Blockchain Implementation Research Articles

Blockchain technology and the circular economy: Implications for sustainability and social responsibility

Blockchain technology is a revolutionary new protocol for sharing and updating information by linking ledgers or databases in a decentralised, peer-to-peer, open-access network. Blockchain is designed to ensure the data is stored and updated in a secure, tamper-proof and irreversible way. Despite being in its nascent stages, the blockchain research is developing rapidly in different fields, making it imperative to capture the ethical and sustainability implications of blockchain development and implementation. The circular economy also focuses on enhancing sustainability and social responsibility, alongside economic growth. In this article, we critically review blockchain technology’s current and potential contribution to the circular economy through the lens of sustainability and social responsibility. This paper contributes to the Industry 4.0 literature by identifying, collating and organising the disparate research on blockchain, with a critical focus on its positive impact and potential repercussions for the ethics agenda. Within this narrative review, we argue and highlight the extant and potential alignment of blockchain with circular economy. Our findings show that blockchain technology can contribute to the circular economy by helping to reduce transaction costs, enhance performance and communication along the supply chain, ensure human rights protection, enhance healthcare patient confidentiality and welfare, and reduce carbon footprint. We also evaluate the challenges to blockchain implementation for circular economy, in terms of trust, illegal activities, potential for hacking and the need to address these through suitable legislation and policy development. Furthermore, we acknowledge the potential upfront costs involved in implementing blockchain technology, although we observe that the benefits are likely to exceed the challenges. We conclude this article with recommendations for future research in this field.

Managing change with and through blockchain in accountancy organizations: a systematic literature review

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to facilitate blockchain innovation immersion in accountancy organizations by providing tools that allow organizations to manage the change. The paper approaches blockchain technology (BT) through the lens of organizational change management, with a specific focus at the organization level.Design/methodology/approachA hybrid systematic literature review of relevant literature is presented based on recent research papers published in highly ranked scientific journals that capture how accounting organizations might manage the changes induced by BT.FindingsThe findings of the review indicate that implementing BT requires some new modus operandi. From individual behavior to organizational structure, the advantages of blockchain must be emphasized in all accounting and auditing organizations. Managers should forge a plan that takes advantage of employees' skills, competencies and talent, implementing forward-looking company procedures and actively deciding how to navigate workplace dynamics, personalities and responsibilities.Research limitations/implicationsThe main limitations of the study refer to the infancy of the BT and require the development of knowledge through future studies to allow a more accurate outline of the overall picture and a detailed one of the BT phenomena with applicability to accounting and auditing. At this stage, it is not yet possible to fully envision the implications of BT on professional accounting and auditing organizations. However, there will be clients who adopt BTs, so firms should work with them to understand BT-based accounting and auditing applications. That is, accounting and auditing organizations should expand their skills and knowledge to anticipate and meet clients' needs.Practical implicationsIn a constantly digitalizing world, the traditional accounting and educational environment is changing but not quickly enough to meet the requirements of a blockchain accounting system yet. For this reason, practical implications on the daily activities of the organizations and the restructuration of their internal architecture have been revealed in this paper.Originality/valueThe paper approaches blockchain using the lens of organizational change management with a specific focus on the accounting and audit organizations, and it proposes solutions to cope with the arising technological challenges. A challenge itself is the implementation of blockchain, especially when an entity is not ready for the process. Therefore, the SWOT analysis elaborated in this paper and focused on the accounting and auditing firms is an element of novelty and at the same time, a helpful tool highlighting the main strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of this technology, supporting organizations in assessing how ready they are for its adoption. The research on blockchain in accountancy organizations is still necessary for at least seven key areas which have been proposed and detailed at the end of the paper, bringing in this way clarity in regards to the most endorsed avenues for future research directions.

CONSTRUCT IDENTIFICATION ON BLOCKCHAIN IMPLEMENTATION IN EMERGING ACCOUNTING AND ASSURANCE DOMAIN

Blockchain, popularly characterized as a distributed ledger technology, has been perceived as a revolutionary innovation. Due to its rapid development, blockchain has the capabilities to influence many domains, including accounting and assurance. Besides improving the efficiency and effectiveness of a business, blockchain has several features that ensure any information's reliability. Currently, many industries are exploring this emerging technology so that it could be implemented in their organizations. This research tried to identify the constructs on blockchain implementation in the accounting and assurance domain through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The five steps conducted in this research are identification, search strategy or study selection, data extraction or quality assessment, data analysis, as well as data synthesis, and report preparation. This research identified blockchain constructs in internal control, accounting, and auditing functions. We also analyzed the private blockchain network is more appropriate to be implemented in these sectors. Subsequently, three aspects need to be considered in implementing blockchain technology, namely technology, business, and environment. This research hopes will contribute to the development of Blockchain-based technology in future accounting and assurance domains. Keywords: blockchain, accounting, assurance, construct, systematic literature review

