The state of play of blockchain technology in the financial services sector: A systematic literature review

The modern trends of digitalization have completely transformed and reshaped business practices, whole businesses, and even a number of industries. Blockchain technology is believed to be the latest advancement in industries such as the financial sector, where trust is of prime significance. Blockchain technology is a decentralized and coded security system which provides the capability for new digital services and platforms to be created through this emerging technology. This research presents a systematic review of scholarly articles on blockchain technology in the financial sector. We commenced by considering 227 articles and subsequently filtered this list down to 87 articles. From this, we present a classification framework that has three dimensions: blockchain-enabled financial benefits, challenges, and functionality. This research identifies implications for future research and practice within the blockchain paradigm

Securing Physical Assets on the Blockchain : Linking a novel Object Identification Concept with Distributed Ledgers

The use of blockchain technology to track physical assets is not new. However, the state of the art concepts are not applicable due to several limitations. One limitation is the scalability of blockchains with regard to the number of transactions that can be processed by the network. The well-established technology in tracking products is based on RFID chips that can be cloned. This paper provides insights into how objects can be protected and monitored by a varnish with a unique crack pattern, as an example of a Physical Unclonable Function. The perceptual hash of the unique pattern is used to encrypt the associated data to ensure privacy. Instead of logging each event on the blockchain individually, which is not possible due to the limited transaction throughput, OriginStamp is used to preserve data integrity on the blockchain. OriginStamp aggregates events, combines them through hashing and embeds this hash into a Bitcoin transaction. Once the Bitcoin network mines the transaction into a block and confirms it, the timestamp is considered as immutable proof of existence. With this approach, the integrity of tracking data cannot be contested. In the future, the craquelure-based tracking approach could be extended to supply chain integration to secure the origin of products, including prevention of counterfeiting, securing the place of manufacture for trademark law or state surveillance of the agricultural economy.publishe