Finance, Money & Blockchains

Fundamental building blocks of finance and financial services; such as money, assets and markets have been changing. The drivers of change have been broad: ranging from the emerging technologies to changing societal, regulatory, industrial, commercial and economic demands. From capital formation to value transfer mechanisms and peer to peer markets; blockchains and their related topics are at the heart of an overarching transformational era of redesign, innovation, creativity, and empowerment. While this era’s morphing effect on services, networks, participants, legal and regulatory frameworks, infrastructures resembles many other times in long history of finance and money; the need for broad global interdisciplinary collaboration is potentially unique in history as we know it. The true purpose and scope of financial services emerge as an anchor. From trade finance to capital markets and financial inclusion; decentralized market infrastructures, tokenomics, digital currencies, digital assets, their associated market structures, various protocols are few of the potential products of this time of change. Nevertheless, these applications themselves are constantly changing as the actors have been connecting the dots. Important questions such as risk management at the era of financial products on blockchain and alternative data enabled infrastructures, have emerged. At the foundational research level, topics such as security, privacy, scalability, decentralized systems, trust, identity as well as legal, semantics, risk and automation as they relate to financial services have been studied. Similarly, the actors including regulators, institutions, academia, industry, public require cutting edge research and insights. Ultimately, true advancements will emerge from the intersections of different disciplines. Interfaces of blockchain technologies with other technologies need to be explored as the field moves to actual design and engineering. We aim to bring together original, high impact research from all participants of the finance, financial technology and markets ecosystem including academics, practitioners, regulators, professional services, and technologists.

The topics of interest include:

• Crypto/Digital Assets
o Definitions, designs, types of assets and coins

• Tokenomics
o Incentives and new business models

• Regulations and Legal
o Legal and regulatory treatment of the products and participants and their impact on broader interest such as systemic risk

• Market Structures
o New services, from trading to valuations and next generation market infrastructures

• Technology
o Unique use of technology, settlement finality to settlement and privacy

• Society & Individual Inclusion
o Preferences of the new entrants of the financial services, new types of investors

• Decentralization/Peer to Peer
o New value and risk transfer mechanisms, disintermediation layers to sharing economy, fintech platforms

• Trust & Identity
o New trust models, identity in increasingly trust-less ecosystems

Articles published within this Research Topic in 2019 are eligible for the $10,000 “Yun Family Frontiers in Blockchain Prize".

For more details, please see our blog post here:

https://blog.frontiersin.org/2018/12/12/frontiers-in-blockchain-introduces-new-journal-wide-10000-best-paper-prize/