Business Commons^™

Riding The Blockchain Mania: Public Firms’ Speculative 8-K Disclosures, Pengkai Lin

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper provides evidence on public firms' initial 8-K disclosures that mention Blockchain and investors' response to these disclosures. We categorize the description of Blockchain activities in firms' 8-Ks as Speculative (e.g., a vague future plan that involves Blockchain) or Existing (e.g., a description of Blockchain product). We document a sharp increase in the number of initial 8-K disclosures of Blockchain, particularly by Speculative firms, coinciding with the rise of Bitcoin prices and excitement in Blockchain technology in the last quarter of 2017. Investors react positively to the Blockchain 8-Ks issued by Speculative firms in the initial seven-day event window …

Quantum Consensus, Jorden Seet, Paul Griffin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel consensus mechanism utilizing the quantum properties of qubits. This move from classical computing to quantum computing is shown to theoretically enhance the scalability and speed of distributed consensus as well as improve security and be a potential solution for the problem of blockchain interoperability. Using this method may circumvent the common problem known as the Blockchain Trilemma, enhancing scalability and speed without sacrificing de-centralization or byzantine fault tolerance. Consensus speed and scalability is shown by removing the need for multicast responses and exploiting quantum properties to ensure that only a single multicast is …

Benefits Of Blockchain Initiatives For Value-Based Care: Proposed Framework, Rongen Zhang, Amrita George, Jongwoo Kim, Veneetia Johnson, Balasubramaniam Ramesh

Management Faculty Research and Publications

Background

The potential of blockchain technology to achieve strategic goals, such as value-based care, is increasingly being recognized by both researchers and practitioners. However, current research and practices lack comprehensive approaches for evaluating the benefits of blockchain applications.

Objective

The goal of this study was to develop a framework for holistically assessing the performance of blockchain initiatives in providing value-based care by extending the existing balanced scorecard (BSC) evaluation framework.

Methods

Based on a review of the literature on value-based health care, blockchain technology, and methods for evaluating initiatives in disruptive technologies, we propose an extended BSC method for holistically …

The Fintech Revolution, Robert J. Kauffman

MITB Thought Leadership Series

The traditional dominance of established big-hitters in financial services is at an end. The market for many types of financial transaction is being disrupted by small businesses, start-ups and entrepreneurs. They are quicker off the mark in both spotting gaps in the market and developing state-of-the-art systems to respond to customer needs.

Ico As Mainstream Method Of Capital Raising, Eduard Yelagin

Undergraduate Research

We develop a theory of financing entrepreneurial ventures by Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). We show how distributed ledger technology (Blockchain) allows ventures to significantly decrease the price of issuance of new types of securities relative to a traditional venture capital (VC) approach. In addition, we discuss several types of new securities, called tokens. We explore the source of their value and benefits (and negative qualities) for entrepreneurial ventures and investors. We find that, in general, different types of tokens can provide unique benefits and additional information about a tokens’ issuer market sentiment. The following information would become available with the …

Adaptive Workflow Design Based On Blockchain, Daniel Narh Treku, Jun Sun

Information Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Increasingly, organizational processes have become more complex. There is a need for the design of workflows to focus on how organizations adapt to emergent processes while balancing the need for decentralization and centralization goal. The advancement in new technologies especially blockchain provides organizations with the opportunity to achieve the goal. Using blockchain technology (i.e. smart contract and blocks of specified consensus for deferred action), we leverage the theory of deferred action and a coordination framework to conceptually design a workflow management system that addresses organizational emergence (e-WfMS). Our artifact helps managers to predict and store the impact of deferred actions. …

Intermediated Securities Holding Systems Revisited: A View Through The Prism Of Transparency, Thomas Keijser, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explains several benefits of adopting transparent information technology systems for intermediated securities holding infrastructures. Such transparent systems could ameliorate various prevailing problems that confront existing tiered, intermediated holding systems, including those related to corporate actions (dividends, voting), claims against issuers and upper-tier intermediaries, loss sharing and set-off in insolvency proceedings, money laundering and terrorist financing, and privacy, data protection, and confidentiality. Moreover, transparent systems could improve the functions of intermediated holding systems even without changes in laws or regulations. They also could provide a catalyst for law reform and a roadmap for substantive content of reforms. Among potential …

