Purpose The purpose of this paper is to alert international business (IB) and international entrepreneurship (IE) researchers of a new phenomenon and novel research opportunities arising as a result of digital innovations brought about by the new, decentralized internet popularly known as âblockchainâ. The paper contains a general overview of the blockchain technology and maps connections with the IB/IE literature, focusing on explaining accelerated internationalization of firms that are born global on blockchain. Design/methodology/approach The paper is a viewpoint based on the authorâs ongoing research on blockchain and fintech and reflections on the born global literature. The paper has benefited from the authorâs insights through her involvement in the global blockchain community as an investor and advisor. Findings The author argues for establishing a theoretical link between the born global literature and the literature on the economics of information goods and platform economics to explain the pace of international growth in the context of blockchain start-ups. Research limitations/implications The author urges IB/IE researchers to pay attention to research opportunities in the blockchain area, especially those related to explaining rapid internationalization of digital start-ups and a new organizational form for organizing cross-border activities known as decentralized autonomous organization. Originality/value Three factors are shown to contribute to a rapid internationalization of blockchain start-ups: network effects, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and building an ecosystem around the evolving technology.
Jan 17, 2018·Peter Krafft, Nicolås Della Penna, Alex Pentland. (2018). An Experimental Study of Cryptocurrency Market Dynamics. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
P. M. Krafft, NicolĂĄs Della Penna, Alex Sandy Pentland
As cryptocurrencies gain popularity and credibility, marketplaces for cryptocurrencies are growing in importance. Understanding the dynamics of these markets can help to assess how viable the cryptocurrnency ecosystem is and how design choices affect market behavior. One existential threat to cryptocurrencies is dramatic fluctuations in traders' willingness to buy or sell. Using a novel experimental methodology, we conducted an online experiment to study how susceptible traders in these markets are to peer influence from trading behavior. We created bots that executed over one hundred thousand trades costing less than a penny each in 217 cryptocurrencies over the course of six months. We find that individual "buy" actions led to short-term increases in subsequent buy-side activity hundreds of times the size of our interventions. From a design perspective, we note that the design choices of the exchange we study may have promoted this and other peer influence effects, which highlights the potential social and economic impact of HCI in the design of digital institutions.
<em>This paper aims to identify the practices involved in the formation of smart contracts and the limitations that are faced by the organizations through development of smart contracts in business. The Smart contract is developed based on specific criteria in the business. The smart chain in the business identify the block chains that are developed in the business to resolve different financial issues in the company. In this report, the elements of smart contracts are evaluated and analyzed along with a discussion of previous researchers on the same criteria. This study identifies that smart contracts become essential for business practices with development of technology. The form of smart contracts has captured the attention of legal attorney and its impact on contract law of business. This report implements the descriptive methodology approach in which the secondary data is analyzed to identify the formation of smart contracts and its liability on business. Additionally, the research data is analyzed through secondary qualitative analysis. </em>
We examine blockchain technologies, especially smart contracts, as a platform for decentralized applications. By providing a basis for consensus, blockchain promises to upend business models that presuppose a central authority. However, blockchain suffers from major shortcomings arising from an over-regimented way of organizing computation that limits its prospects. We propose a sociotechnical, yet computational, perspective that avoids those shortcomings. A centerpiece of our vision is the notion of a declarative, violable contract in contradistinction to smart contracts. This new way of thinking enables flexible governance, by formalizing organizational structures; verification of correctness without obstructing autonomy; and a meaningful basis for trust.
Peter Gomber, Robert J. Kauffman, Chris Parker, Bruce W. Weber
The financial services industry has been experiencing the recent emergence of new technology innovations and process disruptions. The industry overall, and many fintech start-ups are looking for new pathways to successful business models, the creation of enhanced customer experience, and approaches that result in services transformation. Industry and academic observers believe this to be more of a revolution than a set of less influential changes, with financial services as a whole due for major improvements in efficiency, customer centricity, and informedness. The long-standing dominance of leading firms that are not able to figure out how to effectively hook up with the âFintech Revolutionâ is at stake. We present a new fintech innovation mapping approach that enables the assessment of the extent to which there are changes and transformations in four areas of financial services. We discuss: operations management in financial services and the changes occurring; technology innovations that have begun to leverage the execution and stakeholder value associated with payments, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and cross-border payments; multiple innovations that have affected lending and deposit services, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, and social media use; issues with respect to investments, financial markets, trading, risk management, robo-advisory and services influenced by blockchain and fintech innovations.
