Juan Ignacio Ibañez, Chris N. Bayer, Paolo Tasca, Jiahua Xu
Triple entry accounting (TEA) is simultaneously a novel application in the blockchain universe and one of the many concepts applied in blockchain technology. Its Wild Wild West status is accompanied by a lack of consistent and comprehensive set of categories, a state of play that impedes a proper apprehension of the technology, leading to contradictions and oversight of important nuances. To clearly delineate the confines of TEA within the world of blockchain, we provide building blocks to standardise its terminology. Particularly, we distinguish between essential elements such as accounting and bookkeeping, as well as between decentralised systems, distributed ledgers, and distributed journals.
The boundary between the physical and a virtual world is not clearly visible nowadays, the 4.0 industry utilizes artificial intelligence, distributed ledger technology, quantum computing, advanced visualization and other advanced technologies. The surge of capital flows in financial technology is visible wherever we look. Classical businesses face a challenge to connect and create partners with the companies that are technology savvy because this may impact their future success. The strategy for digital business must be thought over very thoroughly since it represents the success threshold in contemporary digital environment. The classic banking system faces the threat or opportunity of an open banking system and banks are forced to be prepared to offer next generation services benefiting from third party channels. The short history on the banking industry including digital banking along, with fintech as a financial institution showing its power to compete sophistically, will shift the studied digital transformation phenomenon into a dilemma whether we indeed face a cashless society challenge, whether the governments should start to accelerate their decisions on Central Bank Digitalized Currency – CBDC or how far several countries already are to become a cashless society. At last, potential security, trust and fraud issues will close this chapter.
Purpose This paper aims to explore issues arising from ṣukūk (Islamic bonds) on blockchain, including Sharīʾah (Islamic law) and legal matters. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative methodology is used in conducting this research where relevant literature on ṣukūk was reviewed. Through a doctrinal approach, the paper presents analyses on the practice of ṣukūk and ṣukūk on blockchain by discussing its legal, Sharīʾah and regulatory issues. This culminates in a conceptual analysis of blockchain ṣukūk and its peculiar challenges. Findings This paper reveals that digitizing ṣukūk issuance through blockchain remedies certain inefficiencies associated with ṣukūk transactions. Indeed, structuring ṣukūk on a blockchain platform can increase transparency of underlying ṣukūk assets and cash flows in addition to reducing costs and the number of intermediaries in ṣukūk transactions. The paper likewise brings to light legal, regulatory, Sharīʾah and cyber risks associated with ṣukūk on blockchain that confront investors, practitioners and regulators. This calls for deeper collaboration in research among Sharīʾah scholars, lawyers, regulators and information technology experts. Research limitations/implications As a pioneering subject, the paper notes the prospects of blockchain ṣukūk and the current dearth of literature on it. The paper would assist relevant Islamic capital market entities and authorities to determine the potential and impact of blockchain ṣukūk in their respective businesses and the financial system. Practical implications Blockchain ṣukūk will assist in addressing issues inherent in classical ṣukūk and in paving the way to innovative solutions that will facilitate and enhance the quality of ṣukūk transactions. For that, ṣukūk would require appropriate regulatory technology to address its governance and regulation peculiarities. Originality/value Integrating ṣukūk with blockchain technology will add value to it. The paper advances the idea that blockchain ṣukūk revolutionises ṣukūk and enhances its practice against known inadequacies.
Abstract Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf outlined an alternative to the current monetary system in which banks are replaced by a peer-to-peer system to issue and transfer digital money: the Bitcoin. While Bitcoin has attracted a substantial investment volume, the system has not achieved the status of a viable alternative monetary system. However, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) underlying the payment system is being applied successfully by financial institutions and is likely to have important implications for the future of money and banking. In this paper we therefore focus on the most advanced distributed ledger application in the financial industry: R3 Corda. This paper is structured as follows. In the first section, we relate the debate about systems of money creation to the rise of Bitcoin. Next, the development of R3 Corda is discussed and the lessons learned for monetary reform. We conclude with an assessment of the scope and likelihood of monetary reform as a consequence of DLT applications by central banks.
Ángel Jesús Varela‐Vaca, Antonia M. Reina Quintero
Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has attracted the attention of the scientific community and companies, as proven by the exponential growth of publications on this topic in recent years. This growing interest is mainly due to the promise that the use of blockchain enables it to be verified, without including any trusted intermediaries, that the information received from the network is authentic and up-to-date. In this respect, blockchain is a distributed database that can be seen as a ledger that records all transactions that have ever been executed. In this context, smart contracts are pieces of software used to facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation of a transaction on a blockchain platform. These pieces of software are implemented by using programming languages, which are sometimes provided by the blockchain platforms themselves. This study aims to (1) identify and categorise the state-of-the-art related to smart contract languages, in terms of the existing languages and their main features, and (2) identify new research opportunities. The review has been conducted as a multivocal mapping study that follows the guidelines proposed by Garousi et al. for conducting multivocal literature reviews, as well as the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters for conducting mapping studies. As a result of the implementation of the review protocol, 4,119 papers were gathered, and 109 of them were selected for extraction. The contributions of this article are twofold: (1) 101 different smart contract languages have been identified and classified according to a variety of criteria; (2) a discussion on the findings and their implications for future research have been outlined. As a conclusion, it could be stated that a rigorous and replicable overview of the state-of-the-art of smart contract languages has been provided that can benefit not only researchers but also practitioners in the field, thanks to its multivocal nature.
