Blockchain

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3 papers in the last 28 days · 0.0% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-14

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Blockchain.

25 papers

Latest in Blockchain

Sep 2, 2026cs.CR

Population-Calibrated Graph Screening at 835-Million-Address Scale, with Label-Free Transfer to New Chains

Compliance screening of blockchain addresses is, in practice, a lookup against sanctions registries plus clustering heuristics; it fails on unlabelled addresses and on chains with no label coverage at all. We describe a deployed system that scores an address by its position in a multi-chain transaction graph rather than by its presence in a list. The substrate is a single graph of 835,330,427 addresses and 15,826,261,934 edges across five EVM chains; a shared inductive encoder with per-chain normalisation feeds two scoring heads. Decision thresholds are exact quantiles of the score distribution over the full population, scanned per chain segment, so the alert volume is known in advance. We report: label-free transfer: heads trained on two chains recall 0.8598 / 0.8182 / 0.9967 of held-out positives on Base, Arbitrum and Gnosis at a 10310^{-3} population alert rate, with no target-chain labels in head training; a static lead-time replay over 68 external registry events: 40 of 68 (58.8%) flagged at the 0.1% budget, ×\times152 over an event-level random-flagging baseline, with first on-chain appearance a median of 528.8 days (Ethereum) / 647.8 days (Tron) before public designation; a serving path whose score is bit-identical to the offline artefact at end-to-end p50 151 ms, gated by a 2,882-address drift panel; and an adversarial harness of eight recurrent reinforcement-learned archetypes that passes an 8-criterion degeneracy audit and, on a detector-independent snapshot, exposes a measured blind spot of the deployed heads against synthesised behaviour.
Yury Korolev
Sep 2, 2026q-fin.GN

Tempting the Agent: The Economics of Reputation without Persistent Identity in AI Agent Markets

Reputation is a fundamental mechanism through which markets sustain trust when service quality cannot be perfectly assessed ex ante, constituting a form of intertemporal economic capital by attracting future demand. Its effectiveness as a disciplinary mechanism depends not only on past interactions but also on the persistence of the identity to which reputation is attached. When identities can be abandoned and recreated cheaply, reputational capital may itself become an object of opportunistic exploitation. This paper develops a dynamic economic framework to study when reputation is sufficient to discipline autonomous agents. We model reputation as capital attracting future economic activity. At each point, an agent chooses between operating honestly, investing in quality to preserve future gains, or executing a one-shot deviation to extract its reputation's value and restart from a penalized identity. Our analysis relates the temptation to opportunistic behavior to identity-reset costs, reputation persistence, demand sensitivity, and enforcement design, deriving comparative statics on optimal quality provision. Autonomous AI-agent operating on the blockchain are a relevant application: infrastructures such as ERC-8004, ERC-8183, and x402 combine reputation, identity, and payments in permissionless markets. Nonetheless, our framework applies to any environment where reputation generates future business and identities are replaceable.
Federico Gatta, Manuel Naviglio, Francesco Tarantelli
Aug 30, 2026cs.AI

Spec2Twin-Chain: Orchestrating Bi-Level Optimization with LLMs for Blockchain Digital Twin Construction

Building a blockchain digital twin largely requires translating domain knowledge and specific system descriptions into a simulator architecture, calibrating its parameters against behavioral evidence, and validating the constructed twin. These steps are commonly performed through application-specific modeling efforts that can be difficult to reuse across systems and downstream decision problems. We consider automating this process through Spec2Twin-Chain, a framework that formulates blockchain digital-twin construction as a bi-level optimization problem. At the upper level, a large language model proposes and revises structurally admissible architectures using system specifications, behavioral evidence, and feedback from evaluated designs. At the lower level, a simulation-based optimizer calibrates the architecture-conditioned parameters under explicit objectives and guardrail constraints. The two levels iterate. The evaluated candidates at lower levels are retained in a global archive and used to guide subsequent proposals at upper levels. We conduct controlled experiments involving twin calibration, feedback-driven recovery, stress analysis, downstream policy optimization, and policy updating. The results demonstrate that the framework can construct behaviorally accurate twins, improve initial designs through iterative feedback, and reuse calibrated twins to support downstream decisions.
Haoting Zhang, Haoxian Chen, Jiayuan Sheng +4
Aug 13, 2026cs.CR

