Challenges of using blockchain technology in the international markets

Abstract

Despite all blockchain's advantages, it has experienced some challenges and disadvantages. Identifying these challenges and minimizing them are important steps in advancing the goals of this technology. The purpose of this study is to investigate and identify the challenges of using blockchain technology in international markets with regard to the risks of such newfound technologies. This is an applied research in terms of purpose and a mixed research in terms of methodology. The effective factors in using blockchain technology have been discovered by the meta-synthesis method at first; then the ranking of these factors has been done by the fuzzy pairwise comparison. A systematic search was performed in the database of Science Direct, Emerald, and Google Scholar. Also, the seven-step method of Sandlowski and Barroso (2007) was applied. All the related articles and the challenges of using blockchain in international markets were identified and coded. The comparison method between the two coders was used to adjust the reliability and the kappa coefficient was used to calculate the correlation coefficient between the two codes. The findings of the extracted sources were finally proposed and 41 challenges were classified into 6 categories of technical, educational, structural, market, infrastructure and legal which divided in both internal and external areas.

Keywords

• blockchain
• international markets
• meta-synthesis method
• challenges