Cryptocurrency is a recent and significant innovation in the financial industry. The goal is to offer a currency that is not tied, created, or backed by a government. Cryptocurrency use the Blockchain technology as the financial platform. Cryptocurrency adoption level has increased, and the market has grown dramatically. There have not been enough literature investigating the adoption and acceptance of the cryptocurrency by users. The aim of this paper is to fill the gap in the current literature by investigating the current cryptocurrency adoption level, adoption-influencing factors, providing an in-depth analysis of these factors and discussing some pitfalls surrounding the cryptocurrency adoption. We believe that despite the difficulty to find out an accurate number of cryptocurrency users, a good estimate can be made by studying the number of cryptocurrency exchange sites' users. In addition, the paper suggests that the main factors driving the adoption decision revealed from the literature review are the investment opportunity cryptocurrency forms, the anonymity of the transactions and privacy, the acceptance by businesses as a payment method, the fast transfer of funds, the low cost of transactions, and technological curiosity. The research findings help researchers, regulators, and cryptocurrency developers to better understand their consumer's intention toward cryptocurrency adoption.
SUMMARY Blockchain offers a drastically new way to record, process, and store financial transactions and information, and has the potential to fundamentally change the landscape of the accounting profession and reshape the business ecosystem. In this article, we introduce two types (i.e., permissionless and permissioned) of blockchain and lay out their technological features. We further discuss implications of blockchain to auditing and elaborate on opportunities and challenges of the two types of blockchain to auditors. We conclude by making specific recommendations for auditors to adapt, adjust, and elevate themselves to the role of strategic partners in blockchain implementation. JEL Classifications: M15; M41; M42; O14; O33; O55.
Cryptocurrencies have received important attention as alternative mediums of exchange that can complement or even replace traditional ones. For this reason, cryptocurrencies have become an attractive investment vehicle with a constantly growing market cap. Cryptocurrencies’ role and economic impact cannot be concluded further than just a disruptive technology to the conventional financial system. The unstable and highly speculative value fluctuations coupled with a relatively new technological system have resulted in a lack of research to predict the future cryptocurrency market development. The research method used in this legal research is the juridical-normative method. The juridical-normative method is intended to seek or find rules, principles, and legal doctrines, which are then applied to analyze a phenomenon that is a legal subject. The presence of cryptocurrency has its own impact on social life. These impacts stem from the main feature of cryptocurrencies, the blockchain. Blockchain offers a revolution in the paradigm of the financial system, which was initially centered on the existence of central authorities such as governments and banks to become user-centered or user-centered. In addition, the philosophical values applied in cryptocurrency and blockchain reflect ideas that are synonymous with the collegial collective spirit, such as decentralization, transparency, equality, and accountability. Abstrak Mata uang kripto telah mendapat perhatian penting sebagai media pertukaran alternatif yang dapat melengkapi atau bahkan menggantikan yang tradisional. Karena alasan ini, Mata uang kripto telah menjadi sarana investasi yang menarik dengan kapitalisasi pasar yang terus berkembang. Untuk saat ini, peran dan dampak ekonomi dari Mata uang kripto tidak dapat disimpulkan lebih jauh dari sekadar teknologi yang mengganggu sistem keuangan konvensional. Fluktuasi nilai yang tidak stabil dan sangat spekulatif ditambah dengan sistem teknologi yang relatif baru mengakibatkan kurangnya penelitian untuk memprediksi perkembangan pasar Mata uang kripto di masa depan. Metode penelitian yang digunakan dalam penelitian hukum ini adalah metode yuridis normatif. Metode yuridis-normatif dimaksudkan untuk mencari atau menemukan kaidah, asas dan doktrin hukum yang kemudian diterapkan untuk menganalisis suatu fenomena yang menjadi subjek hukum. Kehadiran cryptocurrency memiliki dampak tersendiri dalam kehidupan sosial. Dampak ini berasal dari fitur utama Mata uang kripto, blockchain. Blockchain menawarkan revolusi paradigma sistem keuangan yang awalnya berpusat pada keberadaan otoritas pusat seperti pemerintah dan bank menjadi user-centered atau berpusat pada pengguna. Selain itu, nilai-nilai filosofis yang diterapkan dalam cryptocurrency dan blockchain mencerminkan ide-ide yang identik dengan semangat kolektif kolegial seperti desentralisasi, transparansi, kesetaraan, dan akuntabilitas. Kata kunci: Mata uang kripto, Bitcoin, Hukum, Ekonomi, Malaysia
This paper is a review of the literature on fintech and its interaction with banking. Included in fintech are innovations in payment systems (including cryptocurrencies), credit markets (including P2P lending), and insurance, with Blockchain-assisted smart contracts playing a role. The paper provides a definition of fintech, examines some statistics and stylized facts, and then reviews the theoretical and empirical literature. The review is organized around four main research questions. The paper summarizes our knowledge on these questions and concludes with questions for future research.