Discovering Persistent Behavioural Patterns for Interpretable Blockchain Forensics

Public blockchain data enables large-scale DeFi-related analysis, but many existing approaches are application-specific, difficult to scale, or hard to interpret. This research proposes a scalable, application-agnostic framework for \emph{persistent behavioural pattern discovery} from large-scale blockchain activity. It constructs behaviour sentences enriched with contract, token and market context, then applies a two-step embedding process: sentence-level embeddings capture individual actions, while sequence-level embeddings capture user behaviour over time. An interpretable behavioural profiler characterizes discovered communities through behavioural motifs, routines, temporal dynamics, entity exposure, and suspiciousness evidence. Evaluation on Ethereum using over 30 million transactions shows that the framework uncovers both routine and malicious behavioural patterns, including decentralised exchange (DEX) trading, NFT activity, phishing, bot operations, oracle manipulation, and rug-pull schemes. Importantly, many patterns remain stable across independent observation windows, enabling the identification of long-term behaviours beyond a single analysis period. The proposed framework combines scalability, interpretability, and persistence analysis, supporting blockchain forensic investigation, behavioural attribution, and threat discovery.
Dorottya Zelenyanszki, Zhe Hou, Kamanashis Biswas +1
Aug 10, 2026cs.DC

Defining Decentralization: An Ontological Perspective

Decentralization as a concept in computer science has existed for over half a century. Despite its fundamental role across domains such as security, distributed computing, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructures, and Internet of Things (IoT) architectures, there remains no universally accepted definition of decentralization applicable across computer communication systems. This has become increasingly problematic with the emergence of decentralized AI and machine learning paradigms, including collaborative training, distributed inference, blockchain-based, and agentic AI, where decentralization is often treated as a core design objective. Meanwhile, existing approaches frequently conflate decentralization with related notions such as distribution of trust or specific implementation paradigms. Such ambiguity creates inconsistencies in system analysis, limits comparability between works, and weakens the rigor of formal reasoning surrounding communication architectures and protocol design. In this work, we define this research gap as the Decentralization Problem. We analyze the formal-semantic, epistemological, and pragmatic foundations of decentralization and introduce a graph-based ontology defining it as both relational and subject-specific property of computer communication systems. The framework formally distinguishes decentralization from distribution and supports evaluation through two novel metrics: Void Tolerance and Imperviousness. We also provide a browser-based implementation that enables automated classification and metric computation of arbitrary systems. Instantiations to federated learning and blockchain architectures show consistent, comparable assessments where existing definitions produce incomplete or contradictory conclusions, providing a domain-independent foundation for analysing decentralization across heterogeneous systems.
Jakub Kacper Szeląg, Aydin Abadi, Mohammad Naseri
Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

ChainClaw: A Layered Agent Framework for Reliable On-Chain Execution

General-purpose large language model agents have achieved strong performance on tool-augmented tasks, yet they rely on assumptions break down in blockchain environments. On-chain execution is stateful, adversarial, and economically irreversible, exposing three fundamental gaps: Reactivity, Irreversibility, and Observability. We propose ChainClaw, a blockchain-native agent framework built on OpenClaw, that addresses all three gaps through a layered architecture comprising an event-driven orchestration layer, a simulation-based safety intelligence layer, and an on-chain monitoring runtime layer, unified by a cross-layer memory subsystem. ChainClaw closes the Reactivity gap via event ingestion and simulation feedback, the Irreversibility gap via a pre-execution safety pipeline with transaction simulation and action guard, and the Observability gap via an on-chain read adapter and transaction monitor. We evaluate ChainClaw on a purpose-built benchmark covering seven tasks across four categories and five dimensions. ChainClaw consistently outperforms representative baselines on both safety and task completion.
Jiacheng Wei, Zhaoxin Fan, Xin Wen +5
Aug 4, 2026cs.CR

Internalising the Identity Primitive: Cryptographic Individuality for an Autonomous Agent on a Public Blockchain

