Scope

The objective of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (IEEE DAPPS 2022) is to facilitate the exchange between researchers and practitioners in the area of Decentralized Applications based on Distributed Ledger Technologies, Blockchains and related technologies. The conference is part of IEEE CISOSE 2022 congress.

Blockchain has already established itself in the domains of digital payments and NFTs. However, the potential implications of Blockchain technologies go far beyond their application as the technological backbone for cryptocurrencies. Decentralized Applications (dApps) are expected to become a key building block for a plethora of highly expressive applications.

dApps allow for various novel application scenarios, which are built upon distributed consensus and thus are hard to block or censor while providing public verifiability of peer-to-peer transactions without a trusted central party. For that, permissionless Blockchains such as Bitcoin or Ethereum rely on an unrestricted set of participants that run a (time-consuming and energy-hungry) consensus algorithm among them. In contrast, permissioned Blockchains, such as Hyperledger Fabric, distribute trust among a restricted set of consensus participants, a setup that can be well suited to model enterprise application scenarios in a more scalable fashion.

IEEE DAPPS 2022 will provide a high-quality forum for participants from research and industry. The conference will discuss key theories, algorithms, infrastructures, and significant deployments for Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures, as well as emerging research topics.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs)
Smart contract theory
Languages and tools for (secure) dApps
Infrastructures for dApps
Communication protocols and standards for dApps
Software engineering for dApps and smart contracts verification
Decentralized identity
Identity management for dApps
Token economy
Off-Chain/Layer 2 dApps
Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
Non-fungible tokens (NFT)
Cryptographic primitives for applications
Analytics for on-chain and off-chain data
Governance structure and mechanisms
Interoperability for dApps, blockchains, and DLTs
Privacy of dApps
Security of dApps
Scalability, sharding, and performance of blockchain systems
Policy/laws surrounding dApps and cryptocurrencies
Applications in emerging domains
Other emerging research topics

Important Dates

May 8, 2022: Paper submission deadline
June 8, 2022: Author notification
June 15, 2022: Camera-ready submission and conference registration

Paper submission

IEEE DAPPS 2022 solicits research papers describing novel and previously unpublished scientific contributions to the field of Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures. All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.

Two different types of papers can be submitted:
Regular papers (10 pages IEEE double column format)
Short papers (6 pages IEEE double column format)

Regular papers should describe novel and previously unpublished scientific contributions to the field of Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures. Each regular paper is limited to 10 pages, including tables, figures and references.

Short papers aim at presenting novel work in progress, novel applications, and novel industry perspectives in the field of Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures. Each short paper is limited to 6 pages, including tables, figures and references. Short papers will also be peer-reviewed, however, they will be evaluated with a focus on the potential for establishing new ideas and for sparking the interest of participants. Ph.D.'s students are also invited to submit ongoing work lacking complete results as short papers.

All papers must be written in English. Manuscripts must include a title, an abstract, and a list of 4-6 keywords. All papers must be prepared in the IEEE double column proceedings format. Please see: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html

IEEE DAPPS 2022 uses a double-blind review policy. Authors are required to remove their names, affiliation(s) and other identifying information from the header of the manuscript. This also includes meta-data in the submitted document as well as acknowledgement sections. Authors are required to cite their previous work in a neutral manner, for example, avoid “in our previous work [3]” and instead use “as shown in [3]”.
Papers that do not meet these anonymization requirements may be desk-rejected without further review.

All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed. The name(s) of the author(s) will not be visible to the reviewers of a paper. The name(s) of the author(s) will be visible in the submission system to the General Chairs and the Program Committee Chairs. Authors should report any conflict of interest with the list of Program Committee members during submission of the manuscript, in which case the Program Committee Chairs will exclude the corresponding PC member(s) from reviewing the paper.
Authors must submit their manuscripts via the following link by May 8th, 2022, 23:59 AoE at the latest:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ieeedapps2022

Preprints

Authors who have submitted articles for publication by the IEEE may be interested in posting preprint versions of the same article. In order to find out more about the allowed forms of preprints and to understand what counts as a prior publication, please see IEEE's Sharing and Posting Policies as well as Section 8.1.9 on "Electronic Information Dissemination" in the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual.

Paper publication

All accepted papers will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press (EI-Index) and included in the IEEE Digital Library. For publication, each accepted paper is required to be registered by one of its authors, and at least one author is required to attend and present the paper at the conference for the paper to be included in the final technical program and the IEEE Digital Library.

Contact

The organizing committee of IEEE DAPPS 2022 can be reached via email at:
general-chairs@ieeedapps.net
pc-chairs@ieeedapps.net

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Special Session: "Verifiable Off-Chain Computations using Zero-Knowledge Proofs – A DApp Perspective"

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are a long-standing family of probabilistic protocols that have been receiving increased attention in recent years in the context of blockchain-based DApps. ZKPs allow to perform a computation off-chain (on blockchain-external resources) but to verify proofs of computation on-chain (in smart contracts). The on-chain verification of computations only incurs a fraction of the cost compared to running the actual computations on all nodes of the blockchain network. Using verifiable off-chain computations also enhances privacy, as not all information needed for a computation must be shared in the network but remains confidential and external to the blockchain network. Still, knowledge about the computation is being manifested in the network with all the desired properties that the blockchain introduces. Among the early adopters of ZKPs and zkSNARKS, the most widely used ZKPs, are the cryptocurrency Zcash and leading consultancies like EY. Global standardization activities for ZKPs exist, and first developer-friendly tools like ZoKrates that help to use verifiable computations in DApps are available.

In this special session at IEEE DAPPS, we take a DApp perspective on verifiable off-chain computations and call for contributions in the form of (technical, vision, position) papers, best-practice reports and demos. The focus of this special session is explicitly not on the cryptographic challenges in bringing ZKPs to mainstream adoption or on respective cryptographic primitives, but on the DApp engineering, application identification, and usage aspects of verifiable off-chain computations. The session will consist of a “mini-tutorial” for the ZoKrates toolbox and high-quality paper and demo presentations of using verifiable off-chain computations in practice.

The aim of this session is to carry the momentum and curiosity that exists with using ZKPs in DApp development and to create and to bring together an application-oriented community of academics and practitioners. The goal of this inaugural special session at IEEE DApps is to establish a common understanding of the engineering aspects of using ZKPs in practice, first by exploring the use of tools like ZoKrates and by sharing results as well as open issues when applying ZKPs. The session promotes and facilitates the collaboration between academics and industry experts that are interested in creating innovative and practical DApp solutions.

Organizers and Contact for the Special Session: Stefan Tai, Jonathan Heiss, and Frank Pallas, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany