Abstract
Blockchain is an emerging technology that is increasingly being applied in both industrial and academic contexts. Cryptocurrency is a major application of blockchain in the financial sector, but the technology is expected to disrupt other industries. In fact, it has influenced many businesses and reshaped private and public sector activities. Therefore, there is growing interest in blockchain-based solutions, and applications have evolved in finance, insurance, logistics, government, education, and healthcare. Applications built on blockchains benefit from fair access, transparency, and immutability; these properties have attracted business owners and practitioners to explore blockchain opportunities beyond cryptocurrency, motivating them to investigate how they can benefit from the technology and also to evaluate its compatibility with their strategic orientation. Suitability evaluation (or applicability evaluation) has always been a crucial step for the successful adaptation of any innovative technology, including blockchain. Hence, this paper investigates how the current literature has addressed blockchain suitability evaluation for business cases beyond cryptocurrency. A scoping review is presented that examines the evaluation models and frameworks that have been developed to assist decision-makers regarding blockchain adoption. The results indicate that blockchain evaluation methodologies have utilized varied approaches and serve diverse objectives, which are applicable for different technology adoption stages. Through this scoping review, blockchain evaluation initiatives are classified into five categories, and a critical analysis is offered of the evaluation models under each category. As such, this scoping review overviews existing methodologies for blockchain evaluation approaches with a focus on context, identified assessments factors, assessment process, and evaluation dimensions.
Highlights
Blockchain technology is based on the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT)
Given the multidisciplinary of the topic, the included studies used diverse terms to describe their intended objective of developing evaluation methods, which affected the initial search. Studies in this scoping review contained a set of different expressions, including “Decision Models,” “Evaluation Frameworks,” “Implementation Decisions,” or “Adoption,” which were primarily used to assess “Suitability,” “Applicability,” or “Feasibility.” Diversity in language could affect the purpose of the research and, as a consequence, the approach used to address the problem
Among this variety of interest in business blockchain evaluations, our work focused on reporting the applied methodologies, identified factors, and criteria to facilitate the assessment process and the existing validation processes, as well as how they validated the proposed methodologies.In addition, from a scientometric perspective, we noticed an increase in the number of publications covering suitability evaluation methods in the 2018-2019 period compared to 2016-2017
Summary
Blockchain technology is based on the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT). It enables transactional data sharing across multiple untrusted participants with decentralized management, where agreement on a transaction is reached without relying on a central trusted third party (TTP) [1]. Blockchain has created new forms of distributed system architectures that are empowered by smart contracts and a consensus mechanism [2]. Blockchain technology was built based on distributed ledger technology (DLT), which securely records information across a peer-to-peer (P2P) network [16]. To offer a technical definition of a blockchain, as found in [17], it is “a distributed database, decentrally stored across a peer-to-peer network, that maintains a continuously‐growing list of data records (transactions) secured from tampering and revision. It consists of blocks, holding batches of individual transactions.
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