Blockchain Design Research Articles

Decentralized Voting Application Using Blockchain

The emergence of blockchain technology has paved the way for innovative solutions in various domains, particularly in enhancing democratic processes. This research paper presents the design, development, and evaluation of a Web3 blockchain decentralized voting application (DAPP) built using React JS for frontend development and Solidity for smart contract implementation. The objective of this study is to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of employing blockchain technology to create a secure, transparent, and decentralized voting system. The proposed DAPP leverages the immutability and transparency features of blockchain technology to ensure the integrity of the voting process. Smart contracts coded in Solidity are utilized to execute the voting mechanism, ensuring tamper-proof recording and tallying of votes. React JS, a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, is employed to develop an intuitive and user-friendly frontend interface, enhancing accessibility and usability for voters. Key aspects addressed in this research include the architecture of the DAPP, the design of smart contracts for voting logic, integration of React JS components for frontend development, and security considerations to prevent vulnerabilities and attacks. Additionally, the paper discusses the implications of decentralized voting systems on democracy, including increased trust, transparency, and participation.

An auto-scaling multi-tiered node-organizing blockchain design model for the internet of things

An auto-scaling multi-tiered node-organizing blockchain design model for the internet of things

Promoting Sustainable Household Engagement in Recycling via Blockchain-Based Loyalty Program

Recycling plays a crucial role in impacting national GDP and environmental sustainability. Given the complexities inherent in recycling processes, technology serves as a driving force for advancing and optimizing these practices. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, substantial initiatives are underway to foster a green environment and promote a circular economy. However, at the time of writing this paper, existing regulations mandate recycling primarily for business sectors, with no corresponding requirements for household waste collection or segregation. As a result, a significant portion of recyclable waste remains unprocessed. This paper expands upon earlier studies carried out in Jeddah, analyzing the obstacles and variables impacting sustainable recycling solutions, along with the essential conditions to boost household involvement in recycling. This study explores the potential of blockchain technology to improve household engagement by developing a blockchain-based loyalty program. The proposed system leverages the decentralized, immutable, and transparent features of blockchain technology to reward individuals with tokens for the recycling waste they produce, thereby facilitating token tracking across the recycling value chain and enhancing transparency in the circular economy. This article delves into the technical architecture of the loyalty program, aligning its domain model elements with blockchain design heuristics and integrating it with a mobile application that aims to boost recycling engagement by applying social economy principles. This innovative approach promises to overcome the current regulatory and motivational barriers, as well as promote sustainable recycling habits at the household level.

When two chains meet: Optimizing the design of blockchain-enabled supply chain networks

Applications of the blockchain technology are rapidly emerging across sectors. By redefining information flow, blockchain technology promises to instill trust among supply chain members, improve transaction efficiency, thus reshaping the structure and configuration of supply chains. The practical exploratory use of blockchain has shown immense potential in supply chain management. In order to explore the new changes brought by blockchain technology to supply chain network design issues, this study focuses on the supply chain network design problem in the context of blockchain technology. Specifically, we consider a supply chain network comprised of a number of distribution centers (DCs) and retailers. The operation of this physical network is supported by blockchain-based information infrastructure. As the interrelated relationship between these two networks, it is necessary to optimize them simultaneously to improve the profitability and information exchange level. We propose an objective function based on previous studies to maximize the profits of the entire supply chain network, with decision variables including DC locations, retailer assignment, inventory replenishment policy, and blockchain adoption level. At the same time, to characterize the interrelation between the two networks, the demand and certain cost parameters of the model become endogenous depending on the blockchain adoption level, which significantly increases the complexity of the solution algorithm. We reformulate the model and use the polymatroid cutting plane approach to address this issue. We conducted calculations and numerical analysis. The computational results show that the proposed method can solve practically sized problems, and integrating blockchain design reduces the system-wide cost. We discuss managerial insights based on a range of numerical studies and solve a case study using publicly available instance data.

