The emergence of Bitcoin and decentralized cryptocurrencies, and their fundamental innovation---blockchains---have allowed for entities to trade and interact without a central trusted third party. This has led to a captivating research activity in multiple domains and across different venues, such as top security and distributed systems conferences and journals, as well as a vibrant startup rush on this new technology.

The fifth IEEE Security and Privacy on the Blockchain (S&B) workshop aims to unite interested scholars as well as industrial members from all relevant disciplines who study and work in the space of blockchains. We solicit previously unpublished papers offering novel contributions in both cryptocurrencies and wider blockchain research. Papers may present advances in the theory, design, implementation, analysis, verification, or empirical evaluation and measurement of existing systems. Papers that shed new light on past or informally known results by means of sound formal theory or through empirical analysis are welcome. Suggested contribution topics include (but are not limited to) empirical and theoretical studies of:

    Adoption of blockchains in developing countries
    Anonymity and privacy-enhancing technologies
    Applications using or built on top of blockchains
    Atomic Swapping
    Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, Zcash protocol, other coins and extensions (cryptography, scripting/smart contract language etc.)
    Business models for blockchains (both new and new integrations into existing)
    Case studies (e.g., of adoption, attacks, forks, scams etc.)
    Censorship
    Consensus protocols for blockchains
    Cryptocurrency adoption effects (eg economic impact, transition dynamics)
    Decentralized Applications (Exchanges, Mining Pools, Trading Platforms)
    Economic and monetary aspects
    Economics and game theory of mining
    Forensics and monitoring
    Formal verification of blockchain protocols and Smart Contracts
    Fraud detection and financial crime prevention
    Governance
    Identity, Identification and trust in blockchain systems
    Interfacing fiat and cryptocurrencies
    Intermediates in different industries and their future
    Internet of things (IoT) and blockchains
    Legal and policy implications of Smart Contracts
    Legal, ethical, and societal aspects of virtual currencies
    Legal status of crowdfunding for new blockchain projects (ICO/TGE)
    Novel applications of the blockchain
    Off-chain payment channels
    Peer-to-peer broadcast networks/topologies
    Permissioned (e.g. Hyperledger) and permissionless (e.g. Bitcoin) blockchains
    Proof-of-work, and its alternatives (e.g., proof-of-stake, proof-of-burn, and virtual
    mining)
    Real-world measurements and metrics
    Regulation and law enforcement
    Relation to other payment systems
    Scalability and scalable services for blockchain systems
    Security of blockchains
    Smart Contract Programming Languages and VM's
    Transaction graph analysis
    Usability and user studies

This topic list is not meant to be exhaustive. S&B is interested in all aspects of the blockchain research relating to security and privacy. Papers that are considered out of scope may be rejected without full review. We encourage submissions that are "far-reaching" and "risky."