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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

A look into the future of blockchain technology

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology

Affiliation Groupe ALTEN, France

Contributed equally to this work with: Francesco Fontana, Elisa Ughetto

Roles Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, Turin, Italy

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Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Politecnico di Torino & Bureau of Entrepreneurial Finance, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, Turin, Italy

  • Daniel Levis, 
  • Francesco Fontana, 
  • Elisa Ughetto

PLOS

  • Published: November 17, 2021
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258995
  • Reader Comments

Fig 1

In this paper, we use a Delphi approach to investigate whether, and to what extent, blockchain-based applications might affect firms’ organizations, innovations, and strategies by 2030, and, consequently, which societal areas may be mainly affected. We provide a deep understanding of how the adoption of this technology could lead to changes in Europe over multiple dimensions, ranging from business to culture and society, policy and regulation, economy, and technology. From the projections that reached a significant consensus and were given a high probability of occurrence by the experts, we derive four scenarios built around two main dimensions: the digitization of assets and the change in business models.

Citation: Levis D, Fontana F, Ughetto E (2021) A look into the future of blockchain technology. PLoS ONE 16(11): e0258995. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258995

Editor: Alessandro Margherita, University of Salento, ITALY

Received: June 1, 2021; Accepted: October 9, 2021; Published: November 17, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Levis et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1 Introduction

Over the last few years, the hype and interest around blockchain technology have consistently increased. Practitioners from many industries and sectors have joined an open, yet mainly unstructured, discussion on the potential disruptive capabilities of this newly born technology [ 1 – 3 ]. In principle, the size of the phenomenon could be huge, with latest estimates predicting blockchain to store, by 2025, the 10 per cent of the world’s GDP (about $88tn in 2019) [ 4 ]. However, the complexity of the technology itself and the difficulties in assessing its impact across the different application fields have prevented the social, industrial and scientific communities to agree upon a shared vision of future blockchain-based scenarios. Very fundamental questions are still to be answered. Which blockchain-enabled applications will see the light in the next few years? Which industrial sectors will be mainly affected? How will companies react to potential industry-disruptors? How will the current societal paradigm shift? Which role will policy makers play in enhancing this new paradigm?

Despite the great and undoubted technological innovation linked to this technology, uncertainties and speculation on the potential scenarios still animate the industrial and scientific dialogue [ 5 ]. In particular, it is not yet clear which applications will see the light, and, eventually, what effects these changes will have at a societal level.

In this paper, we use a Delphi approach to investigate whether, and to what extent, blockchain-based applications will affect firms’ organizations, innovations and strategies by 2030, and, consequently, which societal areas will be mainly affected. With this methodology, we aim at reaching experts’ consensus to gain new insights and assess the likelihood about the future of the technology. This is a relevant issue, as blockchain technology applications cover a wide spectrum of areas. Blockchain can be applied vertically within an industry (e.g. disrupting its supply chain) or horizontally across different industries or within single companies (e.g. modifying the internal structures and the modus operandi of the different company functions). Given the number of potential applications and the complexity of the technology, stakeholders are divided into skeptics, who believe the technology is still too immature to become a paradigm in the near future, and enthusiasts, who instead believe that this radical innovation will disrupt many industries and completely change business models and people’s behaviors, like internet did during the 90s.

The literature on blockchain is also widely fragmented. Different works have investigated possible blockchain applications within specific domains, such as finance [ 6 – 8 ], logistics [ 9 ], healthcare [ 10 , 11 ] and education [ 12 ]. However, a holistic approach on possible blockchain-enabled future scenarios is still missing. To our knowledge, the only contribution in this direction is the one by White [ 13 ], who explores blockchain as a source of disruptive innovation exclusively with regard to the business field. We depart from his work to adopt a much wider perspective in this study. In fact, our aim is to obtain a deep understanding on how the adoption of this technology in Europe will lead to changes over multiple dimensions, ranging from business to culture and society, policy and regulation, economy and technology. Thus, our research aims at exploring if a convergence between the two divergent perspectives on blockchain can be found, bringing together experts currently working on blockchain projects to explore the possible changes that the technology will bring to the society by 2030.

Our study outlines an overall agreement among experts that the blockchain technology will have a deep impact on multiple dimensions. In the near future people will likely start using and exploit the blockchain technology potential, without really knowing how the technology behind works, in the same way as they send emails today, ignoring how the digital architecture that allows to exchange bytes of information works. Policy makers and governments will play a crucial role in this respect, by enabling productivity boosts and competitive gains from the companies operating under their jurisdictions. As such, a tight and cooperative relationship between industrial actors and regulatory bodies will be extremely important and auspicial. To this aim, it will be of key importance for all players to understand the real competitive advantage that blockchain can bring to their own industry and market.

This work aims at contributing to the raising blockchain literature by offering a holistic view on possible blockchain-enabled future scenarios in Europe, and to investigate which of the proposed scenarios is more likely to occur. As widely agreed by the academic literature, technological developments dictate the speed and pace at which societies change [ 14 ]. Under this assumption, technological forecasting appears to be a method of fundamental importance to understand “ex-ante” the potential development of technological changes, and their impact on different societal aspects [ 15 ]. Foreseeing future technological trends could help society in understanding possible future scenarios, thus contributing to a better knowledge of the new paradigms our society is heading towards. The work is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overview on the main research streams upon which this work is based. Section 3 presents the methodology. Results are described in Section 4 and Section 5 concludes the work.

2 Background literature

2.1 the blockchain technology.

As defined by Crosby et al. [ 3 ] a blockchain can be conceptualized as a shared and decentralized ledger of transactions. This chain grows as new blocks (i.e. read transactions or digital events) are appended to it continuously [ 16 , 17 ]. Each transaction in the ledger must be confirmed by the majority of the participants in the system [ 3 , 18 – 21 ]. This means for the community to verify the truthfulness of the new piece of information and to keep the blockchain copies synchronized between all the nodes (i.e. between all the participants to the network) in such a way that everybody agrees which is the chain of blocks to follow [ 19 ]. Thus, when a client executes a transaction (e.g. when it sends some value to another client), it broadcasts the transaction encrypted with a specific technique to the entire network, so that all users in the system receive a notification of the transaction in a few seconds. At that moment, the transaction is “unconfirmed”, since it has not yet been validated by the community. Once the users verify the transaction with a process called mining, a new block is added to the chain. Usually, the miner (i.e. the user participating to the verification process) receives a reward under the form of virtual coins, called cryptocurrencies. Examples of cryptocurrencies are Bitcoins, Ether, Stellar Lumens and many others. Virtual coins can then be used on the blockchain platform to transfer value between users [ 17 – 19 ].

Thanks to a combination of mathematics and cryptography, the transactions between users (i.e. exchange of data and value), once verified by the network and added to the chain, are “almost” unmodifiable and can be considered true with a reasonable level of confidence [ 17 , 19 , 22 ]. These attributes of the technology make it extremely efficient in transferring value between users, solving the problem of trust and thus potentially eliminating the need of a central authority (e.g. a bank) that authorizes and certifies the transactions [ 7 , 23 , 24 ].

The technology can be easily applied to form legally binding agreements among individuals. The digitalized asset, which is the underlying asset of the contract, is called token. A token can be a digitalized share of a company, as well as a real estate property or a car. Through the setting of smart contracts (i.e. digitalized contracts between two parties), the blockchain technology allows users to freely trade digital tokens, and consequently to trade their underling physical assets without the need of a central authority to certify the transaction (OECD, 2020).

2.2 Blockchain technology applications

The academic literature has investigated a wide range of possible blockchain applications within specific domains, such as finance [ 6 – 8 ], logistics [ 9 ], healthcare [ 10 , 11 ] and education [ 12 ].

As mentioned, one of the undoubted advantages of the blockchain technology is the possibility to overcome the problem of trust while transferring value [ 25 ]. Not surprisingly, the technology seems to find more applications in markets where intermediation is currently high, like the financial sector, and in particular the FinTech sector, that has recently experienced a consistent make-over thanks to the diffusion of digital technologies [ 7 , 26 , 27 ]. The implementation of the blockchain technology in the financial markets could provide investors and entrepreneurs with new tools to successfully exchange value and capitals without relying on central authorities, ideally solving the problem of trust. This is among the reasons why many observers believe that the blockchain would become a potential mainstream financial technology in the future [ 28 ]. Blockchain represents an innovation able to completely remodel our current financial system, breaking the old paradigm requiring trusted centralized parties [ 6 – 8 ]. With new blockchain-based automated forms of peer-to-peer lending, individuals having limited or no access to formal financial services could gain access to basic financial services previously reserved to individuals with certified financial records [ 29 ]. Indeed, blockchain technology can provide value across multiple dimensions, by decreasing information asymmetries and reducing related transactional costs [ 30 ]. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) represent one of the most successful blockchain-based applications for financing which has been currently developed. Virtual currencies like Bitcoins can disruptively change the way in which players active in the business of financing new ventures operate [ 7 , 30 – 33 ]. Through an ICO, a company in need of new capital offers digital stocks (named token) to the public. These digital tokens will then be used by investors to pay the future products developed by the financed company [ 30 , 34 , 35 ]. ICOs represents a disruptive tool: entrepreneurs can now finance their ventures without intermediaries and consequently lower the cost of the capital raised [ 31 , 36 ]. However, some threats coming from the technology adoption can also be identified, as blockchain can also lead to higher risks related to the lower level of control intrinsically connected to the technology, especially in the case of asymmetric information between the parties involved.

Disintermediation plays a key role in the healthcare sector as well, where blockchain has recently found numerous applications. Indeed, many players currently need to exchange a huge amount of information to effectively manage the whole sector: from hospitals, to physicians, to patients. The ability to trustfully exchange data and information becomes of undoubted value in this context [ 10 , 11 ]. It should not be difficult to envision blockchain applications in other fields as well. In every sector in which information, value, or goods are supposed to flow between parties, blockchain can enable a trustful connection between the players, with the need of a central body entrusting the transaction. Within supply chain, it can increase security and traceability of goods [ 9 , 37 ]. Within education, it can help in certifying students’ acquired skills, reducing, for example, degree fraud [ 12 ]. To conclude, a recent work from Lumineau et al. [ 38 ] highlights possible implications of the technology in the way collaborations are ruled and executed, shading light on new organizational paradigms. Indeed, the authors show how the intrinsically diverse nature of the technology could strongly affect organizational outcomes, heavily influencing and modifying (possibly improving) the way in which different entities cooperate and collaborate.

3 Research methodology

3.1 forecasting technique: the delphi method.

In the past decade, an increasing number of forecasting techniques has been employed in the academic literature to predict the potential developments induced by technological changes. In particular, the Delphi method, whose term derives from the Greek oracle Delphos, is a systematic and interactive method of prediction, which is based on a panel of experts and is carried out through a series of iterations, called rounds. Many academic works have adopted this method since its development [ 14 , 39 – 44 ]. As the core of the Delphi approach, experts are required to evaluate projections (representations of possible futures) and assess their societal impact and the likelihood that they will occur within a specific time horizon.

While the majority of forecasting methods does not account for the technological implications on the social, economic and political contexts, the Delphi technique allows subjective consideration of changes in interrelated contexts [ 45 ]. Many different variants of the Delphi methodology have been developed according to the needs and goals of each research. For the purpose of this research, we decided to follow the four-steps procedure suggested by Heiko and Darkow [ 46 ] ( Fig 1 ).

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The first step of the method requires to develop and envisage projections and possible scenarios that might arise through the adoption of the technology. These projections must be short, unequivocal, and concise [ 14 ]. This phase requires researchers to deeply understand the technology by analyzing the existing literature, attending courses and workshops and conducting a number of face-to-face interviews with experts ( Fig 2 ). Once the insights are gathered, the results are synthetized in future projections that will help develop the survey. The second step consists in presenting the study to the panel of selected experts who will take part in the first round of the survey. The main challenge during this phase is to select an appropriate panel of experts and maintain their commitment and response rate. The third step consists in a statistical and quantitative analysis of the answers received and in the selection of the second-round scenarios that experts will need to evaluate again. Through the analysis of the second round of answers, updated scenarios are developed adding to the projections the qualitative and quantitative insights provided by the research. The ultimate goal of this iterative process is to reach consensus among the experts on the scenarios that are most likely to happen in the future.

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3.2 Formulation of the Delphi projections

The formulation of the projections represents a key aspect of the methodology and requires a particular attention and effort. In this phase, the projections that are later tested by the panel of experts are generated. Vagueness and inaccuracy might generate confusion in experts, leading to less meaningful results. To avoid this situation, we developed the projections by means of triangulation: literature review, interviews with experts and participation to workshops and conferences. The analysis of the literature on blockchain technology (and its benefits) allowed us to understand which industries and businesses will be mainly impacted by the technology.

We chose 2030 as a time horizon for the generation of the scenarios. This is a recommended time span for a Delphi study, since a superior period would have become unmanageable to provide relevant advice for strategic development. As reported in Table 1 , projections span among different areas. To the scope of the work, i.e. to grasp a holistic view of the most likely scenarios, it was necessary to investigate a number of multiple dimensions. Projections are related to socio-cultural, policy and regulations, economic, technological and business aspects. As it can be noticed, projections are all structured in the same way, to facilitate their understanding by experts.

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3.2.1 Interviews with experts.

Twelve blockchain experts were interviewed among academics, startups’ founders and professionals working in consultancy firms, banks and legal institutions. The selection of the experts was made in order to get different points of view and a high level of expertise, as provided by the Delphi method guidelines. We conducted interviews that took between thirty and forty-five minutes on average, according to the interviewee’s availability. Each single interview was tailored for each participant by providing guidelines and reflection tips to encourage discussion. However, a certain degree of freedom was given to the expert to allow his/her spontaneous contribution and to gain some original insights that helped in the final design of the future scenarios. Some common aspects were discussed in all interviews generating redundancy and repetition of already emerged scenarios (e.g. ICOs, business model evolution, security and utility tokens, and legal issues). This is one of the reasons why twelve interviews were considered to be sufficient for the purposes of our research.

3.2.2 Conferences.

One of the authors attended three main events in order to strengthen the knowledge about blockchain and have a broader view of its implications in different fields and industries: one in Milan and two in Paris. Of particular notice, the Community Blockchain Week, a blockchain tech-focused initiative organized voluntarily by actors engaged into the technology and with the will and vision to spread the knowledge among citizens. Thanks to various workshops and speeches during the week, it was possible to dive deeper into many aspects of the technology, as well as to meet some knowledgeable experts of various fields, some of which agreed in participating to the research. The event was extremely useful not only to understand how the technology is evolving, but also to see how the community engages itself to spread the knowledge in order to generate more and more interest around it.

3.2.3 Desk research.

We performed desk research to formulate the initial set of projections. Through the survey of the literature, we gained a comprehensive view of all the potential scenarios of the technology. The analysis of consulting companies’ reports also offered a broader vision of future scenarios, thanks to their strategic rather than technical approach [ 1 , 2 ]. This process led to identify 76 projections that represented the basis for a reflection during the expert face-to-face interviews. After screening the relevant articles and reports, a first filtering of the identified 76 projections was made in order to dismiss redundant or incomplete projections, and to keep only the most complete and varied ones. This process reduced the number of projections to 33 and to 20 after the review of two experts.

3.3 The Delphi projections

The formulation of the projections represents the most sensitive part of the research since it influences the whole study. A detailed analysis was carried out in order to avoid mistakes and confusion. In order to facilitate the respondents filling the questionnaire and to avoid any kind of ambiguity, an introduction explaining the meaning of the terminology used in the questionnaire was presented before starting the survey. The developed scenarios were broken down into six macro categories (the same as proposed by Heiko and Darkow [ 46 ]) to guarantee a more complete and systemic view of how the blockchain ecosystem and community can change and shape the future. The choice of 20 projections to be evaluated by experts is in line with prior studies exploiting the Delphi method [ 46 , 47 ]. Parente and Anderson-Parente [ 47 ] have proposed to limit the number of Delphi questions (e.g. to 25 questions) in order to guarantee a high response rate and properly filled-in questionnaires, including only closed answers. We decided to add the possibility to comment the given answers in order to gather additional qualitative data to improve the quality of the results, in line with the methodology proposed by Heiko and Darkow [ 46 ].

3.4 Selection of the panel of experts

As blockchain experts that took part to the survey, we selected individuals working in companies and institutions on the basis of their experience and knowledge of the field. Following Adler and Ziglio [ 48 ] and Heiko and Darkow [ 46 ] four requirements for “expertise” were considered:

  • knowledge and experience on blockchain technology;
  • capacity and willingness to participate to the Delphi study;
  • sufficient time to participate to the Delphi study;
  • effective communication skills.

A minimum panel size of 15–25 participants is often required to lead to consistent results. In our case, a panel of 35 experts was reached for the first round. For the reliability of the study the panelists were selected with different backgrounds and profiles. To be aligned with the European focus of the study, we considered experts working in twelve European countries, being France and Italy the ones with the highest number of respondents. The panel characteristics are reported in Figs 3 , 4 and 5 .

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3.5 Execution of the Delphi surveys

In line with the methodology proposed by Heiko and Darkow [ 46 ], two rounds of surveys were executed. We decided to carry no more than two rounds because participating to a Delphi study requires a lot of effort and is a time-consuming task for panelists. By limiting the rounds to two, we reached a sufficient number of respondents that led to have valuable results and consistent conclusions. Moreover, since for each scenario the possibility to include a qualitative argumentation was included, the smaller number of iterations worked as a stimulus for the experts to explain the reasons of their quantitative answers.

The survey was carried out following the standards of the Internet-based Delphi, also called e-Delphi [ 39 , 40 ]. Giving the possibility to respondents to answer digitally allowed experts to be more flexible in responding to the survey, ensuring a greater participation. The way the questionnaire was structured was exactly as the e-Delphi website suggests, but for practical reasons we edited the survey using Google Form. Other standards, such as the real-time Delphi solution proposed by several studies [ 14 , 42 , 43 , 49 ] could have led to a better comparison among experts, but would have likely caused more withdraws to the survey.

3.5.1 First round.

In the first round of the survey, the experts assessed the expected probability and impact of the twenty outlined projections. Some Delphi studies [ 50 , 51 ] include a third factor that helps to assess the desirability of a scenario (i.e. how much an expert is in favour of the realization of a prediction). However, we decided not to include this last aspect to make the questionnaire lighter and faster to be filled in, and to reduce drop-outs ( Table 2 ).

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Impact, evaluated at the industry level, was measured on a five-point Likert scale [ 52 ]. Since there is not a general consensus among experts regarding the number of points the scale should have, and due to the general nature of the scenarios, we preferred to use a five-point Likert scale. The corresponding probabilities are: 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. Gathering quantitative data allowed to perform a first set of analyses based on descriptive statistics (e.g. mean, median and interquartile range-IQR). We used qualitative data, instead, to build the final scenarios during the fourth step of the forecasting technique. Even though the literature regarding the Delphi method does not suggest a standardized way to analyze consensus, central tendency measures, such as median and mean values, are useful to grasp a first understanding and are frequently accepted and adopted ( Table 3 ). Scenarios with an IQR equal or lower than 1.5 were considered as having reached an acceptable degree of consensus. It should be noticed that most of the projections that achieved the highest probability, having a median value of 75% achieved also the consensus, i.e. IQR below 1.5. This was the case for projections 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 19, 20.

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These results show that it was easier for experts to find a consensus over the projections that resulted as very likely to occur. Only projection number 18 achieved a high probability score but could not reach a consensus.

3.5.2 Second round.

During the Delphi’s second round only the projections with an IQR above 1.5 (i.e. which did not reach consensus in the first round) were tested. In order to allow the respondents to easily understand the answers that the panel gave as a whole in round one, for each projection a quantitative report was provided. This report was made of a bar chart with the distribution of the first round’s answers and the correspondent qualitative details, i.e. some of the argumentations provided by some of the panelists. Experts were asked to reconsider the likelihood of occurrence of the projections number 1, 5, 7, 11, 12, 14 and 18. The second round was again structured using Google Form. Following the Delphi’s approach, we did not ask again to estimate the impact for each projection, since this would have presumably been not subject to any change. Moreover, we decided to leave the opportunity to offer again some qualitative comments in support of the answers for a better analysis of the results. The number of experts who successfully completed the second round of the survey dropped to 28, i.e. the 80% of the experts that completed Round 1 and 56% of the selected initial panel. Again, we evaluated the central tendency measures for the projections tested during the second round ( Table 4 ).

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In order to provide a more effective and structured analysis of the results, we first report the final summary table of the Delphi survey and then describe the insights obtained from the analysis. It has to be noticed that Table 5 reports quantitative data only, while during the survey qualitative data were collected as well. In presenting the results of this research, both quantitative and qualitative data are used to provide the best possible picture of what the blockchain-based future will look like. Alongside with standard statistics, we build on qualitative insights obtained during the interviews carried on with experts.

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Firstly, it is interesting to analyze which projections, out of the initial 20, reached a significant consensus (IQR <1.5 after the two rounds of the surveys) and were given a high probability of occurrence by the experts. We can summarize the findings in this domain around three major axes: efficiency, security, and innovation.

By 2030, it will be easier, faster and leaner to exchange value and data among users, institutions and countries. Efficiency will boost and uncover innovation potential within companies and societies if these latter will be able to exploit such a new opportunity. Policies will be a necessary pre-requisite for companies to be able to build a competitive edge globally. From this perspective, the capability of central governments to spur innovation with lean and flexible regulations will be a key driver in explaining the ex-post productivity differential among companies belonging to different countries. From the interview with an investment banker part of the BPCE French group (one of the largest banks in France), it emerged how efficiency is often hampered by the lack of an equally efficient regulation. To provide the reader with an interesting example, in 2018, Natixis, the international corporate and investment banking, asset management, insurance and financial services arm of BPCE, entered the Marco Polo consortium, an initiative born to provide a newly conceived trade and supply chain finance platform, leveraging Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and blockchain technology. Many other leading banks joined the consortium as well. However, as highlighted by the investment banker, the main limiting factor of the consortium, strongly hampering its efficiency and ability to provide a competitive edge, was the “old-style” bureaucracy linked to it. Although transactions were in principle to be executed smoothly, a bulk of legal paperwork was required to approve them formally. In this case, it appears evident that technology often runs faster than policy, consistently lowering its potential. Interestingly, this view is also shared by regulatory bodies. An experienced lawyer and notary, also member of a panel of experts elected by the Italian government to define the national strategy on blockchain, highlighted that, sometimes, regulators working on blockchain-related policies are trying to adapt existing regulations to the new paradigm. Due to the intrinsically different nature of the technology, this could represent a wrong approach. At the same time, building a new set of policies from scratches could represent a challenging task. From this perspective, projections 4 and 5 confirm this insight: policy and technology should come hand in hand to synergically boost productivity. The three projections reached consensus after the two rounds and were assigned a high probability of occurrence. Overall, it is evident that regulatory aspects linked to the adoption of this new technology shall not be underestimated.

As previously mentioned, security, and specifically cybersecurity, is another dimension around which blockchain could bring consistent advantages, as projections 3, 10, 11 and 15 suggest. On this specific aspect, we interviewed a project leader of the World Economic Forum who previously worked for the United Nations for more than ten years. She dealt specifically with digital regulations, justice, and cybersecurity, and in the last three years before the interview, she specifically worked on blockchain implications and how the technology could be implemented in existing ecosystems. Thanks to her experience in the domain, she clearly explained how the blockchain represents a meaningful technology to avoid cyberattacks to sensitive data and digital files. In her opinion, the avoidance of a single point of failure is the main reason behind a possible blockchain adoption over the next years, since cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and dangerous and related costs for companies are exponentially increasing (e.g. 2020 has been a record year for cyber attacks). Consequently, companies will be increasingly investing in distributed ledgers as a form of contingency budget to lower the cybersecurity risk and its related cost. Given the centrality of data in today’s businesses, serious attacks and loss of data could represent a serious threat to business long-term sustainability.

