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Publications (79)
When talking about blockchain technology in academia, business, and society, frequently generalizations are still heared about its – supposedly inherent – enormous energy consumption. This perception inevitably raises concerns about the further adoption of blockchain technology, a fact that inhibits rapid uptake of what is widely considered to be a...
The digital transformation has resulted in a web of complex systems, creating a tangled mesh of context-specific digital identities for users to manage. Despite the prevalence of privacy risks, users often remain unaware of the extent to which their personal data is used by identity providers and relying parties. Drawing on design science and netwo...
Over the past 10 years, private and public actors have been experimenting with the application of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) in the financial sector. In particular, central banks have explored different approaches toward the issuance of digital versions of cash – i.e., retail central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) – and...
This chapter first gives a brief overview of the evolution of the financial sector, highlighting key milestones such as the introduction of automated teller machines (ATMs), the rise of online and mobile banking, and the impact of FinTech innovations and open banking regulations. It then explores the paradigm shift initiated by Bitcoin and blockcha...
In the course of the digital transformation, increasing amounts of data are exchanged digitally. Business processes and regulatory compliance requirements that demand additional degrees of verifiability of the exchanged information and the accountability of corresponding stakeholders further add to the volume and sensitivity of this data. At the sa...
Im Gegensatz zu Bargeld bieten heutige elektronische Bezahlsysteme i.d.R. keine Möglichkeit für Transaktionen, in denen Details wie Betrag, Sender oder Empfänger nicht gegenüber Dritten - etwa dem Betreiber der Bezahlinfrastruktur - offengelegt werden müssen. Auf der anderen Seite stellen die durch manche Kryptowährungen ermöglichten anonymen Zahlu...
In traditional financial markets, front-running is a well-structured phenomenon. It represents a form of privileged actors utilizing knowledge or power advantages to extract undue profit at the cost of other stakeholders. Various mitigation strategies have emerged, ranging from market design to regulatory measures. More recently, a similar and subs...
In the Internet of Things (IoT), interconnected smart things enable new products and services in cyber-physical systems. Yet, smart things not only inherit information technology (IT) security risks from their digital components, but they may also aggravate them through the use of technology platforms (TPs). In the context of the IoT, TPs describe...
In the emerging space economy, autonomous robotic missions with specialized goals such as mapping and mining are gaining traction, with agencies and enterprises increasingly investing resources. Multi-robot systems (MRS) research has provided many approaches to establish control and communication layers to facilitate collaboration from a technical...
In the new space economy, space agencies, large enterprises, and start-ups aim to launch space multi-robot systems (MRS) for various in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) purposes, such as mapping, soil evaluation, and utility provisioning. However, these stakeholders' competing economic interests may hinder effective collaboration on a centralized d...
With growing awareness of sustainability and convenience expectations, customers are increasingly demanding integrated and seamless mobility in the form of mobility-as-a-service (MaaS). However, as centralized MaaS platforms have thus far failed to integrate a critical share of mobility service providers (MSPs), travelers lack opportunities to effi...
Effective identity management is essential for secure organizational processes, but organizations often do not approach it strategically. To break this trajectory, organizational policymakers need to define a clear and sustainable identity management strategy. This paper presents an overview and guidelines to help shape such strategy. It analyzes t...
Envelopment angst and concerns about the exploitative appropriation of data network effects can lead to fragmented platform markets. In this paper, we investigate if this fragmentation can be mended with decentralized platform architectures. Abstracting from an exemplary case in the mobility-as-a-service sector, we model a competitive two-platform...
The role played by decentralised services in the obfuscation of crypto-asset transactions performed on transparent blockchains has increasingly captured the attention of regulators. This is exemplified by the headlines about the U.S. Treasury's sanctions on the Ethereum-based mixer Tornado Cash. Yet, despite the existing controversies on the use of...
Decentralised cryptocurrency networks, notably those with high energy demand, have faced significant criticism and subsequent regulatory scrutiny. Despite these concerns, policy interventions targeting cryptocurrency operations in the pursuit of sustainability have largely been ineffective. Some were abandoned for fear of jeopardising innovation, w...
Blockchain technology is considered a potential solution to many challenges businesses and public institutions face within the digital transformation. Specifically,
blockchain-based IT solutions can enable cross-organizational digital interactions
for which no universally trusted intermediary exists for economic, political, or social
reasons. Relat...
