Call for Papers

The international conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT) is a premier venue for presenting the latest developments in technologies related to novel financial infrastructure such as digital currencies and their applications, blockchains, cryptographic financial instruments, decentralized finance, and exchanges. Papers may present advances in theory, design, implementation, analysis, verification, or empirical evaluation and measurement of relevant systems.

We solicit previously unpublished papers offering novel research contributions. Proceedings will be published with open-access by LIPIcs.

Papers may be submitted aft24.hotcrp.com. Please email aft2024.chairs@gmail.com with any questions or issues.

Co-location

This year, AFT will be co-located with the Economics of Payments XIII (EoP) conference. EoP is the primary conference for economists, central bankers, and policymakers to present and discuss their studies on topics related to payment, clearing and settlement systems. The purpose of the co-location is to foster collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and professional communities. Interested participants of both events are strongly encouraged to also attend the respective other event.

Important dates

• Abstract registration deadline: May 15th, 2024 (AoE)
• Economics of Computation (EC’24) submission: Please note that the full paper deadline has been set after the notification deadline for EC’24. As such, authors of AFT relevant topics with EC submissions are encouraged to register their abstracts prior to the EC notification and subsequently can withdraw the registration if accepted to EC.
• Paper submission deadline: May 22nd, 2024 (AoE)
• Registration opens: June 7th, 2024
• Notification: July 3rd, 2024
• Camera ready: July 24th, 2024
• AFT conference: September 23-25, 2024
• (Economics of Payments XIII: September 25-27, 2024)

Topics of interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Anonymity and privacy
• Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and their applications
• Case studies (e.g., of adoption, attacks, forks, scams, etc.)
• Censorship resistance
• Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)
• Centralized and decentralized exchanges
• Consensus protocols
• Cryptoasset custody solutions
• Cryptographic protocols and tools
• Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)
• Economic, legal, ethical, regulatory, and societal aspects
• Financial markets
• Fraud detection and financial crime prevention
• Game-theoretic analysis of blockchains and financial protocols
• Protocol governance and stakeholder voting
• Mechanism design for blockchains
• Metrics, measurements, and network forensics
• Miner/maximal extractable value (MEV)
• Quantum-resilience in financial technologies
• Secure hardware for financial technologies
• Scalability and performance
• Smart contracts and applications
• Smart contract security, formal analysis, and correctness by design
• Transaction graph analysis
• User studies

Submissions Policy

All submissions must be original work; the submitters must clearly document any overlap with previously published or simultaneously submitted papers from any of the authors. Failure to point out and explain overlap will be grounds for rejection. Simultaneous submission of the same paper to another venue with proceedings or a journal is not allowed and will be grounds for desk rejection. Please contact the program committee chairs if there are any questions about this policy.

In order to accommodate publishing traditions in different fields, this year we are adding the option for authors of accepted papers to request that an extended abstract of up to 3 pages and a link to the full paper be included in the proceedings (the URL should remain active for 2 years). This way, a subsequent version of the work can be submitted for full publication in a journal without conflicting with the conference proceedings. Authors wishing to publish an extended abstract will submit and be reviewed as a regular full submission, and once accepted, can request that only the extended abstract is published. The main consideration taken for the request is the publishing tradition of the main field of the submission. Note that the full online version must still follow possible shepherding requirements.

SoK papers

We welcome Systemization of Knowledge (SoK) papers which evaluate, systematize, and contextualize existing knowledge, adapted from the successful model at the IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium. SoK papers should provide an important new viewpoint on an established, major research area, support or challenge long-held beliefs in such an area with compelling evidence, or present a convincing, comprehensive new taxonomy of such an area. Survey papers without such insights are not appropriate and may be rejected without full review. Submissions will be distinguished by the prefix “SoK:” in the title and a checkbox on the submission form.

Anonymous Submission

Papers must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review: no author names or affiliations may appear on the title page, and papers should avoid revealing their identity in the text. When referring to your previous work, do so in the third person, as though it were written by someone else. Only blind the reference itself in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible. Publication as a technical report or in an online repository does not constitute a violation of this policy. Contact the program chairs if you have any questions. Papers that are not properly anonymized may be rejected without review.