Design of Blockchain and Strategic Financing Service under the Platform Economy

The capital constrains and uncertainties in supply disruptions faced by small and medium-sized suppliers pose critical challenges for the development of e-commerce platforms. In response, platforms have begun offering direct financing (PDF) to their suppliers alongside traditional bank credit financing (BCF). Within the private (consortium) blockchain, the platform and the supplier (and the bank) achieve consensus on financial smart contract, enabling the execution of flexible contracts tailored to suppliers’ risk profile. We develop a game-theoretic model to examine the terms of smart contracts in different blockchains and further investigate the platform's optimal blockchain design. We find that PDF serves to safeguard the platform's commission income from high-interest BCF. Our analysis reveals that PDF is more likely to be provided to a risky supplier within the consortium blockchain, contrasting with outcomes observed within the private blockchain. As a result, the platform and the supplier could reach win-win, or win-lose outcomes within the private blockchain; while within the consortium blockchain, they tend to result in win-win or lose-win outcomes. Such incentive conflict could potentially hinder blockchain adoption. Our findings further provide the managerial insights guiding the platform's blockchain design: adopting consortium blockchain under moderate market potential and low or high supplier's risk, and adopting private blockchain otherwise. Furthermore, we consider the supplier's endogenous effort on reducing risk, and numerically demonstrate that blockchain may encourage or discourage the supplier's effort. Our research complements previous studies by investigating the interaction between the PDF provision and blockchain structures under uncertain supply disruption risk.

Design principles for a blockchain-based multi-sided platform for the sustainable trade of water: An affordance approach

Water scarcity has become a critical challenge affecting the well-being of many communities worldwide and has been incorporated as one of the focal points within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 6). Digital technologies, such as blockchain technology, have shown promising potential to help tackle this issue through smart distribution of water abundancies to water-scarce regions. This research employs affordance theory and affordance-based design (ABD) to investigate the design of blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) to tackle challenges related to water scarcity. Using design science research (DSR), this paper proposes design principles (DP) for a blockchain-based multi-sided platform (MSP) for the smart distribution and trade of water. To obtain our principles, we collaborated with a company employing a blockchain-based MSP for water trade. We identified the different elements of the DPs, including affordances and material properties, and matched these principles with meta-requirements obtained from the literature. This research aims to contribute to the scholarly debate by generating prescriptive knowledge in the form of DPs and providing tangible contributions that shed light on the optimal design of similar blockchain applications. These applications are envisioned to ensure their efficacy in addressing the pressing challenges of water scarcity and equitable water access, thereby fostering a sustainable and resilient future for everyone.

Integrating fully homomorphic encryption to enhance the security of blockchain applications

Blockchain has been widely used for secure transactions among untrusted parties, but the current design of blockchain does not provide sufficient privacy and security for the data on the chain, limiting its application in sensitive information scenarios. To address this problem, we propose integrating fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to enhance the security of blockchain applications, which can extend the application scope of blockchain and improve the privacy and security of blockchain by the features of FHE. Our scheme classifies FHE into those supporting polynomial and non-polynomial operations and introduces the concept of ciphertext computation conversion into Ethereum, enabling conversion between different ciphertext computation types. Moreover, we analyse the security and correctness to explain the feasibility and availability of the scheme. We carry out comparative experiments using different open-source libraries for fully homomorphic encryption and the time performance evaluation of the ciphertext computation conversion under different thread counts. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency and usability of our scheme.

Blockchain design for optimal joint production and maintenance over multiple periods for oil-filling production lines

Joint maintenance and production planning result in enhanced system efficiency and a significant reduction in expensive costs. Therefore, this research proposed an integrated blockchain design of two optimization models for the joint scheduling and sequencing of production orders and maintenance jobs over multiple periods with probabilistic and stochastic parameters for the oil-filling process. In the scheduling model, the objective function was to minimize total production and maintenance costs. Further, the sequencing model aimed to minimize the total overtime cost and the sum start times of jobs and orders. The proposed models were implemented on five production lines of five-liter lube oil bottles. Results showed that the developed optimization models effectively achieved concurrent production and maintenance planning at minimal total cost. In practice, this results in effective resource utilization, and saving costly production and maintenance costs. In conclusion, the developed blockchain design is valuable in developing, managing, and controlling optimal joint production and maintenance planning of oil-filling production lines.