Digital identity and access management (IAM) poses significant challenges for companies. Cyberattacks and resulting data breaches frequently have their root cause in enterprises’ IAM systems. During the COVID-19 pandemic, issues with the remote authentication of employees working from home highlighted the need for better IAM solutions. Using a desi...
This fundamentals article discusses efficient machine economies in which non-human agents can autonomously exchange information and value. We first identify criteria for achieving Pareto efficiency in such economies by drawing on the Coase Theorem. We then translate these economic criteria to technical requirements before developing a framework tha...
E-commerce has grown rapidly over the past years, with prevailing e-commerce platforms aggregating large amounts of customer data. This practice has several undesirable side effects, such as facilitating profiling that may lead to price discrimination and data feedback loops that can hamper competition. Moreover, data hoarding carries security risk...
Ethereum’s public distributed ledger can issue tokenised voting rights that are tradable on crypto-asset exchanges by potentially anyone. Ethereum thus enables global, unincorporated associations to conduct governance experiments. Such experiments are crucial to Decentralised Finance (DeFi). DeFi is a nascent field of unlicensed, unregulated, and n...
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) constitutes a crucial part of the European legislative framework addressing the dominance of 'Big Tech'. It intends to foster fairness and competition in Europe's digital platform economy by imposing obligations on 'gatekeepers' to share end-user-related information with business users. Yet, this may involve the proces...
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 general and seem particularly concerning in the context of novel applications such as access control for decentraliz...
The digital transformation of the medical sector requires solutions that are convenient and efficient for all stakeholders while protecting patients’ sensitive data. One example that has already attracted design-oriented research are medical prescriptions. However, current implementations of electronic prescription management systems typically crea...
Private permissioned blockchains are deployed in ever greater numbers to facilitate cross-organizational processes in various industries, particularly in supply chain management. One popular example of this trend is Hyperledger Fabric. Compared to public permissionless blockchains, it promises improved performance and provides certain features that...
Society's accelerating digital transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted clearly that the Internet lacks a secure, efficient, and privacy-oriented model for identity. Self-sovereign identity (SSI) aims to address core weaknesses of siloed and federated approaches to digital identity management from both users' and service providers' p...
In the energy transition, there is an urgent need for decreasing overall carbon emissions. Against this background, the purposeful and verifiable tracing of emissions in the energy system is a crucial key element for promoting the deep decarbonization towards a net zero emission economy with a market-based approach. Such an effective tracing system...
Blockchain is no longer just a hype technology, and effective blockchain applications exist in many industries. Yet, few blockchain projects have been successful in Europe’s energy systems. To identify the reasons for this slow progress, we reviewed the recent energy literature regarding the use of blockchain, analyzed industry reports, and intervi...
Art and collectibles markets tend to involve lower liquidity and higher fees than public equity markets. Distributed ledger technology can tokenize artworks and collectibles, so that claims to these assets can be exchanged digitally without intermediaries. Tokenization offers investors access to a global market plus a digitized paper trail, as well...
Some of the most popular decentralised cryptocurrency networks have drawn widespread criticism for consuming vast amounts of electricity and have thus become targets of regulatory interest. Attempts to influence cryptocurrency network operations via policy in the pursuit of sustainability in the past, however, have been widely unsuccessful. Some we...
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies built on blockchains have increasingly attracted investors in recent years. Motivated by the opportunities of this technology, blockchain-based applications in various sectors have also been explored. Yet, so far, finance-related applications have arguably remained the most advanced and relevant area of blockchain...
IoT data markets in public and private institutions have become increasingly relevant in recent years because of their potential to improve data availability and unlock new business models. However, exchanging data in markets bears considerable challenges related to disclosing sensitive information. Despite considerable research focused on differen...
Ticket fraud and ticket scalping activities often cause high costs as well as trust concerns for fans buying event tickets, especially in the secondary ticketing market. To address these issues, several publications and projects have proposed using blockchain technology to enable digital trust and ticket verifiability and thus to improve event tick...
Current debates on the sustainability of blockchain technology primarily focus on proof of work (PoW) cryptocurrencies. This narrow focus leads to one-sided discussions that emphasize the poor sustainability of blockchain technology. What these discussions neglect is that non-PoW blockchains have much lower energy needs. Current debates also turn a...
