Smart Contract Technology Research Articles

Implementation of a Smart Contract on a Consortium Blockchain for IoT Applications

Advancements in cryptography and computer science have given birth to blockchain technology. One of the most exciting evolutions of blockchain is the advancements in smart contract technology. Smart contracts can be used for a broad range of use cases, not just financial transactions. Smart contract technology on the public blockchain, represented by Ethereum, due to its public and opaque nature, is not a good choice for many scenarios that do not require full disclosure, such as many IoT applications. On the other hand, the existing blockchain smart contract system still has a strong connection with virtual currency, which also limits its application in non-financial scenarios. In order to solve the above problems and explore more of the potential of smart contracts for the IoT application domain, this paper mainly explores the construction of a smart contract system based on consortium blockchains associated with no virtual currency. Based on the smart contract system designed in this project, blockchain can be more easily applied in payment, product traceability, authority authentication, and other fields. Through a certain centralized way, the system is easier to manage, can reduce the management expenditure, and the power and other resource consumption is less, which is conducive to environmental protection. Results show that our smart contract system has the potential for IoT usage in the future.

Topical issues of the realization and protection of human rights in the practice of smart contract technology application

The subject and the aim of the study. The article analyzes the approach to smart contract technology, which is reflected in the scientific literature and legislation of Russia and foreign countries, formulates the advantages and disadvantages of a smart contract that affect the implementation and protection of certain constitutional rights, including freedom of contract, the right to protect, the right to manage personal data.Methodology. Guided by formal dogmatic and comparative law methods in research, the author formulates approaches to the concept of a smart contract that has been developed in the practice of foreign countries and deduces how each of the approaches affects the implementation of constitutional human rights. The paper notes that the use of a smart contract based on the federal blockchain does not allow the full implementation of such rights as freedom of contract, the right to self-defense, and the right to manage personal data. In addition, the transnational nature of smart contracts usage, their pseudonymity and failure to unified concept of legal regulation create obstacles to the effective implementation of the right to judicial protection.The main results. The practice of legal regulation of smart contracts in foreign countries, aimed at minimizing the negative consequences of the use of technology is considered. Some countries follow to the concept of recognizing a smart contract as a form of contract (Italy, United States, Republic of Belarus) and a way of guaranteeing fulfilment of obligations (China, Italy, Republic of Belarus, Russian Federation). The second concept is considered as being the most restrictive for digital progress from one side but being able to guarantee protection of human rights such as right to judicial protection or freedom of contract. The first concept which shows smart contract being a type of contract carries additional risks associated with conclusion of a treaty - inconsistency of the smart contract with the actual will of the parties. The third concept considered smart contract as a type of contract is accepted in the Republic of Malta. The Republic of Malta regulated procedure of voluntary certification for smart contracts that allow to eliminate such threats as violation of human rights and the use of smart contracts for criminal purposes. The experience of legal regulation of smart contracts in the Republic of Malta is recognized as reasonable and effective, however, it is concluded that certification will achieve its goals only if it will be implemented in the legal system of wide range of the countries.Conclusions. It is concluded that despite the fact that the smart contract technology has high potential for its implementation in various fields of social and economic life, the effective implementation of smart contract technology in various spheres of society requires the formation of general legal principles for their application, the definition of areas in which the use of smart contracts is prohibited, as well as the development of international standards for their safe execution.

Permissioned Blockchain-based Trustworthy Edge Storage Scheme for Smart Grid

Background: With the development of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud/edge computing, a large number of edge devices in the smart grid accomplish information interconnection and generate massive amounts of data. On the one hand, smart grids need to obtain a large amount of grid data from edge terminal devices. On the other hand, edge computing also brings some security threats. Therefore, edge data security faces major challenges. Objective: In order to ensure the security of data in the edge computing environment of the smart grid, we propose an edge data storage scheme (BlockSE) for the smart grid edge computing environment. Method: BlockSE combines permissioned blockchain and smart contract technology to achieve secure storage of data on edge. We adapted ring signature technology to achieve privacy preserving of participating nodes. To allocate the storage resources of edge servers fairly and transparently, we designed a storage resource allocation algorithm based on the smart contract, whereby edge devices can obtain storage resources fairly according to demand. Results: Simulation experiments were performed; the results show the effectiveness of the proposed BlockSE scheme. Conclusion: This paper focused on data security in the smart grid's edge computing environment and proposed a secure storage scheme for edge data based on permissioned blockchain. The evaluation shows the safety, effectiveness, and practicability of the proposed BlockSE scheme.

