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Recently emerging Decentralized Finance (DeFi) takes the promise of cryptocurrencies a step further, leveraging their decentralized networks to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent protocols that run…
Despite increasing advancements in today's information exchange infrastructure, the preservation of user data and privacy still remains a problem. Both insecure baselines and secure solutions leak user data. For example, Certificate…
Blockchains provide environments where parties can interact transparently and securely peer-to-peer without needing a trusted third party. Parties can trust the integrity and correctness of transactions and the verifiable execution of…
Digital currencies primarily operate online, but there is growing interest in enabling offline transactions to improve digital inclusion. Existing offline methods struggle with double-spending risks, often limiting transaction amounts. In…
This Request For Comment (RFC) is a proposal for a new protocol to use money over the Internet. Features like a distributed architecture, a published cryptographic algorithm, a minimal authority responsibility, the absence of fees will make…
Digital payment systems have become a cornerstone of consumer finance in Africa. Prominent payment categories include money transfer applications, mobile money, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).…
Payment channel networks, and the Lightning Network in particular, seem to offer a solution to the lack of scalability and privacy offered by Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Previous research has focused on the…
Blockchain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin cryptocurrency system, is starting to be adopted for ensuring enhanced security and privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Fervent research is currently being focused in both…
Today, digital identity management for individuals is either inconvenient and error-prone or creates undesirable lock-in effects and violates privacy and security expectations. These shortcomings inhibit the digital transformation in…
Decentralized applications (dApps) in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) face a fundamental tension between regulatory compliance requirements like Know Your Customer (KYC) and maintaining decentralization and privacy. Existing permissioned DeFi…
Blockchain applications often rely on lightweight clients to access and verify on-chain data efficiently without the need to run a resource-intensive full node. These light clients must maintain robust security to protect the blockchain's…
The most prevalent smart card-based payment method, EMV, currently offers no privacy to its users. Transaction details and the card number are sent in cleartext, enabling the profiling and tracking of cardholders. Since public awareness of…
Electronic cash (e-cash) is a digital alternative to physical currency that allows anonymous transactions between users and merchants. Typically, coins in an e-cash scheme are only dispensed through a central bank. A drawback of this…
Zero-Knowledge Proof-of-Identity from trusted public certificates (e.g., national identity cards and/or ePassports; eSIM) is introduced here to permissionless blockchains in order to remove the inefficiencies of Sybil-resistant mechanisms…
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that relies on cryptography rather than trusted third parties such as central banks for its security. Underpinning the operation of the currency is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network that facilitates…
Unlike suggested during their early years of existence, Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies in fact offer significantly less privacy as compared to traditional banking. A myriad of privacy-enhancing extensions to those cryptocurrencies as…
Open technologies, decentralized computation and intelligent applications enable the third-generation web, Web 3.0, thereby digitizing whole industries. The emerging Economy of Things (EoT) will be based on software agents running on…
Bitcoin is the world's first decentralized digital currency. Its main technical innovation is the use of a blockchain and hash-based proof of work to synchronize transactions and prevent double-spending the currency. While the qualitative…
Stablecoins and central bank digital currencies are on the horizon in Asia, and in some cases have already arrived. This paper provides new analysis and a critique of the use case for both forms of digital currency. It provides time-varying…
Data is central to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Most of the current IoT systems are using centralized cloud-based data sharing systems, which will be difficult to scale up to meet the demands of future IoT systems. Involvement of…