Decentralizing components of electronic markets to prevent gatekeeping and manipulation

The landscape of electronic marketplaces has been monopolized by a handful of market operators that have accumulated tremendous power during the last decades. This trend raises concerns about fairness and market manipulation by these operators acting as gatekeepers. These concerns have recently been outlined in the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA...

Blockchain-based solutions for privacy in the Internet of Things Smart Environment

The expansion of the Internet and wireless access has led to a widespread increase of Internet of Things applications. These smart devices are becoming a daily aspect of our lives. All the convenient and automated services provided by smart devices come from a centralized service provider. This service provider has access to all the personal...

VAPOR: A Value-Centric Blockchain that is Scale-out, Decentralized, and Flexible by Design

Blockchains is a special type of distributed systems that operates in unsafe networks. In most blockchains, all nodes should reach consensus on all state transitions with Byzantine fault tolerant algorithms, which creates bottlenecks in performance. In this paper, we propose a new type of blockchains, namely Value-Centric Blockchains (VCBs),...