A software agent on a public blockchain accumulates authority and economic stakes, raising the engineering question of what makes it count as an individual. The paper's central contribution is a shift of trust root for the key-to-weights binding of agent identity: from hardware, operator, or wrapper trust to cryptographic assumptions enforced by a pinned implementation (liveness, key custody, oracle trust, and the underlying software stack remain external). We design and deploy on Solana devnet an agent whose neural-network weights are a deterministic function of its private key. The binding is committed in zero knowledge at genesis, re-checked against that commitment at every state transition, and signed by the agent into an on-chain history unforkable once finalized; in a PoC-tier extension, a protocol-imposed metabolic cost is debited each cycle from a key-derived economic account, adding a consumption-side economic-viability constraint to the key-history-economy triple. Empirically, the agent completes a 2.36-day on-chain run with two host-side resumptions but no rejected transition, at bounded per-transition verification cost; a substituted substrate is rejected on chain, and independently keyed agents diverge as predicted while a same-key control stays at zero. To our knowledge, this is the first published on-chain agent whose identity primitive is itself a cryptographic invariant re-checked at every state transition. The resulting transition-time invariant instantiates the cryptographic individuality proposed by Suzuki 2026's Artificial Externality framework.
Keisuke Suzuki
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

Modeling Decisions in Blockchain Analytics: A Leakage-Aware Evaluation of Tree-Based vs. Sequential Models

Sybil bots are Ethereum actors that imitate legitimate users to extract airdrop rewards or influence governance. Recent Sybil detection methods increasingly use deep learning and treat blockchain activity as a quasi-linguistic sequence. However, complex sequence models are computationally expensive for real-time monitoring, and their reported performance may be inflated by label leakage from high-signal smart contracts. We ask whether and how organic users, Sybil bots, and MEV bots differ in the structural complexity of their transaction histories; whether sequential models outperform tree-based tabular models once leakage is reduced; whether transaction order or timing provides the stronger behavioral signal; and whether the resulting models are practical for low-latency deployment. Our approach to leakage-aware Sybil bot detection consists of a Blind-Spot protocol and a Transaction Grammar representation of wallet behavior. The former eliminates shortcuts associated with high-signal contracts, whereas the latter models wallets using rhythm, EVM execution structure, and intent. We evaluate this approach on Ethereum actor classification by comparing Transformer and BiLSTM sequence models against XGBoost and SVM baselines. We contribute a framework for leakage-aware Ethereum actor classification and a Transaction Grammar representation of wallet behavior. Our results demonstrate that, under leakage-aware evaluation, XGBoost outperforms Transformer-based sequence models while providing lower latency and estimated energy use.
Michał Bartnicki, Jarosław A. Chudziak
Jul 24, 2026cs.AI

Share No More Than the Request Requires: Federated Disclosure for Perspective-Aware AI

Modern AI systems bring societal risks such as mass surveillance, extreme concentrations of power, and loss of user autonomy---calling into question a model where third-parties collect and control massive amounts of user data. Users require a sovereign system to securely own, govern, and disclose their context while remaining compliant across regulated domains with strict provenance, interpretability, and policy adherence. Perspective-aware AI approaches this by transforming a user's aggregated personal data into a structured identity model called a \emph{Chronicle}: a temporal knowledge graph that represents and grows with the user. Chronicles support the secure disclosure of context across federated networks. A Chronicle holder may expose a queryable, authorized view that a third-party agent may consult without centralizing anyone's data. This paper explores the problem of minimum-necessary disclosure across domain boundaries: when a requester's agent queries a Chronicle, how can the system constrain its response to release only what the requester's relationship, stated purpose, and specific task require? We propose \textbf{Provenance Preserving Chronicles} (PPC), a federated protocol that compiles each holder's Chronicle into a compact \emph{authorized evidence subgraph} governed by one rule: \emph{share no more than the request requires}. Holders keep local sovereignty; an access controller projects relationship-aware views over domain-expert ontologies; and a two-phase flow returns provenance-linked text first, releasing raw artifacts only after explicit holder approval. We frame the problem, map gaps in blockchain, P2P, and holder-sovereign designs, define the core constructs, and sketch the protocol with an explicit threat model.
Sourena Khanzadeh, Daniel Platnick, Marjan Alirezaie +1
Jul 22, 2026cs.DC

