Overview of Blockchain Technology Diffusion and Adoption: Theoretical Analysis Based on IDT Theory

Introduction

Blockchain technology is one of the most important innovations of this century. It is considered as the most relevant innovation after the Internet. It is becoming an increasingly hot topic of interest for different domains and multidisciplinary fields (Jraisat et al, 2022; Ennajeh, 2021; Attaran, 2020).

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that has disrupted the global economy with the use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. This disruptive technology has a significant impact in our daily lives in the 21st century. It has the potential to transform the current Internet from “The Internet of Information Sharing” to “The Internet of Value Exchange” (Ullah et al., 2021). It can solve a variety of challenges in a modern manufacturing environment. Blockchain technology is expected to revolutionize the operating modes of commerce, industry, and education, as well as to promote the rapid development of knowledge-based economy on a global scale. Blockchain is considered a key part of the 4th industrial revolution (Ullah et al., 2021; Chen et al, 2018; Javaid et al., 2021).

Blockchain is a database that stores transaction-based records, continually recording all completed transactions in a block of data. More importantly, database systems, known as chains within a network of linked peer-to-peer nodes, are usually called digital ledgers in business (Jraisat et al., 2022). Blockchain technology is used in many fields because of its distributed database nature and the prospect of audit trails (Ullah et al., 2021). Due to its immutability, transparency, and trustworthiness for all transactions executed in a Blockchain network, this innovative technology has many potential applications (Chen et al, 2018). Initially, Blockchain has been largely used for cryptocurrency and financial transactions. In the last couple of years, the upsurge in Blockchain technology has obliged scholars and specialists to scrutinize new ways to apply Blockchain technology with a wide range of domains. The dramatic increase in Blockchain technology has provided many new applications opportunities ranging from healthcare, finance and banking, governance, supply chain, energy etc (Yadav and Singh, 2019; Seyednima et al, 2019). Furthermore, other industries, including entertainment and manufacturing are adopting Blockchain technology to leverage its benefits of enhanced security as well as privacy (Attaran, 2020).

Actually, demand for Blockchain applications is rapidly growing in various industries (Javaid et al., 2021). Recent statistics published by Ruby (2023) find that the compound annual growth of Blockchain industry is about 56.3%. There are over 170 million Blockchain wallets worldwide. Many IT and digital experts suggest that Blockchain will reshape every industry in the future. This is also endorsed by renowned and reliable firms such as Gartner, PwC, Wintergreen, and IDC. They predicted that the Blockchain market would reach USD 176 billion to USD 3.1 trillion between 2025 and 2030 (Malik et al, 2021).

The evolution of Blockchain technology in term of adoption rate and applications development stimulates questions to understand its diffusion and adoption for many stakeholders: Blockchain technology providers, actual and future adopters, decision makers and researchers.