Blockchain-enabled Traceability and Immutability for Financial Applications

Doctoral thesis (2020)

The dissertation explores the efficacy of exploiting the transparency and immutability characteristics of blockchain platforms in a financial ecosystem. It elaborates on blockchain technology employing a ... [more ▼]

The dissertation explores the efficacy of exploiting the transparency and immutability characteristics of blockchain platforms in a financial ecosystem. It elaborates on blockchain technology employing a succinct approach, which serves as the foundation to comprehend the contributions of the present research work. The dissertation gives a verified mathematical model, derived using Nash equilibrium, to function as a framework for blockchain governance. The work elucidates the design, implementation and evaluation of a management plane to monitor and manage blockchain-based decentralized applications. The dissertation also solves the problem of data privacy by the development and evaluation of a management plane for differential privacy preservation through smart contracts. Further, the research work discusses the compliance of the privacy management plane to GDPR using a permissioned blockchain platform. The dissertation is a pioneer in conducting an implementation-based, comparative and an exploratory analysis of tokenization of ethical investment certificates. The dissertation also verifies the utility of blockchain to solve some prevalent issues in social finance. It accomplishes this through the development and testing of a blockchain-based donation application. A qualitative review of the economic impact of blockchain-based micropayments has also been conducted. The discussion on the economic impact also includes a proposition for extending the access of blockchain-based financial services to the underbanked and unbanked people. The work concludes with a hypothetical model of a financial ecosystem, depicting the deployment of the major contributions of this dissertation. [less ▲]

Blockchain and GS1 Standards in the Food Chain: A Review of the Possibilities and Challenges

in Building the Future of Food Safety Technology, 1st Edition, Blockchain and Beyond (2020)

The globalization of food systems has engendered significant changes to the operation and structure of food supply chains (FSCs). Alongside increasing consumer demands for safe and sustainable food ... [more ▼]

The globalization of food systems has engendered significant changes to the operation and structure of food supply chains (FSCs). Alongside increasing consumer demands for safe and sustainable food products, FSCs are challenged with issues related to information transparency and consumer trust. Uncertainty in matters of transparency and trust arises from the growing information asymmetry between food producers and food consumers. In particular: how and where food is cultivated, harvested, processed, and under what conditions. FSCs are tasked with guaranteeing the highest standards in food quality and food safety-ensuring the use of safe and authentic ingredients, limiting product perishability, and mitigating the risk of opportunism such as quality cheating or falsification of information. A sustainable, food-secure world will require multidirectional sharing of information and enhanced information symmetry between food producers and food consumers. The need for information symmetry will drive transformational changes in FSCs methods of practice and will require a coherent standardized framework of best practice recommendations to manage logistic units in the food chain A standardized framework will enhance food traceability, drive FSC efficiencies, enable data interoperability, improve data governance practices, and set supply chain identification standards for products and assets (what), exchange parties (who), locations (where), business processes (why) and sequence (when). FSCs began to adopt industry-driven supply chain standards in 1974 when the first barcode was scanned at a point-of-sale at Marsh's Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. However, the adoption of standards alone will not adequately address the challenges created by the information asymmetry between food producers and food consumers. Therefore, this paper examines the integration of GS1 standards with the functional components of Blockchain technology as an approach to realize a coherent standardized framework of industry-based tools for successful FSC transformation. [less ▲]

BlockPGP: A Blockchain-based Framework for PGP Key Servers

in International Journal of Networking and Computing (2020), 10(1), 1-24

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is one of the most prominent cryptographic standards offering end-to-end encryption for email messages and other sensitive information exchange. PGP allows to verify the identity ... [more ▼]

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is one of the most prominent cryptographic standards offering end-to-end encryption for email messages and other sensitive information exchange. PGP allows to verify the identity of the correspondent in information exchange as well as the information integrity. PGP implements asymmetric encryption with certificates shared through a network of PGP key servers. In this paper, we propose a new PGP management framework with the key servers infrastructure implemented using blockchain technology. Our approach offers fast propagation of certificate revocation among PGP key servers and elimination of man-in-the-middle risks. It also grants users the required access control to update their own PGP certificates, which is not the case with the current PGP key servers. A prototype has been implemented using Ethereum blockchain and an open source key server, named Hockeypuck. Finally, we evaluated the prototype with extensive experiments. Our results show that our solution is practical and it could be integrated with the existing public PGP key servers infrastructure. [less ▲]

Feasibility of Stellar as a Blockchain-based Micropayment System

in Springer SmartBlock 2019 - 2nd International Conference on Smart Blockchain (2019, November)