A Framework for Reputation Aware Uninorm-driven Consensus Algorithms for Blockchain Networks

The operation of blockchain is governed by consensus algorithms (CA). Several consensus mechanisms require significant computational power, while others necessitate high amounts of stakes to select the participant to validate and verify the transactions in the block, leading to centralisation of power and participant exclusion. This paper proposes a novel methodology to address these issues in reputation-based consensus algorithms by studying the reputation behaviour of the validator using intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) and uninorm aggregation operations (UAOs). Our approach uses IFSs to express the "reputation" because the reputation values in a consensus algorithm eventually imply uncertainty, and IFSs facilitate the representation of a lack of precise knowledge about reputation. Moreover, this methodology utilises uninorm aggregation operations to monitor reputation over time and reinforces the importance of negative and positive reputation. Consequently, this solution allows validators to rectify past failures in subsequent verification processes and foster an equitable consensus algorithm design. The proposed framework maintains linear computational complexity and does not introduce additional communication overhead beyond the underlying consensus protocol. Supported by experimental results, our methodology demonstrates improved performance and evaluation, promising advancements in blockchain network fairness and inclusivity.
Bruno Ramos-Cruz, Javier Andreu-Perez, David Richerby +1
Jul 10, 2026cs.CR

Blockchain-Linked Auditable Decision Management for Telecom/IoT Fraud-Control Requests

Telecom fraud-control studies often stop at detector-level classification, but deployment use requires request-level policy resolution, lifecycle traceability, and auditability. This paper reframes fraud control as blockchain-linked auditable decision management for synthetic telecom/IoT fraud-control requests, and its main result is that the QLoRA-tuned LLM branch becomes much more usable than zero-shot prompting but mainly approaches, rather than outperforms, a lower-cost centralized ensemble. The framework maps each synthetic deployment record to a managed request, blocks explicit out-of-boundary cases through a deterministic hard-fraud gate, scores non-hard requests using centralized ML (M1), federated meta-learning (M2), or LLM-family risk sources (M3), and resolves actions through a shared five-state policy, two-zone refinement mechanism, and local Ethereum-compatible audit layer. Evaluation uses separate synthetic training data and a 100,000-record deployment replay corpus, so the study should be read as controlled drift-replay evidence rather than field validation or proof of live deployability. On validation, M1 gives the strongest balance, with legitimate-request FPR 0.0890 under the 0.10 operating cap and soft-fraud recall 0.8341. On labeled deployment replay, however, the legitimate-FPR gap becomes large: M1 rises to 0.1646 and M3-QLoRA to 0.1801, while M3-QLoRA reduces the M3-Base legitimate FPR from 0.3915 and reaches 0.8240 soft-fraud recall. Blockchain telemetry shows that lifecycle gas, cost, latency, and throughput differences are driven by submitted off-chain decision profiles rather than changes in fraud logic.
Saviz Changizi, Nasibeh Mohammadzadeh, Mohammad Shojafar +1
Jul 8, 2026cs.CR

Closed-Loop Dynamic Validator Node Scaling in Private Substrate Blockchains Using Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Inference

Private blockchain networks run with fixed node configurations that cannot adapt to changing workload conditions. Too many nodes serving a light workload waste resources; too few nodes facing heavy demand slow block production and degrade finalisation. The right validator count is hard to determine, as it depends on overlapping factors that shift over time. This paper presents a Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy inference system that reads live blockchain parameters (block production time, block size, and active node count) and outputs a continuous efficiency score alongside a scaling recommendation: Scale Up, Maintain, or Scale Down. The controller uses triangular membership functions across three linguistic variables, evaluated through a complete 27-rule base with product t-norm aggregation. A key contribution is an empirical recalibration of the membership functions, anchoring linguistic terms to the observed operating range of the testbed rather than to theoretical extremes. The system is evaluated on a 10-node Substrate blockchain network storing real smart water meter data hashes from the Queensland Government open data portal. Statistical analysis across configurations of 4, 7, and 10 active nodes confirms that the controller produces distinct operational profiles reflecting each configuration's provisioning state. In closed-loop experiments, the controller autonomously adjusts validator participation in both directions, activating validators under rising load and removing them under over-provisioning, converging to the same stable equilibrium from both directions. Compared against three threshold-based baselines, it shows fewer scaling oscillations while maintaining comparable block production times. Results show that TS fuzzy inference can support autonomous validator management in private blockchain deployments, with stable scaling behaviour threshold approaches cannot match.
Thandile Nododile, Ayinde M. Usman, Clement N. Nyirenda
Jun 27, 2026cs.CY