This paper examines the performance of cryptocurrencies issued in initial coin offerings (ICOs) over a three-year period after the initial exchange listing. Average (median) ICO underpricing amounts to 15% (3%), even though 4 out of 10 ICOs destroy value on the first trading day. Liquidity, market capitalization, and high-low price ratios predict returns. Long-run buy-and-hold returns are positive for the mean and negative for the median. For holding periods between one and twenty-four months, the median ICO depreciates by 30%. Evidently, there is substantial positive skewness in the cryptocurrency market. Further, a size effect emerges from the data as an empirical regularity: Large ICOs are more often overpriced and underperform in the long run.
For decades, changing technology and policy choices have worked to fragment securities markets, rendering them so dark that neither ownership nor real-time price of securities are generally visible to all parties multilaterally. The policies behind these developments are found in the US National Market System and the EU Market in Financial Instruments Directive, together with universal adoption of the indirect holding system, and have painted Western securities markets into a corner from which escape to full transparency has seemed either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Although the reader has a right to skepticism given the exaggerated promises surrounding blockchain in recent years, we demonstrate in this paper that distributed ledger technology (DLT) contains the potential to lead fragmented securities markets back to multilateral transparency.
Leading markets generally lack transparency in two ways that derive from their basic structure: multiple platforms on which trades in the same security are matched have separate bid/ask queues and are not consolidated in real time (fragmented pricing), and high-speed transfers of securities are enabled by placing ownership of the securities in financial institutions, preventing transparent ownership (depository or street name ownership). The distributed nature of DLT allows multiple copies of the same pricing queue to be held simultaneously by a large number of order-matching platforms, curing the problem of fragmented pricing. This same distributed nature of DLT would allow the issuers of securities to be nodes in a DLT network, returning control over securities ownership to those issuers and thus restoring transparent ownership through direct holding with the issuer.
A serious objection to DLT is that its latency is very high – with a Bitcoin blockchain transaction taking up to 10 minutes. To cure this, we first propose a private network without cumbersome proof-of-work cryptography and, second, introduce into our model the quickly evolving technology of “lightning networks”, which are advanced two-layer off-chain networks conducting high-speed transacting with only periodic memorialization in the permanent DLT network. This paper demonstrates against the background of existing securities trading and settlement that a DLT network could bring multilateral transparency and thus represent the next step in evolution for markets in their current configuration.
Personal Health Records (PHRs) have the potential to give patients fine-grained, personalized and secure access to their own medical data and to enable self-management of care. Emergent trends around the use of Blockchain, or Distributed Ledger Technology, seem to offer solutions to some of the problems faced in enabling these technologies, especially to support issues consent, data exchange, and data access. We present an analysis of existing blockchain-based health record solutions and a reference architecture for a "Ledger of Me" system that extends PHR to create a new platform combining the collection and access of medical data and digital interventions with smart contracts. Our intention is to enable patient use of the data in order to support their care and to provide a strong consent mechanisms for sharing of data between different organizations and apps. Ledger of Me is based on around the principle that this combination of event-driven smart contracts, medical record data, and patient control is important for the adoption of blockchain-based solutions for the PHR. The reference architecture we present can serve as the basis of a range of future blockchain-based medical application architectures.
