Search Results (503)

There is diminished transparency, fragmented information exchange, and lack of trust among geographically dispersed stakeholders, which increasingly challenge global supply chains. The classic centralized systems of supply chain management are not always capable of being able to offer real-time traceability and data integrity which is dependable and effective in contract enforcement. The proposed study is a blockchain-based smart contract design that is focused on ensuring increased transparency, traceability and trust in global supply chain management. The suggested framework will combine automated smart contracts, cryptographic provenance tracking, permissioned blockchain consensus, and a decentralized trust score evaluation mechanism to overcome some of the major operation and governance challenges. A simulated assessment with a multi-tier global supply chain setting of 15 blockchain nodes and 12,000 transactions was performed through experimentation. The findings show that the proposed system attained an average transaction delay of 210 ms, which is very low compared to centralized systems (520 ms), with throughput being raised to 120 transactions per minute. End-to-end traceability performance also improved significantly, with a reduction in trace-back time to 8 s compared with 95s this represents a 100% tampering detection rate. The consensus mechanism ensured that the ledger integrity failed only at a rate of less than 1.1%, even when more than 30% of nodes were faulty. Risk-wise, the trust evaluation algorithm dynamically enhanced reliable supplier scores up to 12%, which facilitated the selection of reliable partners. On the whole, the results prove that smart contracts based on blockchains can drastically enhance the efficiency of operations, data integrity, and confidence in global supply chains, with the platform capable of providing a resilient and scalable backbone for the future supply chain management model. Full article

Recent studies highlight blockchain’s potential to enhance residential energy efficiency by enabling traceable, verifiable, and incentivized household actions. This research focuses on optimal organizational models, technology choices, and measurement systems needed to support carbon reduction at the residential level through blockchain. To do so, a multiple-case study was conducted, analyzing six companies that leverage blockchain in the context of carbon markets. Data have been collected through direct, semi-structured interviews with informants from each company. Results from the six cases have been analyzed through a cross-case comparison and clustered to identify three different archetypes of business ecosystem. The results suggests that blockchain supports residential energy efficiency and carbon markets through behavioural incentives, infrastructural integration and hybrid measurement, and reporting and verification systems. They also indicate that blockchain effectiveness depends less on specific protocols than on aligning technological design, governance, and ecosystem context across civic, financial, and institutional models. Full article

The smart city represents a new stage in urban evolution, driven by technological progress, social transformations, and the increasing emphasis placed on sustainability. This metamorphosis generates hub-type architectural models, used not only for data collection and interconnection but also for the management and monitoring of people, resources, and urban services. This discussion addresses how digital urbanism has followed different paths globally by synthesising technological, economic, social, and governance perspectives. Compared with traditional models of urbanisation, new smart cities are built not only for digital interconnection but also to be citizen-centred, environmentally friendly, and resilient to global crises. This article analyses recent scientific literature on the theoretical and practical foundations of technologies that support data-driven decision-making, infrastructure efficiency, and the delivery of inclusive public services. At the same time, major challenges are highlighted, such as the lack of system interoperability, information fragmentation, and the risks associated with excessive surveillance, which can generate social exclusion, as well as financial and political constraints. International examples from Helsinki, Barcelona, Dubai, and Singapore offer both models that have achieved success and critical lessons about the limits of these approaches. This paper is not limited only to the problems faced by smart cities. It also highlights the opportunities they can bring. Finally, based on the conclusions of the analysis carried out and the identified trends, a strategic framework is proposed, oriented towards responsible innovation, collaboration, and sustainability. This approach contributes to informing researchers, decision-makers, urban planners, and the public interested in the transformation of the urban environment. Full article

Using transaction cost economics (TCE) and agency theory, this paper examines how blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) reconfigure financial services across payments, wealth management, real estate, and corporate governance. Three research questions are addressed: (1) What are the quantifiable efficiency gains from blockchain-based real-time settlement compared with legacy systems? (2) How do blockchain technologies reduce intermediation and agency costs in wealth management and real estate? (3) Finally, to what extent do DAOs resolve or transform traditional corporate governance problems? By combining a present-value model calibrated to U.S. Automated Clearing House (ACH) data ($86.2 trillion in annual volume), comparative institutional analysis, and synthesis of empirical evidence from pilot implementations and on-chain governance metrics, this paper makes three principal contributions. First, real-time settlement yields approximately $12 billion in annual opportunity cost savings at the baseline 7.5% discount rate, with sensitivity analysis producing a range of $8–15 billion. The majority of gains accrue from moving to same-day or within-hour settlement. Second, tokenization and smart contract escrow substantially reduce real estate intermediation costs, blockchain-based digital identity streamlines wealth management onboarding, and a stablecoin taxonomy classifies fiat-collateralized, crypto-collateralized, and algorithmic designs by risk profile. Third, on-chain data reveal persistent governance token concentration (Gini > 0.98) and low voter participation (typically below 10%), exposing a gap between DAO theory and practice. Blockchain-specific risks are mapped to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, and mechanism design solutions, such as quadratic voting and AI-assisted proposal evaluation, are proposed to address whale dominance. Effective adoption requires hybrid architecture combining on-chain automation with off-chain structures for accountability and regulatory compliance. Full article

