No abstract

Invoice factoring is a very useful tool for developing businesses that face liquidity problems. The main property that a factoring system needs to fulfill is to prevent an invoice from being factored twice. In order to prevent double factoring, many factoring ecosystems use one or several centralized entities to register factoring agreements. However, this puts a lot of power in the hands of these centralized entities and makes it difficult for users to dispute situations in which factoring data is unavailable, wrongly recorded or manipulated by negligence or on purpose. In this article, we propose an architecture for invoice factoring registration based on a public blockchain. To solve the aforementioned drawbacks, we replace the trusted third parties for factoring registration with a smart contract. Using a smart contract, we record digital evidence of the terms and conditions of factoring agreements in explicit detail, allowing auditability and dispute resolution. Relevant information is highly available on the blockchain while its privacy is protected. The registration is optimal, since it needs only one blockchain transaction and one key-value storage per invoice factoring.

No abstract

Invoice factoring is a handy tool for developing businesses that face liquidity problems. The main property that a factoring system needs to fulfill is to prevent an invoice from being factored twice. Distributed ledger technology is suitable for implementing the platform to register invoice factoring agreements and prevent double-factoring. Several works have been proposed to use this technology for invoice factoring. However, current proposals lack in one or several aspects, such as decentralization and security against corruption, protecting business and personally identifiable information (PII), providing non-repudiation for handling disputes, Know-Your-Customer (KYC) compliance, easy user on-boarding, and being cost-efficient. In this article, a factoring registration protocol is proposed for invoice factoring registration based on a public distributed ledger which adheres to the aforementioned requirements. We include a relayer in our architecture to address the entry barrier that the users have due to the need of managing cryptocurrencies for interacting with the public ledger. Moreover, we leverage the concept of Verifiable Credentials (VCs) for KYC compliance, and allow parties to implement their self-sovereign identities by using decentralized identifiers (DIDs). DIDs enable us to relay on the DIDComm protocol for asynchronous and secure off-chain communications. We analyze our protocol from several security aspects, compare it to the related work, and study a possible business use case. Our evaluations demonstrate that our proposal is secure and efficient, as well as covers requirements not addressed by existing related work.

No abstract

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an important public health problem which can lead to several complications like gastrointestinal dysfunction. Patients with TBI often suffer from gastrointestinal dysfunctions such as enteral feeding intolerance. Gastric ulceration is induced by various forms of stress like surgery, ischemia and trauma. TBI causes a delayed but significant decrease in intestinal contractile activity in the ileum leading to delayed transport. The association between severity of brain injury and enteral feeding intolerance suggests a strong link between the central nervous system and the non-functional gut. The results of recent basic and clinical studies revealed the beneficial effects of estrogen and progesterone hormones in the treatment of gastrointestinal dysfunction. Females have more resistance to stress and fewer gastrointestinal lesions occur in females as compared to males. Sex steroid hormones have sparked interest as possible neuroprotective agents after traumatic injury and many studies have been done on this subject. This article reviews the literature related to some possible physiological effects of female sexual hormones on the gastrointestinal tract following TBI.