Blockchain and digital finance
Wei Xu, Daning Hu, Karl Reiner Lang, Jianjun Zhao · Financial Innovation · 2022
Blockchain technology and its applications in various business domains have attracted great attention from researchers and practitioners in recent years.Finance, which is arguably the most promising and well-known application domain, has been significantly transformed into digital finance by various novel and open technological and business innovations rooted in blockchain technology, such as decentralized finance and cryptocurrency.Digital finance innovations like digital payments, crowdfunding, supply chain finance, and robo-advising have made significant progress.The main goal of this special issue is to deepen and broaden our understanding of the impacts, values, and challenges brought by blockchain technology and digital finance.Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger introduced for cryptocurrency in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto.This technology is poised to become one of the most exciting new inventions after the Internet as it resolves the trust issue efficiently via network computing (Zhao et al. 2016).The article in the Economist Magazine on October 31, 2015 suggested blockchain as the trust machine that would shape how businesses are operated and how transactions are executed.In Finance, it not only changes the way how financial information can be stored and processed securely and efficiently, but can also transform the principles and processes embedded in traditional centralized financial institutions.The articles included in this special issue show how blockchain technology can be applied in novel ways for supporting the transformation of business processes and operations in digital Finance.A large number of submissions were received in response to the call for papers on the theme of blockchain and digital finance.After an extensive review process, 15 of them were included in this 36th volume of Financial Innovation (FIN), Volume 8, No. 6 (2022).Next, we summarize the key outcomes of these articles and then identify an agenda for future research that has emanated from them. A summary of the special issue papersSince cryptocurrency is the earliest and most established application of blockchain technology in digital finance area, most papers in this special issue are related to this topic.These papers can mainly be categorized into four sub themes.The first one is mainly regarding to the price prediction of cryptocurrency and crypto-related assets.Gurrib et al. (2022)find that Fibonacci retracement, a popular technical analysis indicator, captures energy stock prices better than energy cryptocurrencies.Critien et al. (2022) build