Using Multi-dimensional Quorums for Optimal Resilience in Multi-resource Blockchains

Permissionless blockchains commonly use resource challenges to defend against sybil attacks. For example, popular resource challenge designs include Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. It is well-known that simultaneously exploiting multiple resources can help make a permissionless blockchain more robust. For example, combining PoW and PoS can help to keep a blockchain secure, even when the attacker controls more than 50% of the computational power in the system. While there have been existing efforts for combining multiple resources in blockchains, they only provide partial solutions. Specifically, it is currently still unclear how to combine PoW and PoS, or multiple resources in general, to achieve optimal resilience . Here by optimal resilience , we mean that the blockchain can tolerate every security region , unless that security region is proven to be impossible to tolerate. Existing designs are not able to achieve such optimal resilience. As our central contribution, this work proposes the novel design and formal security analysis of a blockchain protocol that combines PoS and PoW, which can be further generalized to multiple resources. Our blockchain is the very first blockchain that can achieve optimal resilience . Our design also overcomes a common tricky issue of PoW difficulty adjustment in previous designs. We have further implemented a research prototype of our blockchain design, and experimentally demonstrated its good end-to-end performance.

IOT Based Health Preventive Management System for Patient information discovery Using Ontology

Over the years, advancements in the work have been incorporated towards the patient’s relationship and data collection techniques to model a wide variety of human activities and behaviors. Sensor data comes from smart devices that provide the ability to manipulate data from monitoring data for patient healthcare. Due to the high popularity and use of smart devices as respondents, performance recognition systems are more accurate and easier to use. The knowledge model is based on two new approaches: to consider a functional degree scheme between measuring sensor energy and functional consciousness to mode controversial sensor data and establish the relationship between them. In this article, we make a case why ontology can contribute to blockchain design. To support this issue, this research proposes an ontology middleware that analysis and exploits ontology and some of its representations into the smart contracts that enable it to implement patient traceability restrictions on the original traceability feature platform.

Comparison Analysis of Blockchain Consensus Algorithms in Decentralized Public Environment: A Review

The rapid evolution of blockchain technology has led to the development of various consensus algorithms (Ben-Sasson et al., 2014), each with distinct characteristics that influence the scalability, decentralization, energy efficiency, and transaction costs within decentralized public environments (Ampel et al., 2019). This study provides a comprehensive review of prominent consensus mechanisms (Block & Marcussen, 2019), including Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET), and others, to elucidate their operational principles (Hu et al., 2021), strengths, and limitations (Al-Housni, 2019). Through a systematic comparison based on defined parameters, we dissect the transaction processes across different blockchains to understand their suitability for diverse applications. Our findings reveal significant trade-offs among the chosen algorithms, highlighting how they balance efficiency with security and decentralization. The analysis aims to offer insights into optimizing blockchain design for enhanced performance and sustainability, addressing the critical challenges faced by current and future decentralized systems. This paper not only serves as a guide for selecting appropriate consensus algorithms for specific needs but also sets the stage for further research into developing more robust and efficient blockchain frameworks.

Game-theoretic private blockchain design in edge computing networks

Considering the privacy challenges of secure storage and controlled flow, there is an urgent need to realize a decentralized ecosystem of private blockchain for cyberspace. A collaboration dilemma arises when the participants are self-interested and lack feedback of complete information. Traditional blockchains have similar faults, such as trustlessness, single-factor consensus, and heavily distributed ledger, preventing them from adapting to the heterogeneous and resource-constrained Internet of Things. In this paper, we develop the game-theoretic design of a two-sided rating with complete information feedback to stimulate collaborations for private blockchain. The design consists of an evolution strategy of the decision-making network and a computing power network for continuously verifiable proofs. We formulate the optimum rating and resource scheduling problems as two-stage iterative games between participants and leaders. We theoretically prove that the Stackelberg equilibrium exists and the group evolution is stable. Then, we propose a multi-stage evolution consensus with feedback on a block-accounting workload for metadata survival. To continuously validate a block, the metadata of the optimum rating, privacy, and proofs are extracted to store on a lightweight blockchain. Moreover, to increase resource utilization, surplus computing power is scheduled flexibly to enhance security by degrees. Finally, the evaluation results show the validity and efficiency of our model, thereby solving the collaboration dilemma in the private blockchain.