The third relevant aspect on which blockchain will have a strong impact is, not surprisingly, innovation. Although regulation could represent a non-negligible limiting factor, experts foresee many sectors to be impacted by the technology adoption. For example, the financial sector could be heavily affected by this new paradigm. Particularly, companies’ capital structures and their strategic interlink with business models will drive a differential competitive power. Most likely, enterprises will have to rethink their business models to account for the possibility to digitize/tokenize their assets (Projections 8 and 18). The capability in flexibly adapting their service offerings to the new opportunity and the ability to raise, and re-invest, new capitals will shape the global competition landscape across different industrial sectors and geographies. From one side, blockchain will enable new strategic decisions, from the other side, it will be of fundamental importance to build technological capabilities to enable these decisions. The underlying technology behind transactions, equity offering and equity share transfers will most likely be the blockchain (Projections 13 and 16). Disintermediation and the ability to exchange value, information, and data trustfully without a central authority will enable a new way of funding and cooperation on open-source projects (Projection 19). Most likely, people will refer to blockchain systems as they now refer to browsers such as Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer. Many blockchains are already available and are constantly improved and developed, and it is foreseeable that this will remain the case in the future. Users will just need to know the characteristics that a blockchain provides to choose the most suitable one for their business and purposes. Blockchain-based systems will require new skills and knowledge that developers and engineers will need to develop. Big efforts will be needed to make the blockchain more and more user friendly and attractive for those who just want to benefit from the immutability, traceability, and security that it intrinsically brings. At the time of the writing and in line with the Abernathy and Utterback model [ 53 ] many players are currently investing and innovating on blockchain to provide services that will satisfy the new market needs.

The opportunity for people to deal freely will in fact generate opportunities that were unforeseeable before. Self-enforcing smart contracts (Projection 20) will let parties to buy and sell products or to rent them with pay-for-use schemes in an automated way, the digitization of shares and assets will allow companies to raise capital in new ways, without the need to rely on banks, venture capitals or traditional IPOs. Indeed, it is important to understand how the digitization of assets can challenge existing investments and the funding industry represented by traditional private equity firms and banks. Blockchain could allow the creation of platforms for the issuance of traditional financial products on a tokenized nature, making it easier, more transparent and cheaper to manage and access these tools for everyone, including both individual savers and SMEs. Two different types of companies can and will operate in the market: those which have blockchain at their core since their foundation, and those which have (or will have) to embark in a digital transformation process to reconvert themselves into blockchain-based enterprises. In both cases, companies are investing to get a competitive advantage over competitors, betting on the technology that is promising to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Once a dominant design in product and services will be achieved, companies that took a different path will likely exit the market, letting firms following the dominant design to gain market shares.

To conclude and to conceptualize the insights we obtained from both quantitative and qualitative data, we derived four scenarios that we organized in a matrix framework, reported in Table 6 . The framework was built around two main dimensions: on one hand the digitization of assets, and on the other hand the change in business models. The proposed framework leads to the identification of four quadrants: scenarios which envision both the digitization of assets and business model changes and scenarios which do not foresee neither of these two changes. These four main development scenarios were completed and analyzed in the light of the conducted interviews and of the quantitative and qualitative data gathered through the Delphi survey. Each quadrant was given a label: Internal Processes, Flow-less Coopetition, Suppliers Potential and Investment Opportunities. When discussing the quadrants, we try to highlight which of the three improvement areas previously identified (efficiency, security, and innovation) are exploited in the discussed scenario.

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To derive relevant insights from the framework, it is useful to start from the bottom left quadrant, Internal Processes. This name was chosen to highlight the absence of any particular evolution for the company at a strategic level through the blockchain adoption. In this case, it is conceivable to use the technology to incrementally improve firms’ operation performances. Blockchain’s main benefits are to increase traceability of transactions and guarantee their immutability. All these characteristics adopted on today’s processes will result in an automation of routine business functions, such as settlements and reconciliation, customs clearance, heavy payments, invoicing, and documentation, boosting operational efficiency and cost performance. In this scenario, security and efficiency will see a consistent improvement.

The top-left scenario shows instead a different perspective, by considering a broader adoption of blockchain that generates new cooperative business models among different stakeholders, potentially even among competitors. This is why it is called Flow-Less Coopetition. In this case, the benefits of blockchain will help at generating a more democratic ecosystem in terms of information. Those actors that base their business models on information asymmetry, having access to key information before others, will need to revisit their business models if they want to stay competitive. It is of interest to notice how big financial institutions, traditionally competing, are now exploring potential collaboration models in the light of this new technology (e.g. JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley). This quadrant envisages an advance in all three blockchain-enabled dimensions: efficiency, security, and innovation.

The bottom-right scenario, called Suppliers Potential, highlights how, thanks to the digitization that blockchain allows, many actors could jump in the market providing solutions to those companies that would like to benefit from the advantages of digitizing their assets, but are lacking means and competences to internally develop them. Those companies would rather outsource the development of blockchain-based solutions. For this reason, the potential for the creation of a remunerative B2B market exists. Even though there are already protocols that are leaders in the market (Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum), new solutions with different configurations will likely be needed to support different industries and use case solutions. As for the first scenario, also in this context efficiency and security will be mainly affected.

Finally, the last scenario (Investment Opportunities) focuses on the combination between the complete digitization of the assets of a company and the new business models that this major change could generate. As already mentioned in previous paragraphs, industries are experimenting many ways to facilitate the access to capital. Since the explosion of ICOs in 2017, new and easier ways to access capital have become possible and achievable. However, due to their unregulated nature, ICOs still present numerous potential threats (Projection 14 did not reach consensus). For this reason, other solutions, such as STOs (Security Token Offerings), are on the way of being tested. Bringing a higher degree of freedom to investments will allow companies to receive funds from diverse and non-traditional investors, and it will also boost investments by private individuals into early-stage companies. Efficiency and innovation will be at the core of this last scenario.

5 Conclusions

In this paper, we studied different blockchain-based projections and we assessed their likelihood and impact thanks to the participation of a pool of experts. We built our findings around three dimensions (efficiency, security, and innovation) and we derived four scenarios based on experts’ shared vision. Being the current literature widely fragmented, we believe this research represents a useful starting for conceptualizing blockchain potential and implications. While many research papers focus on blockchain specific applications or general reviews of the state of the art, we try to propose a unifying framework building on different typologies of insights and analyses. We merged quantitative observations derived from standard statistics with qualitative insights obtained directly from experts’ opinions.

Overall, we believe our research can constitute a useful tool for many practitioners involved in the innovation ecosystem and for managers of small, medium and large enterprises to look at future possible scenarios in a more rational and systematic way. From one side, a company’s management can use these forecasts as a starting point for the implementation of new strategies. As previously highlighted, blockchain offers endless possibilities. However, the ability to focus on activities and projects with a positive return on investment will be crucial. Firstly, managers will face the choice between insourcing or outsourcing the technological development of the platform. While the former choice ensures higher flexibility, it also generates high development and maintenance costs. Companies which will identify blockchain as their core service will be entitled to adopt this first strategy, while the majority of the enterprises will probably gain better competitive advantages adopting Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) solution. This latter approach will boost companies’ performances, by enhancing new service offerings as well as a new level of operational efficiency, without carrying the burden and costs of technological complexity.

As mentioned, we believe this research provides useful insights for policy makers as well. The adoption of blockchain represents a tremendous technological change bringing along interesting and tangible opportunities. However, different threats can be foreseen. Central authorities do not only solve the problem of trust in certifying value transactions. They also provide essential supervision on the process itself, for example ensuring that information asymmetry is kept at reasonable levels between parties engaging in any sort of contracts, especially in the financial world. Letting people directly exchange value between themselves or allowing companies to easily raise capitals can boost financial efficiency, but also provides room for frauds and ambiguous behaviours. Today, companies which are interested in raising capitals both through innovative tools such as crowdfunding or through traditional entities such as public financial markets, have the duty to disclose relevant information and usually go through a deep process of due diligence. Regulators should ensure the same level of control on companies that will raise money through Initial Coin Offerings or other sort of blockchain-enabled offerings. We believe that the first step towards a fair regulation of this newly born technology is the understanding of its foreseeable impact on the society in the near future. This work aims to be a precious enabler in this direction. As highlighted in the body of this research, it appears fundamental for policy makers, regulators and government to deeply understand the potential upsides and threats of this new technology, and to correctly navigate the different possible blockchain-enabled scenarios. The successful cooperation between companies’ management and regulators could enable significant productivity shifts in the economic tissue of many countries. Failing in efficiently grasping and enhancing these new paradigms from a regulatory perspective could result into a heavy deficit for the competitive edge and productivity of the industrial sectors of the governments’ respective countries, potentially leading to macroeconomic differentials in productivity.

To conclude, this research could be a useful reference for orienting into this complex and dynamic environment, reducing the perceived uncertainty associated to such a new technology. Thanks to the experts’ advice, it is now possible to have a clearer picture of the evolution of blockchain technologies and of the opportunities and threats that the technology will generate. Certain limitations and characteristics of this study must be considered to correctly and effectively take advantage of its results. The main objective of this work was to examine the most disrupting aspects that are likely to occur in Europe by 2030, with a particular focus on how the technology will facilitate financing, reduce costs, increase transparency and, in general, influence firms’ business models. From this point of view, the objectives and assumptions presented at the beginning of this paper can be considered as fully achieved, but further works exploring other industries and geographies are required to get an organic understanding of the new enhanced paradigms.

Our research only paves the way for a better understanding of what a blockchain-based future will look like, as the differences between industries are too large to be analyzed in a single work. Organizations and businesses in the financial world are consistently changing, but it will be necessary also for companies belonging to different sectors to completely rethink their core activities. From this perspective, we believe further works are needed in these directions. We hope researchers will use and explode our framework to further characterize and meticulously describe the new possible paradigms around the multiple dimensions examined in this work.

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258995.s001

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, the disruption of blockchain in auditing – a systematic literature review and an agenda for future research.

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal

ISSN : 0951-3574

Article publication date: 24 May 2021

Issue publication date: 22 August 2022

This paper presents a systematic literature review, including content and bibliometric analyses, of the impact of blockchain technology (BT) in auditing, to identify trends, research areas and construct an agenda for future research.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors include studies from 2010 to 2020 in their structured literature review (SLR), using accounting journals on the Scopus database, which yielded 40 articles with blockchain and auditing at its core.

One of the contributions of the authors’ analyses is to group the prior research, and therefore also the agenda for future research, into three main research areas: (1) Blockchain as a tool for auditing professionals to improve business information systems to save time and prevent fraud; (2) Smart contracts enabling Audit 4.0 efficiency, reporting, disclosure and transparency; (3) Cryptocurrency and initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a springboard for corporate governance and new venture financing. The authors’ findings have several important implications for practice and theory.

Practical implications

The results of this study emphasise that (1) the disruption of blockchain in auditing is in a nascent phase and there is a need for compelling empirical studies and potential for the involvement of practitioners; (2) there may be a need to reconsider audit procedures especially suited for digitalisation and BT adoption; (3) standards, guidelines and training are required to pivot towards and confront the challenge BT will represent for auditing; and (4) there are two sides to the BT coin for auditing, enthusiasm about the potential and risk upon implementation. These practical implications can also be seen as a template for future research in a quest to align theory and practice.

Originality/value

The authors’ SLR facilitates the identification of research areas and implications, forming a useful baseline for practitioners, professionals and academics, as they draft the state of the art on the disruption of blockchain in auditing, highlighting how BT is changing auditing activities and traditions.

  • Distributed ledger technology
  • Smart contracts
  • Cryptocurrency

Lombardi, R. , de Villiers, C. , Moscariello, N. and Pizzo, M. (2022), "The disruption of blockchain in auditing – a systematic literature review and an agenda for future research", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal , Vol. 35 No. 7, pp. 1534-1565. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-10-2020-4992

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Blockchain technology-based sustainable management research: the status quo and a general framework for future application

1 School of Management, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, 510006 Guangdong China

Hongping Yuan

2 Institute of Economic and Social Development, Dongbei University of Finance & Economics, Dalian, 116025 Liaoning China

Associated Data

Not applicable.