Risk of non-fulfillment of obligations by participants of investment deals: preventive civil law mechanisms for the protection of rights

Risk of non-fulfillment of obligations by participants of investment deals: preventive civil law mechanisms for the protection of rights

A survey of application research based on blockchain smart contract

Nowadays, blockchain technology and industry has developed rapidly all over the world, which is inseparable from continuous innovation and improvement on smart contract technology. Therefore, by summarizing the working principle and application research status of blockchain smart contract, this paper analyzes the development and challenges of smart contract. Firstly, we introduce the model and operation principle of blockchain smart contract for the overall architecture, analyze the deployment process of smart contract with Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric and EOSIO, and make a comparative analysis from the technical level. And taking Byteball, InterValue and IOTA platforms as examples, we introduce the deployment process and application potential for DAG-based blockchain smart contract. Additionally, we also summarize the application research of smart contract for international and Blockchain Oracle, and discuss its innovative application and development trend in the future. Secondly, we introduce the application status of smart contract with Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric platforms from the aspects of financial transactions, Internet of things, medical applications, and supply chain, and further discuss EOS (enterprise operation system), Blockchain Oracle and other application fields. Furthermore, we introduce the application advantages and challenges to smart contract for industrial Internet from the fields of manufacturing, food industry, industrial Internet of things and industry 4.0. Finally, we discuss the challenges faced by smart contract with technical issues, analyzes the impact on large-scale applications and mining system on the sustainable development of smart contract, and looks forward to the future research direction of blockchain smart contract.

A Review on Recent Progress of Smart Contract in Blockchain

A smart contract, in form, is represented as a piece of computer program code involving related commercial transactions and algorithms. Essentially, this is the computerization of the pre-agreed contract between the participants. This special contract agreement is automatically verified and executed once preset conditions are triggered. Smart contracts are not only used in the field of financial transactions, but also include many aspects of social life. Although smart contract technology has unique advantages, it is still in the early stages of development, and many problems remain to be solved. First, this article briefly summarizes the development process of blockchain, and then focuses on the research progress of blockchain 2.0-smart contracts. Second, the related concepts of smart contracts are presented, and the working mechanism of smart contracts and the difficulties faced by smart contracts are elaborated. Finally, in response to these problems and dilemmas, the corresponding solutions and ideas are summarized, and the future challenges and development trends of smart contracts are analyzed and judged.

Role of Smart Contract Technology Blockchain Services in Finance and Banking Systems: Concept and Core Values

Role of Smart Contract Technology Blockchain Services in Finance and Banking Systems: Concept and Core Values

Incentive and Game of Information Sharing Based on Blockchain Technology

With the development of the information age, the efficiency of information resource sharing has not been fully released, and the willingness of participants to share information needs to be improved. It is of great significance to promote the willingness of participants to share information and increase the value of information utilization. Aiming at the problem of low information sharing rate of participants, this paper constructs an evolutionary game model between information sharing and non-sharing participants under the blockchain technology platform and introduces the critical value corresponding to the initial proportion of participants under the condition of a stable strategy as a trigger Conditions, dynamic adjustment of incentive coefficients to maintain a stable strategy of information sharing, simulation with MATLAB. Research shows that the use of blockchain smart contract technology to dynamically adjust the evolutionary stability strategy is shown as: When the initial proportion of participants is lower than the critical value, the incentive parameters are transformed into shared incentive benefits to motivate the participants to actively participate in information sharing; when it is higher than the critical value, the incentive parameters are transformed into sharing costs and dynamically adjusted to reach the initial participants. The proportion is maximized, which provides a strategy for participants to choose information-sharing strategies.

