Daniel Cerecedo Hernández, Carlos Armando Franco Ruiz, Mario Iván Contreras-Valdez, Jovan Axel Franco Ruiz
El objetivo de esta investigación es analizar la presencia de burbujas financieras o un comportamiento explosivo en cuatro criptomonedas: Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash y EOS. La selección de los activos se basó en la capitalización de mercado. La metodología implementada fue una prueba simple y generalizada (SADF y GSADF) de una variación de la prueba aumentada de Dickey-Fuller propuesta por Phillips et al. (2011, 2015). Encontramos diez, siete, seis y siete comportamientos exuberantes en los activos mencionados, respectivamente. Esta metodología ha sido en gran parte inexplorada y podría emplearse de manera estándar en el sector financiero para cualquier otro activo. Esta es la primera investigación que detecta este tipo de comportamiento para un grupo de criptomonedas con frecuencia diaria. Con el presente trabajo y el artículo de Li et al. (2018), el 68,47% del mercado ha sido analizado bajo la metodología. En consecuencia, este comportamiento podría estar disperso en todo el sector.
A.K.M. Najmul Islam, Matti Mäntymäki, Marja Turunen
This paper investigates the focal actors in a blockchain network and their heterogeneity in splits. Disagreements in blockchain communities often lead to splits in both the blockchain and the community. We use three key elements of the actor-network theory — punctualization, translation, and actor heterogeneity—and employ case study methodology to examine Bitcoin splits. We identify several human actors, such as miners, developers, merchants, and investors, as well as non-human actors, including blockchain, exchanges, hardware manufacturers, and wallets, involved in Bitcoin splits. Our results show that the consolidation of actors in homogeneous groups plays a key role in blockchain splits. We further describe how the human and non-human actors' fluid moves into micro and macro actor positions in the network affect the development of the split. In addition, we discuss the roles of these actors and their engagement in forming micro and macro agencies in blockchain splits.
Objective: to identify characteristics of modern financial technologies, which have become a catalyst for rapid and irreversible changes in the financial sector; to classify the problems of regulation of finance technologies and their products; to search for a compromise between the promotion of financial innovations and financial risks to ensure financial stability. Methods: systematic approach to the cognition of economic phenomena, enabling to study them in dynamic development, taking into account the influence of various environmental factors. The systematic approach determined the choice of specific research methods: empirical, historical, logical, comparative, and statistical. Results: it is shown that the modern financial system is evolving towards its decentralization based on the distributed registers and blockchain technologies. The evolution of decentralized platforms and their impact on the development of crypto networks are considered. The basic principles and working mechanisms of decentralized crypto networks, the advantages and disadvantages of decentralized protocols are reviewed. It is shown that the development of a decentralized financial market is inextricably linked with centralized technologies - artificial intelligence technologies and the use of software interfaces, big data analytics and machine learning. The use of modern financial technologies reduces barriers and costs of entry to the markets for financial intermediaries, but also generates new risks in the system, requiring codification and updating of regulation forms. Regulatory actions of the authorities aimed at minimizing the risks generated by innovative technologies are also described.Scientific novelty: the article shows for the first time that the basis of the modern financial system is decentralized technologies of distributed registers and blockchain, which allow maintaining databases, reaching consensus, generating new transactions and controlling them from more than one center of the distributed network. In order to maximize the impact of the third era of the Internet, decentralized platforms must be synchronized with centralized technologies, the development of which contributes to further decentralization of the financial system. In order to maintain financial stability, prudential regulators and supervisors will have to find an effective compromise between encouraging further financial innovations and the financial risks posed by them.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used to clarify the target mandates, tools, channels and mechanisms of monetary policy of the Bank of Russia, directly related to technological innovations, acting, under the growing uncertainty in the economy, as a built-in stabilizer of financial stability, elastic regulation of trading and financial imbalances within the country and between countries.