Feng Mai, Zhe Shan, Qing Bai, Xin Wang · 5 authors
Bitcoinâs emergence has the potential to pave the way for a technological revolution in financial markets. What determines its valuation is an important open question with far-reaching business and policy implications. Building on information systems and finance literature, we examine the dynamic interactions between social media and the monetary value of bitcoin using textual analysis and vector error correction models. We show that more bullish forum posts are associated with higher future bitcoin values. Interestingly, social mediaâs effects on bitcoin are driven primarily by the silent majority, the 95 percent of users who are less active and whose contributions amount to less than 40 percent of total messages. In addition, messages on an Internet forum, relative to tweets, have a stronger impact on future bitcoin value. Overall, our findings reveal that social media sentiment is an important predictor in determining bitcoinâs valuation, but not all social media messages are of equal impact. This study offers new insights into the digital currency market and the economic impact of social media.
Blockchain technology has been claimed to have the potential to disrupt a large number of industries. Despite all the hype around it, blockchain remains at a nascent state. In the early stage of the development of an IT innovation, its success is to a degree contingent on building legitimacy around it. This seems to be particularly relevant in the context of blockchain due to the questionable reputation that its most famous application, the bitcoin, has gained over time. This paper explores the usage of social media by four key actors in the blockchain ecosystem âmedia, IT, financial services and consulting firms â over a calendar year and through the lens of âorganizing visionsâ to identify how these organizations are trying to legitimize blockchain. Our results show that these actors employ three primary legitimation micro-level strategies through two types of legitimation mechanisms â advertising affiliations with influential field level actors (pragmatic legitimacy), describing positive market responses to blockchain and emphasizing its ongoing development (cognitive legitimacy), and describing characteristics of blockchain that are in alignment with current technological best practices (cognitive legitimacy). This paper extends the current literature on IT innovation adoption and legitimation, and contributes to the nascent literature on blockchain.
It is almost impossible to avoid the hype around blockchain technology. In the space of less than two years, what was once the preserve of developers and deep tech entrepreneurs has exploded into the public consciousness. Perception varies wildly. Kate Baucherel, COO of emerging technology software house City Web Consultants, and presenter of BCSâs recent blockchain webinar looks, discusses and diff erentiates between hype and utility.
This paper provides a description of the blockchain that underpins the Bitcoins. This paper provides a new mechanism to reinforce the credibility of online transactions based on blockchain technology. It then becomes possible to explore the future of the blockchain technology in other online electronic markets of goods and services. We assert that the blockchain technology, still linked with the BT, could become in the near future the keystone of many electronic markets and could considerably increase online transactions. A cryptocurrency regime based on sidechain is modelled and a public blockchain controlled by a central is proposed.
Sandra Hirsh, Susan Alman, Victoria L. Lemieux, Eric T. Meyer
ABSTRACT It is clear from the expanding literature that blockchain technology is a trend potentially on the brink of revolutionizing the public and private sectors. There have been conferences, books, white papers, startâups, and numerous backâchannel discussions on ways blockchain technology can address seemingly endless processes, and it is on the radar of many information professionals. Blockchain technology has the potential for organizations to accomplish much more than cryptocurrency, payments or housing electronic credentials. Currently, organizations are experimenting with its use in a variety of settings from land transaction recording, medical recordkeeping, supply chain management, regulatory compliance, identity management and beyond. The technology enables a broader impact within the information community and around the globe. Some suggestions being mooted for blockchain applications in information centers include building an enhanced metadata center, protecting Digital First Sale rights, supporting communityâbased collections, and facilitating partnerships across organizations. With its potential to transform social, political and economic interactions, and the way that information is managed, there is more to explore about how blockchain can be applied to manage information and what the ethical implications may be. The panelists will provide an update on the current and future uses of blockchain from their own ongoing research: they will present the recommendations developed from the IMLSâfunded project to investigate the possible uses of blockchain, research outcomes from the University of British Columbia's Records in the Chain Project, and the outcomes of a recently completed project (Project Novum) that focused on the organizational and structural issues in visual arts and financial services.