Analyses that fulfill differential privacy provide plausible deniability to individuals while allowing analysts to extract insights from data. However, beyond an often acceptable accuracy tradeoff, these statistical disclosure techniques generally inhibit the verifiability of the provided information, as one cannot check the correctness of the part...
Today’s systems for digital identity management exhibit critical security, efficiency, and privacy issues. A new paradigm, called Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), addresses these shortcomings by equipping users with mobile wallets and empowering them to manage their digital identities. Various companies and governments back this paradigm and promote...
In the last decades, several developments have transformed electricity systems in Europe towards liberalized and decentralized systems that are coupled inter-sectorally and interregionally. These developments have yielded various significant benefits, such as increased efficiency and robustness. However, we argue that they have also caused new inte...
This position paper discusses the challenges of blockchain applications in businesses and the public sector related to an excessive degree of transparency. We first point out the types of sensitive data involved in different patterns of blockchain use cases. We then argue that the implications of blockchains’ information exposure caused by replicat...
The work proposes policies to improve the environmental sustainability of distributed ledger technology (DLT). While the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol requires large amounts of electricity, several DLT protocols consume much less, while still being sufficiently reliable and decentralized. To move from a PoW protocol to a greener system, su...
Decentralised finance (DeFi) is a category of unlicensed, unregulated, and non-custodial financial services that utilise public, distributed ledgers like Ethereum. The Bloomberg Galaxy DeFi Index, launched in August 2021, includes nine Ethereum-based projects – non-custodial exchanges as well as lending and derivatives platforms. Each project is go...
Popular permissionless distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems using proof-of-work (PoW) for Sybil attack resistance have extreme energy requirements, drawing stern criticism from academia, business and the media. DLT systems building on alternative consensus mechanisms, particularly proof-of-stake (PoS), aim to address this downside. In this p...
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Federated machine learning (FL) allows to collectively train models on sensitive data as only the clients' models and not their training data need to be shared. However, despite the attention that research on FL has drawn, the concept still lacks broad adoption in practice. One of the key reasons is the great challenge to implement FL systems that...
Know your customer (KYC) processes place a great burden on banks, because they are costly, inefficient, and inconvenient for customers. While blockchain technology is often mentioned as a potential solution, it is not clear how to use the technology's advantages without violating data protection regulations and customer privacy. We demonstrate how...
Federated machine learning (FL) allows to collectively train models on sensitive data as only the clients’ models and not their training data need to be shared. However, despite the attention that research on FL has drawn, the concept still lacks broad adoption in practice. One of the key reasons is the great challenge to implement FL systems that...
The labeling of electricity is considered an important mechanism to differentiate renewable power generation and, thus, to incentivize the expansion of green energy. However, today's systems for documenting and trading green energy certificates suffer from multiple challenges. These could be addressed by a digital solution that holistically collect...
Enterprises have been attracted by the capability of blockchains to provide a single source of truth for workloads that span companies, geographies, and clouds while retaining the independence of each party's IT operations. However, so far production applications have remained rare, stymied by technical limitations of existing blockchain technologi...
Know your customer (KYC) processes place a great burden on banks, because they are costly, inefficient, and inconvenient for customers. While blockchain technology is often mentioned as a potential solution, it is not clear how to use the technology’s advantages without violating data protection regulations and customer privacy. We demonstrate how...
This is the third thematic report prepared by the new team leading the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum, aiming to present the latest updates and developments within the EU blockchain ecosystem. This is part of a series of reports that will be published addressing selected topics in accordance with the European Commission priorities. The aim is...
Due to blockchains' intrinsic transparency and immutability, blockchain-based applications are challenged by privacy regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Hence, scaling blockchain use cases to production often fails to owe to a lack of compliance with legal constraints. As current research mainly focuses on specific use c...
Within the last decades, our world has changed even faster and more fundamentally than before due to technical progress. Digital technologies influence many areas of our social life. At the same time, privacy and security issues in the digital environment are constantly coming to the foreground. These aspects have become increasingly important, esp...
