We present a general theory of payment systems that is capable of describing both traditional and electronic forms of payment. Starting from the three basic functions of money and general non-functional requirements, we derive the necessary and sufficient properties of technical implementations of money and payments. We describe possible scalable implementations of e-money schemes based on a general description of their data structures (money distributions) and payments. We define the notion of bill scheme, in which the value units are bills with invariant values, and show that only the bill scheme allows for scalable and practically efficient implementations through decomposition, where the components have to process a considerably smaller amount of data and a number of payment requests, compared to the whole system.

Europe is on the brink of a significant demographic shift that will increase the silver population and a decline in the working age group. This change highlights the importance of addressing the evolving needs of individuals, especially older adults. With this in mind, the European Union and the Baltic Sea Region are leading the way in groundbreaking research in aging and technology-driven services aimed at empowering older adults to live fulfilling lives. The OSIRIS project, funded by the European Union, is a vital initiative in this regard. Its primary focus is on creating a ‘Digital Silver Hub’ that provides solutions specifically designed to tackle the challenges faced by the silver population. The Digital Silver Hub is an ecosystem that fosters collaboration between various stakeholders, including private companies, public institutions, academic organizations, and, most importantly, older adults themselves. This document provides an in-depth exploration of the user dialogue model and system architecture of the Digital Silver Hub, which are the intertwined components driving its functioning. We use the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to represent the parts of the platform and show how it brings together collective intelligence to support the silver economy. This research is a testament to the dedication, innovation, and forward-thinking of those committed to improving the quality of life for the silver population. It shows that technology and collaboration can combine to meet the preferences and needs of older adults, ensuring they can live independently with dignity and a strong sense of community. As demographics continue to shift, this research is a step towards a future where aging is not seen as a burden but as an opportunity to celebrate experience, wisdom, and ongoing participation in society.

Our aim is to understand technological and socio-economic barriers to blockchain solutions that are intrinsic in the blockchain technology stack itself (permissionless as well as permissioned). On the basis of that, we want to understand the future potentioal impact of blockchain technology. We provide an argumentation against the theoretical background of Williamson’s instutional analysis framework, and triangulate the insights with results from four design science research efforts. We (i) characterize cryptocurrency as one-tiered collateralized money. We (ii) review potential blockchain solutions against defined essential modes of communications. We review (iii) well-known scalability issues and potential denial-of-service attacks through a new probabilistic model. We (iv) characterize a typical neglection of physical network infrastructure in blockchain technology discussions. We (v) describe four successful blockchain solutions and explain their design. There is (vi) no evidence that the proclaimed “blockchain revolution” can disrupt our institutional stack; instead, it can only happen in the boundaries of the current institutional stack. Nevertheless, it is possible to (vii) design useful blockchain solutions. The findings of this research enable policy makers, decision makers and information systems architects alike to make informed decisions about blockchain technology and its application. Given its theoretic foundation in new institutional economics, triangulated with comprehensive results from design science efforts, this study is the first of its kind in the area of blockchain technology research.

As the size of the silver generation grows, the demographic shift poses both challenges and opportunities in embracing innovation and technology. This study delves into the challenges and barriers faced by the silver generation when using digital platforms. It focuses on a collective intelligence platform, the Digital Silver Hub, and two age groups of older adults within the silver generation: adults aged 55 to 65 and those aged 65 and over. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives of both age groups from the Baltic Sea Region. Thematic analysis results revealed challenges faced by each group, their expectations from the Digital Silver Hub, the importance of a user-friendly interface, concerns about data privacy and security, and the potential impacts of the platform. The research findings emphasize the importance of adopting a user-centric evaluation when designing the platform. The recommendations generated from this study can guide the development of user-friendly solutions, empowering and enriching the lives of the silver generation in our increasingly digitalized world.