The registrar's function in a hybrid society. AI value chain,smart data and the concept of property

Artificial intelligence reaches the land registry not as another tool but as a value chain that turns data into intelligence and intelligence into economic value. This paper argues that the decisive legal move is to place validity, a functional, second-order concept, at the centre of that chain. Rights, liability and supervision organise around it. It traces three impacts.Registry information becomes smart data, governed simultaneously by registry law, the GDPR, the European data acts and the AI Act. Control emerges as the operative concept for digital representations of real estate, whose proprietary effect depends on anchoring to the register. In a hybrid society of human and artificial agents, the registry becomes the public node of validity, with blockchain complementing rather than replacing it. Across three legal cultures, the registra's value migrates from processing documents to guaranteeing validated data,making validity an asset for the UNO Sustainable Development Goals.
Pompeu Casanovas, Carmen Pastor Sempere, Marina Echebarria Saenz
Jun 11, 2026cs.CR

Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto: A Survey

The intersection of crypto x AI is spawning papers, products, online posts, and companies. All the surrounding buzz, though, obscures what exactly has been done, what the opportunities and challenges are, and what open questions deserve attention. This survey paper asks what AI can do for blockchain-based technologies (broadly construed as "crypto") (crypto x AI), and vice versa (AI x crypto). We systematize existing work, summarize key takeaways, highlight open research questions, and offer a perspective on pervasive industry misconceptions, concluding that AI and crypto are still in the very early stages of meaningful integration.
Sarah Allen, Pranay Anchuri, James Austgen +22
Jun 6, 2026cs.AI

From Validator Selection to Portfolio Collection Optimization in Proof-of-Stake Blockchains

We consider a problem arising in proof-of-stake blockchain environments, where agents called nominators select validators - entities responsible for maintaining the blockchain's physical infrastructure. The selection process is inherently subjective and multi-criterial and combines with the fact that nominators commonly operate through multiple accounts. This gives rise to a portfolio selection problem, where agents seek to distribute their nominations across accounts to diversify risk. We propose a decision support framework to optimize this selection by simultaneously maximizing two objectives: the expected utility of the validators likely to be allocated, representing portfolio quality and profitability, and the expected entropy of the allocation, representing diversification and risk mitigation across stashes. Validator utilities are derived using an original active preference learning procedure based on multi-attribute value theory, with emphasis on top-ranked validators. The resulting bi-objective optimization problem is solved with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm and, to support the final choice, we introduce an interactive binary search navigation procedure that guides the nominator through the front and identifies a satisfactory trade-off with only a few questions. Numerical experiments examine the optimization strategies, while an expert assessment involving five experienced nominators confirms the approach's practical relevance and usefulness.
Jonas Gehrlein, Grzegorz Miebs, Matteo Brunelli +2
Jun 5, 2026cs.CR

Blockchain Infrastructure for Intelligent Cyber--Physical--Social Systems:Post-Quantum Security, Interoperability, and Trustworthy Data Economies in the Era of Embodied AI

