Blockchain is emerging as a game changing technology in many industries. Although it is increasingly capturing the business community's attention, a comprehensive overview of commercially available applications is lacking to date. This paper aims to fill this gap. Firstly, we propose a structured approach to assess the application landscape of blockchain technologies. To build our framework, we relied on largely accepted classifications of blockchains, based on protocols, consensus mechanisms and ownership, as well as on the most cited application areas emerging from the literature. Secondly, we applied the framework on a database of 460 released blockchains. The analysis confirms a dominance of applications for cryptocurrencies, financial transactions and certification purposes, with a prevalence of permissionless platforms. We also found new application fields that go far beyond the seven initial areas addressed by the current body of knowledge, leading to some interesting takeaways for both practitioners and IS researchers.
The increasingly need for companies to keep a high level of synchronization globally and the advent of new technologies are pushing more and more to move decision-making and operational power from the centre of organizations to their edges. The blockchain could be the key technology to make this change possible. However, there is no bridge yet capable of shortening the still long distance between this new technological phenomenon and today's business realities. Our work aims precisely at this goal; we propose a framework of blockchain models to help practitioners understanding and potentially implement new solutions based on this technological paradigm. In particular, we have developed an ontology that helps to identify and clarify in detail what are the concepts and structures revolving around this technology, and built a continuum of blockchain architectural solutions, ranging from a classic centralized IT architecture to one completely distributed within a public ecosystem.
New digital technologies are changing the way organizations create and capture value. In particular, blockchain is bringing up opportunities for organizations in terms of transparency and security, and at the same time threatening the position of intermediaries such as banks and notaries. Therefore, intermediaries need to design new business models to generate value from blockchain. Little academic research has been conducted to identify the business models that intermediaries could exploit to leverage a disintermediation technology such as blockchain. Employing a qualitative research based on focus group and interviews, this study highlights how a specific intermediary, the Italian notaries, tried to design appropriate business models to derive value from blockchain ecosystems. Specifically, drawing on the key concepts of value configuration, value creation and business model dimensions, this paper identifies three different business models that Italian notaries can implement to create and capture value from permissionless blockchain ecosystems.
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