Towards trustworthy blockchains: normative reflections on blockchain-enabled virtual institutions

This paper proposes a novel way to understand trust in blockchain technology by analogy with trust placed in institutions. In support of the analysis, a detailed investigation of institutional trust is provided, which is then used as the basis for understanding the nature and ethical limits of blockchain trust. Two interrelated arguments are presented. First, given blockchains’ capacity for being institution-like entities by inviting expectations similar to those invited by traditional institutions, blockchain trust is argued to be best conceptualized as a specialized form of trust in institutions. Keeping only the core functionality and certain normative ideas of institutions, this technology broadens our understanding of trust by removing the need for third parties while retaining the value of trust for the trustor. Second, the paper argues that blockchains’ decentralized nature and the implications and effects of this decentralization on trust issues are double-edged. With the erasure of central points, the systems simultaneously crowd out the pivotal role played by traditional institutions and a cadre of representatives in meeting their assigned obligations and securing the functional systems’ trustworthy performances. As such, blockchain is positioned as a technology containing both disruptive features that can be embedded with meaningful normative values and inherent ethical limits that pose a direct challenge to the actual trustworthiness of blockchain implementations. Such limits are proposed to be ameliorated by facilitating a shift of responsibility to the groups of people directly associated with the engendering of trust in the blockchain context.

Private blockchain-envisioned multi-authority CP-ABE-based user access control scheme in IIoT

Recent advances in Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) are expected to augment the already prodigious proliferation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, this unrepresented growth is tinged by the uncertainty of possible challenges in security and privacy. In this work, we propose a novel blockchain-envisioned fine grained user access control scheme for data security and scalability in IIoT environment. The proposed scheme supports multiple attribute authorities and also a constant size key and ciphertext. The data gathered by the IoT smart devices are encrypted using the cipher-policy attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) and sent to their nearby gateway nodes. Later, the gateway nodes form the transactions from the encrypted data from the smart devices which are used to form partial blocks. The partial blocks are then forwarded to the cloud server(s) in the peer-to-peer (P2P) network to convert them into full blocks, which are verified, mined and added into the blockchain using the voting-based practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm. The proposed scheme also allows a user to access the secure data stored in the blocks into the blockchain using the CP-ABE mechanism. The security analysis demonstrates the robustness of the proposed scheme against various attacks, and the comparative study with related relevant schemes also highlights the advantage of the proposed scheme over existing approaches. Finally, a blockchain implementation of the presented scheme summarizes the computational costs for a varied number of transactions per block, and also for a varied number of blocks mined in the blockchain.

Multi-Layer Blockchain-Based Security Architecture for Internet of Things.

The proliferation of smart devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks creates significant security challenges for the communications between such devices. Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed technology that can potentially tackle the security problems within the 5G-enabled IoT networks. This paper proposes a Multi layer Blockchain Security model to protect IoT networks while simplifying the implementation. The concept of clustering is utilized in order to facilitate the multi-layer architecture. The K-unknown clusters are defined within the IoT network by applying techniques that utillize a hybrid Evolutionary Computation Algorithm while using Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms. The chosen cluster heads are responsible for local authentication and authorization. Local private blockchain implementation facilitates communications between the cluster heads and relevant base stations. Such a blockchain enhances credibility assurance and security while also providing a network authentication mechanism. The open-source Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain platform is deployed for the proposed model development. Base stations adopt a global blockchain approach to communicate with each other securely. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed clustering algorithm performs well when compared to the earlier reported approaches. The proposed lightweight blockchain model is also shown to be better suited to balance network latency and throughput as compared to a traditional global blockchain.

Towards the Use of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications.

