12.11.2020CSG at BCCA 2020

Sina Rafati and Clemens Jeger, presenting a paper each, represented the Communication Systems Group (CSG), Department of Informatics (IfI) of the University of Zurich (UZH) at The Second International Conference on Blockchain Computing and Applications (BCCA 2020). The conference was realized online -- as usual for conferences in 2020 -- upon the entire day of November 3, 2020.

As a great number of IoT devices interacting in Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Blockchain (BC) integrated use cases, it is crucial to provide scalable and secure mechanisms for IoT data persistence within BCs. In this regard, the paper entitled "DLIT: A Scalable Distributed Ledger for IoT Data" presented by Sina Rafati introduced an IoT-oriented permissioned BC, which covers via a scalable Distributed Ledger (DL) a novel sharding mechanism for unstable distributed networks. Therefore, DLIT (Distributed Ledger for IoT Data) offers a novel two-layered transaction distribution, validation, and inter-shard synchronization, combined with authentication and verification mechanisms in support of a viable security level.
 

To analyze the stability and differences between the different mechanisms used in stablecoins during periods of crisis, the paper entitled "Analysis of Stablecoins during the Global COVID-19 Pandemic", presented by Clemens Jeger, conducted an overview of stablecoin stability mechanisms, the current stablecoin market landscape, and the performance of major stablecoins during the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis indicates that stablecoins' performance during the financial crisis and, in particular, the market crash presents a direct relation with their specific behavior attributed to different design aspects, including their popularity.