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AGChain: A Blockchain-based Gateway for Trustworthy App Delegation from Mobile App Markets

  • Mengjie CHEN
  • , Xiao YI
  • , Daoyuan WU*
  • , Jianliang XU
  • , Yingjiu LI
  • , Debin GAO
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

Abstract

The popularity of smartphones has led to the growth of mobile app markets, creating a need for enhanced transparency, global access, and secure downloading. This article introduces AGChain, a blockchain-based gateway that enables trustworthy app delegation within existing markets. AGChain ensures that markets can continue providing services while users benefit from permanent, distributed, and secure app delegation. During its development, we address two key challenges: significantly reducing smart contract gas costs and enabling fully distributed IPFS-based file storage. Additionally, we tackle three system issues related to security and sustainability. We have implemented a prototype of AGChain on Ethereum and Polygon blockchains, achieving effective security and decentralization with a minimal gas cost of around 0.0028 USD per app upload (no cost for app download). AGChain also exhibits reasonable performance with an average overhead of 12%.

Original languageEnglish
Article number30
Number of pages22
JournalDistributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice
Volume5
Issue number3
Early online date23 Dec 2024
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 23 Dec 2024
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

The work by Mengjie Chen and Daoyuan Wu were done while at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Publisher Copyright: © 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

Keywords

  • Blockchain
  • Smart contract
  • Ethereum
  • IPFS
  • App security

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