Recent declarations and investigations by the Securities and ExchangeCommission suggest that blockchain-based assets are potentially subject to regulation as securities under the Securities Act.This Article presents a systematic analysis of the risks and embedded costs of investments in blockchainbased assets and assesses their potential regulation as securities.This Article offers a comprehensive account of the pertinent properties of blockchain-based assets, the technology of the blockchain, the markets available for their trade, and their varied underlying sources of value.It identifies unique costs and risk factors inherent to the blockchain technology, and examines whether securities laws can potentially add value and protect investors from these unique risks.Identified costs and risks factors include controlling costs prevalent even in decentralized ledgers, monitoring costs that vary according to the costs of automatic verification, technology risks rooted in the vulnerability of the blockchain to bugs in its software, and systemic risks embedded in limited transparency and contractual rigidity of the blockchain-based investment contract.This Article examines these unique costs and risk factors and assesses their normative implications for securities regulation of blockchain-based assets.With current efforts by regulatory authorities to designate blockchain-based assets as securities, a coherent approach is presented based on the type of the offering, investors' profile, and the technical and legal contours of the blockchain-based
This exploratory paper examines the relationship between CSCW and emerging blockchain technologies. Although the blockchain technology is at first sight not directly related to CSCW, this paper will identify a number of CSCW research areas that are relevant and that can either profit or contribute to blockchain research. To open CSCW research to new areas and to stipulate a discussion between the disciplines, the paper will start with a brief introduction to basic blockchain concepts followed by an exploration of the relationships between the two research areas. It concludes with an initial proposal on how CSCW research results and concepts can inform blockchain design.
Trevor Clohessy, Thomas Acton, Reuben Godfrey, Michelle Houston
Research carried out at NUI Galway has found a 40% blockchain adoption rate among Irish enterprises to date. The study investigated why implementation in Ireland is relatively low, and proposes recommendations to increase blockchain awareness and adoption that can provide opportunities not only for economic growth but also create a new foundation for how Irish organisations and government conduct business.
The public sector presents several promising applications for blockchain technology. Global organizations and innovative ministries in countries such as Dubai, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Germany have recognized these potentials and have initiated projects to evaluate the adoption of blockchain technology. As these projects can have a far-reaching impact on crucial government services and processes, they should involve a particularly thorough evaluation. In this paper, we provide insights into the development of a framework to support such an evaluation for the German asylum process. We built this framework evolutionarily together with the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Its final version consists of three levels and eighteen categories of evaluation criteria across the technical, functional and legal domains and allows specifying use-case specific key performance indicators or knockout criteria.
I consider a developer working on an open-source blockchain-based software that can be used only in conjunction with a specific crypto-token. This token can be sold in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise funds, but can also be sold later on a frictionless financial market to earn a profit. I show that, if the developer raises funds in an ICO, in each post-ICO period there is a positive probability that the developer sells all of his tokens on the market and, as a consequence, no development occurs. If the developer does not need to raise funds via an ICO, the equilibrium will nonetheless be inefficient because the developer's payoff depends on the surplus generated by the protocol in a given period (when he expects to sell his tokens). He therefore fails to internalize that the protocol will be used (and generate surplus) over multiple periods.
ABSTRACT Blockchain is frequently claimed to be a democratizing technology. However, its relationship to both law and broader democratic institutions remains uncertain. One claim regarding blockchain's democratic potential is that it is radically transparent and can bring such transparency to existing systems of governance. This paper interrogates that claim in three different ways. Firstly, it examines blockchain technology against broader theories of transparency. Secondly, it examines the relationship between transparency and democracy, questioning how blockchain technologies could mediate that relationship. Finally, it examines how blockchain technologies could impact a particular exercise of transparency, freedom of information requests. This paper finds the relationship of transparency itself to democratic ideals is complex, contested and highly contextâdependent; the âdemocratizingâ technological transparency built into blockchains could easily prove undemocratic in application. Blockchain technology cannot meet broader transparency goals without addressing political gatekeepers and the legal, social, and cultural needs that animate those goals.