Analysis of Blockchain Solutions for E-Voting: A Systematic Literature Review

Today, the abstention rate continues to rise, largely due to the need to travel to vote. This is why remote e-voting will increase the turnout by allowing everyone to vote without the need to travel. It will also minimize the risks and obtain results in a faster way compablack to a traditional vote with paper ballots. In fact, given the high stakes of an election, a remote e-voting solution must meet the highest standards of security, reliability, and transparency to gain the trust of citizens. In literature, several remote e-voting solutions based on blockchain technology have been proposed. Indeed, the blockchain technology is proposed today as a new technical infrastructure for several types of IT applications because it allows to remove the TTP and decentralize transactions while offering a transparent and fully protected data storage. In addition, it allows to implement in its environment the smart-contracts technology which is used to automate and execute agreements between users. In this paper, we are interested in reviewing the most revealing e-voting solutions based on blockchain technology.

A blockchain-based integrated document management framework for construction applications

Document management systems in AEC projects manage important project documents such as schedules, RFIs, and change orders. Hence, security concerns in document management systems especially involving data integrity of documents and records may have a severe effect on a project in terms of money and the reputations of project participants. Therefore, in this research blockchain technology is leveraged to facilitate data integrity in document management for construction applications through - (1) irreversible and irrevocable approval workflow logic via smart contract technology, (2) irreversible recording of document changes via blockchain ledger technology, and (3) document version history integrity via a blockchain-based data structure. A prototype of the proposed smart contract framework was developed using Hyperledger fabric and evaluated. The scalability of the proposed framework to support document version integrity was also evaluated and discussed. A formulation based on existing literature is developed to evaluate the cost viability of the proposed framework.

Blockchain technology in smart contracts for refueling civil aviation aircraft

In the process of air transportation, a large amount of information exchange plays an important role in the timely management of aircraft flights. The work of any airline and airport consists of many processes that involve a big number of participants. One of these issues is timely aircraft refueling. The use of the blockchain technology makes it possible to process an airline request for aircraft refueling in a timely manner, make payment and exchange of accounting documents between the airline and the refueling complex. The paper gives the main definitions for the elements of the smart contracts and their interrelationships based on the blockchain technology when performing accounting operations and payment transactions for aircraft refueling. The article is devoted to a comprehensive study of the smart contract technology application in the aircraft refueling system, in particular, the exchange of accounting and payment documentation between the airline, the refueling complexes of civil aviation airports and banks. The aim of the research work is to study the application of the blockchain technology in the aircraft refueling operations. Based on the analysis it is necessary to develop a scheme for the use of the smart contract technology when aircraft refueling, which allows the parties concerned to reduce the volume of accounting and payment operations and increase the operating efficiency of the objects and subjects of the refueling process. The paper presents the chain of information passing and blockchain transformation varying from the execution of refueling operations to the execution of banking operations, payment for jet fuel and related services for aircraft refueling. Special attention is paid to the role and location of aircraft refueling facilities as a key element of the module for automatic reconciliation of accounting and payment documents in the formation of a smart contract. Based on the analysis of the blockchain technology application, a scheme of interaction among an airline, a refueling complex and a bank is proposed. The application of the proposed scheme allows the airline to pay for refueling at the time of refueling without time-consuming accounting operations and prepayment for jet fuel, thereby reducing the accounting time.

Application of blockchain technology in automobile ecosystem

Aiming at the challenges of opaque transaction data and lack of mutual trust among participants in the service ecosystem of the automobile industry, a de-trust system model based on blockchain smart contract technology is constructed, which takes the after-sales prepaid products from an automobile manufacturer as the research object. Under the scenario of prepaid products in automotive industry, this model systematically discusses the roles of participants, business processes and smart contract solution in the blockchain for the first time. The proposed model can not only enrich the application scenarios of consortium blockchain but also be extended to more cross industry ecosystems.

