COMSNETS 2019

The Blockchain distributed ledger technology has attracted significant attention, with a plethora of platforms such as Ethereum, Ripple, Sawtooth Lake, Hyperledger Fabric, Stellar, Corda, Hashgraph etc. gaining wide adoption. The key novelty of Blockchain (and other distributed ledger technologies) is its ability to enable sharing of a common ledger amongst trustless (and anonymous in some cases) parties using distributed consensus protocols and cryptographic puzzles, and its support of a programmable smart contracts framework, allowing (trustless) users to script the appropriate updates to the underlying ledger depending on inputs, in a Byzantine fault tolerant manner. These very properties are most successfully leveraged by crypto currency platforms such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple etc. which use blockchain as their underlying ledger to maintain consensus on the ownership of their currencies.

Apart from being the underlying ledger for crypto currencies, Blockchain is also emerged as the platform of choice for creating innovative smart-contracts based distributed applications amongst trustless participants. The wildly successful series of Initial coin offerings (ICO) on Ethereum platform are a very good example of the same. Another application area of Blockchain which has gained significant attention in recent times is in creating trusted, indelible, transparent "transaction Internet" to be leveraged by businesses (finance, trade, logistics) to bring massive efficiencies in their operations. On the flip side, significant questions have been raised by various quarters on its scalability, finality of recorded transactions in presence of malicious entities and buggy smart-contracts to potential usage to commit financial crimes etc. which might deter mainstream adoption of Blockchain. The evident success of Blockchain technology as an enabler of crypto-currencies and the its even bigger potential (and attendant challenges of crime prevention) as the medium of bringing transparency and efficiency to a large body of present day problems has already prompted significant scrutiny from academic, multiple industries and governments of its applicability on the aspects of identifying newer use cases, ways to enhance its performance as well as alternative designs and implementations of blockchain.

In this workshop, we aim at learning more about the various facets of Blockchain. To this end, we are soliciting submissions describing original and novel early (or mature) work from academics, researchers and early adopters of the technology.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to)

• Critical understanding of the theoretical foundations of blockchain

• Real world experiences from deployments of blockchain

• Innovative use cases which leverage blockchain

• Alternative design/architectures for blockchain

• Theoretical or experimental analysis of properties of present day blockchain platforms

• Advancements to the underlying technologies such as consensus algorithms, new proof-of-work/stake etc.

• Adding properties such as information privacy, prevention of fraud, crime etc.

Accepted and presented papers will be published in the conference proceedings and submitted to IEEE Xplore as well as other Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) databases.

1. Submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal.

2. Submissions must not exceed 6 pages (and not be less than 3 pages) in the IEEE conference proceedings format, including all figures, tables, and references.

3. Reviews will be single-blind: authors name and affiliation should be included in the submission.

4. Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines as given on IEEE Website.

5. All workshop papers will appear in conference proceedings and submitted to IEEE Xplore as well as other Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) databases.

6. All papers must be in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and submitted through the Blockchain Workshop submission site on EDAS.

7. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the latest templates for typesetting as provided on the IEEE Website: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html

8. Papers can be submitted through EDAS : https://edas.info/N25123

All deadlines are with respect to the AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time zone.