Blockchain-Based Smart Contract in Three-Echelon Perishable Food Supply Chain

Contemporary experience has proved the necessity of ensuring unity in the transport and logistics systems of food supplies. This is particularly relevant for perishable goods, the acceleration of delivery dates directly impacts their safety and quality. The article considers the problem of creating an effective transport process for perishable food supply chains. The analysis of influencing the efficiency of perishable food supply chains and the main principles and approaches to improve the transport support of perishable food products have been substantiated. The constructed theoretical model of a technological transportation system for perishable food goods considers compatibility (adaptability) of transport machines with agricultural machinery; technological parameters of technical systems; adaptability of technical systems to environmental conditions and technological properties of perishable food cargoes; transport and technological cycles parameters.

Smart contracts are computer codes that represent contract terms and are designed to run on a blockchain platform, automatically enforced upon receiving predetermined inputs. This technological innovation, a key component of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, provides an advanced and innovative approach to executing contract terms. Incorporating this technology into Shariah-compliant contracts within Islamic Banks (IBs) holds the potential to reduce Shariah non-compliance risk (SNC) and enhance operational transparency, ensuring compatibility with contemporary technological applications. In particular, blockchain-based smart contracts have the potential to be integrated into the operations of IBs’ products that are based on tawarruq contracts. This study aims to investigate the potential application of blockchain-based smart contract technology in tawarruq contract operations within IBs and to suggest directions for future research. This study adopted a qualitative approach, drawing on relevant literature. The findings indicated that blockchain-based smart contracts can address Shariah Non-Compliance (SNC) issues in IB’s tawarruq operations while enhancing transaction transparency. This paper discussed the Shariah and operational challenges associated with blockchain technology and posits that blockchain-based smart contracts can improve the practices of tawarruq contracts within Islamic Banks. This paper offers insights for IB entities and regulatory authorities to evaluate the potential and impact of blockchain-based smart contracts within their operations and the broader financial system.

PurposeCross border trade, involving different business environments between the sellers’ and buyers’ countries, may result in conflicts because of asymmetry in the information structure across the borders. The International Chambers of Commerce (ICC) has laid down ground rules on terms of shipment and payment, enabling harmonization and standardization of business process, and fixing of responsibilities for international trade. The international commercial (INCO) terms by ICC define the duties, obligations and cost borne by the exporter and the importer. An exporter’s uncertainty looms once the goods cross his/her border. Therefore, there is a need for a smart contract that is secured, transparent, legitimate and trustworthy. The authors propose a blockchain technology-based smart global contract (BTGC) framework for international trade.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors develop the framework based on value chain analysis (VCA) of international trade and an ontology-driven-blockchain-design approach. The paper analyzes the sequence of activities in the value chain of global trade, the terms of the contract, the data structure templates, the validation rules and the points-of-failure, and proposes the smart contract blockchain structure.FindingsThis paper proposes the BTGC framework considering the INCO terms 2020; it provides the validation rules and the probability of failures; and identifies the elements that cause the halting of contracts and conditions of creation of side blockchains. The framework also includes the governance of the BTGC system.Research limitations/implicationsThe proposed framework not only has implications at the firm level as it automates and secures a global sale contract but also is expected to harmonize the global-trade process as well. The developers may use the attributes, data structure templates and the rules identified in this paper for developing the GC software. Future research may consider using case analysis, class diagrams and the related steps for developing the blockchain software.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a complete value chain of global contract (GC) concerning exports, an ontology of GC and a blockchain-based smart-contract framework based on global standards. Besides, it specifies the elements of fraud (such as the non-integration of side chains) and uncertainty, i.e. the probability of failures. Such a framework will harmonize the global-trade process and build an international standards for smart GC based on blockchain technology (ISSGCBT), which is not yet done.

