In a research community, data sharing is an essential step to gain maximum knowledge from the prior work. Existing data sharing platforms depend on trusted third party (TTP). Due to the involvement of TTP, such systems lack trust, transparency, security, and immutability. To overcome these issues, this paper proposed a blockchain-based secure data sharing platform by leveraging the benefits of interplanetary file system (IPFS). A meta data is uploaded to IPFS server by owner and then divided into n secret shares. The proposed scheme achieves security and access control by executing the access roles written in smart contract by owner. Users are first authenticated through RSA signatures and then submit the requested amount as a price of digital content. After the successful delivery of data, the user is encouraged to register the reviews about data. These reviews are validated through Watson analyzer to filter out the fake reviews. The customers registering valid reviews are given incentives. In this way, maximum reviews are submitted against every file. In this scenario, decentralized storage, Ethereum blockchain, encryption, and incentive mechanism are combined. To implement the proposed scenario, smart contracts are written in solidity and deployed on local Ethereum test network. The proposed scheme achieves transparency, security, access control, authenticity of owner, and quality of data. In simulation results, an analysis is performed on gas consumption and actual cost required in terms of USD, so that a good price estimate can be done while deploying the implemented scenario in real set-up. Moreover, computational time for different encryption schemes are plotted to represent the performance of implemented scheme, which is shamir secret sharing (SSS). Results show that SSS shows the least computational time as compared to advanced encryption standard (AES) 128 and 256.

In this paper, we address the problems of fraud and anomalies in the Bitcoin network. These are common problems in e-banking and online transactions. However, as the financial sector evolves, so do the methods for fraud and anomalies. Moreover, blockchain technology is being introduced as the most secure method integrated into finance. However, along with these advanced technologies, many frauds are also increasing every year. Therefore, we propose a secure fraud detection model based on machine learning and blockchain. There are two machine learning algorithms—XGboost and random forest (RF)—used for transaction classification. The machine learning techniques train the dataset based on the fraudulent and integrated transaction patterns and predict the new incoming transactions. The blockchain technology is integrated with machine learning algorithms to detect fraudulent transactions in the Bitcoin network. In the proposed model, XGboost and random forest (RF) algorithms are used to classify transactions and predict transaction patterns. We also calculate the precision and AUC of the models to measure the accuracy. A security analysis of the proposed smart contract is also performed to show the robustness of our system. In addition, an attacker model is also proposed to protect the proposed system from attacks and vulnerabilities.

Blockchain technology originated alongside Bitcoin as a novel method of conducting financial transactions. It has garnered significant attention from both industry and academia in recent years, emerging as a prominent area of research. It is a decentralized record-keeping system that holds transactional information. The scale of a blockchain network expands according to the growth in the number of nodes and transactions, resulting in issues related to storage capacity, data processing speed, and time delay. These issues have a direct impact on the scalability of a blockchain network. Currently, scalability is one of the prominent concerns in the field of blockchain technology and an active research area. This study conducts a comprehensive survey of the scalability challenges faced by blockchain technology in several sectors. It also examines potential solutions based on consensus mechanisms, smart contracts and directed acyclic graph (DAG). It is observed that the proposed scalability solutions target enhancing system throughput, reducing costs, and improving blockchain efficiency. Therefore, we examine, compare, and evaluate the literature using these specific criteria. Moreover, a survey of existing blockchain based survey papers is presented. A comparative analysis of these survey papers is presented along with their recency score, which is determined by the number of recent publications reviewed in a survey paper. By "recent," we mean the current year (or the publication year of a survey paper) and the three years prior to it. Additionally, this paper offers an elaborate discussion on the forthcoming open research challenges and applications of blockchain.

In the smart grid (SG) environment, consumers are enabled to alter electricity consumption patterns in response to electricity prices and incentives. This results in prices that may differ from the initial price pattern. Electricity price and demand forecasting play a vital role in the reliability and sustainability of SG. Forecasting using big data has become a new hot research topic as a massive amount of data is being generated and stored in the SG environment. Electricity users, having advanced knowledge of prices and demand of electricity, can manage their load efficiently. In this paper, a recurrent neural network (RNN), long short term memory (LSTM), is used for electricity price and demand forecasting using big data. Researchers are working actively to propose new models of forecasting. These models contain a single input variable as well as multiple variables. From the literature, we observed that the use of multiple variables enhances the forecasting accuracy. Hence, our proposed model uses multiple variables as input and forecasts the future values of electricity demand and price. The hyperparameters of this algorithm are tuned using the Jaya optimization algorithm to improve the forecasting ability and increase the training mechanism of the model. Parameter tuning is necessary because the performance of a forecasting model depends on the values of these parameters. Selection of inappropriate values can result in inaccurate forecasting. So, integration of an optimization method improves the forecasting accuracy with minimum user efforts. For efficient forecasting, data is preprocessed and cleaned from missing values and outliers, using the z-score method. Furthermore, data is normalized before forecasting. The forecasting accuracy of the proposed model is evaluated using the root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE). For a fair comparison, the proposed forecasting model is compared with univariate LSTM and support vector machine (SVM). The values of the performance metrics depict that the proposed model has higher accuracy than SVM and univariate LSTM.