During elections, information manipulation on social media has accelerated the use of artificial intelligence, yet the evidence is difficult to interpret without an integrated view of methods, data, and evaluation. We mapped 557 English-language journal articles from Scopus and Web of Science, combining performance indicators, science mapping, and a focused full-text synthesis of highly cited papers. The literature grows sharply after 2019, peaks in 2025, and shows geographically uneven production, with collaboration structured around a small set of hubs. The thematic structure suggests that, during the pandemic era, infodemic-related research served as a catalyst, intensifying scientific attention to fake news and disinformation and expanding the associated detection and monitoring agendas. In addition, socio-political harm constructs such as hate speech, extremism, and polarization appear as recurrent and structurally central targets, highlighting that election-relevant work often extends beyond veracity assessment toward monitoring discourse risks. Blockchain also emerges as a novel and adjacent integrity theme, aligned with authenticity and provenance-oriented mitigation rather than mainstream detection pipelines. AI for electoral disinformation is not reducible to veracity classification, as influential studies also target automation and coordinated behavior, verification support, diffusion analysis, and estimation frameworks that focus on exposure and impact. Evaluation remains heterogeneous and is often shaped by benchmark settings, making high accuracy values hard to compare and potentially misleading when labeling quality, topic leakage, or context shift are not characterized. Overall, the findings motivate evaluation protocols that align operational objectives with modeling roles and explicitly address robustness to temporal and platform changes, asymmetric error costs during election windows, and representativeness across electoral contexts and languages, while also guiding future work on emerging integrity challenges and governance-relevant deployment settings. Full article

Under China’s rural revitalization and agricultural modernization strategies, digital village construction overcomes resource limits to drive transformation. Using 2013–2022 provincial panel data and a case study of Lin’an, Hangzhou, this study reveals how digital villages boost high-quality agriculture. The empirical results show they significantly enhance agricultural total factor productivity via three paths: IoT-driven precision production, blockchain-enabled green value addition, and e-commerce direct sales demonstrate more pronounced effectiveness in major grain-producing regions and those characterized by balanced production and sales. Simultaneously, this study employs the instrumental variable (TI) approach to address endogeneity from reverse causality and omitted variables. Mechanism testing reveals agricultural technological innovation exerts a significant 77.5% mediating effect. Finally, digital rural construction exhibits a non-linear threshold (0.3082); surpassing it triggers a gradual slowdown in growth with decreasing marginal returns. The Lin’an case validates the empirical results while revealing structural barriers, including industrial chain penetration gaps, data silos, and factor supply constraints, leading to the formulation of targeted optimization strategies. The practical contribution of this study is the proposal of a “data-value-technology” closed loop: public brands like “Tianmu Mountain Treasures” channel premiums into R&D funds, creating a self-sustaining mechanism. The findings indicate that digital villages drive high-quality agriculture primarily through direct effects, powered by full-chain tech coordination, institutional reform, and inclusive factor supply. Finally, this study proposes a coordinated governance framework encompassing “technical synergy, institutional innovation, and factor optimization,” providing theoretical support and strategic references for optimizing the pathways of regional agricultural digital transformation. Full article

In increasingly interconnected tactical environments, cybersecurity, trust, and interoperability must evolve in tandem. Federated Coalition Networks (FCNs) enable multinational cooperation while preserving national sovereignty; however, the secure management of identities, policies, and configurations across coalition domains remains a critical challenge, particularly under adversarial and resource-constrained conditions. This paper proposes a blockchain-enabled management framework aligned with the defense-in-depth paradigm, focusing on management-plane functions such as policy enforcement, public key infrastructure (PKI) management, and auditable governance, rather than time-critical tactical communications. The solution relies on a permissioned blockchain architecture with Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus, avoiding energy-intensive Proof-of-Work mechanisms and supporting operation under Disconnected, Intermittent, and Low-bandwidth (DIL) conditions. A coalition-level trust-and-governance model is introduced to prevent unilateral control while preserving national autonomy. A realistic use case and a proof-of-concept implementation demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, showing bounded latency, limited energy overhead, and sufficient throughput for FCN management. These results indicate that appropriately tailored blockchain solutions can effectively enhance resilience, trust, and compliance in federated defense networks. Full article

Blockchain is frequently presented as a decentralised infrastructure capable of enhancing efficiency and trust by replacing or bypassing legacy institutions. Such accounts, however, often treat blockchain as a neutral technical system and overlook the ethical and political consequences of institutional transformation through code. This perspective article applies Andrew Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology to examine blockchain as a normative socio-technical system shaping institutional transformation, governance practices, and moral expectations. Using a conceptual, critical-theoretical methodology supported by illustrative cases from decentralised finance, blockchain-based land registries, and decentralised autonomous organisations, the paper illustrates how blockchain design and governance embed values that may reinforce exclusion, obscure accountability, and constrain democratic contestation. In response, the article proposes a set of normative principles intended to guide ethical reflection on blockchain-based institutional change: participatory co-design; reflexivity and reversibility; moral pluralism through modular governance; and embedded ethical impact assessment. These principles are advanced as evaluative criteria for ethically responsible blockchain-based institutional transformation. By extending Feenberg’s framework into the domain of blockchain ethics, the paper shifts ethical debate beyond privacy and compliance toward questions of institutional legitimacy, democratic rationalisation, and context-sensitive innovation. Full article

The present article examines the pioneering case of blockchain adoption in local government by the City of Lugano and discusses how Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) may support institutional innovation beyond pilot experimentation. The Swiss municipality of Lugano has developed an integrated strategy that combines permissioned blockchain infrastructure (SwissLedger), a municipal payment token (LVGA), digital literacy and payment innovation initiatives (Plan ₿), and the issuance of fully digital municipal bonds. By adopting a case study methodology, the analysis draws on quantitative indicators of platform usage, operational data, and a sentiment analysis of media coverage to document technological developments and socio-economic patterns correlated with the initiative. SwissLedger has been adopted as an infrastructural experiment for secure document notarization, public administration digital services, open-finance interoperability with optional compliance tools, and sector-specific applications. Furthermore, the Plan ₿ initiative emerges as a communication catalyst, generating international visibility and positive sentiment, alongside descriptive statistics consistent with local economic activity. Lugano’s digital bond issuances also attracted attention to the potential of how DLT could support settlement processes and transparency in public finance. Overall, the evidence gathered suggests that DLT adoption in local government is not merely a technological upgrade, but rather part of a broader organizational transformation process. The case findings also outline a set of potentially transferable elements for municipalities seeking to align innovation with public value creation. Full article

In the wake of rapid digital transformation, emerging technologies like FinTech, AI, and Blockchain are reimagining how countries pursue sustainable development. This study examines how FinTech adoption, Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness, and Blockchain activity influence sustainable development performance across G20 economies over the period 2015–2023. Drawing on Innovation-Driven Growth Theory, the Technology–Organization–Environment framework, and Institutional Theory, the analysis evaluates both the direct and complementary effects of these digital technologies on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) outcomes using cross-country panel data and key macroeconomic controls. The results show that FinTech, AI, and Blockchain each exert a positive and statistically significant impact on national sustainability performance, with AI exhibiting the strongest effect. Moreover, the findings reveal meaningful digital complementarities, indicating that coordinated adoption of these technologies amplifies sustainable development gains. Overall, the study provides robust macro-level evidence that digital transformation functions as a strategic driver of sustainability and offers policy-relevant insights for G20 governments seeking to accelerate inclusive, transparent, and environmentally responsible development. Full article

Collaboration is a cornerstone of digital transformation in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector. Despite widespread adoption of building information modeling (BIM), a critical “human factor gap”—the disconnect between rapid technological advancement and organizational readiness—remains largely unaddressed. This study investigates the intellectual structure of BIM collaboration research. Adopting a mixed-methods review design, it conducts a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 1595 journal articles indexed in Web of Science and Scopus, followed by a qualitative content analysis of 38 purposefully selected studies. Findings reveal a clear shift from process-oriented collaboration frameworks toward data-centric and cyber–physical systems, including digital twins, Artificial Intelligence, and blockchain-enabled environments. However, this evolution also highlights a notable asymmetry in BIM collaboration, with technology-driven dynamics substantially outweighing human and organizational considerations. This imbalance, conceptualized as a human factor gap in thematic development observed through the bibliometric analysis, points to a potential socio-technical misalignment, in which technological topics receive more scholarly attention than organizational and human factors. Rather than framing collaboration maturity as a purely technical challenge, the study emphasizes the need for advanced digital infrastructure, human-centered governance models, organizational readiness, and socio-technical competencies. It provides analytical insights for researchers and implications for policymakers and industry stakeholders, emphasizing the necessity of integrated approaches that address both the technological and human dimensions of BIM-enabled collaboration. Full article