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) establishes the trustworthiness of service providers and consumers in several domains; including the Internet of Things (IoT). Given the proliferation of Blockchain technology, we find it compelling to reconsider the assumption of trust and centralised governance typically practised in SLA management including monitoring, compliance assessment, and penalty enforcement. Therefore, we argue that, such critical tasks should be operated by blockchain-based smart contracts in a non-repudiable manner beyond the influence of any SLA party. This paper envisions an IoT scenario wherein a firefighting station outsources end-to-end IoT operations to a specialised service provider. The contractual relationship between them is governed by an SLA which stipulates a set of quality requirements and violation consequences. The main contribution of this paper lies in designing, deploying and empirically experimenting a novel blockchain-based SLA monitoring and compliance assessment framework in the context of IoT. This is done by utilising Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), an enterprise-grade blockchain technology. Our work highlights a set of considerations and best practice at two sides, the IoT application monitoring-side and the blockchain-side. Moreover, it experimentally validates the reliability of the proposed monitoring approach, which collects relevant metrics from each IoT component and examines them against the quality requirements stated in the SLA. Finally, we propose a novel design for smart contracts at the blockchain-side, analyse and benchmark the performance, and demonstrate that the new design proves to successfully handle Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) conflicts typically encountered in blockchain applications, while maintaining sound throughput and latency.

A smart contract is a concept of computer protocols that helps to facilitate blockchain technology. This blockchain-based smart contract is a public ledger of all participating transactions. It is considered a self-executable application and contains predetermined rules. It also operates by decentralizing networks that are shared between all parties, and this execution of contracts between parties could be securely done without a middleman or a third party. With blockchain technology, developers could provide an efficient framework and ensure security issues. While the new blockchain has successfully been developed to prevent the problems of fraud and hacking, there is still a considerable risk concerning security and confidentiality. Therefore, we should not underestimate this matter. This study aims to review the potential risks that may take place on blockchain-based smart contracts. In addition, the options that may assist application developers in order to provide viable guidance, and to avoiding these security vulnerabilities.

Blockchain-based smart contract platforms have traditionally employed the transaction-driven execution model. This paper presents an alternate framework for blockchain-based smart contract execution called EDSC. Our platform design presents a novel approach to tackle the scalability and performance challenges facing the smart contract ecosystem. We base EDSC's design on the Ethereum template, and it can be readily implemented for other existing smart contract platforms. To evaluate our design, we perform an experimental implementation using the Ethereum client. Our experiments with performance modeling show, on average, a 2.2 to 4.6 times reduced total latency of event-triggered smart contracts, demonstrating the effectiveness of the design in supporting time-sensitive applications. Additionally, we comment on the design's potential security aspects and demonstrate its utility by discussing potential use cases.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">As electric vehicles adoption becomes more common, power grid operators are facing new challenges in managing the unpredictable and varying energy demands in the existing electrical infrastructure. Moreover, the cost of Electric vehicle is high when compared to fuel vehicle it has limited access to charging infrastructure along with the driving range that act as a key barrier preventing the drivers from making shift to EVs. When the EV usage integrates with blockchain, it mitigates the limitation in charging station infrastructure along with the former problem discussed. The lack of trust exists between EV owners and charging station providers can be solved through secure and transparent payment processing possible by blockchain based smart contract. Building charging station on blockchain will ease the automated payment through the use of smart contract and create more efficient EV charging network. Also, the blockchain-based charging system would enable EV owners know if they are being charged in excess and Prosumer know if they are being underpaid. The high initial cost is another prominent issue within the market place. To address this issue the introduction of sharing economy to the EV industry showcases another innovative solution that blockchain offers. The blockchain enabled sharing economy platform allows individuals to access collaboratively with the prosumer and the consumer. This provides alternative to traditional ownership while reduces individual financial barriers and maximizing electric vehicle utilization across the network. The EV users have great opportunity worldwide to take a stake in the future of EV adoption on blockchain. Therefore, this work demonstrates the sharing economy while designing, building, and customizing smart contracts for prosumers and consumers by enabling decentralized payment systems. Our research aims to develop decentralized charging electronic payment systems using blockchain and customized smart contracts to build and design the application. For blockchain Solidity programming language is used. The application displays the charging process, payment system, and charging history information.</div></div>

