IFIP NTMS 1st International Workshop on Blockchains and Smart Contracts (BSC 2018)

Blockchain has recently emerged as a disruptive technology that may revolutionize the world economy and our societies, with applications in key industries including finance, insurance, energy, mobility, healthcare and logistics. A blockchain is typically a decentralized, trustless and continuously growing ledger that is used to record and keep track of every transactions across a peer-to- peer network of participants.

This technology is secure by design and leverages well known cryptographic protocols and distributed consensus algorithms to provide key characteristics, such as resilience, fault-tolerance, persistence, anonymity, auditability and data immutability. More recently, smart contracts, backed by the blockchain technology, have emerged as a promising means for automating the execution of business workflows and enforcing legal contracts, in a fully decentralized way and without the need for any trusted third parties. However, there are still major research challenges that need to be overcome to unlock the tremendous potential of blockchains, and before enabling a mass market penetration and adoption.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together experts from various domains to explore the current state of the art of blockchains and its related challenges, and to discuss new ideas and innovations to design scalable and robust blockchain solutions that are technically, economically and legally viable.

The workshop invites both academic researchers and industry practitioners to submit original and previously unpublished contributions covering the theoretical and practical aspects of the blockchain technology, smart contracts and their applications.