The problems of data leakage and unreliable information transfer in the management process make sustainability management an inevitable need for future development. Globally, there is increasing attention paid to blockchain technology and particularly its application in addressing sustainable management issues, both from academia and industry. Aiming to deepen the understanding of how blockchain technology could deal with sustainable management issues across different disciplines, this paper investigates the latest research on the application of blockchain technology in sustainable management published from 2017 to 2021. It is found that there is a drastic surge of publications in the recent 2 years. The analysis focuses on authors’ origins, the collaboration network of the keywords, countries, and research topics covered. The application of blockchain technology in five key sectors of sustainable management, encompassing energy management, construction management, supply chain management, environmental management, and e-government management, is selected for further analysis detail. Also, a general framework for applying blockchain technology is proposed for broadening its use and dealing with sustainable management issues. The findings show that the identified 108 publications are distributed in 75 different journals, and scholars from China, the UK, and the USA have been working closely in BT-based sustainable management research. Blockchain technology is just emerging in sustainable management, and there is a great potential for applying blockchain technology to improve sustainable management performance and, more importantly, to provide solutions to quite a few long-lasting problems in these sectors. Opportunities for future research are also presented and discussed.

Introduction

The blockchain technology (BT) refers to a digitally distributed data structure that records and shares data and information between any two parties (peer-to-peer network) in a verifiable and tamper-proof way that applies globally (Lansiti and Lakhani 2017 ). It enables the evolution from the traditional centralized to the distributed network, which can be achieved securely without the need for a trusted authority (Dutta et al. 2020 ). It earned worldwide fame via bitcoin (Nakamoto 2008 ) and the associated cryptocurrency transactions (Islam et al. 2018 ). However, applying BT is not limited to bitcoin in the finance field. Over the last decade, its application has been promoted by various governments around the global. For example, a report by the UK government states that BT might have the capacity to “reform our financial markets, supply chains, consumer and business-to-business services, and publicly-held registers” (Andoni et al. 2019 ; Walport 2016 ). The US government published the Blockchain Promotion Act and the US Export Finance Agency Act for exploring BT promotion across government agencies and export–import banks (Dewey 2022 ). The Canadian federal government was experimenting with BT throughout different departments, particularly in the Canada Border Services Agency, intending to improve data quality and facilitate the movement of goods (Grant Simon and Matthew 2022 ). Theoretically, BT can be innovatively adopted to address various management issues, including the revolution of information and communication technology, and digital economics (Upadhyay 2020 ). During the period, there has been a rapid development of BT application across critical sectors of sustainable management, including environmental management (Pellegrini et al. 2020 ), supply chain management (Zelbst et al. 2019 ), and healthcare management (Biswas et al. 2020 ).

The past application of BT in different disciplines witnessed its strength in improving management effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, it can effectively resolve the critical challenges for energy trading and the loopholes and bottlenecks of management in distributed energy systems, such as deception, malicious tampering, and subpeption (Cong and He 2019 ; Liu et al. 2020 ; Tasatanattakool and Techapanupreeda 2018 ). With the features of BT, the insufficient Building information modeling (BIM) can also be replenished, so that the transaction costs traditionally associated with construction projects can be reduced or removed, and consensus and information exchange in a meaningful manner can be reached (Li et al. 2019 ; Succar 2009 ). Furthermore, BT provides the probability of strict supervision for illegal dumping and occupation (Bennett et al. 2019 ; Pellegrini et al. 2020 ), product traceability, and food quality (Astill et al. 2019 ; Chen et al. 2021 ), and can resolve the problem of data security and authenticity among governments, citizens, and businesses (Fu and Zhu 2019 ; Ramsey et al. 2020 ).

An extensive review of BT-related literature tells that the current application of BT in addressing sustainable management issues is still at the infant stage. In detail, the concept of sustainable management is becoming known to scholars, which is proposed to achieve sustainable development. It is mainly applied to the green supply chain (An et al. 2021 ; Khan et al. 2021 ), sustainable transport systems (Ullah et al. 2019 , 2021 ), sustainable environment (Pellegrini et al. 2020 ), and medical waste sustainability (Singh et al. 2022 ). Notably, sustainable management relies on information with several features, including high reliability, efficient transfer, and absolute truthfulness, which cannot be achieved by traditional information technology and is considered an impossible challenge. The blockchain as a emerging technology can perfectly adapt to the information needs of sustainable management, which given its significant potential for decentralization (Croman et al. 2016 ; Crosby et al.  2016 ), distrusting (Arvind Narayanan et al. 2016 ), transparency (Bonneau et al. 2015 ; Lin and Liao 2017 ), traceable and unforgeable (Karame et al. 2012 ), anonymity (Arvind Narayanan et al. 2016 ; Christidis and Devetsikiotis 2016 ), and credibility (Karame et al. 2012 ). Therefore, it is necessary to promote more comprehensive and in-depth application of BT to realize sustainable social development. As a commonly applied technology, BT can be better exploited to deal with problems across the key sustainable management sectors, though a framework might help to adapt to the particular context of industries. Prior research efforts have been made to apply BT in various fields (Abou Jaoude and Saade 2019 ; Hasselgren et al. 2020 ; Makhdoom et al. 2020 ; Miglani et al. 2020 ; Paulavicius et al. 2019 ). However, the research status and directions of BT in the field of sustainable managment remains to be clarified. Particularlythere is still a lack of the general framework to apply BT in sustainable management as aforementioned. This paper aims to fill the research gap. On the one hand, this study seeks to understand the current status of research and research trends by systematically and critically reviewing papers on the application of blockchain technology in sustainable management. The outcomes are expected to assist scholars in gaining an in-depth understanding of previous research efforts on this topic and to grasp the directions for future research. On the other hand, establishing the general framework for BT application to help managers and researchers quickly comprehend the steps of blockchain implementation to accelerate the application of BT in sustainable management. The paper attempts to answer the following three research questions (RQs):

  • RQ1: What are the main research directions on blockchain technology-based (BT-based) sustainable management at present?
  • RQ2: What are the challenges and opportunities of BT-based sustainable management research?
  • RQ3: Is there a general framework for applying BT in addressing sustainable management issues?

Research methodology

Review approach.

The principle of systematic literature review (SLR), was defined as “[…] a referential method to organize, synthesize and identify emerging paths and opportunities, as well as understanding the relevant issues, contradictions and limitations, based on previous studies. (Queiroz et al. 2020 ),” was followed to design the research methodology. SLR provides a timely and effective approach for investigating the issues and field concerned.

Planning and conducting the review

The process for identifying and selecting papers is presented in Fig.  1 , which involves four phases, including identification, screening, eligibility check, and content analysis phase. Firstly, research databases, including Web of Science Core Collection, Springer, and Scopus, are used as the primary sources for searching the literature, which allows target papers to be found by the search terms and exported with their meta-information (Ante et al. 2021 ; Zupic and Cater 2015 ). Meanwhile, the back-reference list checking which selected papers from the reference in the target paper is implemented to identify additional relevant articles.

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Paper selection process

Secondly, to cover the holistic topics and keywords for BT-based sustainable management research, we use the following the search code: TS = (blockchain OR “block chain” OR cryptocurrency* OR “distributed ledger”) AND TS = (energy OR construct* OR “supply chain” OR “carbon emission” OR land OR water OR waste) AND TS = (management OR manage*). The asterisk (*) represents any group of characters in the research terms, such as “construct*” covers both “constructor” and “construction.” The specific time frame is determined as a 5-year period (i.e., from 2017 to 2021), because the bitcoin whitepaper was published in 2008, and the first literature relevant to sustainable management was published in 2017.

Similar to some literature review papers (Syn and Ramaprasad 2019 ; Wang and Su 2020 ), scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals are selected, while all other kinds of publications like proceedings, books, and technical reports are excluded for analysis. The found papers merely focusing on computer science are also excluded and the identification of the papers limit to the scope of the five key sustainable management sectors and the research categories of management business and operation research and management science. Furthermore, the language is limited to English.

bibliometric analysis

Co-citation analysis is conducted, the purpose of which is to measure the relationship between studies. It would be helpful to demonstrate the frequency with which earlier papers were cited by the later ones (Small 2010 ). This not only implies a timely relationship but also composes a network of papers. By doing so, the central study in the cluster of publications can be identified.

A brief analysis of the identified studies

Year wise publication details.

Figure  2 shows the publication frequency of BT-based sustainable management-related papers between 2017 and 2021. Overall, there are 108 papers identified for analysis from 75 different journals. Notably, nineteen journals (25.33%) published two or more papers, while only three journals (4%) published four or more. A closer examination tells that 27 review papers (25.00%) and 81 research papers (75.00%). The detailed journal-wise distribution of the identified papers is provided in Appendix Table ​ Table2 2 .

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The publication frequency of papers on BT-base sustainable management (2017–2021)

Journal-wise distribution of selected papers

Country collaboration network

BT-based sustainable management researches have been contributed by scholars from different countries. Country collaboration analysis is conducted so that the cooperation intensity and relationship between those countries can be better interpreted (see Fig.  3 ). In the figure, the size of the circle represents the frequency of published papers in any specific country, and the ties show the strength of cooperation between the countries connected. Notably, the scale of the circle is consistent with the number of papers in the countries. For instance, the corresponding nodes of China, the UK, and the USA are much larger than in other countries, indicating that scholars from the three countries have been working closely in BT-based sustainable management research. To facilitate a comprehensive understanding, the cooperation network among significant countries is provided in Table ​ Table1 1 .

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The main countries’ cooperation network

Co-occurrence frequency of keywords

A co-occurrence analysis was conducted with the indexed keywords in identified papers to understand the core intellectual topic addressed by the extant research with the VOSviewer software (He et al. 2021 ). Blockchain and management emerged as significant keywords in the overall network in Fig.  4 , which can be explained by the size of the node and the lines between the keywords. From the perspective of clustering, all keywords are clustered into six groups with different colors, which occurred in other years. The blockchain, as one of the core keywords, connected various keywords in a different years, which were dyed different colors, including BIM, construction industry, power, energy, sustainable city, and E-governance. The prominent combinations indicate the rising importance of specific characteristics of blockchain technology which has been useful in various fields of sustainable management. Notably, the other emerging technology, including the internet of things (IoT), big data (BD), and peer-to-peer (P2P), has developed and applied alongside BT. Therefore, it is necessary that notice the typical application of BT in various fields and its combined application with other technologies.

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BT application in key sectors of sustainable management

After a careful review of the identified papers from the research objective, five management sectors, including energy management, construction management, supply chain management, environment management, and E-government management, are determined for further analysis. The sample distribution in these management sectors is described in Fig.  5 .

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The sample distribution in five management sectors

Construction management

At present, the research on BT in the domain of construction management stays at a theoretical level (Li et al. 2020 ). However, the construction management processes, including planning, design, construction, and maintenance, provide good conditions and opportunities for applying BT (Anjum et al. 2017 ). Such a viewpoint is also supported by a few facts, including (1) the complex and fragmented supply chains of the projects in the construction industry (Hunhevicz and Hall 2020 ); (2) the mutual trust problems existing in construction projects that originate from the interdependent action of numerous stakeholders (Pishdad-Bozorgi and Beliveau 2016 ; Zolin et al. 2004 ); and (3) the high volume of transactions among various entities and stakeholders (Kim et al. 2020 ). Therefore, BT can be applied to improving construction project performance under several scenarios, such as multidisciplinary data updates and validation, information interface of the project, time-limited the transaction, and interaction in transaction (Anjum et al. 2017 ; Liu et al. 2019 ).

In the construction project lifecycle, blockchain can help tackle sustainable management issues related to data security and trusts, such as bidding and tendering, archiving documents, controlling model access, and updating transaction settlements during the planning and design stages (Li et al. 2019 ). In the phases of the construction and maintenance, the payment system of construction contract can be tricky. Yet, with the aid of blockchain, automatic payment can be achieved to improve project finance in the construction industry (Cardeira 2015 ; Wang et al. 2017 ). Furthermore, smart contracts based on the blockchain can also benefit facility management and maintenance (IEBC 2018 ), material procurement (Geipel 2017 ), and supply chain management (Kim and Laskowski 2018 ). Overall, using blockchain helps solve sustainable management issues regarding data and information management, contract, and finance management in the construction industry, which bears the potential to have a significant impact on construction management.