This paper conducts a bibliometric research in the literature on Fintech and Islamic finance. The data of this study consists of relevant articles obtained from the Scopus database as of February 2021. A keywords bundle related to Islamic finance and keyword has been used for the search, resulting in 89 publishments included in this research. Results show the stunning increase in the Islamic Fintech publishments after 2017, mainly in the fields of cryptocurrencies, micro-finance, impact investing, and SRI investing, and so on. The two main centers of Islamic Fintech research are Malaysia-Indonesia Region and the GCC area. The increasing number of Islamic Fintech publishments show the potential of the field for the industry's future.
With the advent of the blockchain era, employee incentives need to open up new ideas. The application of blockchain technology can promote the advantages of traditional equity incentive schemes and avoid weaknesses. Although there is still no mature ESOP on-chain solution on the market, and ESOP onchain still needs to consider a series of legal issues. The combination of equity incentives and blockchain technology is feasible. Due to the consensus mechanism of blockchain technology, grant and exercise information is recorded at each node on the chain. The implementation of the plan will be open and transparent throughout the process, avoiding the possibility of dark box operations. This is conducive to enhancing the credibility of the enterprise and enhancing employees’ trust in the enterprise, which can really play an incentive role.
Paolo Zappalà, Marianna Belotti, Maria Potop-Butucaru, Stefano Secci
In this paper we propose a game theoretical framework in order to formally characterize the robustness of blockchains systems in terms of resilience to rational deviations and immunity to Byzantine behaviors. Our framework includes necessary and sufficient conditions for checking the immunity and resilience of games and an original technique for composing games that preserves the robustness of individual games. We prove the practical interest of our formal framework by characterizing the robustness of various blockchain protocols: Bitcoin (the most popular permissionless blockchain), Tendermint (the first permissioned blockchain used by the practitioners), Lightning Network, a side-chain protocol and a cross-chain swap protocol. For each one of the studied protocols we identify upper and lower bounds with respect to their resilience and immunity (expressed as no worse payoff than the initial state) face to rational and Byzantine behaviors.
Abstract In this paper, we propose one content-sharing system InnerLight based on IPFS and BlockChain, which is a creation and public discussion platform about mental health. InnerLight put copies of articles from creators on IPFS to achieve distributed storage of contents and complete the first step of returning the data to creators. At the same time, it also encourages creators and readers to maintain the sustainable development of the system through blockchain-based cryptocurrency. In addition to IPFS and Blockchain, ranking algoithms contribute to make Innerlight to be a decentralized autonomous ecosystem.
Chaosong Yan, Jun Zhu, Yinglong Ouyang, Xingyu Zeng
This article makes relevant research and analysis from theory and practice, respectively. At the same time, with reference to the current state of the Internet, relative analysis was used to focus on the state of commercial banks. The analysis mainly focuses on the problems encountered in the current Internet development in various forms such as the bank’s sales status and customer products. In addition, it really made a reasonable opinion about the relevant sales status of this bank. It systematically studied the development history of marketing products of financial blockchain in China’s financial blockchain and analyzed the process of gradual improvement of the functions and characteristics of marketing products of financial blockchain in China. The characteristics and shortcomings of the marketing products of the financial blockchain were discussed in detail, and from the perspective of technological innovation, the application of emerging technologies in the marketing of China’s financial blockchain was analyzed. This article analyzes the many challenges and opportunities faced by security firms in the development of the Internet. Under the new situation, what kind of development model to adopt and how to transform and upgrade is the strategic proposition that security firms must think about. Based on Internet finance, this article finds that the equity crowdfunding model can be selected in the future development of security companies. On the one hand, the use of equity crowdfunding by security firms can enhance their direct financing capabilities, which will benefit the security industry, especially Internet security firms. On the other hand, through equity crowdfunding, security companies can expand direct financing channels for small, medium, and micro enterprises to promote entrepreneurship. The paper promotes the development of Internet finance, thereby improving the ability of the capital market to serve the real economy.