With the advent of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, the growth and adaptation of cryptographic features and capabilities were quickly extended to new and underexplored areas, such as healthcare. Currently, blockchain is being implemented mainly as a mechanism to secure Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, new studies have shown that this technology can be a powerful tool in empowering patients to control their own health data, as well for enabling a fool-proof health data history and establishing medical responsibility. Additionally, with the proliferation of mobile health (m-Health) sustained on service-oriented architectures, the adaptation of blockchain mechanisms into m-Health applications creates the possibility for a more decentralized and available healthcare service. Hence, this paper presents a review of the current security best practices for m-Health and the most used and widely known implementations of the blockchain protocol, including blockchain technologies in m-Health. The main goal of this comprehensive review is to further discuss and elaborate on identified open-issues and potential use cases regarding the uses of blockchain in this area. Finally, the paper presents the major findings, challenges and advantages on future blockchain implementations for m-Health services and applications.

Application of Block Chain & Artificial Intelligence in E-commerce supply chain to reduce product counterfeiting & increase transparency

Product counterfeiting is a major issue in today’s world. These days product counterfeiting leads to around 1.05 lac crore rupees in India per year. As per a report by business standard, if even 50% of product counterfeiting is stopped with authentication, monitored properly and governed, it can save 50,000 crore rupees per year in India itself, then think about whole world. This research paper is based on the use of block chain along with artificial intelligence to curb the problem of product counterfeiting and maintain the transparency. This research paper also demonstrates the use of blockchain using R studio as a platform. R is a programming language mostly for data analytics purposes. So, the implementation of blockchain in R can give a wide exposure to the data to be analyzed and suitable insights and forecasts can also be made. The research findings give a holistic picture of all the variables that affect the supply chain of E-commerce industry. This study helps the supplier side in curbing their loses and also the consumer side in receiving the genuine product that build trust among both the stakeholders

Sensing-Mining-Access Tradeoff in Blockchain-Enabled Dynamic Spectrum Access

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is crucial to improve the utilization efficiency of the limited and precious radio spectrum resources. Recently, the application of blockchain is proposed to improve the security, distribution and transparency of DSA. However, in opportunistic spectrum access (OSA), the implementation of blockchain consumes considerable amount time in each time slot so that the time left for spectrum sensing and access will be decreased. Therefore, in this letter, we aim to optimize the frame structure regarding the sensing time and mining time so that the average achievable throughput is maximized. We first decouple the original optimization problem into two sub-optimization problems with respect to sensing time and mining time, respectively, and then prove that there exists a unique maximum point for both the two sub-optimization problems. After that, an alternating algorithm is proposed for the optimization. Using the simulations, the sensing-mining-access tradeoff and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm to optimize such a tradeoff are illustrated.

Rent Seeking in Blockchain Governance: The Awkward Transition From Market Decision Making to Non-market Decision Making

Blockchains and applications built on blockchains are decentralised ecosystems that are nonetheless built by centralised firms. The typical launch and maturity of a blockchain ecosystem involves the transition from an entrepreneurial institutional arrangement characterised by market decisionmaking to a decentralised one characterised by non-market decisionmaking. This paper considers how to assess rentseeking in the context of blockchain governance. Rentseeking in blockchain implementations and ecosystems occurs when participants seek rewards or privileges in excess what would be considered a market contribution after a certain threshold of decentralisation. The paper considering two controversies in blockchain governance – the Zcash founders’ reward and the SushiSwap developer fund – which involved the intertwining of mechanisms to fund public goods with mechanisms to compensate founders for their entrepreneurial effort. The paper finds that the normative ideal of decentralisation in blockchain governance has a parallel function to the normative ideal of liberal governance in political systems.

Determinants of Blockchain Technology Introduction in Organizations: an Empirical Study among Experienced Practitioners

Blockchain is expected to enable new types of interorganizational relationships, new approaches to governance and new approaches to settlement and clearing processes. Neverthless, although the interest on blockchain is on the rise, there are not many blockchain implementations in organizations and there is limited empirical research investigating the reasons for this. This paper contributes to filling this gap by investigating the following research question: what are the impeding and motivating factors for organizational blockchain adoption? Data were collected through a survey based on pairwise comparisons of key factors identified in the literature. The data collected were analyzed using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) which is a structured approach for deriving priorities among diverse elements. The results provide insights about the issues that matter the most for practitioners and show that infrastructural qualities (reliability, transparency, immutability) matter more than characteristics related to blockchain´s transformative potential (automation of transactions, decentralization). Furthermore, the results for impeding factors indicate that the most prominent concerns relate to maturity and scalability.

