Blockchain Research and Applications

About Blockchain Research and Applications

Aim and Scope

The blockchain emerged as a novel distributed consensus scheme that allows transactions, and any other data, to be securely stored and verified in a decentralized way. Considered by some as revolutionary as the Internet, the blockchain has the potential to underpin concepts, frameworks, regulations, and economics. The nascent field of blockchain research is highly interdisciplinary, and has the potential for fascinating research projects and results, sitting at the intersection of computer science, cryptography, economics, engineering, finance, law, mathematics, and politics. Many technical challenges arise with the rapid development of distributed ledger technologies. There is a great interest in applying blockchain to different application scenarios and in solving complex problems. This technology also offers superb opportunities to support the transformation of business models.

This special session aims to provide a forum for researchers in this area to carefully analyze current systems or propose new ones, in order to create a scientific background for a solid development of new blockchain technology systems.

Track 1. Theoretical and Empirical Studies and Engineering Applications

Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

• Adoption and transition dynamics
• Blockchain-enabled services
• Blockchain protocols and extensions
• Case studies (of adoption, attacks, forks, scams, …)
• Economic and monetary aspects
• Forensics and monitoring
• Fraud detection and financial crime prevention
• Game theoretic analysis of blockchain protocols
• Legal, ethical and societal aspects
• P2P network analysis
• Permissioned and permissionless blockchains
• Privacy and anonymity-enhancing techniques
• Proof-of-work, -stake, -burn, and virtual mining
• Real-world measurements and metrics
• Regulation and law enforcement
• Scalability solutions for blockchain systems
• Security and cryptography engineering questions relevant to blockchains
• Smart contracts
• Transaction graph analysis

Track 2. Initial Token Offering / Initial Coin Offering Solutions

We invite submissions of short research or/and engineering papers pertaining to the development of solutions and/or business and software ecosystems in relation to or funded by an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), or an Initial Token Offering (ITO) operation. We would expect that these ITO / ICO operations are either ongoing or recently completed or publicly announced (on a company web site, through press releases, recent white papers, etc.). The papers should begin with an introduction, followed by a study of the state of the art and competing research/solutions. It should then contain a novel or original part, a conclusion which makes it clear what are the contributions and achievements, and a list of references. Authors are expected to be not-anonymous, and for each author, a very short 3-line biography should be inserted before the bibliography section. The biographies should emphasize academic, engineering, research and software development qualifications, and professional experience. The papers should be self-contained, with a clear and well defined scope. These ITO / ICO papers are expected to attempt to demonstrate clearly that the presented solutions correspond to the ITO / ICO operations and help to achieve desirable outcomes for the business or software ecosystem being built or developed.

We welcome all sorts of:

• Feasibility studies
• Detailed design / engineering / crypto / protocol / architecture white papers
• Performance usability and security evaluations
• Software / hardware /cryptographic / other solutions to distributed storage
• Distributed execution environments
• Distributed trust and distributed business systems
• Efficient / optimized implementations
• In-depth comparative studies
• Discussions of pros and cons of how blockchain can be used to solve business problems
• Studies on intellectual property pertaining to practical applications of distributed ledger technology
• In-depth analyses of existing or future token ecosystems with token economics, transaction activity, etc.