The advent of Bitcoin was heralded as an innovation in the global monetary system, that could bring down transaction fees by circumventing the need for third parties and conduct transactions in real time ... [more ▼]

The advent of Bitcoin was heralded as an innovation in the global monetary system, that could bring down transaction fees by circumventing the need for third parties and conduct transactions in real time. The divisibility of a blockchain cryptocurrency to even fractions of a cent, caused microtransactions to become feasible to formerly non-existent denominations. These microtransactions have spurred the development of novel ways of monetizing online resources and hold the potential to aid in alleviation of poverty. The paper conducts a feasibility study on Stellar as a blockchain-based micropayment system. It highlights the computational and other issues that impedes its progress and utilizes a characterization model for micropayment systems to evaluate the efficacy of the Stellar platform. The paper conducts a comparison with the micropayment solutions from Bitcoin, Ethereum and PayPal. The paper analyzes a subset of transactions from the Stellar blockchain to aid in drawing a conclusion on the undertaken study and elaborates on the mitigation tools to enable fraud prevention in online monetary transactions. [less ▲]

Lightning Network: A Comparative Review of Transaction Fees and Data Analysis

in Springer Blockchain and Applications (2019)

Blockchain is a revolutionary, immutable database disrupting the finance industry with a potential to provide payments in a secure environment, unhindered by intermediaries. However, scalability and ... [more ▼]

Blockchain is a revolutionary, immutable database disrupting the finance industry with a potential to provide payments in a secure environment, unhindered by intermediaries. However, scalability and throughput issues plague the technology and prevent it's mass scale adoption. The paper focusses on Lightning Network, the off-chain, scalable and high throughput payment solution from Bitcoin. A comparison is conducted to highlight the fee incurred for payment transactions through Lightning Network, Raiden, Stellar, Bitcoin and conventional payment systems to assess its viability as a blockchain-based payment sys-tem. The paper also provides an analysis of the data of Lightning Network, to give a global overview of its usage and reachability. [less ▲]

FAST: A MapReduce Consensus for High Performance Blockchains

in ACM BlockSys'18 Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Blockchain-enabled Networked Sensor Systems (2018, November 04)

Blockchain platforms when used as a database for IoT systems can resolve data reliability fault-tolerance, consistency and non-repudiation issues. However, their inherent shortcomings related to their ... [more ▼]

Blockchain platforms when used as a database for IoT systems can resolve data reliability fault-tolerance, consistency and non-repudiation issues. However, their inherent shortcomings related to their throughput in terms of processed transactions, limit their applicability in such environments in a decentralized way as the underlying network is unable to sustain high workloads. In this paper a fully decentralized high performance consensus mechanism, named FAST, is proposed for a public blockchain. FAST is based on mapreduce paradigm for aggregating and adding transactions on blockchain blocks. FAST was implemented and evaluated in a basic blockchain prototype. A light client for FAST using IPFS, was developed to bring about a reduction in the data stored locally. The obtained results from tests conducted on the prototype depict that FAST exceeds the performance of not just other existing blockchain platforms but comes very close to the throughput of traditional electronic payment networks such as Visa. [less ▲]

Blockchain Technology - Arsenal for a Shariah-Compliant Financial Ecosystem

in Journal of Business and Economics (2017, December 05)

The authors’ first challenge is to decipher the complexity of Islamic Finance despite the opacity of the sector. A second focal point is the agent’s agenda; in the Islamic Finance industry, contributors ... [more ▼]

The authors’ first challenge is to decipher the complexity of Islamic Finance despite the opacity of the sector. A second focal point is the agent’s agenda; in the Islamic Finance industry, contributors mandate intermediaries (agents) to transfer their contributions to social causes according to the Shariah; in principle, Islamic financial institutions must create value for their stakeholders by offering Shariah-compliant products and services. An underlying assumption of agency theory is that agents attempt to maximize their personal welfare and compensation, but such behaviour may not always be in the best interests of other stakeholders, and an analysis of the agent’s agenda can help explain how agents can fall off the pedestal of altruism. Relationships between Islamic banks and three key stakeholders (contributors, beneficiaries and regulators) are also explored via a complexity-aware monitoring process. Contributors provide funds to an Islamic bank (agent), and in return, the agent should be accountable to the contributors, but the form and degree of accountability can vary depending on the organization’s mission. There are many unanswered questions regarding the monitoring process. One objective of the article is to consider whether agents act in the best interests of the stakeholders. Finally, the authors explore the following question: Can blockchain technology and smart contracts support and enhance the transparency feature, which is the core underlying principle of all transactions in the Islamic Finance industry? A qualitative research framework was adopted because of the constraints of the enigmatic, secretive Islamic Finance culture. [less ▲]