8,600 research outputs found
Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs
This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc
Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs
This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc
Multilateral Transparency for Security Markets Through DLT
For decades, changing technology and policy choices have worked to fragment securities markets, rendering them so dark that neither ownership nor real-time price of securities are generally visible to all parties multilaterally. The policies in the U.S. National Market System and the EU Market in Financial Instruments Directive— together with universal adoption of the indirect holding system— have pushed Western securities markets into a corner from which escape to full transparency has seemed either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Although the reader has a right to skepticism given the exaggerated promises surrounding blockchain in recent years, we demonstrate in this paper that distributed ledger technology (DLT) contains the potential to convert fragmented securities markets back to multilateral transparency.
Leading markets generally lack transparency in two ways that derive from their basic structure: (1) multiple platforms on which trades in the same security are matched have separate bid/ask queues and are not consolidated in real time (fragmented pricing), and (2) highspeed transfers of securities are enabled by placing ownership of the securities in financial institutions, thus preventing transparent ownership (depository or street name ownership). The distributed nature of DLT allows multiple copies of the same pricing queue to be held simultaneously by a large number of order-matching platforms, curing the problem of fragmented pricing. This same distributed nature of DLT would allow the issuers of securities to be nodes in a DLT network, returning control over securities ownership and transfer to those issuers and thus, restoring transparent ownership through direct holding with the issuer.
A serious objection to DLT is that its latency is very high—with each Bitcoin blockchain transaction taking up to ten minutes. To remedy this, we first propose a private network without cumbersome proof-of-work cryptography. Second, we introduce into our model the quickly evolving technology of “lightning networks,” which are advanced two-layer off-chain networks conducting high-speed transacting with only periodic memorialization in the permanent DLT network. Against the background of existing securities trading and settlement, this Article demonstrates that a DLT network could bring multilateral transparency and thus represent the next step in evolution for markets in their current configuration
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
Distributed Access Control with Blockchain
The specification and enforcement of network-wide policies in a single
administrative domain is common in today's networks and considered as already
resolved. However, this is not the case for multi-administrative domains, e.g.
among different enterprises. In such situation, new problems arise that
challenge classical solutions such as PKIs, which suffer from scalability and
granularity concerns. In this paper, we present an extension to Group-Based
Policy -- a widely used network policy language -- for the aforementioned
scenario. To do so, we take advantage of a permissioned blockchain
implementation (Hyperledger Fabric) to distribute access control policies in a
secure and auditable manner, preserving at the same time the independence of
each organization. Network administrators specify polices that are rendered
into blockchain transactions. A LISP control plane (RFC 6830) allows routers
performing the access control to query the blockchain for authorizations. We
have implemented an end-to-end experimental prototype and evaluated it in terms
of scalability and network latency.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures, 2 table
Blockchain For Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds
The global food system is under pressure and is in the early stages of a major transition towards more transparency, circularity, and personalisation. In the coming decades, there is an increasing need for more food production with fewer resources. Thus, increasing crop yields and nutritional value per crop is arguably an important factor in this global food transition.
Biofortification can play an important role in feeding the world. Biofortified seeds create produce with increased nutritional values, mainly minerals and vitamins, while using the same or less resources as non-biofortified variants. However, a farmer cannot distinguish a biofortified seed from a regular seed. Due to the invisible nature of the enhanced seeds, counterfeit products are common, limiting wide-scale adoption of biofortified crops. Fraudulent seeds pose a major obstacle in the adoption of biofortified crops.
A system that could guarantee the origin of the biofortified seeds is therefore required to ensure widespread adoption. This trust-ensuring immutable proof for the biofortified seeds, can be provided via blockchain technology
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