The deployment of embodied artificial intelligence via world-model-based robotics presents a transformative opportunity for blockchain infrastructure, establishing urgent demand for trustworthy data provenance, cross-organizational governance, and incentive-compatible sharing across decentralized ecosystems. Simultaneously, quantum computing advances recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics and the Turing Award threaten the cryptographic primitives securing these data economies, creating an interdependent imperative: long-lived verification for embodied AI depends on crypto-agile architectures capable of withstanding quantum adversaries. This tutorial examines blockchain as the coordination layer bridging this dual transition, from financial substrate to foundational Cyber-Physical-Social Systems infrastructure that simultaneously secures against quantum cryptanalysis and enables scalable, trustworthy data economies. The session opens with an immersive AWS Braket demonstration engaging participants with superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom hardware to assess cryptographic threat timelines and witness ECDSA-to-post-quantum signature transitions. Five integrated modules progress from embodied AI and world-model requirements through quantum hardware reality and evidence-based security migration, to scalable cross-shard architectures via BrokerChain protocols, trustworthy data economies implementing Croissant metadata standards and robotic learning provenance, and industry ecosystem integration for multi-modal cloud deployment. By bridging quantum hardware realities with embodied AI data requirements, this tutorial charts blockchain as unified infrastructure for next-generation decentralized intelligent environments, providing open-source frameworks and roadmaps for architecting quantum-resistant, interoperable, and data-trustworthy systems.
Song Guo, Huawei Huang, Dongping Liu +2
Jun 3, 2026cs.CR

TITAN-FedAnil+: Trust-Based Adaptive Blockchain Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained Intelligent Enterprises

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for collaborative intelligence while preserving data privacy. However, data heterogeneity arising from non-IID distributions and decentralized security threats remain significant challenges, particularly in resource-constrained enterprise environments. This paper presents TITAN-FedAnil+, a Trust-Based Adaptive Network for blockchain-enabled federated learning in intelligent enterprises. The proposed framework introduces affinity propagation-based adaptive clustered aggregation to identify and filter malicious updates without requiring prior knowledge of the number of attackers. In addition, GPU-accelerated vectorization is employed to improve computational efficiency, while a signed state jump mechanism enables lightweight blockchain resynchronization. Experimental results demonstrate substantial reductions in memory overhead, achieving up to 81% savings across 50 communication rounds on constrained 8 GB edge devices compared with the baseline framework. The results indicate that TITAN-FedAnil+ effectively improves robustness, scalability, and resource efficiency for secure federated learning deployments in intelligent enterprise environments.
Muhammad Hadi, Muhammad Jahangir, Talha Shafique +1
May 28, 2026cs.CR

Temporal Motif-aware Graph Test-time Adaptation for OOD Blockchain Anomaly Detection

Ever-evolving transaction patterns have significantly hindered anomaly detection on emerging cryptocurrency blockchains due to the vast number of addresses and diverse anomalous behaviors. Recently, advanced Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) approaches applied to blockchains have faced two critical challenges: \textit{adversarial pattern evolution by malicious actors} and \textit{the out-of-distribution (OOD) problem caused by varied transaction semantics on blockchains}. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed \textbf{TE}mporal \textbf{M}otif-aware \textbf{G}raph \textbf{T}est-\textbf{T}ime \textbf{A}daptation (\textbf{TEMG-TTA}). First, we comprehensively capture the 3-node temporal motif distribution of each active address using an efficient computational mechanism, enabling downstream temporal motif-aware graph learning. Second, we design a simple yet effective test-time adaptation strategy to facilitate the sharing of common patterns between training and testing graphs. Extensive experiments on 5 real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed \textbf{TEMG-TTA} outperforms \textit{state-of-the-art} GAD approaches by an average of 54.88%. A further case study on interpretable motif patterns reveals that \textbf{TEMG-TTA} explicitly characterizes the complex transaction patterns of anomalous addresses, thereby verifying the effectiveness of our technical designs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/LuoXishuang0712/TEMG-TTA/.
Runang He, Tongya Zheng, Huiling Peng +6
May 27, 2026cs.AI

SwarmHarness: Skill-Based Task Routing via Decentralized Incentive-Aligned AI Agent Networks