Blockchain and digital transformation of insurance business models

The blockchain has recently received significant attention from researchers and practitioners, highlighting its perceived impact and emerging disruption potential. However, most of the literature on blockchain is dedicated to the banking sector, with limited attention to other sectors and answering how blockchain technology may affect business models. This research examines how the adoption of blockchain technology transforms business model components in the insurance industry. We performed a qualitative research through a multi-case study analysis of three blockchain implementations in the insurance sector. Based on the data, we identified that blockchain technology has the potential to contribute to the digital transformation of business models in all aspects. This research provides insightful implications for blockchain and insurance relevant researchers and executives.

Implementation of Hybrid Blockchain in a Pre-Owned Electric Vehicle Supply Chain

Ecumenical carbon dioxide (CO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> ) emission emanates from car, bus, taxi, and motorcycle is around 45%. Electric vehicle could be the major contributor to abbreviate the pollution level in a transportation sector. According to the Forbes report the ecumenical passenger electric vehicle demand expected to reach 15% in 2025, and 23% in 2030. This research provides a blockchain predicated solution for a pre-owned electric vehicle market that could engender a trust, transparency, immutable records, and an efficient way to track the entire life cycle of a futuristic electric vehicle supply chain. At present most of the pre-owned electric conveyance purchase transpires through the third-party accommodations, websites, and mobile applications. This does not provide the authentic information on electric conveyance history, charging capabilities of the battery, history of the charging records, and performance of the driver (wear and tear affect battery life). Our solution implemented utilizing hybrid blockchain technology. Each stakeholder assigned with the Ethereum blockchain address to track the vehicle records as a distributed ledger. This design considered electric vehicle manufacturer, charging station, battery manufacturer, road convey ascendancy as major stakeholders. Astute contract designed with solidity programming. Truffle platform used to deploy keenly intellective contract in private blockchain that ascertain the privacy of electric conveyance owners and other stakeholders. Meta mask a mobile application utilized kovan network for tracking vehicle in a public blockchain. This application tested with 0.1 Ether for each transaction. Blockchain Electric Vehicle Cloud of Things (BEVCoT) concept proposed to integrate the IoT-Blockchain application in a cloud environment.

Auditor's Perception on Technology Transformation: Blockchain and CAATs on Audit Quality in Indonesia

The purpose of this study is to analyze the auditor’s perception of the implementation of technology transformation such as: blockchain and CAATs that can affect audit quality at the Big Four Public Accounting Firm in Jakarta. This study uses quantitative research methods using a combination of primary and secondary data. The data collection techniques used in this study was questionnaires. The sample was taken using purposive sampling method, which resulted in 60 respondents. Data analysis was carried out with SmartPLS 3.0 and IBM SPSS 26 software which resulted in the conclusion that the auditor’s perception of the implementation of blockchain had a significant positive effect on audit quality, while the auditor’s perception of the implementation of CAATs had no significant positive effect on audit quality.

A Layer Image Auditing System Secured by Blockchain

In Additive Manufacturing (AM), auditing layer-by-layer images can detect infill defective attacks effectively. However, the auditing process itself can become a target of inside or outside attackers in Cyber-Physical Manufacturing System (CPMS) environments because pervasive connection through various types of computer networks in CPMS opens new doors for adversaries to compromise various components in an attack detection system. To maintain an effective attack detection system and prevent data from malicious data injection, this paper presents a Layer Image Auditing System (LIAS) secured by the Blockchain technology in CPMS. LIAS consists of a pre-processing system and a Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP). To evaluate the prediction accuracy of LIAS, a set of simulated infill images and physical images were used for training and testing. The effectiveness of the Blockchain implementation is demonstrated by presenting the comparative performance analysis of the proposed attack detection system with and without the Blockchain.

Blockchains, Front-Running, and Candle Auctions

Blockchain implementations of auctions have to deal with the problem of front-running: block production happens at discrete intervals, and anyone can inspect and react to the incoming bids before they are written on chain. The presence of smart contracts among bidders, a hallmark of automated blockchain environments, renders current cryptographic solutions infeasible and essentially precludes static auctions. Moreover, their transparent nature makes smart contracts susceptible to shill bidding in strategy-proof auctions more generally. As a remedy, this paper considers an ascending auction with a random ending time --- a so-called candle auction. Time is discrete and in every round, the bidders bid sequentially and in a fixed order. The bidder with the highest bid at the end of the decisive round wins the auction and pays her bid. We show that an appropriately chosen ending time distribution mitigates the main problems of front-running: low revenue, reduced utility when being front-run, and limited efficiency.

