This paper proposes a novel Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) composed of a large-scale network of extensible software agents, referred to as DPI Nodes, designed to operate across complex and distributed ecosystems. Our infrastructure addresses value chain ecosystems—such as global trade, supply chains, and the circular economy—which currently lack decentralisation, transparency, and traceability, while facing increasing regulatory compliance demands. To address these challenges, we introduce an infrastructure capable of supporting heterogeneous, multi-stakeholder environments without requiring centralised control or pre-established trust. Our DPI Nodes are built on distributed ledger technologies and heterogeneous data stores and provide three core capabilities: (i) auditable digital twins representing trade items and associated documents throughout their lifecycle; (ii) a permissioned, verifiable protocol for secure data discovery and exchange among sovereign participants; and (iii) a trust framework and federation layer based on self-sovereign identity. Together, these components enable transparent, tamper-evident record keeping while allowing different actors to autonomously manage and exchange trusted data without dependence on a centralized data hub. The proposed architecture has been designed to support multiple decentralised technologies, including the IOTA distributed ledger, used as a base for the implementation presented in this paper. We evaluated the benefits of our solution through pilot deployments across distinct trade ecosystems and trade lanes in Kenya and the United Kingdom. Experimental results demonstrate benefits in terms of cost reduction, improved transport efficiency, enhanced transparency, and streamlined compliance verification. Among other, most notably, the processing time of export/import documents is reduced from days/weeks to under 5 min with 96% improvement in cross-border process efficiency. While the proposed DPI significantly improves accessibility, accountability, and operational efficiency, and contributes to fraud reduction across cross-border trade processes, its global adoption remains contingent on addressing open multidisciplinary challenges. To answer that, we conclude the paper with a discussion on how scalable governance, interoperability across jurisdictions, and sustainable business models become the keystones capable of supporting long-term operation and evolution of decentralised public infrastructures.

IntroductionThis paper introduces two novel verifiable (t,n)-threshold secret sharing schemes utilising the resultant of bivariate polynomials.MethodsBoth schemes leverage the evaluation and scaling properties of resultants, facilitating share generation as well as secure verification processes capable of identifying adversarial participants. One scheme uses efficient numerical shares derived from resultant evaluations, while the other distributes polynomial (symbolic) shares offering enhanced security and potential advantages for use in post-quantum cryptography applications. An algorithm is also provided to assist the share distributor (the dealer) in constructing suitable input bivariate polynomials for these resultant-based schemes.ResultsIn addition to the two novel schemes, this study includes complete mathematical proofs, presented as theorems and lemmas, which formally verify the correctness of the polynomial construction algorithm and establish the correctness and verifiability (including adversary identification) of both proposed schemes.DiscussionThese resultant-based approaches expand the design space of secret sharing, enabling efficient, flexible, and provably verifiable schemes with guaranteed adversary detection (excluding events of negligible probability). The proposed schemes are particularly relevant to secure AI–blockchain convergence, where distributed trust, auditability, privacy-preserving computation, and protection of sensitive cryptographic material are critical requirements.

IntroductionFinancial risk assessment requires models that jointly satisfy privacy, explainability, and decentralized trust, yet existing machine-learning approaches usually address these requirements in isolation.MethodsThis paper proposes the Privacy-Preserving Explainable Trust Framework (PP-ETF), integrating federated learning with differential privacy, post hoc SHAP and LIME explanations, and a permissioned distributed ledger for trust management. PP-ETF is evaluated on the German Credit and HELOC datasets against statistical models, centralized ensembles and deep networks, and privacy-preserving baselines.ResultsPP-ETF outperforms privacy-preserving baselines in AUC-ROC while remaining within 1.4%–1.6% of centralized deep-learning models. Reputation-based adversarial detection excludes a malicious participant within two communication rounds with a 3.2% false-positive rate. Explanation stability yields average cosine similarity of at least 0.87, and the ledger processes up to 480 transactions per second with 2.4 s finality latency.DiscussionThe results support the feasibility of jointly implementing privacy, interpretability, and decentralized trust under the evaluated conditions; they do not imply that the underlying trade-offs are eliminated. PP-ETF provides an end-to-end blueprint for effective, scalable, private, interpretable, and trustworthy risk-management systems.

The secure management of electronic prescriptions is a critical challenge in modern healthcare, where medication errors, drug diversion, and fraudulent claims collectively cost billions of dollars annually. Centralized Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), the prevailing e-prescription framework, presents a single point of failure, obstructs interoperability between doctors and pharmacists, and provides no safeguard against prescription duplication. This paper introduces a decentralized cross-chain PKI architecture that integrates four complementary technologies: permissioned blockchains utilizing Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus, three functionally separated InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) nodes, a formally specified Lock & Mint cross-chain synchronization protocol deployed on a dedicated Ethereum relay chain, and entropy-verified secure QR codes. The proposed solution incorporates a five-state certificate lifecycle with cryptographic chaining and enforces a strict separation between the control plane and the storage plane. We formally prove three security properties of the Lock & Mint protocol: reentrancy freedom, replay idempotency, and atomic rollback. Experimental evaluation conducted on three EVM-compliant Ethereum chains across 200 attack attempts spanning four threat categories (reentrancy, certificate forgery, QR cloning, and QR replay) yields an overall detection rate of 89% at a measured precision of 1.00 (F1 = 0.942), with prescription issuance completing in 74.0 ms and consumption in 70.5 ms on average. These results indicate that the proposed framework achieves robust, formally analysed prescription management with performance margins that are compatible with clinical workflows.