Design of Blockchain and ECC-Based Robust and Efficient Batch Authentication Protocol for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Design of Blockchain and ECC-Based Robust and Efficient Batch Authentication Protocol for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Optimal scheduling and sequencing of medical tests in blockchain design

Optimal scheduling and sequencing of medical tests in blockchain design

Monero With Multi-Grained Redaction

Monero is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that allows users to obscure their transactions with multiple input and output addresses. Current research on Monero mainly focuses on identifying design vulnerabilities or optimizing towards stronger privacy, security, etc. For example, improving the design of ring confidential transaction (RingCT) protocol proposed by Noether et al. As revealed by Ali et al. in USENIX 2016, new blockchains have inadequate nodes and network computing resources to resist powerful attack (e.g. 51% attack). Obviously, Monero blockchain is not an exception. Ateniese et al. proposed the notion of redactable blockchain in EuroS&P 2017, which begins the trend of formalizing blockchain with extra cryptographic primitives. The motivation is to turn an immutable blockchain into a mutable ledger by adapting the blockchain design and integrating with new cryptographic schemes. In such a setting, users could use their private keys to perform the secure multi-party computation to reverse blockchain history. The idea of redactable blockchain has attracted many researchers to pursuit this topic. However, few works have considered the privacy-preserving setting. Even fewer have practised their designs in an actual cryptocurrency. In this paper, we seek to adapt the RingCT protocol with several building blocks. Our proposal achieves most of the desired properties for blockchain redaction. It allows multiple tracing authorities to collaboratively trace users' identities, and a system manager to perform multi-grained (including block-level, transaction-level, accumulator-level and commitment-level) redaction on block contents. Our proposal can be seen as an extension of RingCT protocol. We give rigorous security requirements and comprehensive analysis of our scheme. The performance evaluation suggested that our scheme suffers from some unscalabilities in large-scale implementations. A more elegant design to achieve stronger security and ideal scalability is deemed as a challenging and interesting future work.

Blockchain-enabled renewable energy certificate trading: A secure and privacy-preserving approach

In the 21st century, transitioning to renewable energy sources is imperative, with fossil fuel reserves depleting rapidly and recognizing critical environmental issues such as climate change, air pollution, water pollution, and habitat destruction. Embracing renewable energy is not only an environmental necessity but also a strategic move with multiple benefits. By shifting to renewable energy sources and supporting their production through the acquisition of renewable energy certificates, we foster innovation and drive economic growth in the renewable energy sector. This, in turn, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, aligning with global efforts to mitigate climate change. Additionally, renewable energy certificates ensure compliance with regulations that mandate the use of renewable energy, enhancing legal adherence while promoting transparency and trust in energy sourcing. To monitor the uptake of renewable energy, governments have implemented Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) as a tracking mechanism for the production and consumption of renewable energy. They certify the generation of a specific amount of electricity from renewable sources, allowing for accurate tracking of renewable energy contributions to the overall energy mix. However, there are two main challenges to the existing REC schema: (1) The RECs have not been globally adopted due to inconsistent design; (2) The consumer privacy has not been well incorporated in the design of blockchain. In this study, we investigate the trading of RECs between suppliers and consumers using the directed acyclic graph (DAG) blockchain system and introduce a trading schema to help protect consumer information. The DAG system reduces the intense calculation of typical blockchains for scalability and lowers mining fees by eliminating the mining of blocks. The proposed approach allows renewable energy suppliers and consumers to trade RECs globally and to take advantage of secure trading transactions. Our results demonstrate lower transaction time by 41% and energy consumption by 65% compared to proof-of-stake.

Blockchain-Based IoT Model and Experimental Platform Design in the Defence Supply Chain

This paper aims to design, implement, and test a blockchain-based Internet of Things (IoT) platform model for the defence industry that enables the various supply chain actors to manage transactions and information in a transparent, secure, and traceable manner, while also fostering multilateral collaboration in the supply network. The platform was designed using a private and authorised model in the supply chain of MBDA Italy, part of MBDA -European leader in missile industry. Blockchain technology can facilitate the decentralisation and automation of supply chain activities. Throughput, latency, infrastructure, interoperability, onboarding and maintenance costs, data storage costs, waste of resources, block size restrictions, and the definition of smart contracts are the primary challenges and benefits that have influenced the design of a private permissioned blockchain. Managerial implications on the necessity to integrate the supply blockchain platform into other systems (e.g., finance, insurance, social domains) are explored to provide recommendations for the development of a more integrated digital industrial ecosystem.