Conflict of Interest

During submission of a research paper, the submission site will request information about conflicts of interest of the paper’s authors with program committee (PC) members. It is the full responsibility of all authors of a paper to identify all and only their potential conflict-of-interest PC members, according to the following definition. A paper author has a conflict of interest with a PC member when one or more of the following conditions holds:

• The PC member is a co-author of the paper.
• The PC member is or was the author’s primary thesis advisor at any point.
• The author is or was the PC member’s primary thesis advisor at any point.
• The PC member has been a direct collaborator within the past two years.
• The PC member has been a co-worker in the same organization or university within the past two years.
• For student interns, the student is conflicted with their supervisors and with members of the same research group. If the student no longer works for the organization, then they are not conflicted with a PC member from the larger organization.
• The PC member is a relative or close personal friend of the author.

For any other situation where the authors feel they have a conflict with a PC member, they must explain the nature of the conflict to the PC chairs, who will mark the conflict if appropriate. Papers with incorrect or incomplete conflict of interest information as of the submission closing time are subject to rejection without review.

When a program co-chair is conflicted, the other co-chair will be responsible for managing that paper. When both program co-chairs are in conflict, a committee member will be appointed to handle the paper. Program co-chairs are not allowed to be authors or co-authors of any submissions.

Financial Conflicts-of-interest

Authors are required to state material conflicts-of-interest in the camera-ready version of their papers (but not at the time of submission). This includes not just direct research funding, but also disclosure of any financial interest that could be reasonably construed as related to the research described. For example, "Author X is on the Technical Advisory Board of the ByteCoin Foundation," or "Professor Y is the CTO of DoubleChain, which specializes in on-chain forensics."

Human Subjects and Ethical Considerations

Submissions that describe experiments on human subjects, that analyze data derived from human subjects (even anonymized data), or that otherwise may put humans at risk or affect financial situation of humans in existing systems, must:

• Disclose whether the research received an approval or waiver from each of the authors’ institutional ethics review boards (IRB) if applicable.
• Discuss steps taken to ensure that participants and others who might have been affected by an experiment were treated ethically and with respect.

If the submission deals with vulnerabilities (e.g., software vulnerabilities in a given program or design weaknesses in a hardware system), the authors need to discuss in detail the steps they have taken or plan to take to address these vulnerabilities (e.g., by disclosing vulnerabilities to the vendors). The same applies if the submission deals with personal identifiable information (PII) or other kinds of sensitive data. If a paper raises significant ethical and legal concerns, it might be rejected based on these concerns.

Page Limit and Formatting

Submissions may include up to 20 pages of text in LIPIcs format (see https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publishing/series/details/LIPIcs), and an unlimited number of pages for references and appendices.

All submissions may be automatically checked for conformance to these requirements. Failure to adhere to the page limit and formatting requirements are grounds for immediate rejection.

The same page limits apply to camera-ready accepted papers. Appendices will be read at the reviewers' discretion.

Submission

Submissions must be in Portable Document Format (.pdf). Authors should pay special attention to unusual fonts, images, and figures that might create problems for reviewers. Your document should render correctly in Adobe Reader 9 and when printed in black and white.

Papers must be submitted at https://aft24.hotcrp.com/

Publication and Presentation

Accepted papers will be published with open access in the conference proceedings by LIPIcs.

Authors are responsible for obtaining appropriate publication clearances. At least one of the authors of the accepted paper is expected to register for the conference. In the event of an in-person meeting, one of the authors is expected to attend and deliver a presentation at the meeting. Authors may contact the program chairs directly to enquire about exceptions.

Call for Workshop Proposals

AFT invites proposals for workshops to be co-located with AFT 2024 (the day after the main conference). Proposals should be emailed to aft2024.chairs@gmail.com. Proposals are due on March 27th, 2024, decisions will be announced April 17th, 2024, and the workshop would take place on September 26th, 2024.

Proposals can be brief (one page should suffice), but should contain the following:

• The title of the workshop
• The names, contact information, and short biographies of the organizers (links to the organizers' web pages would suffice)
• A brief description of the workshop theme
• The organization/format of the workshop
• Any previous versions of the workshop
• Required facilities for the workshop
• The desired workshop length (half day preferred)

Organization

AFT 2024 is jointly hosted by the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and the University of Innsbruck. The Austrian National Bank (OeNB) hosts the co-located Economics of Payments XIII (EoP) conference and makes available its conference facilities to both AFT and EoP.