Agriculture insurance has developed across emerging economies in South East Asia (SEA). New products are introduced to farmers to lessen financial losses of crops with low commercialised. Drought-based crop insurance has launched in some SEA countries to protect farmers from extreme weather events. The evaluation process for insurance value coverage is costly and lengthy. Farmer participation in crop insurance schemes, hence, remains low. Additionally, while dealing with extreme events, stated-owned irrigation water companies with complex bureaucratic systems delay decisions. This adds a heavy toll on farmers’ shoulders when facing drought. To solve these problems, a blockchain-based smart contract linking with oracle services to ensure asymmetric information is proposed to reduce the evaluation costs and lengthy process of evaluating compensation is a. Currently, building smart contract that oracles can push required information to is not used in the case of agricultural insurance. Hence, we proposed a blockchain-based smart contract framework that applies to weather-based index insurance. We selected NEO for our experiment due to its easy access tokens. While developing a smart contract on NEO, we designed 5 functions that can be triggered if certain conditions are met and built a virtual oracles server. This initial experiment promised a scalable and trusted platform that can lessen farmers’ potential damages and reduce their vulnerability.

An electricity supply smart contract was developed and demonstrated to perform pre-time-of-use price negotiation between demand and generation and posttime- of-use settlement and payment. The smart contract was demonstrated with 1000 loads/generators with usages simulated using lognormal probability distributions. It combines payment of deposit, negotiation of price based on estimates, settlement based on actual usage and enactment of payments using crypto-currency. The settlement procedure rewards customers that adjusted to balance the system. The smart contract was written in the Solidity programming language and implemented with a simulated Ethereum blockchain using testrpc and go-ethereum. In the example test case, a price was agreed, settled and payment enacted.

Blockchain-based Smart Contract allows reliable enforcement of the programmatically specified agreement between distributed agents. However, during the process of verifying the result of transaction execution with distributed consensus protocol, private information such as fund amount being transferred can be exposed to others. To hide such sensitive information while keeping the integrity of the Smart Contract instances, we employ a homomorphic encryption technique. With this encryption technique, the validity of the arithmetic operation in a transaction can be checked without decrypting the operands. For instance, a remaining balance after fund transfer can be validated while the exact amount of the transferred fund and the final balance are kept in a ciphertext. In this work, we discuss the novel system architecture for verifying Smart Contracts instances with homomorphic encryption and evaluate its efficiency.

Email services nowadays are flooded by spam and phishing attacks. Email service providers build their own email filters to protect the final users from such attacks resulting in an overall better experience. However, the attacks come mainly from the same problem in the email protocols, i.e., the lack of authentication mechanism. In this work, we attempt to minimize some of the most common problems identified in email services such as spam, phishing, spoofing, lack of encryption, repudiation and centralization by implementing a smart contract over the Ethereum protocol. The proposal involves a decentralized system, a smart contract, a file system and two applications used as proof of concept.

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that offers a new kind of inventive service. It can handle a variety of sophisticated issues associated with the secrecy, integrity, and availability of fast and secure distributed systems. This concept paper begins by addressing the shift in people's attitudes towards the insurance industry, particularly in Malaysia, and then goes on to understand how the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), Task Technology Fit (TTF), and Initial Trust Model (ITM), influence behavioural intentions in using blockchain smart contracts. A digital insurance platform must be redefined after the increase in online insurance sales transactions prompted by COVID-19 to satisfy the market's expectations. Whereas traditional paper contracts rely on middlemen for execution, blockchain smart contracts are now based on blockchains, which include an immutable record of data and the ability to remove single points of failure. Despite the growing popularity of blockchain research in recent years, research on blockchain smart contract adoption behaviour at the individual level concerning insurance services remains limited. Hence, this study utilises the three models to characterise how performance expectancy, technological context, and initial trust interact to forecast behavioural intention. Furthermore, we stressed the need for additional research to demonstrate the intention to employ blockchain smart contracts is impacted by performance anticipation, technical environment, and personal initial trust. Based on the review, we will design realistic research that will incorporate prospects for theoretical progress as well as empirical discoveries in blockchain smart contract studies. The findings are intended to assist policymakers in developing suitable and improved strategies for capturing interest in blockchain smart contract insurance services in the Malaysian market. We also believe that the evolution of blockchain technology in tandem with smart contracts will enable the creation of new sorts of innovative services, such as insurance.

