BRAINS 2026 (Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services) is an academic conference held in Florence, Italy on 2026-10-13. The paper submission deadline is 2026-05-17. Acceptance notifications are sent on 2026-07-01.
Decentralized technologies (Web3, Blockchain, Distributed Ledger Technologies, Distributed Storage and Computation as IPFS) have started to disrupt multiple domains, including finance and payments, but also networks, computing, supply chain, identity management, and Artificial Intelligence with decentralized learning.
The BRAINS conference is dedicated to these advances that could make the world of networks and services more secure while enabling new distributed business models.
This year, a new DeFi track is open to both technically oriented and economics-oriented papers. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary work that combines blockchain protocols, smart contract engineering, and DeFi market design, as well as empirical and theoretical studies on crypto-economics and financial innovation.
Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
Effective challenges for decentralized systems
Theoretical contributions to Blockchain, DLT and decentralized storage
Distributed consensus and fault tolerance solutions, including domain-specific consensus
Protocols and algorithms
Distributed ledger analytics
Trade-offs between decentralization, scalability, and security
Zero-Knowledge proofs
Layer 2 solutions for scalability and privacy
Blockchain interoperability and cross-chain mechanisms
Storage solutions and data availability
Censorship resistance and fair ordering
Malicious or self-serving attacks, and defenses
Obstacles to achieving effective decentralization
Fundamentals of Decentralized Apps, Smart contracts, and chain code
Languages and tooling for dApp development
Security, privacy, and forensics
Formal methods for blockchain
Transaction monitoring and analysis
Collaboration between on-chain and off-chain code
Blockchain-defined networking
Web3 and distributed storage and computation
Application and service cases of DLT and Smart contracts
Identity management
Finance, payments, and fraud detection and prevention
IoT and cyber-physical systems
Smart grids and Industry 4.0, including dataspaces
V2X, connected and autonomous vehicles
Networking, Edge, and Cloud technologies
Blockchain for Beyond 5G and 6G technologies
Service or resource marketplaces
Public sector Blockchain solutions and infrastructures
Results from large collaborative projects on these topics
Blockchain for education, public administration, health
Blockchain for Business Process and Supply Chain Management
Regulation and policies
Blockchain and AI
Machine learning and AI for blockchain security
Federated and decentralized learning for blockchain systems
Large Language Models for blockchain
Using Blockchain for agentic AI
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Track (Open to both technical and economics/finance-oriented papers on blockchain and DeFi.)
AMMs (Automated Market Makers)
Lending Protocols
Stablecoins
Restaking
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks)
Prediction Markets
AI Agents & DeFi
DeFi and Privacy
Blockchain for Information Systems and Business Process Management
On-chain and off-chain data and processes integration
Business processes auditing and monitoring on blockchain
Process mining techniques for blockchain-based systems
Software architecture for blockchain-based information systems
Modeling aspects for processes and data in blockchain-based systems
Student Track
We encourage the submission of student papers (i.e., all authors of the paper must be MSc or PhD students) on the topics mentioned in the CFP. Student papers have to be clearly stated on the first page. The papers should follow the same guidelines as short papers (max 4 pages) and be submitted on the dedicated track for student papers.
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