Blockchain technology is argued to be the next “big” digital technology trend that will challenge a number of organizations, including higher education institutions. In contrast, higher education institutions have a history of being slow to adopt new digital technologies in the organizational apparatus. The question that remains discussing is whether universities will approach blockchain technologies in ways that are different from traditional research and education. This paper intends to discuss three particular ways in which blockchain may challenge higher education institution. The paper questions whether blockchain technologies can democratize and automate learning process, reduce costly bureaucracy and be adopted in higher education institutions. In sum, the intent is to invite to a discussion on blockchain and address whether or in what ways higher education institutions should adopt blockchain technologies as a digital technology.
Weiqin Zou, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xuan-Bach Dinh Le · 8 authors
Smart contract, a term which was originally coined to refer to the automation of legal contracts in general, has recently seen much interest due to the advent of blockchain technology. Recently, the term is popularly used to refer to low-level code scripts running on a blockchain platform. Our study focuses exclusively on this subset of smart contracts. Such smart contracts have increasingly been gaining ground, finding numerous important applications (e.g., crowdfunding) in the real world. Despite the increasing popularity, smart contract development still remains somewhat a mystery to many developers largely due to its special design and applications. Are there any differences between smart contract development and traditional software development? What kind of challenges are faced by developers during smart contract development? Questions like these are important but have not been explored by researchers yet. In this paper, we performed an exploratory study to understand the current state and potential challenges developers are facing in developing smart contracts on blockchains, with a focus on Ethereum (the most popular public blockchain platform for smart contracts). Toward this end, we conducted this study in two phases. In the first phase, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 developers from GitHub and industry professionals who are working on smart contracts. In the second phase, we performed a survey on 232 practitioners to validate the findings from the interviews. Our interview and survey results revealed several major challenges developers are facing during smart contract development: (1) there is no effective way to guarantee the security of smart contract code; (2) existing tools for development are still very basic; (3) the programming languages and the virtual machines still have a number of limitations; (4) performance problems are hard to handle under resource constrained running environment; and (5) online resources (including advanced/updated documents and community support) are still limited. Our study suggests several directions that researchers and practitioners can work on to help improve developers’ experience on developing high-quality smart contracts.
Yoon-Chow Yeong, Khairul Shafee Kalid, Savita K. Sugathan
Since the inception of the first cryptocurrency in 2008, cryptocurrency has been receiving global attention from the public, media, merchants and regulators. Although the general sentiment suggested cryptocurrencies which leverage on blockchain technology might eventually replace the paper currency as the mainstream currency, the Malaysian regulators are still unsure that a well-established cryptocurrency ecosystem can come into place anytime soon. Unfortunately, there is a lack of cryptocurrency acceptance study, particularly in Malaysia (developing country context). Hence, this paper aims to propose a research model that integrates cryptocurrency dimension antecedents with Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology2 (UTAUT2) constructs to examine the factors that influence cryptocurrency acceptance. This study employs a quantitative approach by collecting online survey questionnaire data through the means of cryptocurrency community group on social media. The survey instrument was reviewed by four experts from the field of blockchain and 36 responses have been gathered from individuals who have cryptocurrency knowledge for pilot study. To further evaluate the reliability and validity of the proposed measures, the measurement model was assessed using structural equation modeling (SEM) technique with partial least square approach (PLS). SmartPLS software was used for PLS-SEM analyses. In this paper, the proposed research model contributes a high-level overview of and valuable insights into the potential cryptocurrency acceptance factors to regulatory bodies, practitioners as well as prospective cryptocurrency users. The findings of pilot study confirm that the measurement items and constructs in the proposed model are reliable and valid.