Supply chain management

The data storage and management processes of the traditional supply chain are centralized and depend on third-party organizations (Howson 2020 ), which makes it challenging to meet the demands of consumers for traceable data and transparent commodity information. Yet, the unique features, including traceability, transparency, and immutability of blockchain, offer opportunities to improve supply chain management (Shahid et al. 2020 ). Blockchain technology was first applied in agriculture to establish a system for tracing agricultural products (Tian 2016 ). With the rapid development of research in different disciplines, current research of supply chain management with BT includes the multiple uses of BT to improve food supply chain management (Chen et al. 2021 ; Howson 2020 ; Shahid et al. 2020 ; Yadav et al. 2020 ), the adopt of BT to achieve sustainable supply chain management (Esmaeilian et al. 2020 ; Saberi et al. 2019 ), enhancing international supply chains by BT application (Y. L. Chang et al. 2020a , b ; Choi et al. 2019 ), the management of internal, and external supply chain with BT (Di Vaio and Varriale 2020 ; Kim and Shin 2019 ).

Specifically, food supply chain management includes not only safety issues, but also origin fraud and quality defects (Aung and Chang 2014 ). The fisheries supply chain, as one of the major food supply chains, faces more common difficulties than the others (Howson 2020 ), including illegal and unregulated production (Young 2016 ); laboring under coercion (Vandergeest and Marschke 2020 ); material waste (Wilcox et al. 2016 ); and food provenance missing. A sustainable supply chain has attracted the attention of academics and government, as an essential part of circular economy practices. With the use of blockchain technology, data and information of a supply chain can be disclosed to different stakeholders to improve its sustainability. Due to the security and authenticity of information realized by BT, supply chain risks can be minimized to improve business performance and reliability (Ivanov et al. 2018 ). Meanwhile, adopting BT in supply chain management can eliminate human errors and reduce transaction times (Saberi et al. 2019 ) and help achieve trust to benefit the consumers (Ward 2022 ). In addition, sustainable supply chain management with BT can not only mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption, but also downsize the carbon footprint and tax (Kshetri 2018 ). Notably, the global supply chain has entered the digital era, and its management has become more challenging due to the associated uncertainties in the geopolitical, technological, and economic spheres (V. Chang et al. 2020a , b ). Nevertheless, the adoption of blockchain technology in the global supply chain is still in its infancy. Several scholars explored the applications of BT in the global supply chain, including exploiting global supply chain information and facilitating the profit distribution across the global supply chain (Choi 2020 ; Deloitte. 2017 ; Hald and Kinra 2019 ). Therefore, the adoption of blockchain can be leveraged to tackle these issues and devote itself to meeting sustainable management goals of different supply chains.

Environmental management

The critical elements of environmental management include the atmosphere, land, water, and waste, which provide the foundation for the people’s living environment. Managing these factors has become increasingly conplex with a surge in urbanization rate and economics in many countries. In particular, developing countries face more issues than developed countries in different aspects, such as wasteful land use, illegal land possession, lack of precise irrigation, insufficient water security supervision, and illegal waste dumping.

A few studies investigate the use of BT to tackle existing issues in the convention of environmental management. Bennett et al. ( 2019 ) offer a new operation mode and service for traditional land management with blockchain technology (Bennett et al. 2019 ), to improve the transparency of land records and transfers. Meanwhile, sustainable development goals are achieved through clear ownership and valuation to reduce fraudulent transactions with BT (Hughes et al. 2019 ; Pandey and Litoriya 2021 ; Thakur et al. 2020 ; Veeramani and Jaganathan 2020 ). Even though agriculture irrigation and city water supply play an essential role in many countries, it is hard to perform comprehensive supervision and sophisticated management without advanced technology. Thus, some scholars explored the application of blockchain technology in this direction to achieve accurate, automatic, and real-time water billing and water quality monitoring to ensure the achievement of a number of relevant management (Ramsey et al. 2020 ), including guaranteed water security and precise irrigation management (Munir et al. 2019 ), and achieve water conservation goals (Ramsey et al. 2020 ). Also, waste management is a critical activity in the urban environment, which has the potential to contribute more to the development of a circular economy with technical support. The practice of waste management can be combined with BT and adherent platforms to realize digital waste management (Pellegrini et al. 2020 ). It can prevent not only illegal dumping but also reduce the cost and carbon emission of the recovery, which can be regarded as drivers for improving the environment and society (Berglund et al. 2020 ).

Energy management

The blockchain research of the energy sector covered various areas, including the power grid (Calvillo et al. 2016 ; Di Silvestre et al. 2019 ), P2P network (Li 2016 ; Zhou et al. 2020 ), internet of energy (Miglani et al. 2020 ; Rifkin 2011 ), and energy transaction (Ahl et al. 2020 ). Among these areas, energy transaction focuses more on the management practice compared with the other aspects. It may be due to the tendency of each stakeholder to pursue their maximum interests, the traditional energy transaction management framework faces significant challenges and risks under the current conditions of energy management, such as security risks of spoofing, malicious tampering, and subterfuge (Liu et al. 2020 ; Noor et al. 2018 ; Van Cutsem et al. 2020 ). Therefore, researchers utilize BT to improve traditional energy management theories and tools.

The efficient demand-side forecasting and secure data transmission were perceived as crucial facilitators to an energy transition, which forms a context to impel the reformation of the traditional energy management transition toward a new paradigm of a distributed system for energy management. Those new technologies, e.g., BT, facilitate the implementation of a distributed energy systems that can break through the bottlenecks of traditional energy management (Tasatanattakool and Techapanupreeda 2018 ). Several advantages have been obtained with the application of BT in the energy field, including achieving the more efficient performance of energy transmission (Jin et al. 2017 ; Macrinici et al. 2018 ; Pop et al. 2018 ; Wang and Su 2020 ), realizing simplified multi-layer trading systems (Kareem et al. 2020 ), capturing sustainable consumption (Ben Ruben et al. 2017 ), and developing decentralized energy trading and supply systems (Brilliantova and Thurner 2018 ; Casado-Vara et al. 2019 ; Wang et al. 2019 ; Zhang and Hao 2017 ).

E-government management

Electronic government (E-government) commonly involves three domains, namely, government to citizen (G2C), government to government (G2G), and government to business (G2B). Information transmission is the basis of E-government, which provides a platform for different business organizations, citizens, authorities, and government agencies, to circulate data among themselves and improve performance effectively (Kumar and Bhalaji 2021 ). Due to the reason that it prone to cyber-attacks by culprits who purpose to steal vital information, an increasing number of scholars introduced BT to ensure data and information security (Fu and Zhu 2019 ). It is worth noting that the alliance chain, a type of blockchain, caught wide attention in E-government for its several characteristics and advantages, which overcome the disadvantage of the traditional system to promote the striding of government management to “smart government” (Fu and Zhu 2019 ; Kumar and Bhalaji 2021 ).

Discussions

The major function of bt in sustainable management.

Various sectors have utilized the BT to improve their performance and management practices, including energy, environment, construction, supply chain, and E-government. Notably, it can be summarized that the previous studies have specifically categorized the use of BT in sustainable management into three aspects, namely, transactions, technical support, and supervision.

Specifically, the aspect of the transactions focused on financial transactions during management processes. The P2P network of the energy market is a classical application in transactions aspect (Li et al. 2019 ), which efficiently connects the contracting parties, provides more transparent transacting information, and denies the involvement of intermediaries to improve the performance of energy management (Wang and Su 2020 ). It was confirmed that payment systems and supply chain finance using blockchain technology greatly decreased the possibility of project failure in the construction industry (Salah et al. 2019 ). The carbon trade and tax have attracted more studies to improve the performance of environmental management. However, the other parts also provided similar advantages for the environment, such as the land trade and water trade, which are concentrated on the aspect of demand and supply management.

The aspect of technical support is considered one of the most important parts, which encompasses multiple applications of blockchain technology in sustainable management. The platform and database were identified as the crucial components for supporting data-driven management. A few blockchain-based energy commodity trading platforms with large banks and trading companies (Gallacher and Champion 2019 ). Blockchain technology has changed the long-standing “paper” transaction model and then turned it into a more transparent, more convenient and cheaper “electronic” model for oil and gas companies, and commodity traders (Wang and Su 2020 ). Meanwhile, the new model provided a few advantages for improving the transparency of commodity transactions and reducing the risk of fraud. However, it is notable that the importance of sensitive information for all parties was stored in various servers supported by blockchain to provide accuracy and security database and visualized database for management practice. Therefore, information sharing and updating can be better supported, which facilitates more efficient supply chain management.

The aspect of supervision was regarded as a necessary segment for realizing sustainable management goals, which applies to the project lifecycle and the management process. In addition, blockchain technology helps energy companies automatedly to track the information of renewable energy automatedly. For example, the utility of BT in sustainable energy management is confirmed by a pioneer user in the renewal industry as, “this innovation shows us that it is a crucial catalyst in the process of decarbonising the economy, allowing traceable, secure and rapid transactions.” (Iberdrola 2019 ) Therefore, on the one hand, the use of BT to create an effective supervision way can reduce the illegal dumping and illegal occupying of land, water, and waste fields, which provides a new path for sustainable development. On the other hand, BT ensures untampered data, which can guarantee accurate information, such as place of origin, transferring record, temperature, and humidity of the goods in the supply chain.

Challenges of blockchain technology applying in management

The emerging technologies, like BT, hardly adapted to variable demands without suitable government policy, law, and regulatory environment at the macro-level. Also, the application of those technologies in management process cannot achieve rapid development and promotion, even with BT (Li et al. 2019 ). Among the functional domains of BT, P2P electricity market has expanded slowly (Zhu et al. 2020 ), while smart city seldom attempts to employ BT. Therefore, it is essential to ensure a an appropriately developed environment that allows the use of blockchain to thrive in the long term and facilitate its further use.

The conflict between blockchain and conventional management practices cannot be ignored at the micro-level (Li et al. 2019 ). The current management system may be contrary to the conditions required by BT. For example, some conventional practices may be matched with the new system, resulting in the failure of BT adoption in practice. Therefore, the conflict between existing management systems and blockchain use must be addressed when promoting such an integration. It is also quite challenging to select an appropriate theory or design new coordinate mechanism for its development.

From a technical perspective, there are several potential drawbacks to blockchain technology, including suffering from the over-51% attack (Mistry et al. 2020 ), high development cost (Kumari et al. 2020 ), lack of reliable data standards, and low fault tolerance of the system (Salah et al. 2019 ). However, the use and development of BT in the domain of sustainable management are problematic due to the lack of experienced personnel to support BT use. Therefore, it remains a challenge to ensure the availability of BT use standards and concordant mechanisms for sustainable management.

General steps for applying BT in sustainable management

Generally, as identifying the need and necessity of BT use in a specific field is the first step, especially in the management process as illustrated in Fig.  6 . Such an effort can help avoid the interruption of the original management model and process caused by the abrupt application of blockchain. Meanwhile, it can also contribute to improving the management efficiency and realizing the technical effectiveness of blockchain in management practice. Notably, the application of BT in practice mainly involves finance and information and mainly depends on the characteristics of the sector in which BT is applied. In addition, the identification of the internal and external properties was considered a major application of blockchain technology in management. The internality and externality are interpreted as the requirements of the platform for different elements, which can help to select the types of blockchain adoption, smart contract, and consensus system. Therefore, the aforementioned step ranked second. The third step relies on the above step to establish a financial platform and realize standardized information processing, including verification, comparison, and preconditioning. It has four main features, which are high transfer speed, good reliability, satisfactory security, and high efficiency. The fourth step is the beginning of the managerial application, which is based on the framework of BT. At present, it is mainly used to trace the goods information in the supply chain and construction project management, identify geographic information and supervise relevant illegal behavior in environment management, support energy trading platform in energy management, enable policy and regulation communication, and penalty information recorded in E-government. Therefore, there are four steps for blockchain technology to function in sustainable management, which provides a new management approach for practitioners.

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The step of applying BT in sustainable management

The opportunity for future research

Blockchain technology has been practiced to facilitate sustainable management. However, there are still a number of problems remaining to be solved or revealed. The following discourse refers to the key sustainable management sectors to point out the potentials of BT use that future research can explore.

In the supply chain sector, the use of disruptive technologies, including blockchain, big data platforms, and even decision systems, continuously transforms supply chain management (Pournader et al. 2020 ). Yet, some features are found in relevant research. On the one hand, dramatically increasing academic literature focus on a single aspect rather than the framework that accommodates the implementation and integration of those technologies. On the other hand, the trust issues in sharing information and signing contracts should be managed. For example, to deal with information dissymmetry on the trade and financial information transmission between buyer and seller (Wang et al. 2021 ), to let all the relevant supply chain partners have access to the same sets of accurate data or ensure an instantaneous signed contract (Saberi et al. 2019 ). They will have some theoretical implications to contribute, so researchers should investigate the integration of BT and hardware in the supply chain. It is also fairly important to explore how the relationship between various supply chain partners may change and what influences contracting and coordination mechanisms, is when trusted information sharing and instantaneous trade systems based on blockchain technology are well adopted in the supply chain.

