Finance 4.0—A Socio-Ecological Finance System

Abstract

This contribution develops the framework of a novel, socio-ecological finance system that enables the incentivization of environmentally friendly behavior, socially responsible production, resource recycling, sharing and more. We call this system Finance 4.0—where Finance 1.0 refers to a physical coin-based system, Finance 2.0 to a fiat currency system, Finance 3.0 to blockchain finance, while Finance 4.0 stands for a multi-dimensional, real-time feedback system that combines blockchain technology with the Internet of Things. Instead of “Finance 4.0,” we will also often use the abbreviation “FIN4.”In comparison with citizen scores such as the Chinese social credit score, the FIN4 approach is different in a variety of aspects: FIN4 is not aimed at punishment and control, but rather at helping to encourage, empower and coordinate sustainable and other favorable action. It is being built for local, temporary measurements and feedback, not for global surveillance and control. It seeks to protect the privacy of people rather than to keep information about everyone and every action forever. It is not focused on the individual in the sense of profiling and targeting, but on favorable interactions and our social and environmental goals. It offers a multi-dimensional choice of options instead of trying to determine every individual’s action through behavioral manipulation and control. It has a participatory opt-in nature, where people can co-create the incentive system in such a way that they can reach their goals more successfully. With multi-dimensional incentivization, it becomes possible to advance several goals simultaneously; thereby, many more people can benefit from the interactions they engage in, as multi-dimensional value exchange increases the solution space enormously.

Blockchain for regenerative built environment governance

“…Therefore, a transformative governance tooling that tightly unites social, economic, and technological aspects is pivotal in advancing regenerative development to a higher level of effectiveness. Visionary researchers explored BT's potential in establishing new economic coordination [43], value-sensitive complex system design [44] and to form new transparent, code-based legal institutions [45]. This chapter illustrates in detail the potential of BT to achieve 1) governance of information, 2) governance of procedures, and 3) governance of ownership and values.…”

“…Token-represented value in DAOs can enable the representation of values of both humans, the built environment, and nature, and provide incentives for the adoption of regenerative practices. Examples of tokenization could include carbon credits [62] and the issuance of new currencies representing community-defined values, as explored by the Finance4.0 project for sustainability [44].…”

Cryptocurrency Research in the Field of Information Systems: A Literature Review and its Implications for Sharing Economy Research

“…However, there was a slight decline in 2021. One possible explanation for this decline is that IS scholars' interests may have shifted from cryptocurrency to the application of its characteristics, including how the cryptocurrency system helps the sharing economy to emerge (e.g., Ballandies et al, 2021;Heines et al, 2021;Hofmann et al, 2021). As shown in Figure 2, most of the studied papers were published in conference proceedings.…”

Constructing Effective Customer Feedback Systems -- A Design Science Study Leveraging Blockchain Technology

“…tion 4.2.4) and system design (Section 4.2), a software artifact is created to incentivize the provision of high-quality feedback to organizations. Figure 4 illustrates the software stack: A web app is built using the VUEjs 9 framework, on top of the Finance 4.0 software stack Ballandies, Dapp, Degenhart, Helbing, Klauser, & Pardi, 2021), which enables the creation of cryptoeconomic incentives in the form of tokens. By utilizing the Finance 4.0 software stack, the trustworthy data storage and computation engine of the Ethereum blockchain is utilized that facilitates durable data and trusted computation as required by the system design (Section 4.2.5).…”

“…During the experiment phase, participants utilized the software artifact and provided feedback to Library 1. In the exit phase, users answered a questionnaire that included a UTAUT (Section 3 of the Supplementary Material, adapted from Venkatesh, Thong, and Xu ( 2012)) and questions regarding the value of cryptoeconomic tokens (Ballandies, Dapp, Degenhart, Helbing, Klauser, & Pardi, 2021). After the experiment, a focus group consisting of Library 1 employees (FG3 in Table 1) evaluated the quality of collected feedback.…”