Blockchain and Smart-Contracts in terms of Economics

In this paper the author’s interpretation of essence and applicability of smart-contracts in economics. Examples are given along with critical view on wrong statements, found in publications on examined topic. Repeating of certain theses from similar papers won’t be redundant, because it will help to observe the topic from different point of view. In general, author gives positive valuation of applicability of smart-contracts technology in economics (both, financial and real sector, despite of some obvious inherent disadvantages of current implementation in Ethereum. In author’s opinion, integration of smartcontracts and blockchain with IoT can give synergetic effect and consider real cyber-social interaction. Certain value to this paper is added by author’s practical experience of coding and adopting smart-contracts. Smart-contracts are mentioned by Bank of Russia with implementation of CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) concept in the form of digital rubble and receive additional significance in current trend of dematerialization and virtualization of money. In paper essential terms and author’s point to ability to change contract terms after deploy are given.

How Useful Is a Distributed Ledger for Tracking and Tracing in Supply Chains? A Systems Thinking Approach

Background: The use of blockchain technology for tracking and tracing (T&T) in supply chains is the subject of lively debate in scientific literature. However, distributed ledger technology (DLT) does not have to have the characteristic blockchain structure and often performs better without such a structure. Generalized DLT for T&T in supply chains has rarely been discussed in the existing literature. Methods: This article presents an exploratory case study research of eight companies to identify the main goals, and problems that the companies have when they engage in T&T. This practical perspective is complemented by a theoretical systems thinking perspective. Based on these two foundations, we discuss the usefulness of blockchain technology and, more generally, DLT for T&T in supply chains. Results: Based on our analysis, DLT is only necessary in special cases, e.g., when the owners of the data have an interest in deleting the data, but the data stakeholders do not. In the other cases examined, DLT competes with other technologies, such as conventional, centralized databases in combination with digital signatures. Furthermore, it became evident that DLT can only be useful for supply chain tracing. The technological features of DLT do not provide any benefit for supply chain tracking, i.e., the timely communication of the status of a physical good. Conclusions: Distributed ledgers often have a disadvantage in that they are very complex and, therefore, expensive. DLT should preferably only be used when it is technologically necessary or the simplest/cheapest choice, which is probably not all that often. Finally, the usefulness of distributed ledger technology and its integrated smart contract technology is highly dependent on how easy it is to link the real physical world to a digital record/contract in an error-free and tamper-proof way. Currently, such a definite link exists only in very few cases and is often impossible.

Research on digital copyright protection based on the hyperledger fabric blockchain network technology.

With the recent development in network technology over a few years, digital works can be easily published online. One of the main issues in the field of digital technology is the infringement of digital works, which can seriously damage the data owners’ rights and affects the enthusiasm of the owners to create original work. Thus, more attention is required for the protection of digital copyright as it has a great impact on the development of society. Many digital copyright protection techniques were developed in the past, but still, there are many loopholes in the protection systems to be covered. The protection means are still relatively weak, timeliness is poor, infringement is frequent, a right determination is cumbersome, and the results are not ideal. Aiming at the mentioned problems, this paper proposes a protection technique, which can realize the automatic management of the complete digital rights life cycle on the blockchain using fabric's smart contract technology. The proposed system is based on blockchain technology, which leverages the distributed, tamper-proof and traceable characteristics of blockchain. The system uses smart contracts to manage the full life cycle of digital copyright. The test results show that the proposed system provides effective protection of the digital copyright system and can efficiently confirm the rights of digital copyright.

A Traceable Online Insurance Claims System Based on Blockchain and Smart Contract Technology

In the current medical insurance claims process, there are problems of low efficiency and complex services. When a patient applies for medical insurance claims, he/she must go to the hospital to apply for a diagnosis certificate and receipt and then send the relevant application documents to the insurance company. The patient will not receive compensation until the company completes the verification with the patient’s hospital. However, we can improve the current dilemma through blockchain technology. Blockchain technology can effectively open up the information channels of the insurance industry and medical institutions, promote industry integration, and enhance the ability of insurance companies to obtain information. In this research, we used blockchain and smart contract technology to make the following contributions to the development of Internet insurance. First, blockchain and smart contract technology can effectively solve the problem of online underwriting. Second, it is conducive to improving supervision. Third, it is conducive to solving risk control problems. Fourth, it is conducive to effective anti-money laundering. The proposed scheme fulfills the following security requirements: mutual authentication of identities, non-repudiation between each of two roles, and other major blockchain-based security requirements. In the event of a dispute, we also proposed an arbitration mechanism to divide responsibilities.

