Pay for Success: The First Generation - A Comparative Analysis of the First 10 Pay for Success Projects in the United States

Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) has released a comprehensive free report on the first 10 Pay for Success (PFS) projects that have launched in the United States. This report details how and why communities have applied this new approach to address critical social issues including early childhood education, homelessness, and criminal justice and recidivism. Pay for Success is an approach to contracting that ties payment for service delivery to the achievement of measurable outcomes. In the U.S., all of the current PFS projects have been accompanied by a form of social innovation financing, often referred to as a Social Impact Bond, in which investors provide upfront financing for the delivery of services and are repaid only if the services achieve a pre-agreed upon set of positive outcomes. The report includes a series of comparative graphics and observations on the market's development to-date. It examines project goals and project design; the partners and stakeholders involved; the underlying data, evidence, and evaluation plans; the governance and investment structures, including repayment terms and investor profiles; and project costs. To create the report, NFF drew on experience as a PFS educator, partner, and investor and conducted research using project documentation, publically available information, and stakeholder interviews. Over the past five years, NFF has conducted more than 200 PFS trainings, presentations, webinars, workshops, and convenings across the country for service providers, governments, and investors. NFF also manages the Pay for Success Learning Hub, www.payforsuccess.org, the leading national repository for education and information on Pay for Success. NFF's work on the report was made possible with the support of the Corporation for National and Community Service's Social Innovation Fund (SIF)

Electronic security - risk mitigation in financial transactions : public policy issues

This paper builds on a previous series of papers (see Claessens, Glaessner, and Klingebiel, 2001, 2002) that identified electronic security as a key component to the delivery of electronic finance benefits. This paper and its technical annexes (available separately at http://www1.worldbank.org/finance/) identify and discuss seven key pillars necessary to fostering a secure electronic environment. Hence, it is intended for those formulating broad policies in the area of electronic security and those working with financial services providers (for example, executives and management). The detailed annexes of this paper are especially relevant for chief information and security officers responsible for establishing layered security. First, this paper provides definitions of electronic finance and electronic security and explains why these issues deserve attention. Next, it presents a picture of the burgeoning global electronic security industry. Then it develops a risk-management framework for understanding the risks and tradeoffs inherent in the electronic security infrastructure. It also provides examples of tradeoffs that may arise with respect to technological innovation, privacy, quality of service, and security in designing an electronic security policy framework. Finally, it outlines issues in seven interrelated areas that often need attention in building an adequate electronic security infrastructure. These are: 1) The legal framework and enforcement. 2) Electronic security of payment systems. 3) Supervision and prevention challenges. 4) The role of private insurance as an essential monitoring mechanism. 5) Certification, standards, and the role of the public and private sectors. 6) Improving the accuracy of information on electronic security incidents and creating better arrangements for sharing this information. 7) Improving overall education on these issues as a key to enhancing prevention.Knowledge Economy,Labor Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Education for the Knowledge Economy,Knowledge Economy,Banks&Banking Reform,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Governance Indicators

ARPA Whitepaper

We propose a secure computation solution for blockchain networks. The correctness of computation is verifiable even under malicious majority condition using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC), and the privacy is preserved using Secret-Sharing. With state-of-the-art multiparty computation protocol and a layer2 solution, our privacy-preserving computation guarantees data security on blockchain, cryptographically, while reducing the heavy-lifting computation job to a few nodes. This breakthrough has several implications on the future of decentralized networks. First, secure computation can be used to support Private Smart Contracts, where consensus is reached without exposing the information in the public contract. Second, it enables data to be shared and used in trustless network, without disclosing the raw data during data-at-use, where data ownership and data usage is safely separated. Last but not least, computation and verification processes are separated, which can be perceived as computational sharding, this effectively makes the transaction processing speed linear to the number of participating nodes. Our objective is to deploy our secure computation network as an layer2 solution to any blockchain system. Smart Contracts\cite{smartcontract} will be used as bridge to link the blockchain and computation networks. Additionally, they will be used as verifier to ensure that outsourced computation is completed correctly. In order to achieve this, we first develop a general MPC network with advanced features, such as: 1) Secure Computation, 2) Off-chain Computation, 3) Verifiable Computation, and 4)Support dApps' needs like privacy-preserving data exchange

A Consensus Algorithm Based on Risk Assessment Model for Permissioned Blockchain

Blockchain technology enables stakeholders to conduct trusted data sharing and exchange without a trusted centralized institution. These features make blockchain applications attractive to enhance trustworthiness in very different contexts. Due to unique design concepts and outstanding performance, blockchain has become a popular research topic in industry and academia in recent years. Every participant is anonymous in a permissionless blockchain represented by cryptocurrency applications such as Bitcoin. In this situation, some special incentive mechanisms are applied to permissionless blockchain, such as mined native cryptocurrency to solve the trust issues of permissionless blockchain. In many use cases, permissionless blockchain has bottlenecks in transaction throughput performance, which restricts further application in the real world. A permissioned blockchain can reach a consensus among a group of entities that do not establish an entire trust relationship. Unlike permissionless blockchains, the participants must be identified in permissioned blockchains. By relying on the traditional crash fault-tolerant consensus protocols, permissioned blockchains can achieve high transaction throughput and low latency without sacrificing security. However, how to balance the security and consensus efficiency is still the issue that needs to be solved urgently in permissioned blockchains. As the core module of blockchain technology, the consensus algorithm plays a vital role in the performance of the blockchain system. Thus, this paper proposes a new consensus algorithm for permissioned blockchain, the Risk Assessment-based Consensus protocol (RAC), combined with the decentralized design concept and the risk-node assessment mechanism to address the unbalance issues of performance in speed, scalability, and security.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure