Blockchain: Enabling Decentralized Innovation

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/112533

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Exploring Blockchain Applications Across the Green Hydrogen Supply Chain: Use Cases, Functionalities, and Implementation Potentials
(2026-01-06) Grünewald, Alexander; Gürpinar, Tan; Wappner, Tobias
To combat environmental pollution from excessive fossil fuel use, efforts are underway to shift toward carbon-free energy. Green hydrogen is seen as a crucial element of the energy transition. However, building a functioning hydrogen economy remains challenging, particularly in verifying renewable origin, managing certification processes, and enabling trustworthy data exchange across supply chain actors. Blockchain technology, in particular, offers significant potential to enable secure, decentralized, and verifiable data management within green hydrogen systems. This paper explores its application through a systematic literature review and an in-depth case study of selected industry projects. The results are synthesized into four application clusters that capture distinct functional roles of blockchain across production, certification, distribution, and consumption stages of the green hydrogen value chain.
Designing Digital Sovereignty: A Framework for Digital Economies Based on Cryptoeconomic Systems
(2026-01-06) Lamberty, Ricky; Weiss, Fleming; Kirste, Daniel
The concentration of market power among technology giants in digital economies has created unprecedented challenges for competition, innovation, and democratic governance, highlighting the necessity for digital sovereignty. This work addresses the fragmented understanding of foundational components required to build sovereign digital economies based on cryptoeconomic systems. We employ a systematic literature review, analyzing 40 high-quality publications to synthesize core building blocks for digital sovereignty in digital economies and validated our findings through semi-structured interviews. This work introduces a comprehensive conceptual framework that categorizes foundational building blocks into clearly defined layers and components, bridging technical, economic, regulatory, and governance aspects. By systematically identifying these building blocks and linking them to digital sovereignty principles, this work provides actionable insights for strategic decision-making and practical implementation challenges. This helps to advance the discourse on digital sovereignty by offering a structured approach to understanding and implementing cryptoeconomic systems as viable alternatives to current centralized digital infrastructures.
Pathways to Performance: A Configurational Analysis of Consensus in DAOs
(2026-01-06) Alexy, Oliver; Baumann, Oliver; Hsieh, Ying-Ying; Sampó, Giorgia
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent a radical form of socio-technical systems, where rules are enforced by code and governance is conducted by a distributed network of stakeholders. A critical challenge in designing these systems is achieving consensus without centralized authority, yet how consensus ensures effective governance remains underexplored. This study investigates the design of DAO governance systems, utilizing data from 70 DAOs and applying Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to explore which consensus configurations lead to positive organizational outcomes. Our analysis challenges the notion of a single consensus model. Instead, we uncover 13 distinct configurations that characterize successful DAOs. Our key finding reveals a fundamental “ideation-legitimation trade-off”: successful DAOs optimize for broad participation in either the proposal (ideation) stage or the voting (legitimation) stage, but rarely both. These insights provide a nuanced framework for understanding and designing effective governance systems for DAOs.
What We Talk About When We Talk About DAOs: An Integrated Socio-Technical Framework
(2026-01-06) Sampó, Giorgia; Baumann, Oliver; Peressotti, Marco
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) integrate blockchain-based automation with novel forms of collective governance, yet research on them remains fragmented across technical and organizational silos, hindering a comprehensive understanding of DAOs as socio-technical systems. To bridge these gaps, we first conduct a systematic umbrella review of 12 prior surveys to map research themes and persistent gaps. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel, three-layer framework that explicitly links (i) technical artefacts (the infrastructure, e.g., tokens, smart contracts), (ii) governance logics (the rules, e.g., incentives, consensus mechanisms), and (iii) organizational manifestations (the outcomes, e.g., proposals, votes). By making cross-layer dependencies explicit, the framework enables more holistic theorizing, supports comparative empirical work, and provides a diagnostic tool for practitioners dealing with design trade-offs between decentralization, efficiency, and participation.
Playing Strategic Games in The Open Network (TON): Analyzing the Robustness of Proof-of-Stake Slashing Incentives
(2026-01-06) Hägele, Sascha
This paper examines the strategic behavior of rational actors in the TON blockchain, focusing on their responses to slashing mechanisms in a proof-of-stake (PoS) environment. Slashing introduces financial penalties for behavior that threatens network integrity, addressing the nothing-at-stake problem, where validators in PoS systems can support multiple chains at no cost. Although slashing is intended to deter malicious behavior by Byzantine actors, it also affects rational validators by altering their expected returns. Using a game-theoretic model inspired by the BAR framework, this study examines how rational, utility-maximizing validators weigh the risks and rewards of violating or enforcing slashing mechanisms in the presence of potentially Byzantine actors when penalty enforcement is uncertain. Located at the intersection of game theory and distributed systems, this research sheds light on compliance and deviation dynamics in PoS networks, contributing to a deeper understanding of incentive alignment in blockchain governance.
Undercollateralized Lending with Inverum DeFi Protocol
(2026-01-06) Horne, Robert; Louca, Soulla; Papangelou, Stamatis
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) enables financial services to operate without centralized intermediaries, using smart contracts and blockchain consensus to ensure transparency and trust minimization. While DeFi protocols like Aave and MakerDAO use overcollateralization to mitigate credit risk, this approach creates capital inefficiencies and limits access to borrowers lacking on-chain assets. This paper introduces Inverum, a novel DeFi lending protocol designed to support undercollateralized loans for Web3 businesses and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Inverum integrates on-chain credit scoring via soulbound tokens, decentralized liquidity pools, and governance-driven incentives to enable trustless, reputation-based lending. The protocol offers a fully composable framework for exploring undercollateralized lending without relying on traditional identity or off-chain reputation systems, contributing a research-ready model for future experimentation and protocol design.
Introduction to the Minitrack on Blockchain: Enabling Decentralized Innovation
(2026-01-06) Makridis, Christos; Louca, Soulla; Beck, Roman

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