DESCAN: Censorship-resistant indexing and search for Web3

The popularity of blockchain technology has bootstrapped many “Web3” applications, e.g., Ethereum and IPFS, that apply distributed ledger technology to store transactions. The amount of transactions generated and stored in such Web3 applications is significant and, in its raw form, usually not searchable by users. Existing Web3 transaction...

LO: An Accountable Mempool for MEV Resistance

Manipulation of user transactions by miners in permissionless blockchain systems is a growing concern. This problem is a pervasive and systemic issue that incurs high costs for users of decentralised applications and is known as Miner Extractable Value (MEV). Furthermore, transaction manipulations create other issues such as congestion,...

A Deployment-First Methodology to Mechanism Design and Refinement in Distributed Systems

Catalyzed by the popularity of blockchain technology, there has recently been a renewed interest in the design, implementation and evaluation of decentralized systems. Most of these systems are intended to be deployed at scale and in heterogeneous environments with real users and unpredictable workloads. Nevertheless, most research in this field...

MeritRank: Sybil Tolerant Reputation for Merit-based Tokenomics

Decentralized reputation schemes present a promising area of experimentation in blockchain applications. These solutions aim to overcome the shortcomings of simple monetary incentive mechanisms of naive tokenomics. However, there is a significant research gap regarding the limitations and benefits of such solutions. We formulate these trade-offs...

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...

Gromit: Benchmarking the Performance and Scalability of Blockchain Systems

The growing number of implementations of blockchain systems stands in stark contrast with still limited research on a systematic comparison of performance characteristics of these solutions. Such research is crucial for evaluating fundamental trade-offs introduced by novel consensus protocols and their implementations. These performance...

Values for a Post-Pandemic Future

The costs of the COVID-19 pandemic are yet to be calculated, but they include the loss of millions of lives and the destruction of countless livelihoods. What is certain is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has changed the way we live for the foreseeable future. It has forced many to live in ways they would have previously thought impossible. As well as...

Ethics in the COVID-19 pandemic: myths, false dilemmas, and moral overload

Safe by design regulation for academic experimentation and value conflicts: An exploration of solution directions

In this paper, we explore solution directions for the implementation of Safe by Design (SbD) in safety regimes for academic experimentation. SbD is a dynamic and anticipatory strategy for safety regulation in academic research. In this strategy, safety is taken in a broader sense including not only issues of technical precaution of avoiding...

Sovereignty, privacy, and ethics in blockchain-based identity management systems

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) solutions implemented on the basis of blockchain technology are seen as alternatives to existing digital identification systems, or even as a foundation of standards for the new global infrastructures for identity management systems. It is argued that ‘self-sovereignty' in this context can be understood as the...

MATCH: A Decentralized Middleware for Fair Matchmaking In Peer-to-Peer Markets

Matchmaking is a core enabling element in peer-to-peer markets. To date, matchmaking is predominantly performed by proprietary algorithms, fully controlled by market operators. This raises fairness concerns as market operators effectively can hide, prioritize, or delay the orders of specific users. Blockchain technology has been proposed as an...

Open Sourcing Normative Assumptions on Privacy and Other Moral Values in Blockchain Applications

The moral significance of blockchain technologies is a highly debated and polarised topic, ranging from accusations that cryptocurrencies are tools serving only nefarious purposes such as cybercrime and money laundering, to the assessment of blockchain technology as an enabler for revolutionary positive social transformations of all kinds. Such...

The Ethical Limits of Blockchain-Enabled Markets for Private IoT Data

This paper looks at the development of blockchain technologies that promise to bring new tools for the management of private data, providing enhanced security and privacy to individuals. Particular interest presents solutions aimed at reorganizing data flows in the Internet of Things (IoT) architectures, enabling the secure and decentralized...

Fictions and frictions: Promises, transaction costs and the innovation of network technologies

New network technologies are framed as eliminating ‘transaction costs’, a notion first developed in economic theory that now drives the design of market systems. However, the actual promise of the elimination of transaction costs seems unfeasible, because of a cyclical pattern in which network technologies that make that promise create...

Blockchain Technology as an Institution of Property

This paper argues that the practical implementation of blockchain technology can be considered an institution of property similar to legal institutions. Invoking Penner's theory of property and Hegel's system of property rights, and using the example of bitcoin, it is possible to demonstrate that blockchain effectively implements all...