An examination of blockchain technology and Venezuela’s sovereign-based cryptocurrency including the effects of implementing a sovereign-based cryptocurrency in developing countries.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.After the 2008 financial crisis and the failure of the banking system there was a need to develop alternate payment systems where there was no intermediary involved. In 2008, Bitcoin was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, and it did not require an intermediary. The invention of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, has numerous advantages that can be beneficial to society. Venezuela, a developing country, created their own sovereign cryptocurrency as an attempt to ease the economic strain that burdens the country. The main focus of this research is to examine cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology by looking at Venezuela’s Petro as the model to assess whether such a development would be beneficial to a developing country such as South Africa. In addition, any risks that are attached to this invention will be examined. his research was based on the qualitative approach. Various journal articles, online articles and legislation was consulted to assist with the research of this paper. This research was aimed at assisting the relevant stakeholders of developing countries such as South Africa since such countries are facing economic crises. The Petro which was introduced by Venezuela has been critiqued to have numerous flaws due to the lack of research and investigation by the Venezuelan government. Furthermore, such a development defeats the purpose of a cryptocurrency. The South African Reserve Bank experimented with distributed ledger technology which is based on the blockchain, where interbank transactions were simulated. Although the experiment was successful, the South African Reserve Bank stated that such a system would not be implemented currently as more research needs to be conducted. Considering the various implications, it was concluded that introducing a sovereign cryptocurrency would not be viable and feasible in a country like South Africa. This research paper recommends that the developing countries consider implementing blockchain technology in various institutions as this technology has many uses and advantages such as assisting with the voting process, as well as minting citizen’s information. A further recommendation is for the South African Reserve Bank to research the area of blockchain technology in the banking system as this would decrease interbank transactional costs thereby allowing more transactions to be completed in a shorter amount of time

Benchmark and comparison between hyperledger and MySQL

In this paper, we report the benchmarking results of Hyperledger,  a Distributed Ledger, which is the derivation Blockchain Technology.  Method to evaluate Hyperledger in a limited infrastructure is developed. Themeasured infrastructure consists of 8 nodes with a load of up to 20000 transactions/second. Hyperledger consistently runs all evaluation, namely, for 20,000 transactions, the run time 74.30s, latency 73.40ms latency, and 257 tps. The benchmarking of Hyperledger shows better than a database system in a high workload scenario. We found that the maximum size data volume in one transaction on the Hyperledger network is around ten (10) times of MySQL. Also, the time spent on processing a single transaction in the blockchain network is 80-200 times faster than MySQL. This initial analysis can provide an overview for practitioners in making decisions about the adoption of blockchain technology in their IT systems

Blockchain Technology and The Current Discussion on Fraud

Blockchain has received increased attention from both the academic and practitioner worlds. Numerous papers have been written on how blockchain works and its potential applications. However, few studies have focused on fraudulent activities on blockchain. The purpose of this study is to understand common issues and scams related to blockchain. A literature review was conducted to identify top security issues on blockchain. In addition, we collected tweets on blockchain fraud discussion from November 6, 2018 to December 31, 2008. The results of tweets analysis show that the most frequently mentioned words in tweets include scams, crypto/cryptocurrency, ICO, Bitcoin, Ethereum,combat/fight, Asia, Japan, and Germany. The top mentioned sentiment words include scam, combat, guilty, prevent,solution, tired, and fake. In addition, a sentiment analysis shows that the majority of the tweets (69%) on the discussion on blockchain fraud are negative. The findings also shows the majority of top influencers of the topic are the companies that have developed blockchain-based platforms/applications

What determines FinTech success? — A taxonomy-based analysis of FinTech success factors

Value creation in the financial services sector has been fundamentally transformed by digitally born financial technology (FinTech) companies. FinTech companies synthesize information systems with financial services. Given its disruptive power, the FinTech phenomenon has received great attention in academic research, practice, and media. Still, limited systematic research provides a structure and holistic view of FinTechs’ success. Aiming to enhance understanding of the factors enabling FinTech success, we classify success factors across extant scientific literature on distinct FinTech business model archetypes. Our analysis reveals that the “cost–benefit dynamic of the innovation,” “technology adoption,” “security, privacy, and transparency,” “user trust,” “user-perceived quality,” and “industry rivalry” are crucial factors for FinTech success and can be seen as “grand challenges” for the FinTech ecosystem. In addition, we validate and discuss our findings with real-world examples from the FinTech industry and two interviews with stakeholders from the FinTech ecosystem. Our study contributes to the knowledge of FinTechs by providing a classification system of success factors for practitioners and researchers

HoneyBadgerMPC and AsynchroMix: Practical AsynchronousMPC and its Application to Anonymous Communication

Multiparty computation as a service (MPSaaS) is a promising approach for building privacy-preserving communication systems.However, in this paper, we argue that existing MPC implementations are inadequate for this application as they do not address fairness, let alone robustness. Even a single malicious server can cause the protocol to abort while seeing the output for itself, which in the context of an anonymous communication service would create a vulnerability to censorship and deanonymization attacks. To remedy this we propose a new MPC implementation, HoneyBadgerMPC, that combines a robust online phase with an optimistic offline phase that is efficient enough to run continuously alongside the online phase. We use HoneyBadgerMPC to develop an application case study, called AsynchroMix, that provides an anonymous broadcast functionality. AsynchroMix features a novel MPC program that trades off between computation and communication, allowing for low-latency message mixing in varying settings. In a cloud-based distributed benchmark with 100 nodes, we demonstrate mixing a batch of 512 messages in around 20 seconds and up to 4096 messages in around two minutes