In the construction sector, the construction project involves a complex network of stakeholders, who have multiple different needs and goals. For example, owners pay more attention to the transparency of information sharing, while contractors tend to have opportunistic behavior (Lee et al. 2020 ; Lin et al. 2019 ). In the future, understanding the influencing mechanism and the key driving factors for applying blockchain in the construction industry can significantly improve the performance and success of projects. Notably, the platform to share information cannot be ignored and will become the impetus to break through the traditional limitations and address managerial issues, which is similar to applying them to the supply chain sector. The primary purposes of such an adoption are to improve data security, reduce privacy issues, and remove the probability of data missing during the process of transferring data to external systems.

In the other sectors, including E-government, environment, and energy sectors, researchers can pay more attention to the application of BT in the management process. The regulation of the environment and energy is an important management task. Therefore, based on the abovementioned information platform, management, and regulation, the framework should be improved and practiced with blockchain technology. The trade aspect of E-government was ignored in the research field, which mainly included government procurement and payment. The features of blockchain technology can effectively prevent illegal behaviors such as tax evasion, bribery, and stakeholder conflicts.

Healthcare plays an essential role in national public infrastructures, which supports the fundamental guarantee of national production and effectively curbs the spread of the epidemic. BT has become a fundamental technology in the digital revolution of the healthcare sector. Likely in the future, such applications in the field of medicine could include electronic health records (Skiba 2017 ), health insurance (Engelhardt 2017 ), biomedical and drug research (Brennan and Lunn 2016 ), drug procurement and supply, and medical education (Radanovic and Likic 2018 ). In particular, shared healthcare resources and information in the public medical policy field can flow into different organizations and institutions in a reliable way with the aid of a BT-enhanced information system. Such a function has significant importance. For example, in the current COVID-19 pandemic or influenza pandemic, it is crucial to share some of the patients’ information, which has tamper-proof properties, with many organizations, and the transmission time cannot be lost (Radanovic and Likic 2018 ). Blockchain had the potential to keep valuable time from unnecessary lost, while at the same time assisting in controlling the epidemic. Endowment has become a severe issue for society with the global aging trend. On the one hand, it proposes a challenge for the health care system and economic development. It requires not only a perfect medical aid system and accurate information records, but also a strong economy to support it. On the other hand, it provides an opportunity for technological development and increasing employment in the related fields.

Conclusions and future work

This study analyses the current research on BT-based sustainable management, which reviews 108 papers from the databases of Web of Science Core Collection, Springer, and Scopus during the period of 2017–2021. The empirical results support that blockchain as a promising technology indeed promotes the revolution of the sectors, including construction, energy, environment, supply chain, and E-government. The long-term value of BT will gradually be revealed, especially in sustainable management during the government and industrial revolution. Therefore, a few conclusions are presented as follows.

From the frequency of publications in BT-based sustainable management research, after 2017, BT attracted wide attention from more scholars around the world. With the increasing trend of innovations in sustainable management with BT, such diffusion is confirmed in the reviewed literature. The development and reformation of various industries have been greatly promoted, which makes blockchain have a broad development prospect. The basic research of the blockchain in sustainable management is in its infancy, so this paper concludes that research in this field will continue to flourish in the coming years.

Regarding the country-wise ranking of blockchain studies in sustainable management, China is the country with the most relevant articles published in the world. It should be noted that India ranks third after the US regarding the number of paper published in this field, and the fourth is the UK. Such a result means that developing countries are paying more effort to develop scientific and technical innovation research and are gradually beginning to be a pioneer of BT use research. Therefore, revealing that emerging counties have devoted substantial research and development expenses and policies to support the basic research, their gap with developed countries is gradually narrowed.

The results of the keyword cluster analysis show that the existing studies pay more attention to the supply chain and construction industry, especially, the food supply chain and smart city, and try to solve the problems of information tampering and information traceability encountered in these sectors. Notwithstanding, scholars strive to understand and utilize the characteristics of BT, such as trustworthiness, privacy, and transparency, and combine the use of BT with IoT, BIM, and the Internet, to overcome the problems and breakthrough bottlenecks in relevant management practice. Thus, the use of BT can enhance the security in information exchange, reduce the possibility of information fraud, and finally, help achieve the goal of intelligent management.

In summary, the multiple characteristics of BT provided a feasible solution for sustainable management. More importantly, although the developed countries have put forward the basic theory of this technology, developing countries are playing a more critical role in the global blockchain technology research system. In particular, the total number of articles published by China and India has exceeded that of the USA and the UK, which could originate from the developing economies’ determination of economic and industrial reformation that may not be paid equal attention to by developed countries.

However, as review-based research, this study has certain limitations. Firstly, although a broad list of keywords was used in leading research databases, which may overlook a few important works owing to the dispersion in the function of the employed keywords in this field. Secondly, this study did not consider “gray literature,” i.e., the general non-academic literature, including technical reports, newspapers, blogs, and webpages. Future research can be directed to improving BT implementation framework and revealing the evolution of the BT research in the field of sustainable management.

Table ​ Table2Table 2

Author contribution

Wenbo Du: conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software, writing—original draft; Xiaozhi Ma: investigation, review, and editing; Hongping Yuan: methodology, review, and editing; Yue Zhu: data curation, validation, review, and editing.

This study was financially supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (grant number: 20BGL187).

Data availability

Declarations.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Publisher's note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Contributor Information

Wenbo Du, Email: nc.ude.uhzg.e@udbw .

Xiaozhi Ma, Email: [email protected] .

Hongping Yuan, Email: moc.liamg@5002nauyph .

Yue Zhu, Email: moc.621@1966euyuhz .

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Blockchain technology-based sustainable management research: the status quo and a general framework for future application

  • Review Article
  • Published: 06 July 2022
  • Volume 29 , pages 58648–58663, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

  • Wenbo Du 1 ,
  • Xiaozhi Ma 1 ,
  • Hongping Yuan 1 &
  • Yue Zhu 2  

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The problems of data leakage and unreliable information transfer in the management process make sustainability management an inevitable need for future development. Globally, there is increasing attention paid to blockchain technology and particularly its application in addressing sustainable management issues, both from academia and industry. Aiming to deepen the understanding of how blockchain technology could deal with sustainable management issues across different disciplines, this paper investigates the latest research on the application of blockchain technology in sustainable management published from 2017 to 2021. It is found that there is a drastic surge of publications in the recent 2 years. The analysis focuses on authors’ origins, the collaboration network of the keywords, countries, and research topics covered. The application of blockchain technology in five key sectors of sustainable management, encompassing energy management, construction management, supply chain management, environmental management, and e-government management, is selected for further analysis detail. Also, a general framework for applying blockchain technology is proposed for broadening its use and dealing with sustainable management issues. The findings show that the identified 108 publications are distributed in 75 different journals, and scholars from China, the UK, and the USA have been working closely in BT-based sustainable management research. Blockchain technology is just emerging in sustainable management, and there is a great potential for applying blockchain technology to improve sustainable management performance and, more importantly, to provide solutions to quite a few long-lasting problems in these sectors. Opportunities for future research are also presented and discussed.

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Introduction

The blockchain technology (BT) refers to a digitally distributed data structure that records and shares data and information between any two parties (peer-to-peer network) in a verifiable and tamper-proof way that applies globally (Lansiti and Lakhani 2017 ). It enables the evolution from the traditional centralized to the distributed network, which can be achieved securely without the need for a trusted authority (Dutta et al. 2020 ). It earned worldwide fame via bitcoin (Nakamoto 2008 ) and the associated cryptocurrency transactions (Islam et al. 2018 ). However, applying BT is not limited to bitcoin in the finance field. Over the last decade, its application has been promoted by various governments around the global. For example, a report by the UK government states that BT might have the capacity to “reform our financial markets, supply chains, consumer and business-to-business services, and publicly-held registers” (Andoni et al. 2019 ; Walport 2016 ). The US government published the Blockchain Promotion Act and the US Export Finance Agency Act for exploring BT promotion across government agencies and export–import banks (Dewey 2022 ). The Canadian federal government was experimenting with BT throughout different departments, particularly in the Canada Border Services Agency, intending to improve data quality and facilitate the movement of goods (Grant Simon and Matthew 2022 ). Theoretically, BT can be innovatively adopted to address various management issues, including the revolution of information and communication technology, and digital economics (Upadhyay 2020 ). During the period, there has been a rapid development of BT application across critical sectors of sustainable management, including environmental management (Pellegrini et al. 2020 ), supply chain management (Zelbst et al. 2019 ), and healthcare management (Biswas et al. 2020 ).

The past application of BT in different disciplines witnessed its strength in improving management effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, it can effectively resolve the critical challenges for energy trading and the loopholes and bottlenecks of management in distributed energy systems, such as deception, malicious tampering, and subpeption (Cong and He 2019 ; Liu et al. 2020 ; Tasatanattakool and Techapanupreeda 2018 ). With the features of BT, the insufficient Building information modeling (BIM) can also be replenished, so that the transaction costs traditionally associated with construction projects can be reduced or removed, and consensus and information exchange in a meaningful manner can be reached (Li et al. 2019 ; Succar 2009 ). Furthermore, BT provides the probability of strict supervision for illegal dumping and occupation (Bennett et al. 2019 ; Pellegrini et al. 2020 ), product traceability, and food quality (Astill et al. 2019 ; Chen et al. 2021 ), and can resolve the problem of data security and authenticity among governments, citizens, and businesses (Fu and Zhu 2019 ; Ramsey et al. 2020 ).

An extensive review of BT-related literature tells that the current application of BT in addressing sustainable management issues is still at the infant stage. In detail, the concept of sustainable management is becoming known to scholars, which is proposed to achieve sustainable development. It is mainly applied to the green supply chain (An et al. 2021 ; Khan et al. 2021 ), sustainable transport systems (Ullah et al. 2019 , 2021 ), sustainable environment (Pellegrini et al. 2020 ), and medical waste sustainability (Singh et al. 2022 ). Notably, sustainable management relies on information with several features, including high reliability, efficient transfer, and absolute truthfulness, which cannot be achieved by traditional information technology and is considered an impossible challenge. The blockchain as a emerging technology can perfectly adapt to the information needs of sustainable management, which given its significant potential for decentralization (Croman et al. 2016 ; Crosby et al.  2016 ), distrusting (Arvind Narayanan et al. 2016 ), transparency (Bonneau et al. 2015 ; Lin and Liao 2017 ), traceable and unforgeable (Karame et al. 2012 ), anonymity (Arvind Narayanan et al. 2016 ; Christidis and Devetsikiotis 2016 ), and credibility (Karame et al. 2012 ). Therefore, it is necessary to promote more comprehensive and in-depth application of BT to realize sustainable social development. As a commonly applied technology, BT can be better exploited to deal with problems across the key sustainable management sectors, though a framework might help to adapt to the particular context of industries. Prior research efforts have been made to apply BT in various fields (Abou Jaoude and Saade 2019 ; Hasselgren et al. 2020 ; Makhdoom et al. 2020 ; Miglani et al. 2020 ; Paulavicius et al. 2019 ). However, the research status and directions of BT in the field of sustainable managment remains to be clarified. Particularlythere is still a lack of the general framework to apply BT in sustainable management as aforementioned. This paper aims to fill the research gap. On the one hand, this study seeks to understand the current status of research and research trends by systematically and critically reviewing papers on the application of blockchain technology in sustainable management. The outcomes are expected to assist scholars in gaining an in-depth understanding of previous research efforts on this topic and to grasp the directions for future research. On the other hand, establishing the general framework for BT application to help managers and researchers quickly comprehend the steps of blockchain implementation to accelerate the application of BT in sustainable management. The paper attempts to answer the following three research questions (RQs):

RQ1: What are the main research directions on blockchain technology-based (BT-based) sustainable management at present?

RQ2: What are the challenges and opportunities of BT-based sustainable management research?

RQ3: Is there a general framework for applying BT in addressing sustainable management issues?