Supply Chain Transparency and Blockchain Design

Companies that are investing in blockchain technology to enhance supply chain transparency face challenges in fostering collaborations with others and deciding what information to share. Transparency over the actions of supply chain partners can improve operational decisions, but sharing own data on the blockchain can put firms at a competitive disadvantage. In this paper, we investigate the resulting questions of when blockchain should be adopted in a supply chain and how it should be designed by analyzing two ways that it can enhance supply chain transparency: making the manufacturer’s sourcing cost transparent to the buyers (i.e., vertical cost transparency) and making the ordering status of buyers transparent to each other (i.e., horizontal order transparency). Given such transparency, firms can design a smart contract that automates transactions contingent on the revealed information and enables them to realize better equilibrium outcomes. We find that blockchain increases supply chain profit only when the manufacturer’s capacity is large and decreases supply chain profit otherwise. If the capacity is sufficiently large to eliminate the buyers’ competition, blockchain leads to a win–win–win and the incentives of all participants are naturally aligned. If the capacity is only moderately large, the manufacturer needs to compensate the buyers to facilitate a blockchain implementation. However, if the capacity is small, horizontal order transparency enabled by the blockchain mitigates the buyers’ overorder incentive to compete for the manufacturer’s capacity and increases double marginalization. For such cases, we show that a blockchain that only enables vertical cost transparency should (and can) still be adopted in a range of small capacity cases, and we propose an access control layer for the logistics data to implement such a blockchain. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, operations management. Funding: J. Liu was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72101110] and The MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [Grant 20YJC630084]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4851 .

A Scalable and Trust-Value-Based Consensus Algorithm for Internet of Vehicles

As blockchain technology plays an increasingly important role in the Internet of Vehicles, how to further enhance the data consensus between the areas of the Internet of Vehicles has become a key issue in blockchain design. The traditional blockchain-based vehicle networking consensus mechanism adopts the double-layer PBFT architecture, through the grouping of nodes for first intra-group consensus, and then global consensus. To further reduce delay, we propose a CRMWSL-PBFT algorithm (C-PBFT) for vehicle networking. Firstly, in order to ensure the security of RSU nodes in the network of vehicles and reduce the probability of malicious nodes participating in the consensus, we propose to calculate the reputation of RSU nodes based on multi-weighted subjective logic (CRMWSL) model. Secondly, in order to ensure the efficiency of blockchain data consensus, we improve the consensus protocol of traditional double-layer PBFT, change the election method of the committee and the PBFT consensus process, and improve throughput by reducing the number of consensus nodes. For the committee, we combine the credibility value and hash method to ensure the credibility of nodes, but also to ensure a certain degree of election randomness. For the PBFT consensus process, the regional committee consensus is carried out first, and then the regional master node carries out the global consensus. Through experimental comparison, we show that the C-PBFT significantly reduces consensus time, network overhead, and is scalable for Internet of Vehicles.

DIGITAL ENTITIES COMMUNICATION WITHIN A BLOCKCHAIN-ENABLED INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT SYSTEM

Nowadays the blockchain is considered to be an integral part of intelligent transport systems. Intelligence of a transport systems allows to increase road safety, wisely utilize systems’ resources and provide additional services to participants. However, blockchain implementations for intelligent transport systems must be adopted to the peculiarities of such systems. This work analyzes existing blockchain solutions, their features, advantages, drawbacks, and presents a consortium type blockchain implementation for an intelligent transport system. This implementation includes a two-layered architecture of digital entities interaction, consideration for digital entities distribution over the layers, consensus mechanism selection and its implementation, trust model considerations, and a block structure for the proposed blockchain implementation. The article also brings the solution to the single point of failure vulnerability of the proposed blockchain system. Thus, the paper covers key aspects of a blockchain design for an intelligent transport system.