This article discusses the cultural conceptions of trust underpinning the experimentation of blockchain startup applications beyond the financial sector. Based on qualitative research undertaken in the context of the so-called “Blockchain 2.0” scene, we show how a peculiar conception of trust, which blends the libertarian views of blockchain inventors with the neoliberal culture of competition and meritocracy that is typical of the startup world, underpins these implementations. As a result, we argue that “Blockchain 2.0” entrepreneurs ultimately fail to recognize the eminently social nature of the trust-building process. They emerge from our observation as unable to comprehend the extent to which the implementation of blockchain in a societal (i.e., not purely financial) context cannot do away with considerations about what kind of “social” the technology intervenes within, and find difficult to effectively conceive of how this technology embeds in existing social relations and power structures.
João Akio Ribeiro Yamaguchi, Teresa Rachael Santos, A. P. de Carvalho
Several renewable energy certificate (RECs) applications point out that the blockchain technology can be useful in ensuring the traceability and transparency of transactions, despite some barriers to its implementation, such as the legal and market development. However, it is not clear how the organizational positioning, in relation to its given market, influences the artifact developed. In this study, through design science research (DSR) and case study methodology, we structure the problem space of two different positioned organizations in the sustainability field, with blockchain-based applications to produce and trade RECs. We find out that: (a) the position of the organization in relation to other stakeholders changes the behavior of the technology adoption; (b) the technological solution preceded the perception of the problem; (c) organizations create different representations of the artifact for each stakeholder. We suggest other studies to deepen these findings in order to better develop theories that explain how organizations see their problem when developing technological solutions while using DSR.
Abstract This article presents a socio-anthropological analysis of the formation of a business ecosystem around blockchain technology in the Netherlands, within the broader context of the European Union and the digital single market. I argue that while reproducing widespread global models of business group and network formation, the relations created by these networks also reveal particularities of local business and governance cultures. Such particularities emerge from the pragmatics of collaboration and competitive market relationships, as well as legal heterogeneity and plans for legal harmonisation in digital innovation and governance in Europe. They also emerge from the challenges and transformations that current experimentation cultures for digital innovation bring to the interactions between market players, regulators, and government. These challenges and transformations materialise in increasingly informal connections and strategies for experimental legitimisation, which occur in parallel to more formal and traditional forms of regulatory and governmental interaction. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and in online terrains, including observation periods and 32 interviews with entrepreneurial project teams, as well as with individuals involved in financial incumbents’ innovation labs.
Nasibeh Mohammadzadeh, Sadegh Dorri Nogoorani, José L. Muñoz
Invoice factoring is a very useful tool for developing businesses that face liquidity problems. The main property that a factoring system needs to fulfill is to prevent an invoice from being factored twice. In order to prevent double factoring, many factoring ecosystems use one or several centralized entities to register factoring agreements. However, this puts a lot of power in the hands of these centralized entities and makes it difficult for users to dispute situations in which factoring data is unavailable, wrongly recorded or manipulated by negligence or on purpose. In this article, we propose an architecture for invoice factoring registration based on a public blockchain. To solve the aforementioned drawbacks, we replace the trusted third parties for factoring registration with a smart contract. Using a smart contract, we record digital evidence of the terms and conditions of factoring agreements in explicit detail, allowing auditability and dispute resolution. Relevant information is highly available on the blockchain while its privacy is protected. The registration is optimal, since it needs only one blockchain transaction and one key-value storage per invoice factoring.
Cross‐border trade is also changing and innovating. Electronic payment has become the core application of modern cross‐border e‐commerce. However, although electronic payment has brought convenience and efficiency to enterprises and social life, there are also many problems in transaction information security. These problems not only hinder the development of electronic payment but also bring hidden dangers to people’s property security. Therefore, an encryption algorithm of e‐commerce was proposed, and its algorithm security and risk control mode was further studied by means of case analysis, empirical analysis, and comparative analysis. Experimental data show that blockchain technology is a breakthrough. The aim of the study is to explore its application in specific circumstances and strive to make the new e‐payment mode in line with international standards.
Lingling Guo, Qingfu Liu, Ke Shi, Yao Gao · 6 authors
In the era of paper-based contract, a lot of time, human labor and expenses are required to handle the process of contract drafting, contract signing, contract execution, and payment settlement. The emerging of electronic contract enhances the tedious signing process of paper-based contract and improves the efficiency of contract management. However, due to the centralized system architecture and the database-based storage schema, the stored contract data is at high risk of information leaking, data tampering and hacker attacks. In this study, we introduce Blockchain technology to the contract management, and develop a process-oriented contract management system (BEcontractor) for a Hangzhou-located power grid enterprise X, aiming to solve a series of security issues existing in the traditional electronic contract system. By deploying BEcontractor, procurement activities could be resumed online among X and its nation-widely commodity suppliers during COVID-19 epidemic. Up to September 2020, 6336 electronic contracts have been signed, with an accumulated amount of$\yen ~6.5$billion. It is showed that the cost for accomplishing the contract signing process was significantly reduced, and the payment period was shortened from three months to around one month.