Research methodology

Review approach.

The principle of systematic literature review (SLR), was defined as “[…] a referential method to organize, synthesize and identify emerging paths and opportunities, as well as understanding the relevant issues, contradictions and limitations, based on previous studies. (Queiroz et al. 2020 ),” was followed to design the research methodology. SLR provides a timely and effective approach for investigating the issues and field concerned.

Planning and conducting the review

The process for identifying and selecting papers is presented in Fig.  1 , which involves four phases, including identification, screening, eligibility check, and content analysis phase. Firstly, research databases, including Web of Science Core Collection, Springer, and Scopus, are used as the primary sources for searching the literature, which allows target papers to be found by the search terms and exported with their meta-information (Ante et al. 2021 ; Zupic and Cater 2015 ). Meanwhile, the back-reference list checking which selected papers from the reference in the target paper is implemented to identify additional relevant articles.

figure 1

Paper selection process

Secondly, to cover the holistic topics and keywords for BT-based sustainable management research, we use the following the search code: TS = (blockchain OR “block chain” OR cryptocurrency* OR “distributed ledger”) AND TS = (energy OR construct* OR “supply chain” OR “carbon emission” OR land OR water OR waste) AND TS = (management OR manage*). The asterisk (*) represents any group of characters in the research terms, such as “construct*” covers both “constructor” and “construction.” The specific time frame is determined as a 5-year period (i.e., from 2017 to 2021), because the bitcoin whitepaper was published in 2008, and the first literature relevant to sustainable management was published in 2017.

Similar to some literature review papers (Syn and Ramaprasad 2019 ; Wang and Su 2020 ), scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals are selected, while all other kinds of publications like proceedings, books, and technical reports are excluded for analysis. The found papers merely focusing on computer science are also excluded and the identification of the papers limit to the scope of the five key sustainable management sectors and the research categories of management business and operation research and management science. Furthermore, the language is limited to English.

bibliometric analysis

Co-citation analysis is conducted, the purpose of which is to measure the relationship between studies. It would be helpful to demonstrate the frequency with which earlier papers were cited by the later ones (Small 2010 ). This not only implies a timely relationship but also composes a network of papers. By doing so, the central study in the cluster of publications can be identified.

A brief analysis of the identified studies

Year wise publication details.

Figure  2 shows the publication frequency of BT-based sustainable management-related papers between 2017 and 2021. Overall, there are 108 papers identified for analysis from 75 different journals. Notably, nineteen journals (25.33%) published two or more papers, while only three journals (4%) published four or more. A closer examination tells that 27 review papers (25.00%) and 81 research papers (75.00%). The detailed journal-wise distribution of the identified papers is provided in Appendix Table 2 .

figure 2

The publication frequency of papers on BT-base sustainable management (2017–2021)

Country collaboration network

BT-based sustainable management researches have been contributed by scholars from different countries. Country collaboration analysis is conducted so that the cooperation intensity and relationship between those countries can be better interpreted (see Fig.  3 ). In the figure, the size of the circle represents the frequency of published papers in any specific country, and the ties show the strength of cooperation between the countries connected. Notably, the scale of the circle is consistent with the number of papers in the countries. For instance, the corresponding nodes of China, the UK, and the USA are much larger than in other countries, indicating that scholars from the three countries have been working closely in BT-based sustainable management research. To facilitate a comprehensive understanding, the cooperation network among significant countries is provided in Table 1 .

figure 3

Co-occurrence frequency of keywords

A co-occurrence analysis was conducted with the indexed keywords in identified papers to understand the core intellectual topic addressed by the extant research with the VOSviewer software (He et al. 2021 ). Blockchain and management emerged as significant keywords in the overall network in Fig.  4 , which can be explained by the size of the node and the lines between the keywords. From the perspective of clustering, all keywords are clustered into six groups with different colors, which occurred in other years. The blockchain, as one of the core keywords, connected various keywords in a different years, which were dyed different colors, including BIM, construction industry, power, energy, sustainable city, and E-governance. The prominent combinations indicate the rising importance of specific characteristics of blockchain technology which has been useful in various fields of sustainable management. Notably, the other emerging technology, including the internet of things (IoT), big data (BD), and peer-to-peer (P2P), has developed and applied alongside BT. Therefore, it is necessary that notice the typical application of BT in various fields and its combined application with other technologies.

figure 4

BT application in key sectors of sustainable management

After a careful review of the identified papers from the research objective, five management sectors, including energy management, construction management, supply chain management, environment management, and E-government management, are determined for further analysis. The sample distribution in these management sectors is described in Fig.  5 .

figure 5

The sample distribution in five management sectors

  • Construction management

At present, the research on BT in the domain of construction management stays at a theoretical level (Li et al. 2020 ). However, the construction management processes, including planning, design, construction, and maintenance, provide good conditions and opportunities for applying BT (Anjum et al. 2017 ). Such a viewpoint is also supported by a few facts, including (1) the complex and fragmented supply chains of the projects in the construction industry (Hunhevicz and Hall 2020 ); (2) the mutual trust problems existing in construction projects that originate from the interdependent action of numerous stakeholders (Pishdad-Bozorgi and Beliveau 2016 ; Zolin et al. 2004 ); and (3) the high volume of transactions among various entities and stakeholders (Kim et al. 2020 ). Therefore, BT can be applied to improving construction project performance under several scenarios, such as multidisciplinary data updates and validation, information interface of the project, time-limited the transaction, and interaction in transaction (Anjum et al. 2017 ; Liu et al. 2019 ).

In the construction project lifecycle, blockchain can help tackle sustainable management issues related to data security and trusts, such as bidding and tendering, archiving documents, controlling model access, and updating transaction settlements during the planning and design stages (Li et al. 2019 ). In the phases of the construction and maintenance, the payment system of construction contract can be tricky. Yet, with the aid of blockchain, automatic payment can be achieved to improve project finance in the construction industry (Cardeira 2015 ; Wang et al. 2017 ). Furthermore, smart contracts based on the blockchain can also benefit facility management and maintenance (IEBC 2018 ), material procurement (Geipel 2017 ), and supply chain management (Kim and Laskowski 2018 ). Overall, using blockchain helps solve sustainable management issues regarding data and information management, contract, and finance management in the construction industry, which bears the potential to have a significant impact on construction management.

Supply chain management

The data storage and management processes of the traditional supply chain are centralized and depend on third-party organizations (Howson 2020 ), which makes it challenging to meet the demands of consumers for traceable data and transparent commodity information. Yet, the unique features, including traceability, transparency, and immutability of blockchain, offer opportunities to improve supply chain management (Shahid et al. 2020 ). Blockchain technology was first applied in agriculture to establish a system for tracing agricultural products (Tian 2016 ). With the rapid development of research in different disciplines, current research of supply chain management with BT includes the multiple uses of BT to improve food supply chain management (Chen et al. 2021 ; Howson 2020 ; Shahid et al. 2020 ; Yadav et al. 2020 ), the adopt of BT to achieve sustainable supply chain management (Esmaeilian et al. 2020 ; Saberi et al. 2019 ), enhancing international supply chains by BT application (Y. L. Chang et al. 2020a , b ; Choi et al. 2019 ), the management of internal, and external supply chain with BT (Di Vaio and Varriale 2020 ; Kim and Shin 2019 ).

Specifically, food supply chain management includes not only safety issues, but also origin fraud and quality defects (Aung and Chang 2014 ). The fisheries supply chain, as one of the major food supply chains, faces more common difficulties than the others (Howson 2020 ), including illegal and unregulated production (Young 2016 ); laboring under coercion (Vandergeest and Marschke 2020 ); material waste (Wilcox et al. 2016 ); and food provenance missing. A sustainable supply chain has attracted the attention of academics and government, as an essential part of circular economy practices. With the use of blockchain technology, data and information of a supply chain can be disclosed to different stakeholders to improve its sustainability. Due to the security and authenticity of information realized by BT, supply chain risks can be minimized to improve business performance and reliability (Ivanov et al. 2018 ). Meanwhile, adopting BT in supply chain management can eliminate human errors and reduce transaction times (Saberi et al. 2019 ) and help achieve trust to benefit the consumers (Ward 2022 ). In addition, sustainable supply chain management with BT can not only mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption, but also downsize the carbon footprint and tax (Kshetri 2018 ). Notably, the global supply chain has entered the digital era, and its management has become more challenging due to the associated uncertainties in the geopolitical, technological, and economic spheres (V. Chang et al. 2020a , b ). Nevertheless, the adoption of blockchain technology in the global supply chain is still in its infancy. Several scholars explored the applications of BT in the global supply chain, including exploiting global supply chain information and facilitating the profit distribution across the global supply chain (Choi 2020 ; Deloitte. 2017 ; Hald and Kinra 2019 ). Therefore, the adoption of blockchain can be leveraged to tackle these issues and devote itself to meeting sustainable management goals of different supply chains.

Environmental management

The critical elements of environmental management include the atmosphere, land, water, and waste, which provide the foundation for the people’s living environment. Managing these factors has become increasingly conplex with a surge in urbanization rate and economics in many countries. In particular, developing countries face more issues than developed countries in different aspects, such as wasteful land use, illegal land possession, lack of precise irrigation, insufficient water security supervision, and illegal waste dumping.

A few studies investigate the use of BT to tackle existing issues in the convention of environmental management. Bennett et al. ( 2019 ) offer a new operation mode and service for traditional land management with blockchain technology (Bennett et al. 2019 ), to improve the transparency of land records and transfers. Meanwhile, sustainable development goals are achieved through clear ownership and valuation to reduce fraudulent transactions with BT (Hughes et al. 2019 ; Pandey and Litoriya 2021 ; Thakur et al. 2020 ; Veeramani and Jaganathan 2020 ). Even though agriculture irrigation and city water supply play an essential role in many countries, it is hard to perform comprehensive supervision and sophisticated management without advanced technology. Thus, some scholars explored the application of blockchain technology in this direction to achieve accurate, automatic, and real-time water billing and water quality monitoring to ensure the achievement of a number of relevant management (Ramsey et al. 2020 ), including guaranteed water security and precise irrigation management (Munir et al. 2019 ), and achieve water conservation goals (Ramsey et al. 2020 ). Also, waste management is a critical activity in the urban environment, which has the potential to contribute more to the development of a circular economy with technical support. The practice of waste management can be combined with BT and adherent platforms to realize digital waste management (Pellegrini et al. 2020 ). It can prevent not only illegal dumping but also reduce the cost and carbon emission of the recovery, which can be regarded as drivers for improving the environment and society (Berglund et al. 2020 ).

  • Energy management

The blockchain research of the energy sector covered various areas, including the power grid (Calvillo et al. 2016 ; Di Silvestre et al. 2019 ), P2P network (Li 2016 ; Zhou et al. 2020 ), internet of energy (Miglani et al. 2020 ; Rifkin 2011 ), and energy transaction (Ahl et al. 2020 ). Among these areas, energy transaction focuses more on the management practice compared with the other aspects. It may be due to the tendency of each stakeholder to pursue their maximum interests, the traditional energy transaction management framework faces significant challenges and risks under the current conditions of energy management, such as security risks of spoofing, malicious tampering, and subterfuge (Liu et al. 2020 ; Noor et al. 2018 ; Van Cutsem et al. 2020 ). Therefore, researchers utilize BT to improve traditional energy management theories and tools.

The efficient demand-side forecasting and secure data transmission were perceived as crucial facilitators to an energy transition, which forms a context to impel the reformation of the traditional energy management transition toward a new paradigm of a distributed system for energy management. Those new technologies, e.g., BT, facilitate the implementation of a distributed energy systems that can break through the bottlenecks of traditional energy management (Tasatanattakool and Techapanupreeda 2018 ). Several advantages have been obtained with the application of BT in the energy field, including achieving the more efficient performance of energy transmission (Jin et al. 2017 ; Macrinici et al. 2018 ; Pop et al. 2018 ; Wang and Su 2020 ), realizing simplified multi-layer trading systems (Kareem et al. 2020 ), capturing sustainable consumption (Ben Ruben et al. 2017 ), and developing decentralized energy trading and supply systems (Brilliantova and Thurner 2018 ; Casado-Vara et al. 2019 ; Wang et al. 2019 ; Zhang and Hao 2017 ).

