The role of blockchain technologies in digital assessment

Once information is stored on the Blockchain, it cannot be altered retroactively. This immutability makes Blockchain technology an ideal candidate to secure learning achievements and educational credentials. Keeping data trustworthy, secure and manipulation-proof has become an increasing issue in education due to the rise of digital learning environments, which often combine learning experiences, testing procedures and educational credential management. Currently, most digital learning environments safeguard their data using traditional safety systems (e.g. password protection), which in turn are not Blockchain-based, but controlled by a centralized authority. While these centralized systems provide a certain level of security against unauthorized access from outside the system, manipulation from within the system cannot be excluded. Users with high enough access rights (teachers, administrators, system managers) can still add, change or delete entries. This becomes an even greater problem when learning achievements are to be reflected in fair and transparent credit systems, and especially when these educational credits are to be valid across different institutions or even countries. Due to their ability to store data in a decentralized, transparent and manipulation-proof way, Blockchain-based technologies can provide solutions to this problem. The aim of this paper is to describe the status quo of Blockchain technologies in the educational sector, including the expected merits and drawbacks.peer-reviewe

Peer-to-Peer EnergyTrade: A Distributed Private Energy Trading Platform

Blockchain is increasingly being used as a distributed, anonymous, trustless framework for energy trading in smart grids. However, most of the existing solutions suffer from reliance on Trusted Third Parties (TTP), lack of privacy, and traffic and processing overheads. In our previous work, we have proposed a Secure Private Blockchain-based framework (SPB) for energy trading to address the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we present a proof-on-concept implementation of SPB on the Ethereum private network to demonstrates SPB's applicability for energy trading. We benchmark SPB's performance against the relevant state-of-the-art. The implementation results demonstrate that SPB incurs lower overheads and monetary cost for end users to trade energy compared to existing solutions

Carbon Trading with Blockchain

Blockchain has the potential to accelerate the deployment of emissions trading systems (ETS) worldwide and improve upon the efficiency of existing systems. In this paper, we present a model for a permissioned blockchain implementation based on the successful European Union (EU) ETS and discuss its potential advantages over existing technology. We propose an ETS model that is both backwards compatible and future-proof, characterised by interconnectedness, transparency, tamper-resistance and high liquidity. Further, we identify key challenges to implementation of a blockchain ETS, as well as areas of future work required to enable a fully-decentralised blockchain ETS