Publications — Nuno Braz

Blockchain technology has seen adoption across various industries and the real estate sector is no exception. The traditional property leasing process guarantees no trust between parties, uses insecure communication channels, and forces participants who are not familiar with the process to perform contracts. Blockchain technology emerges as a solution to simplify the traditional property leasing process. This work proposes the use of two blockchain oracles to handle, respectively, maintenance issues and automate rent payments in the context of property rental. These two components are introduced in a blockchain-based property rental platform.

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We explore a blockchain-based voting protocol tailored for low-electorate, weighted-voting environments. The blockchain ensures correctness and censorship-resistance. The cryptographic primitives, namely Threshold Fully Homomorphic Encryption (TFHE) and signatures of knowledge to ensure correctness, privacy, and weak coercion-resistance under the assumption that a minimum number of voters are honest.

We study binary decision-making in governance councils of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), where a group of experts must choose between two alternatives on behalf of the organization. We introduce an information structure model for such councils and formalize desired properties in blockchain governance. Building on these foundations, we propose a decision-making mechanism where we assume the availability of an evaluation tool that ex-post returns a boolean indicating success or failure. Smart contracts allow the implementation of this mechanism in practice.

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