Blockly2Hooks: Smart Contracts for Everyone with the XRP Ledger and Google Blockly

Scientific Conference (2023)

Recent technologies such as inter-ledger payments, non-fungible tokens, and smart contracts are all fruited from the ongoing development of Distributed Ledger Technologies. The foreseen trend is that they ... [more ▼]

Recent technologies such as inter-ledger payments, non-fungible tokens, and smart contracts are all fruited from the ongoing development of Distributed Ledger Technologies. The foreseen trend is that they will play an increasingly visible role in daily life, which will have to be backed by appropriate operational resources. For example, due to increasing demand, smart contracts could soon face a shortage of knowledgeable users and tools to handle them in practice. Widespread smart contract adoption is currently limited by security, usability and costs aspects. Because of a steep learning curve, the handling of smart contracts is currently performed by specialised developers mainly, and most of the research effort is focusing on smart contract security, while other aspects like usability being somewhat neglected. Specific tools would lower the entry barrier, enabling interested non-experts to create smart contracts. In this paper we designed and developed Blockly2Hooks, a solution towards filling this gap even in challenging scenarios such as when the smart contracts are written in an advanced language like C. With the XRP Ledger as a concrete working case, Blockly2Hooks helps interested non-experts from the community to learn smart contracts easily and adopt the technology, through leveraging well-proven teaching methodologies like Visual Programming Languages, and more specifically, the Blockly Visual Programming library from Google. The platform was developed and tested and the results are promising to make learning smart contract development smoother. [less ▲]

Self-Sovereign Identity for the Financial Sector: A Case Study of PayString Service

Scientific Conference (2021, December 06)

PayString is an initiative to make payment identifiers global and human-readable, facilitating the exchange of payment information. However, the reference implementation lacks privacy and security ... [more ▼]

PayString is an initiative to make payment identifiers global and human-readable, facilitating the exchange of payment information. However, the reference implementation lacks privacy and security features, making it possible for anyone to access the payment information as long as the PayString identifier is known. Also this paper presents the first performance evaluation of PayString. Via a large-scale testbed our experimental results show an overhead which, given the privacy and security advantages offered, is acceptable in practice, thus making the proposed solution feasible. [less ▲]

Privacy-Preserving PayString Service

Poster (2021, May)

PayString is an initiative to make payment identifiers global and human-readable, facilitating the exchange of payment information. However, the reference implementation lacks privacy and security ... [more ▼]

PayString is an initiative to make payment identifiers global and human-readable, facilitating the exchange of payment information. However, the reference implementation lacks privacy and security features, making it possible for anyone to access the payment information as long as the PayString identifier is known. Also, this paper presents the first performance evaluation of PayString. Via a large-scale testbed, our experimental results show an overhead which, given the privacy and security advantages offered, is acceptable in practice, thus making the proposed solution feasible. [less ▲]

Deep dive into Interledger: Understanding the Interledger ecosystem - Part 4

Learning material (2020)

At the technical level, the goal of Interledger is to provide an architecture and a minimal set of protocols to enable interoperability for any value transfer system. The Interledger protocol is literally ... [more ▼]

At the technical level, the goal of Interledger is to provide an architecture and a minimal set of protocols to enable interoperability for any value transfer system. The Interledger protocol is literally a protocol for interledger payments. To understand how is it possible to achieve this goal, several aspects of the technology require a deeper analysis. For this reason, in our journey to become knowledgeable and active contributor we decided to create our own test-bed on our premises. By doing so, we noticed that some aspects are well documented but we found that others might need more attention and clarification. Despite a large community effort, the task to keep information on a fast evolving software ecosystem is tedious and not always the priority for such a project. Therefore, the purpose of this document is to guide, through several hands-on activities, community members who want to engage at different levels. The document consolidates all the relevant information from generating a simple payment to ultimately create a test-bed with the Interledger protocol suite between Ripple and other distributed ledger technology. [less ▲]

Deep dive into Interledger: Understanding the Interledger ecosystem - Part 2

Learning material (2019)

At the technical level, the goal of Interledger is to provide an architecture and a minimal set of protocols to enable interoperability for any value transfer system. The Interledger protocol is literally ... [more ▼]

At the technical level, the goal of Interledger is to provide an architecture and a minimal set of protocols to enable interoperability for any value transfer system. The Interledger protocol is literally a protocol for interledger payments. To understand how is it possible to achieve this goal, several aspects of the technology require a deeper analysis. For this reason, in our journey to become knowledgeable and active contributor we decided to create our own test-bed on our premises. By doing so, we noticed that some aspects are well documented but we found that others might need more attention and clarification. Despite a large community effort, the task to keep information on a fast evolving software ecosystem is tedious and not always the priority for such a project. Therefore, the purpose of this document is to guide, through several hands-on activities, community members who want to engage at different levels. The document consolidates all the relevant information from generating a simple payment to ultimately create a test-bed with the Interledger protocol suite between Ripple and other distributed ledger technology. [less ▲]

Deep dive into Interledger: Understanding the Interledger ecosystem

Learning material (2019)

At the technical level, the goal of Interledger is to provide an architecture and a minimal set of protocols to enable interoperability for any value transfer system. The Interledger protocol is literally ... [more ▼]

At the technical level, the goal of Interledger is to provide an architecture and a minimal set of protocols to enable interoperability for any value transfer system. The Interledger protocol is literally a protocol for interledger payments. To understand how is it possible to achieve this goal, several aspects of the technology require a deeper analysis. For this reason, in our journey to become knowledgeable and active contributor we decided to create our own test-bed on our premises. By doing so, we noticed that some aspects are well documented but we found that others might need more attention and clarification. Despite a large community effort, the task to keep information on a fast evolving software ecosystem is tedious and not always the priority for such a project. Therefore, the purpose of this document is to guide, through several hands-on activities, community members who want to engage at different levels. The document consolidates all the relevant information from generating a simple payment to ultimately create a test-bed with the Interledger protocol suite between Ripple and other distributed ledger technology. [less ▲]