based on DPoS Consensus Mechanism

When tales of money fail: the importance of price, trust, and sociality for cryptocurrency users

ABSTRACT This paper is based on research among blockchain communities in the Netherlands and online terrains. Through an empirical example, it explores tales produced by projects based on the blockchain protocol and on the premise that cryptocurrencies are money and that money has generative potential for social and economic change. By unpacking the pragmatics of a particular project – Bitnation and Pangea – I argue that despite tales of decentralisation through the moneyness of cryptocurrencies, and the distributed and automated character of the blockchain protocol, these currencies, and projects, are deeply entangled with fiat and mainstream economies and markets. This is visible by looking at the ups and downs of cryptocurrency pricing and on the effects this volatility has on (certain) projects. The lack of a sustainable community of trust in cryptocurrencies as money – particularly visible in initiatives following more libertarian and utopian tales, detached from everyday life realities – and the way these retain attention mainly due to speculation, have very real effects for blockchain based projects. No matter how radical their tales for decentralisation and socioeconomic revolution are, utterances for these tales to become real have to be there, and seem absent.