Centers and Peripheries in a World of Blockchain: An Introduction to the Symposium

If, as has been claimed by one of their most successful proponents, blockchain technologies “automate away . . . center[s]” of authority, in lieu of subordinating peripheries, then what might this imply for global governance: already the work of a distributed politico-legal regime without a single center? Does blockchain seem likely to emancipate and equalize in the ways frequently anticipated? Whose authority is being “automate[d] away” and whose is being augmented by prevailing blockchain implementations? How might blockchain-borne redistribution bear upon law and legal institutions, or what might it demand of those, on the international plane? How might we envision blockchain-based futures on the global plane? These are among the questions taken up by contributors to this symposium. Before examining the various ways in which this rich suite of essays approach these and other cognate questions, the central object of their concern—blockchain—warrants brief, explanatory attention.

Blockchain in healthcare: The current situation and challenges

The lack of traceability of transactions and the complicated network of middlemen in healthcare cause a slew of issues. To name a few: healthcare data is scattered across multiple silos, adversely impacting research and services; about half of clinical trials are never published; the cost of drug development continues to rise; and counterfeit and inferior medications remain a major issue. Because it offers trust without middlemen, has traceability as a default feature, and promises new business models by allowing innovative incentive structures, blockchain has the potential to address these issues. Blockchain has sparked a lot of interest in the healthcare sector because of its potential. We examine key application cases of blockchain in healthcare, including patient data management, pharmaceutical research, medical supply chain management, prescription administration, billing claims management, analytics, and telemedicine, as well as associated initiatives, in this paper. We discovered that the majority of blockchain initiatives are just white papers, proof of ideas, or products with a small user base. However, we saw an increase in the number, quality, and maturity of the initiatives. We also go through the technological, regulatory, and commercial barriers to blockchain implementation in the healthcare sector.

HIDRA: A Distributed Blockchain-Based Architecture for Fog/Edge Computing Environments

Nowadays, the fog computing paradigm is being consolidated as a solution for processing the explosion of data generated by lots of common IoT devices connected to the Internet. In contrast to cloud computing, fog computing achieves efficient data processing without incurring large latencies or data transfers to/from the cloud. The distributed nature of fog computing makes the resource orchestration a challenge. Commonly used centralized solutions are of limited utility in this context. Moreover, fog nodes are usually resource constrained, so the implementation of the management modules should be carefully designed in order not to cause excessive overheads. On the other hand, blockchain has proven its utility beyond cryptocurrencies, to support distributed and reliable information storage. When combined with smart contracts it can provide a distributed computer where all the nodes independently and equally contribute to a common global system state, which must be agreed by consensus. This also provides inherent desirable features, such as immutability and transparency. In this work, a novel architecture called HIDRA is presented, aimed at resource orchestration in fog computing environments based on a Ethereum blockchain implementation. A prototype implementation on a testbed composed of single-board computers has been carried out. Results show the low overhead introduced into the system and its ability to perform a coordinated action among fog nodes without the intervention of any central authority.

Data Integrity Time Optimization of a Blockchain IoT Smart Home Network Using Different Consensus and Hash Algorithms

Data security is a major issue for smart home networks. Yet, different existing tools and techniques have not been proven highly effective for home networks’ data security. Blockchain is a promising technology because of the distributed computing infrastructure network that makes it difficult for hackers to intrude into the systems through the use of cryptographic signatures and smart contracts. In this paper, an architecture for smart home networks that could guarantee data integrity, robust security, and the ability to protect the validity of the blockchain transactions has been investigated. The system model is tested using various sizes of realistic datasets (30, 3 k, and 30 k to represent a small, medium, and large number of transactions, respectively). Four different consensus algorithms were considered, the conventional schemes concatenated hash transactions (CHT) and Merkle hash tree (MHT), as well as the newly proposed odd and even modified MHT (O&amp;E MHT) and modified MHT (MMHT). Moreover, 15 hash functions were also examined and compared to understand the effects of each consensus algorithms on the data integrity verification check execution time and the time optimization provided by the proposed MMHT algorithm. The results show that even though the CHT algorithm gives the lowest execution time, it is impractical for a blockchain implementation due to the requirement to copy the entire blockchain ledger in real time. Meanwhile, the O&amp;E MHT does not give any tangible benefit in the execution time. However, the proposed MMHT offers a minimum of 30% gain in time optimization than the conventional MHT algorithm typically used in blockchains. This work shows that the proposed MMHT consensus algorithm not only can identify malicious codes but has an improved data integrity check performance in smart homes, all while ensuring network stability.