Abstract:

Recent years have witnessed the increasing investor’s attention to digital tokens market, initial coin offering (ICO) and blockchain technology. In last decade, the cryptocurrency market has evolved significantly. In 2019 more than 50 million users invest in cryptocurrencies on more than 100 independently owned and exist in parallel across countries exchange platforms (Makarov and Schoar 2019). Larios-Hernández (2017) show that two billion people in developing economies have limited or no access to formal financial services. Moreover, De Soto (2017) argue that five billion people in the world do not have the kind of ledgers that provide the documented information that allows them to transfer, partition, and aggregate assets. Blockchain promises to solve this problem (Iansiti and Lakhani 2017). The technology behind bitcoin is expected to revolutionize multiple industries and drive economic development worldwide. While significant attention has been paid to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and few other Large cap cryptocurrencies, there has not been a systematic analysis of digital tokens classified according to types of application. While significant attention has been paid to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and few other Large cap cryptocurrencies, there has not been a systematic analysis of blockchain as a component technology of the Industry 4.0 concept. In this paper we attempt to fill this gap. For this purpose, the authors decided to employ two distinct categories of economic and managerial analyses, namely: transaction costs and scalability, as basis for the postulated framework model situating the blockchain concept in the technological system of Industry 4.0 in relation to these two categories.