Blockchain is one of the growing technologies used for financial management systems. Financial data must be kept secure otherwise it can create a huge loss. So, whenever security features or technologies are developed must keep financial security as a priority. Stock market management is another area of finance sector that works on two concepts, that is, minimize the risk and maximize the profit. In this chapter, the authors discuss how blockchain technology is used for stock market analysis. Mainly blockchain will help us to make optimal stock exchanges through automation and decentralization. Stock market across the globe is rapidly using blockchain technology for the market transaction. Some of the country is still preparing themselves to use the blockchain technology. This technology offers huge potential for tracing securities lending, margin financing, and surveillance of system risk.
A reduction in cost of traditional financial intermediation was one of the main motivations cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in a 2008 proposal for “… an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.” We begin here with some back-of-the-envelope calculations of these potential cost savings and benefits from the customer perspective. We then discuss the public blockchain ledger and various solutions to two important problems that are constraints on the public blockchain’s trustless consensus, viz. “mining” costs in proof-of-work and governance issues. We speculate that foreseeable institutional implementations will often involve integration of permissioned blockchains with public blockchains. We then discuss exchanges for trading cryptocurrencies, the second component of the crypto blockchains, and in particular their “teething problems,” along with the evolution of a subset of them into increasingly “industrial strength” entities. We suggest that with a more industrial strength infrastructure in place, self-executing smart contracts are virtually natural counterparts for more traditional passive investment products. We end with a discussion of Security Token Offerings (STOs) and the newer Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs): STOs are an interesting hybrid between the ICOs and traditional IPOs; they could conceivably pave the way to a long-time-coming “direct electronic IPO” market. <b>TOPICS:</b>Currency, indexing exchange-traded, exchanges/markets/clearinghouses <b>Key Findings</b> • A set of crypto exchanges is evolving into institutional-strength entities with law-of-one-price, clearing and settlement, custody services, and user algorithms to deal with <i>fake</i> inflated trade volumes. • Pure public blockchains with well-known “blockchain trilemma” problems like high energy consumption, low performance, governance shortcomings, and no clear “how-to-pay” mechanism for ledger-updating in non-crypto applications are inexorably leading toward hybrid public/permissioned blockchain networks. • Despite their rocky start, STOs and ICOs are leading to direct or electronic IPO markets while smart contracts running on blockchains with securities trading identifiers and data seem ideal vehicles for administering passive investment products.
Michael J. Fell, Alexandra Schneiders, David Shipworth
Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading could help address grid management challenges in a decentralizing electricity system, as well as providing other social and environmental benefits. Many existing and proposed trading schemes are enabled by blockchain, a distributed ledger technology (DLT) relying on cryptographic proof of ownership rather than human intermediaries to establish energy transactions. This study used an online survey experiment (n=2064) to investigate how consumer demand for blockchain-enabled peer-to-peer energy trading schemes in the United Kingdom varies depending on how the consumer proposition is designed and communicated. The analysis provides some evidence of a preference for schemes offering to meet a higher proportion of participants’ energy needs, and for those operating at the city/region (as compared to national or neighbourhood) level. People were more likely to say they would participate when the scheme was framed as being run by their local council, followed by an energy supplier, community energy organization, and social media company. Anonymity was the most valued DLT characteristic and mentioning blockchain’s association with Bitcoin led to a substantial decrease in intended uptake. We highlight a range of important questions and implications suggested by these findings for the introduction and operation of P2P trading schemes.
In this chapter, the authors outline the historical evolution of trust and discuss how, for most of human history, trust and reputation have shaped personal relationships. They shed light on today’s sharing economy platforms’ activities in designing and operating reputation systems to leverage digital trust between peers. They further explore opportunities and challenges to foster trust based on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in the sharing economy, and analyze the public discourse in the Reddit community addressing these technological advances. They conclude that the advantages of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies may offer several promising avenues for many sharing economy platforms, as they may allow for improvements regarding the decentralization of control. However, sharing economy platforms must leverage the potential of blockchain and cryptocurrencies with great care, and be aware of the challenges and downsides that these technologies may bring.