Blockchain technology has significant potential to promote transparency, efficiency, and sustainability in the agricultural sector. However, successful implementation depends not only on the availability of technology but also on organizational readiness, infrastructure, and coordinated effort among stakeholders. This paper identifies the key facilitators that support the adoption of blockchain across agri-food value chains spanning farm-level precision-agriculture practices and downstream supply-chain operations and analyzes the interdependencies among them. A literature review identified ten Facilitators of Blockchain Adoption (FBA), which were reviewed and validated by a panel of five experts spanning academia, agro-industry, farming, non-governmental organizations, and information technology. The interrelationships among these facilitators were analyzed using Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM), a structural method for organizing expert judgments about pairwise influence into a hierarchical model; ISM does not estimate causal effect size or statistical significance. Applying transitivity consistently to the expert-derived reachability matrix revealed that nine of the ten facilitators form a single, tightly interdependent cluster, while enhancing trust among stakeholders emerges as the sole outcome-level factor at the apex of the hierarchy. A complementary MICMAC analysis confirms that these nine facilitators exhibit both high driving power and high dependence power (a “linkage” profile), indicating that the blockchain-adoption system is mutually reinforcing rather than governed by a small set of independent root causes. These findings suggest that ICT infrastructure, stakeholder collaboration, shared responsibility, service quality, auditability, usability, and fast-payment capability function together as a coupled socio-technical system that ultimately builds stakeholder trust. The results can inform extension professionals, educators, policymakers, and technology developers seeking to prioritize interventions that support a more coordinated and sustainable introduction of blockchain into agri-food value chains.

Sustainable, impact and development finance increasingly rely on digital systems to measure and manage real-world social and environmental performance. Yet impact information is still used primarily for reporting and retrospective assessment, rather than as an operational input into financial decision-making. This creates a persistent gap between what financial systems know about real-world outcomes and how capital is actually allocated, released or constrained. This study examines how that gap might be addressed through the Impact-Finance Protocol (IFP), an institutional architecture designed to connect trusted real-world information with financial execution. Building on the conceptual IFP proposed in earlier work, the study evaluates how the protocol behaves when operationalised under real implementation conditions. A comparative Design Science approach was used, combining an initial reference implementation with a longitudinal programme of implementation across multiple institutional, governance and technical contexts. The protocol, rather than any individual organisation, technology or project, was treated as the unit of analysis. Implementation evidence was systematically reconstructed through evidence validation, qualitative coding, implementation-episode reconstruction, comparative analysis and Design Knowledge synthesis. The findings show that the core responsibilities for structuring evidence and verifying its meaning remain comparatively stable across different implementation contexts. By contrast, connecting verified information to financial action requires more extensive governance, institutional authority and operational coordination than the original architecture anticipated. Practical implementation also depends on cross-cutting capabilities such as legal identity, compliance, financial accounts, payment rails and coordination across recurring and overlapping implementation processes. Community participation emerges as an operational capability, while system-level Assessment remains comparatively immature and requires further implementation and evaluation. Where distributed ledger technology (DLT) mechanisms were used, they supported selective integrity, coordination and governed execution, but remained context-dependent rather than necessary architectural components; off-chain verification, institutional authority and governance remained fundamental to financial activation. The study contributes implementation-derived Design Knowledge and transferable Design Principles for digital sustainable finance. It shows that enabling trusted impact information to influence financial decisions requires not only reliable data and verification, but an institutional architecture capable of governing how information becomes actionable financial value across diverse real-world settings.

The valuation of decentralized blockchain platforms remains challenging because their native tokens do not represent conventional residual claims and may derive value from several interacting economic mechanisms. This study develops an integrative framework of Ethereum value formation through a mechanism-based conceptual synthesis of the relevant literature. The literature is organized into six principal valuation perspectives: fundamental and on-chain, network-based, monetary and tokenomics, scarcity-oriented, security and staking-based, and behavioral and reflexive approaches. The synthesis indicates that the six perspectives emphasize different but partly overlapping mechanisms of value formation and that none independently explains the interaction among productive activity, adoption, monetary demand, token scarcity, network security, and market expectations. These mechanisms are integrated into a causal-loop framework comprising five reinforcing feedback loops, three balancing feedback loops, and additional productive value-creation pathways that do not form a closed feedback loop. The framework analytically distinguishes ecosystem value creation, ETH-related value capture, and market-price formation while conceptualizing Ethereum as a complex adaptive socio-economic system rather than solely as a conventional productive asset or monetary instrument. The resulting framework provides a theory-building foundation for subsequent stock-and-flow model development, empirical calibration, and comparative application to other blockchain platforms.

Unlike Ethereum, which was conceived as a general-purpose smart-contract platform, Bitcoin was designed primarily as a transaction ledger for its native currency, which limits programmability for conditional applications. This constraint is particularly evident when considering oracles, mechanisms that enable Bitcoin contracts to depend on exogenous events. This paper investigates whether new oracle designs have emerged for Bitcoin Layer 1 since the 2015 transition to the Ethereum smart contracts era and whether subsequent Bitcoin improvement proposals have expanded oracles’ implementability. Using Scopus and Web of Science searches, complemented by Google Scholar to capture protocol proposals, we observe that the indexed academic coverage remains limited, and many contributions circulate outside journal venues. Within the retrieved corpus, the main post-2015 shift is from multi-sig-style, which envisioned oracles as co-signers, toward attestation-based designs, mainly represented by Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs), which show greater alignment with Bitcoin design constraints, tool support, and evidence of practical implementations in real-world scenarios such as betting and prediction markets.