Introduction: Although blockchain technology and smart contracts are garnering attention in various sectors, their applications and familiarity within the realm of radiology remain largely unexplored. Blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger technology, offers secure, transparent, and resilient data management by distributing the verification process across a network of independent entities. This decentralized technology presents a possible solution for a range of healthcare challenges, from secure data transfer to automated verification processes. To address such challenges in the context of medical imaging, blockchain could provide different approaches, including smart contracts, machine learning algorithms, and the secure dissemination of large files among key stakeholders such as patients, healthcare providers, and institutions. This manuscript aims to explore the current attitudes and perspectives of trainees and radiologists to the utilization of blockchain technology and smart contracts in clinical radiology. Additionally, the study provides an in-depth analysis of the potential applications for incorporating blockchain into radiology.Methods: After obtaining The George Washington University Committee on Human Research Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, we conducted a 10-question survey among radiologists and trainees at several institutions and private practices. Surveys were created via the Google Forms application and were emailed to potential participants. Participants were asked about their current academic level (medical student, resident/fellow, academic radiologist, private practice radiologist, others), their knowledge level about the field of imaging informatics and blockchain and smart contract technologies, their level of interest in learning more about blockchain and smart contracts, and their opinion about possible applications of blockchain and smart contract in the future of medical imaging.Results: A total of 118 survey requests were distributed; 83 were returned, reflecting a 70.3% overall response rate. Of these, 19 were sent to private practices with a 15.8% response rate (3/19), and 99 to academic centers, yielding an 80.8% response rate (80/99). The survey respondents demonstrated a strong interest and need to further understand these technologies among radiologists and trainees. This study focuses on key components of this technology as it relates to healthcare and the practice of radiology, including data storage, patient care, secure communication, and automation, as well as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis.Discussion: To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate and establish a baseline for the current perspectives on the application of blockchain technology and smart contracts in clinical radiology amongst trainees and radiologists across academic and private settings. Incorporating blockchain and smart contracts technologies into the field of radiology has the potential to achieve greater efficiency, security, and patient empowerment. However, the adoption of this technology comes with challenges, such as infrastructure, interoperability, scalability, and regulatory compliance. Collaboration between radiologists, hospital administration, policymakers, technology developers, and patient advocacy organizations will help guide and advance our understanding of the potential applications of blockchain and smart contracts in radiology and healthcare.

This paper proposes an innovative approach to achieving real-time polymorphic behavior detection, and its direct application to blockchain-focused smart-contracts. We devise a method based on a non-deterministic finite state machine to perform approximate pattern-matching, using a look-ahead mechanism implemented through a concept similar to that of a sliding window, and using threshold-based similarity checking at every state in the automaton. We introduce and formalize our approach, discuss the challenges we faced and then test it in a real-world environment. The experimental results obtained showed a significant speed-up of our approach, as compared to the classic similarity measures used commonly in such scenarios.

The aim of this article is to investigate possible applications of blockchain technology in the fight against the pandemic, which, among other negative consequences, has disrupted global supply chains. Bottlenecks in the supply of raw materials and intermediary products for drug production had cascading effects in other areas, causing shortages in the supply of finished products. The author shows how blockchain-based smart contracts can help improve the functioning of the health service in general, how they can be used to optimize treatment methods and make social insurance more efficient. After reviewing the key features of blockchain technology and tracking the stages of its development, from the creation of the Bitcoin virtual currency to its use in smart contracts and other applications in combination with artificial intelligence in many spheres of the economy and social life, the presentation focuses on the use of blockchain in the management of medical records and its role in securing the stability of supplies of medicines and medical equipment.