The ability to run smart contracts confers on blockchain technology the capability to run autonomous systems, from a simple transaction to an entire decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). When applied to the sharing economy, the blockchain enables users to organize themselves to share resources autonomously. It involves new relationships of trust, and the development of suitable systems of governance. This chapter suggests that blockchain-based sharing economy platforms can imitate the governance models of current decentralized organizations, such as the platform cooperativism and open value networks. It also describes some of the emerging developments based on DAOs and reveals their main limitations. The chapter finishes with an optimistic vision of DAOs as “virtual gated communities” in which developing “sharing in” practices is a way to promote a sense of community among their members.
This paper presents TXSC, a framework that provides smart contract developers with transaction primitives. These primitives allow developers to write smart contracts without the need to reason about the anomalies that can arise due to concurrent smart contract function executions.
Digital assets are hot right now. Whether cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, or initial coin offerings and tokens, this new asset class has captured the imagination of American investors. While it remains to be seen if this phenomenon has staying power, there is no doubt that these assets and their promoters have attracted the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But neither Congress nor the SEC has formally elucidated which digital assets are securities and which are not. This Article seeks to provide clarity in determining which digital assets are securities. It proposes two tests that operationalize the Supreme Court’s test in SEC v. W. J. Howey Co. The first test is the Bahamas Test, which asks whether a digital asset is sufficiently decentralized such that it is not a security. The second test is the Substantial Steps Test which is used to determine whether an investment is made with an expectation of profit. This Article takes a rules-based approach to provide clarity and begin a conversation about crafting more predictable jurisprudence and regulation in this area.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible contributions of blockchain technology to creating new governance structures that facilitate social cooperation. Design/methodology/approach Conceptual analysis with key ideas in new institutional economics and political theory is used in this paper. Findings Blockchain technology provides a new tool through which political entrepreneurs can credibly alienate some of their power within a system of rules that they have established. Originality/value This paper links discussion of blockchain entrepreneurship in commercial markets to research into private governance.
Kyleen W. Prewett, Gregory L. Prescott, Kirk Phillips
Abstract Blockchain technology possesses a vast potential to transform traditional business models. Savvy business executives are already exploring how blockchain might impact their industries and their competitive positions within those industries. Yet, there are significant barriers and risks associated with blockchain technology. In this article, we highlight some of the major obstacles and risks associated with this transformative technology. The topics discussed here are neither definitive nor comprehensive; however, they provide accounting and finance professionals with a timely introduction to the barriers and perils related to blockchain technology. Although blockchain adoption is inevitable for business enterprises, careful consideration of the risks and challenges before, during, and after blockchain implementation will help ensure long‐term success.
Yoon-Chow Yeong, Khairul Shafee Kalid, Savita K. Sugathan
Dated back in 2008, the first blockchain-powered cryptocurrency-Bitcoin was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto. Over the years, the types of cryptocurrencies available in the market amounted to more than 2,000. With the disruptive potential to revolutionize the traditional financial services, cryptocurrencies become a topic of interest among scholars, global regulators, investors, business operators, information technology enthusiasts and consumers. Nevertheless, the negative activities associated with cryptocurrencies such as money laundering and illicit trading, have resulted in the legality of cryptocurrencies remain controversial in the global context.As the worldwide regulators expressed different stance towards cryptocurrency acceptance and adoption, this study sought to gauge the individual’s behavioral intention to use cryptocurrency. Recognizing the dearth of study in Asian countries, especially the developing country, this study addresses the literature gap by focusing the case of Malaysian individuals. Specifically, this study investigated the effects of age, education level and income level differences in an individual’s behavioral intention to use cryptocurrency.The sample is made up of 176 Malaysian individuals who are equipped with cryptocurrency knowledge. The empirical data were gathered using online survey questionnaire via Google form. Subsequently, the data were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to understand the demographics effect on the intention to adopt cryptocurrency.Finally, the results revealed that the role of age, education and income level are not significant in influencing an individual’s behavior towards cryptocurrency adoption.