The Web3 vision takes blockchain disintermediation to a next level by making it ubiquitous, encompassing not only payments and financial services but also digital identities, data and business models. Recently, Web3 has gained massive attention by major analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, Forbes Technology Council and the Harvard Business Review. Albeit the current enthusiasm about Web3, we are lost in a state of confusion about what Web3 actually is - or could be. The purpose of this paper is to mitigate the gap between the perceived usefulness of Web3 and its potential implementation. We take a descriptive design science approach. We provide informed arguments for a potential foundation of Web3 in terms of fundamental components,  architectural principles and a Web3 design space. We demonstrate the usefulness of the provided Web3 foundation by describing Alphabill, a platform that allows for universal asset tokenization and transfer as a global medium of exchange. The findings of this research enable policy makers, decision makers and information systems architects alike to make informed decisions about Web3 and its potential implementation as follows: (i) The Web3 can be characterized as the integration of digital rights exchange into the (application layer) internet protocols. (ii) The Web3 has the potential to revolutionize today’s information systems’s landscape by turning today’s information systems into deeply standardized views on a huge, single underlying information structure. The killer application of a well-founded Web3 is the Web3 itself – being the currently missing backbone (value-added middleware) for all of today’s and future enterprise applications and business-to-business communication. (iii) The scenario-based evaluation of the provided Web3 foundation reveals the described Alphabill platform as a Web3 enabling technology.

An Adaptive Security Governance Architecture based on Smart Contracts for Syntactically Interoperable Services in Smart Cities

Since its introduction with Bitcoin in 2009, blockchain technology has received tremendous attention by academia, industry, politics and media alike, in particular, through extended blockchain-based visions such as smart contracts, decentralized finance, and, most recently, Web3. The critical prerequisite for any such blockchain-based vision to be turned into reality is uncapped scalability. Furthermore, and equally important, blockchain technology needs to transcend the stage of specialized tokens into an adaptive, heterogeneous tokenization platform. In this paper, we explain the Alphabill family of technologies that addresses both unlimited scalability and unrestricted adaptivity. We deliver a sharded blockchain technology with unlimited scalability and performance, called KSI Cash, which is based on a new form of electronic money scheme, the bill scheme. We present performance tests of KSI Cash that we have conducted with the European Central Bank and a group of eight national central banks from the Eurosystem in order to assess the technological feasibility of a digital euro, showing the system operating with 100 million wallets and 15 thousand transactions per second (under simulation of realistic usage), having an estimated carbon footprint of 0.0001g CO2 per transaction (Bitcoin = 100 kg and more); furthermore, showing the system operating with up to 2 million payment orders per second, an equivalent of more than 300.000 transactions per second (in a laboratory setting with the central components of KSI Cash), scaling linearly in terms of the number of deployed shards.  We explain, in detail, the key concepts that unlock this performance (i.e., the concepts of the bill money scheme). The results provide evidence that the scalability of our technology is unlimited in both permissioned and permissionless scenarios, resulting into the Alphabill Money technology. Next, we contribute the architecture of a universal tokenization platform that allows for universal asset tokenization, transfer and exchange as a global medium of exchange,  called Alphabill platform. We reveal the crucial conceptual and technical contributions of the platform’s architecture and their interplay, including the data structures of KSI Cash and Alphabill Money, the dust collection solution of Alphabill Money, and the  atomic swap solution of the Alphabill platform.

With the increasing population of the silver economy, many potential economic opportunities appear, in particular, in developed countries. Recently, the European Union and the Baltic Sea Region have been very active with their research on active aging and to tackle the challenges arising from the exponentially increasing ageing population. The OSIRIS project is one such EU-funded initiative to develop a digital platform for the elderly named the Digital Silver Hub, which aims to serve as an ecosystem for the quadruple helix actors (private sector, public sector, academic institutions, senior citizens) to participate in knowledge exchange, collaboration and co-creation of innovative technological solutions to facilitate the elderly population. In this paper, 30 interviews were conducted from the partner heads of the OSIRIS project as well as quadruple helix actors from each region in the Baltic Sea Region (Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Lithuania, and Denmark) in order to deeply understand the functionalities that are needed to be offered by the Digital Silver Hub. A deductive thematic analysis is conducted to analyse these functionalities in terms of Collective Intelligence (CI) components (namely staffing, processes, goals and motivation) based on a most recent generic CI model. The functionalities were further evaluated by experts working in the field of science and technology in the silver economy. As results, the needed functionalities are identified and explained in depth. As an outlook, we discuss how these functionalities can be translated into architectural components of a system design.