Centre for Distributed Ledger Technologies - University of Malta

Congratulations to Stanislaw Baranski, Ben Biedermann and Prof. Joshua Ellul for having their paper titled "Internet Voting Maturity Framework — Quantifying Maturity in Internet Voting Protocols" accepted in ACM's DLT Journal.

As the VinoVeritas project comes to an end, we would like to thank all those involved including research staff, collaborators, and stakeholders, and reflect on the work undertaken and the results achieved.

The initiative focused on investigating how:
1. Blockchain can be used to provide tamperproof guarantees within wine certification processes in a frictionless manner as possible;
2. How IoT devices and imagery can be utilised to provide further insights that can help vineyards.

A final article discussing aspects of the project is available here:
https://thinkmagazine.mt/in-wine-and-blockchain-we-trust/

An end of project event was held on 28th November 2025 at the National Viticulture and Oenology Centre.

Once again, we would like to express appreciation to all stakeholders, collaborators and research staff, and we hope to continue to issue updates on the efforts in future projects.

The project, VinoVeritas, is co-funded by the European Union
under M16.2 of the Rural Development Programme (RDP)
for Malta 2014-2022.

Congratulatons to Prof. Joshua Ellul, Prof. Gordon Pace, Ryan Falzon and Matthew Scerri for having their paper titled "Formal Semantics and Implementation of Ethereum Smart Contracts for Blockchain-based Supply Chain Attestation Flows: A Viticulture Case Study" accepted for publication in IEEE Access.

The paper proposes an attestation flow diagram framework including formal semantics and its implementation for Ethereum-based smart contracts using a viticulture case study.

The approach was explored in the VinoVeritas project for wine supply chain transparency 🍷 funded by the European Union under M16.2 of the Rural Development Programme (RDP) for Malta 2014-2022.

The paper is available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11215706

Looking back at this year's rareevo.io/ conference, Charles Hoskinson (a founder of Ethereum and Cardano) interviewed Dr Lars Brunjes (from IO) and resident academic Prof. Joshua Ellul during which they discussed their recently released book "Mastering Cardano".

Watch the podcast here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB5MGXaWlkI

Introducing Mastering Cardano | Rare Evo 2025 Mastering Cardano is more than just a book; it’s intended to be a community-driven resource that grows and improves with the collective knowledge of the Card...

Congratulations to Dr Lars Brunjes (from IOG) and Prof. Joshua Ellul for launching "Mastering Cardano" - a book that covers the Cardano ecosystem providing different learning paths for users new to the space, and those interested in governance, smart contracts and DApps, operating staking pools, and internals.

The book is currently available in digital form from book.io: https://book.io/book/mastering-cardano/