Shedding Light on the Blockchain Disintermediation Mystery: A Review and Future Research Agenda

Blockchain technology has been in the interest of IS researchers and practitioners for several years. One key reason for this curiosity is the possibility to carry out peer-to-peer transactions without a trusted intermediary. Building upon this capability, many researchers posited that blockchain technology would remove traditional intermediaries from their market position. This process has been described in electronic markets literature as Disintermediation. However, other researchers proposed a more distinct perspective by proposing that blockchain technology will not facilitate Disintermediation in all settings. Thus, no unified view on this topic exists yet. Our literature review identifies three dominating concepts in blockchain literature: Extensive Disintermediation, Limited Disintermediation, and Re-Intermediation. We further highlight in our findings that most of the identified literature does not consider all market functions as described in the electronic markets literature. Hence, we provide a structured overview of the field and possibilities for future research

Exploring Blockchain Governance

Blockchain systems continue to attract significant interest from both practitioners and researchers. What is more, blockchain systems come in various types, such as cryptocurrencies or as inter-organizational systems in business networks. As an example of a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, one of the most prominent blockchain systems to date and born at the time of a major financial crisis, spearheaded the promise of relying on code and computation instead of a central governing entity. Proponents would argue that Bitcoin stood the test of time, as Bitcoin continues to operate to date for over a decade. However, these proponents overlook the never-ending, heated debates “behind the scenes” caused by diverging goals of central actors, which led to numerous alternative systems (forks) of Bitcoin. To accommodate these actors’ interests in the pursuit of their common goal is a tightrope act, and this is where this dissertation commences: blockchain governance. Based on the empirical examples of various types and application domains of blockchain systems, it is the goal of this dissertation to 1) uncover governance patterns by showing, how blockchain systems are governed, 2) derive governance challenges faced or caused by blockchain systems, and, consequently, to 3) contribute to a better understanding to what blockchain governance is. This dissertation includes four parts, each of these covering different thematical areas: In the first part, this dissertation focuses on obtaining a better understanding of blockchain governance’s context of reference by studying blockchain systems from various application domains and system types, for example, led by inter-organizational networks, states, or an independent group of actors. The second part, then, focuses on a blockchain as an inter-organizational system called “cardossier”, a project I was involved in, and its governance as a frame of reference. Hereupon, for one, I report on learnings from my project involvement in the form of managerial guidelines, and, for two, I report on structural problems within cardossier, and problems caused by membership growth and how they can be resolved. The third part focuses on a wider study of blockchains as inter-organizational systems, where I summarize findings of an analysis of 19 blockchain consortia. The findings, for one, answer the question of why blockchain consortia adopt blockchain technology, and, for two, show internal and external challenges these systems faced to derive managerial recommendations. The fourth and last part studies blockchain governance’s evolution and contributes an analysis of blockchain’s governance features and its contrast to established modes of governance. These four parts, altogether, have scientific value as they increase our understanding on blockchain governance. Consequently, this dissertation contributes to the body of knowledge on modes of governance, distributed system governance, and blockchain governance in general. I do so, by grounding the concept of blockchain governance in empirical detail, showing how these systems are governed on various application domains and system types, and by studying empirical challenges faced or caused by these systems. This approach is relevant and necessary, as blockchain systems in general, but particularly outside of cryptocurrencies, mostly still are in pursuit of a sustainable blockchain governance. As blockchains can be expected to continue to mature, the upcoming years offer very fruitful ground for empirical research along the empirical insights and theoretical lines shown in this dissertation

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc

Conversations on a probable future: interview with Beatrice Fazi

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Unriddling Blockchain: A Study of Outcomes, Tensions, and Governance of Blockchain Implementations

From a theoretical perspective, evidence from scholarly articles suggests how the existing body of research focuses mostly on the architectural aspects related to the technology and therefore, there is a grey area in literature linking blockchain with established theories, frameworks or models (Monrat et al., 2019; Pelt, 2021). Despite blockchain having been in the spotlight for over a decade, there is an ongoing concern on the need to widen the discourse on the topic of blockchain beyond the technical features and performance evaluation (Ølnes et al., 2017; Hughes et al., 2019). More specifically, in the domain of Information Systems (IS) there has been a continues call to look at blockchain from multidisciplinary approaches in an effort to better interpret the benefits and challenges associated with the technology (Ølnes et al., 2017; Risius & Spohrer, 2017). In this regard, research should dwell further into linking blockchain with different levels of analysis including users, platforms, industries (Risius & Spohrer, 2017) and sociocultural patterns (Ghosh, 2019; Rossi et al., 2019). In this regard, more rigorous empirical studies should center around the unexplored avenues in IS research in order to understand better the implications of blockchain and improve our understanding of the technology (Ghosh, 2019; Lu, 2022). Furthermore, blockchain has been regarded as a potential technology with a series of important techno-social implications, nevertheless, the technology should not be considered bulletproof. Research has demonstrated that whilst blockchain provides important technological innovations, its adoption can be very challenging (Batubara et al., 2018; Spahiu et al., 2022). In this regard, many studies have underlined how theorizing on such challenges is still lacking and more empirical investigation is required in order to have a more concrete understanding of the impeding factors (Zheng et al., 2018; Monrat et al., 2019). Although the number of blockchain applications has exponentially increased, many blockchain initiatives are short lived and more result oriented research on successful case studies is required (Rossi et al., 2019; Treiblmaier, 2020), especially with regard to the role of governance where evaluations have been limited (Beck et al., 2018; Pelt et al., 2021; Lumineau et al., 2021). Lastly, blockchain adoption has not been proportionate in every sector, with public domain and public administration showing particularly low rates of adoption, despite factual evidence displaying blockchain’s potential in such areas. In this regard, current studies have only looked at the inherent nature of these domains but make little reference to the potential challenges related to the blockchain attributes (Navadkar et al., 2018; Cagigas et al., 2021)