Exploring Blockchain and Smart Contract Technology for Reliable and Secure Land Registration and Record Management

Exploring Blockchain and Smart Contract Technology for Reliable and Secure Land Registration and Record Management

Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption from Ring-Learning-with-Errors

Abstract We propose and evaluate a secure-multiparty-computation (MPC) solution in the semi-honest model with dishonest majority that is based on multiparty homomorphic encryption (MHE). To support our solution, we introduce a multiparty version of the Brakerski-Fan-Vercauteren homomorphic cryptosystem and implement it in an open-source library. MHE-based MPC solutions have several advantages: Their transcript is public, their o~ine phase is compact, and their circuit-evaluation procedure is noninteractive. By exploiting these properties, the communication complexity of MPC tasks is reduced from quadratic to linear in the number of parties, thus enabling secure computation among potentially thousands of parties and in a broad variety of computing paradigms, from the traditional peer-to-peer setting to cloud-outsourcing and smart-contract technologies. MHE-based approaches can also outperform the state-of-the-art solutions, even for a small number of parties. We demonstrate this for three circuits: private input selection with application to private-information retrieval, component-wise vector multiplication with application to private-set intersection, and Beaver multiplication triples generation. For the first circuit, privately selecting one input among eight thousand parties’ (of 32 KB each) requires only 1.31 MB of communication per party and completes in 61.7 seconds. For the second circuit with eight parties, our approach is 8.6 times faster and requires 39.3 times less communication than the current methods. For the third circuit and ten parties, our approach generates 20 times more triples per second while requiring 136 times less communication per-triple than an approach based on oblivious transfer. We implemented our scheme in the Lattigo library and open-sourced the code at github.com/ldsec/lattigo.

A Blockchain-Based Sealed-Bid e-Auction Scheme with Smart Contract and Zero-Knowledge Proof

e-Auction improves the efficiency of bid transaction. However, the protection of bidders’ privacy, transaction fairness and verifiability, transaction data security, high cost of third-party auction center, and other issues have attracted more attention. According to the transaction process and basic principles of the sealed auction, we explored the problems existing in the current sealed-bid e-auction schemes. Based on the blockchain technology, we proposed a sealed-bid e-auction scheme with smart contract technology, Bulletproofs zero-knowledge proof protocols, and Pedersen commitment algorithm. The proposed scheme constructed an auction mechanism without the third-party auctioneer so as to restrict the behaviors of auction parties for the sake of auction security, reliability, fairness, and privacy protection. Compared with the related sealed e-auction schemes based on blockchain technologies in six metrics, we conducted the experiment to show that the proposed scheme protected the bid information from leakage well and successfully verified the winning bid price and the related bidder by all transaction participants without the third-party auctioneer.

RBT: A distributed reputation system for blockchain-based peer-to-peer energy trading with fairness consideration

It has been proved by recent works that reputation can help to improve the efficiency of blockchain and enhance the fairness of energy trading markets. However, the application of distributed reputation in the energy field has not been fully studied yet. In this paper, we design a distributed reputation system to simulate real-world trust in blockchain-based peer-to-peer energy trading. It is a comprehensive reputation system in the sense that reputation scores are decided by the behavior of participants as consensus nodes, energy buyer, and energy sellers. Its implementation relies on blockchain, especially the smart contract technology, to achieve distributed and automatic reputation management. The distributed reputation system in turn helps to implement a delegated consensus algorithm for blockchain and a reputation-based k-double auction matchmaking scheme for peer-to-peer energy trading. In addition, we define a fairness indicator to capture the reputation-based average benefits and costs when considering reputation as the contribution to the peer-to-peer energy trading market. By simulating the comprehensive system, the numerical results demonstrate the effects of distributed reputation in improving the efficiency of blockchain and balancing fairness indicators between sellers and buyers during peer-to-peer energy trading. As far as we know, this paper is one of the few works to provide a formal method of evaluating the fairness of the peer-to-peer energy trading market.