Fengkie Junis, Faisal Malik Widya Prasetya, Farouq Ibrahim Lubay, Anny Kartika Sari
Blockchain-based smart contract has become a growing field in the blockchain technology. What was once a technology used to solve digital transaction issues turns out to have some wider usage, including smart contract. The development of smart contract can be traced from the numerous platforms facilitating it, however the issue on how well each platform works as oppose to each other has yet been fully explored. The usage of smart contract can be seen from the applications that are built on top of the smart contract platform, such as the tokenization of real world to virtual world assets. However smart contract contains several issues concerning security and codifying which could be solved by various tools that are proposed by existing research. This paper aims to revisit the blockchain-based smart contract technology in order to understand and discuss the research gaps gathered from existing research and to provide guidance for future research.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This is an in-progress research project that aims to explore how archival science and cybersecurity can be applied to evaluate the trustworthiness and security of smart contracts. The analysis will be made using the requirements of trustworthy records and the investigation of vulnerabilities related to the development and implementation of smart contracts. The expected contribution is to improve smart contracts’ trustworthiness as archival records and evidence.
This chapter examines online payment methods, including the use of tokens, in electronic commerce. It first provides an overview of token payments before looking at alternative electronic payment systems including debt substitution, payment by credit cards, and fund transfer. The chapter reviews the failure of the European Commission’s Electronic Money Directive 2000 and examines whether the current law, found in the 2009 Electronic Money Directive, is likely to provide a better legal environment for electronic money to flourish. It spends considerable time looking at the development of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and how blockchain is used to establish trust in cryptocurrency transactions, before concluding with an analysis of the law in relation to cryptocurrency.
Over the years, elections at different levels are the subject of many disputes, consolidation and reaffirmation of confidence in different leaders. These elections range from either boardroom elections, local elections to national elections. Correspondingly, electioneering as an institutional process has transformed with both technological advancements as well political sophistication. Blockchain as a nascent technology has ushered in a range of opportunities in different sectors such as finance, real estate, supply chain management, medical records, elections etc. In this paper, we leveraged on some of the key characteristics of Blockchain technology in form of immutability, auditability, confidentiality, transparency, decentralization etc to develop a Blockchain eVoting network system that can be utilized for geographically dispersed elections. Key users of the system or actors were isolated and their interactions with the system identified using Use Case Methodology. The system actors are the voters, miners that consists of Universities and public libraries, central authority, candidates and the voters. The different stages of an election process such as pre-election, registration of both candidates and voters, voting/balloting, tallying and auditing were equally enumerated. The interactions of the actors with the system were equally captured, analyzed and used to develop the conceptual system. The proposed system is made up of a multichain Blockchain network, an arbitration server, distributed database, an interactive, multi-device graphic user interface GUI, and an application server. To engender anonymity, a combination of Digital Signature and Secure Hash Algorithm SHA was proposed, also Proof of Work PoW was the proposed consensus algorithm. The identified stages of the election were evaluated against the requirements of an eVoting system. The proposed system was found to satisfy the requirements of an eVoting system such as transparency, privacy, scalability, receipt freeness, security, integrity, accuracy, auditable etc.
Blockchain technology has become an epidemic and significant decision that organizations may make in the next few years, as integrated business solution enabling institutions to integrate business functions, operations, and processes in a decentralized distributed ledger technology. This technology will transform the business world and economy in solving the limitations created by centralization and system inefficiency. Accordingly, with the highly demanding and complexity of growing economies such as Gulf Cooperation Council GCC countries, the need for a typical solution technology is a game changer. The result of this will lead GCC to a solid base of the economy. Blockchain technology can be applicable in many different fields such as: banking, education, health care, finance, government, trade, etc. This article will propose a conceptual framework for the acceptance of Blockchain technology and innovation in the GCC, particularly in Saudi Arabia. Also, more research can be conducted in the future as the system might be integrated in these countries.
Cryptocurrency has gained an increasing interest as a new type of technology that is potentially both a leader and a destroyer to the payment industry on a global scale. However, the future of cryptocurrency is unclear because there are many different usage scenarios and different needs of the stakeholders. Blockchain technology is the infrastructure-enabling technology for the cryptocurrency. Blockchain technology has become very powerful and created the backbone of a new type of internet. This research article will give a better future perspective to study the conceptual framework and model for cryptocurrency acceptance and the continued usage of digital finance. This is by using potential business innovations by combining the theory of the innovation diffusion (IDT) and the technology acceptance model (TAM).