Vast quantities of compute (GPU cycles on personal workstations, idle inference servers, and edge devices between jobs) go unused because no incentive-aligned protocol exists for their owners to share them safely and profitably. Existing approaches either require a trusted central coordinator (cloud marketplaces), demand heavy blockchain infrastructure (Golem, BrokerChain), or lack an incentive layer entirely (BOINC, Petals). We propose SwarmHarness, a decentralised protocol in which HarnessAPI skill nodes self-organise into a compute swarm without any central authority. SwarmHarness has three interlocking components: a SwarmRegistry built on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for peer discovery and capability advertisement; a SwarmRouter that dispatches tasks to nodes using a utility function over capability, load, latency, and trust; and SwarmCredit, an incentive mechanism that attributes compute-credit rewards to contributing nodes via a Shapley-value approximation. Nodes earn credits by serving tasks and spend credits to submit them; idle nodes that never contribute drain credits and lose routing priority, creating a self-regulating participation economy. As nodes specialise toward high-reward skills and routing signals act as digital pheromones, the network exhibits emergent collective intelligence analogous to biological swarms. Beyond compute sharing, SwarmHarness is a foundational primitive for autonomous distributed AI agent networks in which agents hire compute, route subtasks, and settle credits without human intermediation.
Edwin Jose
May 11, 2026cs.CR

SoK: A Systematic Bidirectional Literature Review of AI & DLT Convergence

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has become a growing research area, yet contributions tend to cluster around specific application domains or examine only one direction of the integration, leaving the broader architectural interplay between the two technologies poorly understood. This work addresses that gap through a structured, bidirectional review of peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025. We classify contributions along two directions: AI-enhanced DLT, and DLT-enhanced AI. In the first case, we examine how AI techniques improve DLT systems across five layers: data, network, consensus, execution, and application layers. In the second case, we analyse how DLT supports AI systems across five layers: infrastructure, data, model, inference, and application layers, with particular attention to federated learning, model evaluation, and multi-agent coordination. The analysis reveals that most works concentrate on a small subset of layers: execution and consensus for AI-enhanced DLT, data and model for DLT-enhanced AI. Other layers remain comparatively neglected. Despite reported improvements in controlled settings, no study demonstrates deployment at production scale, and the field has not yet offered satisfying answers to fundamental questions around scalability, interoperability, and verifiable execution. We argue that progress will require cross-layer co-design and empirical validation in real-world settings.
Ali Irzam Kathia, Yimika Erinle, Abylay Satybaldy +3
May 6, 2026cs.MA

DAO-enabled decentralized physical AI: A new paradigm for human-machine collaboration

We propose DAO-enabled decentralized physical AI (DePAI), a democratic architecture for coordinating humans and autonomous machines in the operation and governance of physical-digital systems. We (1) synthesize foundations in blockchains, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and cryptoeconomics; (2) connect DAO design with digital-democracy research on deliberation and voting, showing how each can advance the other; (3) position DAO-governed decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) within a vertically integrated stack that links energy and sensing to connectivity, storage/compute, models, and robots; (4) show how these elements specify workflows that couple machine execution with human oversight, enabling enhanced self-organization of techno-socio-economic systems, which we call DePAI; and (5) analyze risks, including security, centralization, incentive failure, legal exposure, and the crowding-out of intrinsic motivation, and argue for value-sensitive design and continuously adaptive governance. DePAI offers a path to scalable, resilient self-organization that integrates physical infrastructure, AI, and community ownership under transparent rules, on-chain incentives, and permissionless participation, aiming to preserve human autonomy.
Mark C. Ballandies, Florian Spychiger, Uwe Serdült +1
May 5, 2026cs.CR

Tailored Prompts, Targeted Protection: Vulnerability-Specific LLM Analysis for Smart Contracts

Smart contracts on blockchains are prone to diverse security vulnerabilities that can lead to significant financial losses due to their immutable nature. Existing detection approaches often lack flexibility across vulnerability types and rely heavily on manually crafted expert rules. In this paper, we present an LLM-based framework for practical smart contract vulnerability detection. We construct and release a large-scale dataset comprising 31,165 professionally annotated vulnerability instances collected from over 3,200 real-world projects across 15 major blockchain platforms. Our approach leverages precise AST-based context extraction and vulnerability-specific prompt design to instantiate customized detectors for 13 prevalent vulnerability categories. Experimental results demonstrate strong effectiveness, achieving an average positive recall of 0.92 and an average negative recall of 0.85, highlighting the potential of carefully engineered contextual prompting for scalable and high-precision smart contract security analysis.
Xing Zhang, Keyu Zhang, Taohong Zhu +1
Apr 22, 2026cs.MA