This research analyses how the joint integration of artificial intelligence and blockchain can contribute to the resilience and sustainability of multimodal transport chains. We adopt an interpretivist and constructivist stance in order to understand the modalities of appropriation, negotiation, and deployment of AI–blockchain mechanisms at the port–rail–road interfaces. The data come from 29 semi-structured interviews conducted with four categories of actors involved in multimodal corridors: digital-solution start-ups, transport–logistics SMEs, industrial shippers, and infrastructure managers. The thematic analysis, conducted through an abductive approach, highlights that the expected effects of AI and blockchain do not manifest directly on sustainability, but mainly pass through four mediating organizational mechanisms. First, shared logistics visibility appears as the decisive entry point. Inter-organizational coordination, supported by augmented governance mechanisms, conditions the translation of visibility into joint decisions. Third, distributed trust is built around shared evidence. Transactional automation unfolds gradually, with an ambivalence between efficiency gains and risks of rigidity in crisis situations. These mechanisms jointly fuel resilience as well as sustainability. The study proposes an integrated conceptual model and opens the way to a confirmatory phase by suggesting avenues for operationalizing the constructs. Full article

Blockchain technology has increasingly drawn the attention of governments seeking to modernize public services through transparent, secure, and efficient digital infrastructures. Drawing on case studies from diverse regions, including the UAE, Estonia, Georgia, Colombia, and multiple Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, this systematic review synthesizes implementation patterns across domains such as land administration, digital identity, procurement, and intergovernmental payments. The critical analysis highlights blockchain’s capacity to establish tamper-evident records, automate verification, and reduce administrative overhead while also addressing technical and institutional factors that shape its impact. Outcomes across successful deployments suggest that benefits are most pronounced when blockchain aligns with real governance needs and is supported by robust legal and digital infrastructure. This review also identifies key barriers to adoption, including interoperability challenges, regulatory uncertainty, limited technical capacity, and resistance to organizational change. Notably, this review highlights a critical but underexplored dimension involving the need for public accountability not only in service delivery but also in the governance of blockchain systems themselves. By examining real-world use cases alongside technical and policy frameworks, this review advances a deeper understanding of blockchain’s role in reshaping public administration and sets a research agenda for building more trusted, auditable, and inclusive digital government systems. Full article

This study examines intelligent judgment formation in blockchain-based public digital wallet systems within smart city environments. Drawing on an integrated framework that combines cognitive evaluation, social influence, and trust–risk appraisal, this research conceptualizes intelligent decision-making as a socially embedded and contextually enacted evaluative process rather than a fixed cognitive attribute. A structural equation modeling approach is employed to analyze the interrelationships among perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, subjective norms, social electronic word of mouth, trust–risk appraisal, attitude, and behavioral intention. The findings indicate that socially distributed information signals play a dominant role in shaping evaluative integration and decision readiness, while cognitive and institutional appraisals operate primarily through mediated pathways. The results suggest that intelligent action in public digital service ecosystems emerges from the coordinated interaction of usability perception, institutional confidence, and socially calibrated information flows. These findings contribute to theoretical extensions of technology acceptance models in public governance contexts and offer implications for the design of socially responsive digital service infrastructures. Full article

The transition to electric mobility requires the coordinated evolution of vehicles, charging infrastructure, power systems, and intelligent digital platforms. This study examines the role of Industry 4.0 technologies in enabling large-scale electric vehicle (EV) adoption and effective EV grid integration and synthesizes the existing evidence into a coherent analytical framework to support planning and policy decision-making. A systematic review of 27 peer-reviewed studies published between 2018 and 2025 was conducted in accordance with PRISMA 2020 guidelines, capturing the acceleration of electromobility following the consolidation of Industry 4.0 technologies and the emergence of large-scale policy commitments worldwide. The analysis covers six technology families, including the Internet of Things, big data and analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, blockchain, digital twins, and extended reality, and examines their applications in smart charging, grid vehicle coordination, fleet optimization, and vehicle-to-grid services. The findings show that analytics and artificial intelligence consistently enhance operational reliability and efficiency, while digital twins are increasingly applied to infrastructure siting, grid impact assessment, and scenario analysis. Building on these results, the study proposes a three-layer analytical framework composed of physical, digital, and decision layers, together with a functional EV grid generation integration model that links technology readiness to system-level deployment. In addition, a transition timeline for the 2025–2040 period and a concise set of key performance indicators are introduced to support evaluation and comparison. Policy implications for Ecuador and Latin America emphasize interoperability, data governance, realistic cost assessment, and a phased approach to vehicle-to-grid deployment. Full article