Devrim Ünal, Mohammad Hammoudeh, Mehmet Sabır Kiraz
Blockchain offers unprecedented opportunities for innovation in financial transactions. A whole new world of opportunities for banking, lending, insurance, money transfer, investments, and stock markets awaits. However, the potential for wide-scale adoption of blockchain is hindered with cybersecurity and privacy issues. We provide an overview of the risks and security requirements and give an outlook for future research that could be helpful in solving some of the challenges. We also present an approach for policy specification and verification of financial transactions based on smart contracts.
Oliver James Scholten, David Zendle, James Alfred Walker
This paper describes the York Combined Transaction Set (YCTS), which offers a single consolidated list of publicly available gambling related transactions derived from the Ethereum blockchain. This data includes over 1.4M individual transactions across 17,000+ unique addresses, which represent spending on decentralised gambling smart contracts. These contracts, and corresponding applications, have been selected based on their popularity as presented by an officially recognised ranking service, and have transacted over £240M by naive estimation over the past 10 months. Given the historical opacity of data driven gambling research, our contribution is to identify, and make available in a simple form, the transaction data found on the Ethereum blockchain such that existing questions surrounding player spending can be explored, and differences between decentralised and traditional forms of gambling can be identified.
Libra is the first private cryptocurrency with the potential to change the worldwide payment and monetary system landscape. Due to the scale and reach provided by its affiliation with Facebook, the question will be not whether, but how, to regulate it. This short paper introduces the Libra project and analyses the potential responses open to regulators worldwide.
In this study, we explore blockchain’s potential to make journalism a more sustainable business. By reflecting on the relative advantage attribute of the diffusion of innovations theory by Rogers, this study assesses whether a blockchain-based newsroom model can compete against the traditional centralised model. As a case study, we explore Civil, a blockchain-based protocol that aims to use cryptoeconomics to incentivise the production of quality journalistic content. We conclude that the main relative advantage of a Civil newsroom model is the ability to enhance news credibility. The protocol achieves this by allowing a greater degree of decentralisation, equality, transparency and accountability, which collectively reduce the influence of intermediaries such as advertisers, gatekeepers and media owners. Since Civil and blockchain technology in general are in early stages of development and face many challenges, we argue that it is too early to predict the success of this model and find it useful to track the progress of Civil and similar platforms over time. We hope that the conclusions drawn from this study bring awareness to this domain and initiate scholarly curiosity in how this technology may have an impact on the future of journalism.
Data privacy has been an important issue, especially over the last few years. Ethereum and other blockchains have had an ongoing problem with the lack of privacy. The European Union (EU) approved a law in 2016, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that is currently enforceable. It is considered to be one massive step towards protecting and preserving user privacy. Not only does it affect companies with offices in the EU but also organizations throughout the world that have users from the EU. Further, it mandates key obligations for organizations handling user data, in addition to introducing new rights for individuals - for instance, the right to erasure represents a challenge to the immutable nature of a blockchain.
Blockchain offers a drastically new way to record, process, and store financial transactions and information, and has the potential to fundamentally change the landscape of the accounting profession and reshape the business ecosystem. In this article, we introduce two types (i.e. permissionless and permissioned) of blockchain and layout their technological features. We further discuss implication of blockchain to auditing and elaborate opportunities and challenges of two types of blockchain to auditors. We conclude by making specific recommendations for auditors to adapt, adjust, and elevate themselves to the role of strategic partners in blockchain implementation.
Blockchain is considered by many to be a disruptive core technology. Although many researchers have realized the importance of blockchain, the research of blockchain is still in its infancy. Consequently, this study reviews the current academic research on blockchain, especially in the subject area of business and economics. Based on a systematic review of the literature retrieved from the Web of Science service, we explore the top-cited articles, most productive countries, and most common keywords. Additionally, we conduct a clustering analysis and identify the following five research themes: “economic benefit,” “blockchain technology,” “initial coin offerings,” “fintech revolution,” and “sharing economy.” Recommendations on future research directions and practical applications are also provided in this paper.