AGNT2: Autonomous Agent Economies on Interaction-Optimized Layer 2 Infrastructure

Current blockchain Layer 2 solutions, including Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, and their derivatives, optimize for human-initiated financial transactions. Autonomous AI agents instead generate high-frequency, semantically rich service invocations among mutually untrusting principals. Existing chains treat those interactions as generic calldata, forcing identity, escrow, dependency ordering, and session state to be encoded above the execution layer at the wrong cost point. We present AGNT2, a three-tier stack purpose-built for agent and microservice coordination on-chain. AGNT2 combines: (1) a sidecar deployment pattern that turns any Docker container into an on-chain agent without application-code modification; (2) Layer Top P2P state channels for established bilateral pairs (<100 ms, rough design target 1K-5K TPS per pair, 10M+ aggregate TPS design envelope under endpoint-resource limits), Layer Core as a dependency-aware sequenced rollup for first-contact and multi-party interactions (500 ms-2 s, 300K-500K TPS design target), and Layer Root settlement with computational fraud proofs anchored to any EVM L1; and (3) an agent-native execution environment plus interaction trie that make service invocation, identity, reputation, capabilities, and session context first-class protocol objects. This paper focuses on the execution-layer systems problem: sequencing, state, settlement, and the data-availability (DA) bandwidth gap that bounds all three. Simulation and analytical modeling support the architecture, and prototype measurements validate selected components, but no end-to-end Layer Core implementation exists yet. Practical deployment is currently constrained to roughly 10K-100K TPS by DA throughput, leaving a ~100x gap at the target ceiling. AGNT2 argues that the agent economy requires a dedicated execution layer rather than a general-purpose chain repurposed for agents.
Anbang Ruan, Xing Zhang
Apr 16, 2026cs.CR

Public and private blockchain for decentralized digital building twins and building automation system

The communication protocols and data transfer mechanisms employed by IoT devices in smart buildings and corresponding digital twin systems predominantly rely on centralized architectures. Such centralized systems are vulnerable to single points of failure, where a malfunction can disrupt operational processes. This study introduces a blockchain-based decentralized protocol to enhance the cyber resilience of IoT data transfer for digital twins and enable decentralized automation of building operations. The framework incorporates public and private blockchain technologies alongside two case studies showcasing prototypes of each system. These prototypes were validated within a real-world building environment using smart home appliances and two digital twin platforms, with their performance evaluated based on cost, scalability, data security, and privacy. The findings reveal that the Hyperledger Fabric-based system excels in terms of scalability, speed, and cost-effectiveness, while both frameworks offer advantages over traditional centralized protocols in system cyber resilience, data security, and privacy.
Reachsak Ly, Alireza Shojaei
Oct 21, 2025cs.MA

Fetch.ai: An Architecture for Modern Multi-Agent Systems

Recent surges in LLM-driven intelligent systems largely overlook decades of foundational multi-agent systems (MAS) research, resulting in frameworks with critical limitations such as centralization and inadequate trust and communication protocols. This paper introduces the Fetch.ai architecture, an industrial-strength platform designed to bridge this gap by facilitating the integration of classical MAS principles with modern AI capabilities. We present a novel, multi-layered solution built on a decentralized foundation of on-chain blockchain services for verifiable identity, discovery, and transactions. This is complemented by a comprehensive development framework for creating secure, interoperable agents, a cloud-based platform for deployment, and an intelligent orchestration layer where an agent-native LLM translates high-level human goals into complex, multi-agent workflows. We demonstrate the deployed nature of this system through a decentralized logistics use case where autonomous agents dynamically discover, negotiate, and transact with one another securely. Ultimately, the Fetch.ai stack provides a principled architecture for moving beyond current agent implementations towards open, collaborative, and economically sustainable multi-agent ecosystems.
Michael J. Wooldridge, Attila Bagoly, Jonathan J. Ward +2