BRAIN 2026
7th Workshop on Blockchain theoRy and ApplicatIoNs
in conjunction with IEEE PerCom 2026
Pisa, Italy
https://sites.google.com/unipi.it/brain-2026

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Workshop date: March 16 or 20, 2026
Paper Submission Deadline: November 17, 2025 (AoE)
Submission link: https://edas.info/N34012

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A blockchain protocol is employed to implement a tamper-free distributed ledger that stores transactions created by the nodes of a P2P network and agreed upon through a distributed consensus algorithm, avoiding the need for a central authority.
Blockchain technology has a great potential to radically change our socio-economical systems by guaranteeing secure transactions between untrusted entities, reducing their cost, and simplifying many processes. Such technology is going to be exploited in many areas like IoT, social networking, health care, electronic voting, and so on. In particular, blockchain provides an innovative solution to address challenges in pervasive environments, e.g., distributed computing, smart devices, and device-to-device coordination, in terms of decentralization, data privacy, and network security, while pervasive environments offer elasticity and scalability characteristics to improve the efficiency of blockchain operations.

Even if many applications are already leveraging the disruptive potentials of this technology, further research and development are required for several challenging aspects like scalability, efficiency, privacy and support of complex queries, both from a theoretical and practical point of view.

This workshop aims to provide a venue for researchers from both academy and industry to present and discuss important topics on blockchain technology. The workshop’s goal is to present results on both theoretical and more applicative open challenges, as well as to provide a venue to showcase the current state of existing proposals.

All workshop papers are limited to no more than 6 pages (including references) in IEEE format aligned with the IEEE PerCom main conference guidelines. Note that it is possible to purchase only 1 extra page.

All submissions will undergo a double-blind review process. As a result, authors must make a good faith effort to anonymize their submissions.

In accordance with the main conference indications, the workshop will be an in-person only event.

Accepted workshop papers will be included in the IEEE PerCom 2026 proceedings and will appear in the IEEE Explore Library.

All accepted papers are required to be supported by an author full registration (no workshop author discounted fee available). Please note that papers without a valid full registration or that are not presented in-person will be excluded from the proceedings.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Blockchain Fundamentals
Distributed consensus Algorithms
Permissioned vs permissionless paradigms
Scalability issues
P2P communication protocols
Inter-ledger protocols
Smart contracts automatic verification
Layer-2 payment protocols, lightning networks
Legal Aspect (smart contract, utility and security tokens, ICO, ...)
Blockchain for pervasive computing
System engineering with IoT and blockchain
Digital identity Management on blockchain
Distributed supply chains
Blockchain-based mobile edge computing systems
Blockchain for Medicine and Healthcare
Blockchain for trustworthiness in 5G and 6G Networks
Blockchain for peer-to-peer energy management
Blockchain-enabled distributed social platforms
Blockchain-based access control
Smart Contracts and dApp software engineering aspects
Cryptocurrencies


Important Dates
Paper Submission Deadline: November 17, 2025 (AoE)
Notification of Acceptance: January 5, 2026 (AoE)
Camera Ready: February 2, 2026 (AoE)
Registration: TBA
Workshop: March 16 or 20, 2026

Workshop co-chairs
Damiano Di Francesco Maesa, University of Pisa, Italy
Laura Ricci, University of Pisa, Italy
Nishanth Sastry, University of Surrey, UK

Technical program committee chair
Matteo Loporchio, University of Pisa, Italy