E-government management

Electronic government (E-government) commonly involves three domains, namely, government to citizen (G2C), government to government (G2G), and government to business (G2B). Information transmission is the basis of E-government, which provides a platform for different business organizations, citizens, authorities, and government agencies, to circulate data among themselves and improve performance effectively (Kumar and Bhalaji 2021 ). Due to the reason that it prone to cyber-attacks by culprits who purpose to steal vital information, an increasing number of scholars introduced BT to ensure data and information security (Fu and Zhu 2019 ). It is worth noting that the alliance chain, a type of blockchain, caught wide attention in E-government for its several characteristics and advantages, which overcome the disadvantage of the traditional system to promote the striding of government management to “smart government” (Fu and Zhu 2019 ; Kumar and Bhalaji 2021 ).

Discussions

The major function of bt in sustainable management.

Various sectors have utilized the BT to improve their performance and management practices, including energy, environment, construction, supply chain, and E-government. Notably, it can be summarized that the previous studies have specifically categorized the use of BT in sustainable management into three aspects, namely, transactions, technical support, and supervision.

Specifically, the aspect of the transactions focused on financial transactions during management processes. The P2P network of the energy market is a classical application in transactions aspect (Li et al. 2019 ), which efficiently connects the contracting parties, provides more transparent transacting information, and denies the involvement of intermediaries to improve the performance of energy management (Wang and Su 2020 ). It was confirmed that payment systems and supply chain finance using blockchain technology greatly decreased the possibility of project failure in the construction industry (Salah et al. 2019 ). The carbon trade and tax have attracted more studies to improve the performance of environmental management. However, the other parts also provided similar advantages for the environment, such as the land trade and water trade, which are concentrated on the aspect of demand and supply management.

The aspect of technical support is considered one of the most important parts, which encompasses multiple applications of blockchain technology in sustainable management. The platform and database were identified as the crucial components for supporting data-driven management. A few blockchain-based energy commodity trading platforms with large banks and trading companies (Gallacher and Champion 2019 ). Blockchain technology has changed the long-standing “paper” transaction model and then turned it into a more transparent, more convenient and cheaper “electronic” model for oil and gas companies, and commodity traders (Wang and Su 2020 ). Meanwhile, the new model provided a few advantages for improving the transparency of commodity transactions and reducing the risk of fraud. However, it is notable that the importance of sensitive information for all parties was stored in various servers supported by blockchain to provide accuracy and security database and visualized database for management practice. Therefore, information sharing and updating can be better supported, which facilitates more efficient supply chain management.

The aspect of supervision was regarded as a necessary segment for realizing sustainable management goals, which applies to the project lifecycle and the management process. In addition, blockchain technology helps energy companies automatedly to track the information of renewable energy automatedly. For example, the utility of BT in sustainable energy management is confirmed by a pioneer user in the renewal industry as, “this innovation shows us that it is a crucial catalyst in the process of decarbonising the economy, allowing traceable, secure and rapid transactions.” (Iberdrola 2019 ) Therefore, on the one hand, the use of BT to create an effective supervision way can reduce the illegal dumping and illegal occupying of land, water, and waste fields, which provides a new path for sustainable development. On the other hand, BT ensures untampered data, which can guarantee accurate information, such as place of origin, transferring record, temperature, and humidity of the goods in the supply chain.

Challenges of blockchain technology applying in management

The emerging technologies, like BT, hardly adapted to variable demands without suitable government policy, law, and regulatory environment at the macro-level. Also, the application of those technologies in management process cannot achieve rapid development and promotion, even with BT (Li et al. 2019 ). Among the functional domains of BT, P2P electricity market has expanded slowly (Zhu et al. 2020 ), while smart city seldom attempts to employ BT. Therefore, it is essential to ensure a an appropriately developed environment that allows the use of blockchain to thrive in the long term and facilitate its further use.

The conflict between blockchain and conventional management practices cannot be ignored at the micro-level (Li et al. 2019 ). The current management system may be contrary to the conditions required by BT. For example, some conventional practices may be matched with the new system, resulting in the failure of BT adoption in practice. Therefore, the conflict between existing management systems and blockchain use must be addressed when promoting such an integration. It is also quite challenging to select an appropriate theory or design new coordinate mechanism for its development.

From a technical perspective, there are several potential drawbacks to blockchain technology, including suffering from the over-51% attack (Mistry et al. 2020 ), high development cost (Kumari et al. 2020 ), lack of reliable data standards, and low fault tolerance of the system (Salah et al. 2019 ). However, the use and development of BT in the domain of sustainable management are problematic due to the lack of experienced personnel to support BT use. Therefore, it remains a challenge to ensure the availability of BT use standards and concordant mechanisms for sustainable management.

General steps for applying BT in sustainable management

Generally, as identifying the need and necessity of BT use in a specific field is the first step, especially in the management process as illustrated in Fig.  6 . Such an effort can help avoid the interruption of the original management model and process caused by the abrupt application of blockchain. Meanwhile, it can also contribute to improving the management efficiency and realizing the technical effectiveness of blockchain in management practice. Notably, the application of BT in practice mainly involves finance and information and mainly depends on the characteristics of the sector in which BT is applied. In addition, the identification of the internal and external properties was considered a major application of blockchain technology in management. The internality and externality are interpreted as the requirements of the platform for different elements, which can help to select the types of blockchain adoption, smart contract, and consensus system. Therefore, the aforementioned step ranked second. The third step relies on the above step to establish a financial platform and realize standardized information processing, including verification, comparison, and preconditioning. It has four main features, which are high transfer speed, good reliability, satisfactory security, and high efficiency. The fourth step is the beginning of the managerial application, which is based on the framework of BT. At present, it is mainly used to trace the goods information in the supply chain and construction project management, identify geographic information and supervise relevant illegal behavior in environment management, support energy trading platform in energy management, enable policy and regulation communication, and penalty information recorded in E-government. Therefore, there are four steps for blockchain technology to function in sustainable management, which provides a new management approach for practitioners.

figure 6

The step of applying BT in sustainable management

The opportunity for future research

Blockchain technology has been practiced to facilitate sustainable management. However, there are still a number of problems remaining to be solved or revealed. The following discourse refers to the key sustainable management sectors to point out the potentials of BT use that future research can explore.

In the supply chain sector, the use of disruptive technologies, including blockchain, big data platforms, and even decision systems, continuously transforms supply chain management (Pournader et al. 2020 ). Yet, some features are found in relevant research. On the one hand, dramatically increasing academic literature focus on a single aspect rather than the framework that accommodates the implementation and integration of those technologies. On the other hand, the trust issues in sharing information and signing contracts should be managed. For example, to deal with information dissymmetry on the trade and financial information transmission between buyer and seller (Wang et al. 2021 ), to let all the relevant supply chain partners have access to the same sets of accurate data or ensure an instantaneous signed contract (Saberi et al. 2019 ). They will have some theoretical implications to contribute, so researchers should investigate the integration of BT and hardware in the supply chain. It is also fairly important to explore how the relationship between various supply chain partners may change and what influences contracting and coordination mechanisms, is when trusted information sharing and instantaneous trade systems based on blockchain technology are well adopted in the supply chain.

In the construction sector, the construction project involves a complex network of stakeholders, who have multiple different needs and goals. For example, owners pay more attention to the transparency of information sharing, while contractors tend to have opportunistic behavior (Lee et al. 2020 ; Lin et al. 2019 ). In the future, understanding the influencing mechanism and the key driving factors for applying blockchain in the construction industry can significantly improve the performance and success of projects. Notably, the platform to share information cannot be ignored and will become the impetus to break through the traditional limitations and address managerial issues, which is similar to applying them to the supply chain sector. The primary purposes of such an adoption are to improve data security, reduce privacy issues, and remove the probability of data missing during the process of transferring data to external systems.

In the other sectors, including E-government, environment, and energy sectors, researchers can pay more attention to the application of BT in the management process. The regulation of the environment and energy is an important management task. Therefore, based on the abovementioned information platform, management, and regulation, the framework should be improved and practiced with blockchain technology. The trade aspect of E-government was ignored in the research field, which mainly included government procurement and payment. The features of blockchain technology can effectively prevent illegal behaviors such as tax evasion, bribery, and stakeholder conflicts.

Healthcare plays an essential role in national public infrastructures, which supports the fundamental guarantee of national production and effectively curbs the spread of the epidemic. BT has become a fundamental technology in the digital revolution of the healthcare sector. Likely in the future, such applications in the field of medicine could include electronic health records (Skiba 2017 ), health insurance (Engelhardt 2017 ), biomedical and drug research (Brennan and Lunn 2016 ), drug procurement and supply, and medical education (Radanovic and Likic 2018 ). In particular, shared healthcare resources and information in the public medical policy field can flow into different organizations and institutions in a reliable way with the aid of a BT-enhanced information system. Such a function has significant importance. For example, in the current COVID-19 pandemic or influenza pandemic, it is crucial to share some of the patients’ information, which has tamper-proof properties, with many organizations, and the transmission time cannot be lost (Radanovic and Likic 2018 ). Blockchain had the potential to keep valuable time from unnecessary lost, while at the same time assisting in controlling the epidemic. Endowment has become a severe issue for society with the global aging trend. On the one hand, it proposes a challenge for the health care system and economic development. It requires not only a perfect medical aid system and accurate information records, but also a strong economy to support it. On the other hand, it provides an opportunity for technological development and increasing employment in the related fields.

Conclusions and future work

This study analyses the current research on BT-based sustainable management, which reviews 108 papers from the databases of Web of Science Core Collection, Springer, and Scopus during the period of 2017–2021. The empirical results support that blockchain as a promising technology indeed promotes the revolution of the sectors, including construction, energy, environment, supply chain, and E-government. The long-term value of BT will gradually be revealed, especially in sustainable management during the government and industrial revolution. Therefore, a few conclusions are presented as follows.

From the frequency of publications in BT-based sustainable management research, after 2017, BT attracted wide attention from more scholars around the world. With the increasing trend of innovations in sustainable management with BT, such diffusion is confirmed in the reviewed literature. The development and reformation of various industries have been greatly promoted, which makes blockchain have a broad development prospect. The basic research of the blockchain in sustainable management is in its infancy, so this paper concludes that research in this field will continue to flourish in the coming years.

Regarding the country-wise ranking of blockchain studies in sustainable management, China is the country with the most relevant articles published in the world. It should be noted that India ranks third after the US regarding the number of paper published in this field, and the fourth is the UK. Such a result means that developing countries are paying more effort to develop scientific and technical innovation research and are gradually beginning to be a pioneer of BT use research. Therefore, revealing that emerging counties have devoted substantial research and development expenses and policies to support the basic research, their gap with developed countries is gradually narrowed.

The results of the keyword cluster analysis show that the existing studies pay more attention to the supply chain and construction industry, especially, the food supply chain and smart city, and try to solve the problems of information tampering and information traceability encountered in these sectors. Notwithstanding, scholars strive to understand and utilize the characteristics of BT, such as trustworthiness, privacy, and transparency, and combine the use of BT with IoT, BIM, and the Internet, to overcome the problems and breakthrough bottlenecks in relevant management practice. Thus, the use of BT can enhance the security in information exchange, reduce the possibility of information fraud, and finally, help achieve the goal of intelligent management.

In summary, the multiple characteristics of BT provided a feasible solution for sustainable management. More importantly, although the developed countries have put forward the basic theory of this technology, developing countries are playing a more critical role in the global blockchain technology research system. In particular, the total number of articles published by China and India has exceeded that of the USA and the UK, which could originate from the developing economies’ determination of economic and industrial reformation that may not be paid equal attention to by developed countries.

However, as review-based research, this study has certain limitations. Firstly, although a broad list of keywords was used in leading research databases, which may overlook a few important works owing to the dispersion in the function of the employed keywords in this field. Secondly, this study did not consider “gray literature,” i.e., the general non-academic literature, including technical reports, newspapers, blogs, and webpages. Future research can be directed to improving BT implementation framework and revealing the evolution of the BT research in the field of sustainable management.

Data availability

Not applicable.

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This study was financially supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (grant number: 20BGL187).

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Du, W., Ma, X., Yuan, H. et al. Blockchain technology-based sustainable management research: the status quo and a general framework for future application. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29 , 58648–58663 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-21761-2

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