Picking Flowers In An Ico Garden, Fam Guo Teng, Paul R. Griffin, Andrew Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rise of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) in recent times and their potential for investment opportunities have investors spending a lot of time researching ICOs or having to follow the crowd. This paper aims to explore four broad factors of ICOs: identity, credibility, investor sentiment, and price movement to develop a framework that is useful in determining ICO quality. Research is shown using data sources including public forums, chat groups, web sites, white papers as well as smart contract details. Finally, a system, based on the framework, is proposed that can be used to detect and regulate ICO activities and …

"Gatekeepers" Are Vital Participants In Anti-Money-Laundering Laws And Enforcement Regimes As Permission-Less Blockchain-Based Transactions Pose Challenges To Current Means To "Follow The Money", Sarah Jane Hughes

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Two phenomena dominate reports about blockchain-based transactions—that they will disrupt and displace legacy banking, securities, and trade intermediaries, and that they present new or greater opportunities for hiding proceeds of crimes or corruption. This essay does not deal with the former topic. Rather, the organizers of the symposium at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law asks me to consider the latter question. It proved to be a tough assignment.

This essay looks at the separate questions of (1) the degree to which permission-less blockchain transactions will disrupt current anti-money laundering (AML) regimes and enforcement efforts, and (2) what …

Coin-Operated Capitalism, Shaanan Cohney, David A. Hoffman, Jeremy Sklaroff, David A. Wishnick

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents the legal literature’s first detailed analysis of the inner workings of Initial Coin Offerings. We characterize the ICO as an example of financial innovation, placing it in kinship with venture capital contracting, asset securitization, and (obviously) the IPO. We also take the form seriously as an example of technological innovation, where promoters are beginning to effectuate their promises to investors through computer code, rather than traditional contract. To understand the dynamics of this shift, we first collect contracts, “white papers,” and other contract-like documents for the fifty top-grossing ICOs of 2017. We then analyze how such projects’ …

Applying Blockchain For Dual Use Technologies Supply Chain Security, Babita Gupta, Seema Gahlaut, Shwadhin Sharma

College of Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

Blockchain technology is gaining momentum with potential applications in businesses, government, and social context with some impressive applications for storing information, eliminating intermediaries, and enabling greater coordination between entities in issues such as in maintaining data standards (Higginson, Nadeau, and Rajgopal, 2019). While there are aspects of this technology that are still not settled such as the question of whether it is a disruptor or foundational technology, there is an agreement that it has the capability to increase security and transparency of transactions to all parties. Smart contracts using blockchain are theorized to be manifested using machine-to-machine coordination within IoT …

Property, Agency, And The Blockchain: New Technology, And Longstanding Legal Paradigms, Sarah Jane Hughes

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article, presented first as the keynote address at the February 2019 Symposium “The Emerging Blockchain and the Law” at Wayne State, explores the need for repetitive considerations of how blockchain technology affects our traditional concepts of property and agency. The article concludes that well-tested norms of property and agency may matter more, not less, when new technologies such as blockchain are used.

Natural Resources Governance Employing Blockchain-Based Decision-Making, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Adrian Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Natural resources are essential structures of socio-economic systems which shape the well-being of humanity, environment, and the economy. Human actions have become the critical responsibility for environmental changes and pressuring many planetary boundaries. Having a systematic approach can provide a governance platform including the inherent characteristics of the resource, the historically established form of use, and transaction costs. A natural resource governance framework is developed by applying Blockchain technology as the primary goal of this study to regulate and manage the extraction and trades. Blockchain technology provides a distributed concurrency monitoring system for sustainable resource management. Persistent and pervasive cooperation …