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As a foundational and disruptive technology with unique features, blockchains can provide distinct technology pushes for novel business models, strategies, processes, and applications. Revised or new business models can be iteratively refined and transformed to increasingly more detailed design and implementation models to be realized by applications supported by blockchains. Governance concerns with how decisions are made, implemented, and controlled. It is an important focal point of any model and process. Blockchain enables new governance opportunities that are trusted, decentralized, automated, accountable, secured, and privacy-protected. These opportunities can be used to analyze governance issues in constructing models, processes, and blockchain applications. Based on our prototyping experience in two permissioned blockchain platforms, we propose a framework of six governance attributes for constructing consortium blockchain applications: decision process, accountability and verifiability, trust, incentive, security and privacy, and effectiveness. The framework aids in exploring blockchain-created governance opportunities and driving future research.
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This content will become publicly available on February 6, 2026
Blockchain Security and Privacy: Threats, Challenges, Applications, and Tools
Blockchain technology has heralded a new era in digital innovation, revolutionizing our approach to designing and building distributed applications in the digital sphere. Blockchain technology operates as an immutable digital ledger, where each entry representing a digital transaction is indelible and cannot be altered once established. Initially designed as the fundamental framework for cryptocurrencies, blockchain has outgrown its original purpose, demonstrating significant potential in various industries and offering a variety of security and privacy features. Our study provides a thorough and current survey of blockchain applications, security, privacy concepts, primitives, and threat models. It stands out by concentrating on how blockchain technology intersects with emerging fields like IoT, EVs, FinTech, and healthcare systems in a single framework. To provide security and privacy features, blockchain systems employ different foundational notions and primitives while tackling diverse adversarial scenarios with various capabilities and goals. This study presents a fresh examination of the current state of applications, security and privacy notions and primitives, and threat models in blockchain systems. Additionally, this work highlights existing gaps in knowledge and outlines open questions, aiming to stimulate interest in further advancements in the field.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2325452
- PAR ID:
- 10639801
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM Digital Library
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice
- ISSN:
- 2769-6480
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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