Due to a steeply growing number of energy assets, the increasingly decentralized and segmented energy sector fuels the potential for new digital use cases. In this paper, we focus our attention on the application field of asset logging, which addresses the collection, documentation, and usage of relevant asset data for direct or later verification....
The ongoing digital transformation of the medical sector requires solutions that are convenient and efficient for all stakeholders while protecting patients' sensitive data. One example involving both patients and health professionals that has already attracted design-oriented research are medical prescriptions. However, current implementations of...
IoT data markets in public and private institutions have become increasingly relevant in recent years because of their potential to improve data availability and unlock new business models. However, exchanging data in markets bears considerable challenges related to the disclosure of sensitive information. Despite considerable research that has foc...
Most central banks in advanced economies consider issuing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to address the declining use of cash and to position themselves against increased competition from Big Tech companies, cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins. One crucial design dimension of a CBDC system is the degree of transaction privacy. Existing solut...
Bei der Blockchain-Technologie handelt es sich um ein dezentrales elektronisches Register für digitale Transaktionen. Zu den Eigenschaften der Technologie zählen u. a. eine hohe Manipulationsresistenz, welche Vertrauen in digitale Daten erzeugen kann, sowie die Möglichkeit, Prozesse und Transaktionen, ohne Intermediär abzuwickeln. Diese besonderen...
Innerhalb der letzten Dekaden hat sich unsere Welt durch technologischen Fortschritt noch schneller und fundamen-taler verändert als zuvor. Viele Teilbereiche unseres gesellschaftlichen Lebens werden heute durch digitale Technolo-gien bestimmt. Dabei rücken auch immer wieder Themen der Privatsphäre und Sicherheit im digitalen Umfeld in den Vordergr...
In 2020, the world has witnessed an unprecedented global pandemic with COVID-19. It has led nations to take measures that have an enormous impact on individuals, society, and the economy. Researchers and practitioners responded rapidly, evaluating the opportunities to capitalize on technology for tackling the associated challenges. We investigate t...
Private permissioned blockchains, such as Hyperledger Fabric, are widely deployed across the industry to facilitate cross-organizational processes and promise improved performance compared to their public counterparts. However, the lack of empirical and theoretical results prevent precise prediction of the real-world performance. We address this ga...
The enormous power consumption of Bitcoin has led to undifferentiated discussions in science and practice about the sustainability of blockchain and distributed ledger technology in general. However, blockchain technology is far from homogeneous - not only with regard to its applications, which now go far beyond cryptocurrencies and have reached bu...
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) promise to revolutionize business ecosystems by permitting secure transactions without intermediaries. A widely recognized challenge that inhibits the uptake of DLT is scalability and performance. Hence, quantifying key metrics such as throughput and latency is crucial for designing DLT-based infrastructures, a...
Zusammenfassung
Der enorme Stromverbrauch von Bitcoin hat dazu geführt, dass in Wissenschaft und Praxis oft eher undifferenziert Diskussionen über die Nachhaltigkeit von Blockchain- bzw. Distributed-Ledger-Technologie allgemein geführt werden. Allerdings ist die Blockchain-Technologie bereits heute alles andere als homogen – nicht nur hinsichtlich...
Seit der Erfindung von Bitcoin im Jahr 2008 hat die Blockchain-Technologie eine bemerkenswerte Entwicklung zu verzeichnen. Spätestens durch die enormen Wertsteigerungen von Kryptowährungen Ende 2017 gibt es im privaten und öffentlichen Sektor intensive Bemühungen, ihre Potenziale zu verstehen und zu nutzen. Der nachfolgende Beitrag geht speziell au...
Given the increasingly volatile prices on the power markets, it becomes economically more and more important for companies to develop and realize flexible strategies for energy consumption. A steady adaption of production processes which considers current power prices can take place on several levels of the automation pyramid, where each level has...
In this article, we present a new descriptive model for industrial flexibility with respect to power consumption. The advancing digitization in the energy sector opens up new possibilities for utilizing and automatizing the marketing of flexibility potentials and therefore facilitates a more advanced energy management. This requires a standardized...
Even though globalization has led to larger, faster, and more efficient
supply chains, at the same time the new worldwide interconnection has also resulted
in major challenges with respect to hidden systemic risks. In particular,
there is a lack of a holistic perspective on the entire supply network. This missing
global view prohibits the anamnesis...