BLOCKCHAIN IN BUSINESS: SCIENTIFIC BASIS, ECONOMIC IMPACT, AND CHALLENGES

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of blockchain technology as a transformative force in the digital economy, focusing on its scientific foundations, technical mechanisms, economic implications, and challenges for business adoption. Blockchain, as a distributed ledger technology, ensures decentralization, immuta-bility, transparency, and data security, offering a fundamentally new way of organizing transactions and trust in economic systems. The study highlights its multidimensional impact across finance, supply chains, energy, healthcare, government services, and aviation, emphasizing how programmable transactions and smart contracts reshape business processes, reduce transaction costs, and enable new organizational forms. Special attention is given to asset tokenization, decentralized finance (DeFi), and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which represent innovative business models emerging from blockchain integration.
The article situates blockchain research within its historical and theoretical roots, starting with Satoshi Nakamoto’s foundational 2008 paper, and traces the evolution of scientific literature from technical proofs of concept to systematic reviews addressing governance, regulation, and sustainability. Empirical studies from 2019–2024 show that blockchain generates the highest returns in contexts characterized by information asymmetry and complex intermediation, such as financial clearing or medical data sharing. At the same time, persistent barriers include scalability, interoperability, energy consumption, cyber threats, and fragmented regulation.
The rapid rise of Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) further expands accessibility, allowing firms to integrate blockchain solutions without heavy infrastructure costs. However, achieving sustainable large-scale implementation requires resolving legal uncertainties, developing unified performance metrics, and addressing environ-mental concerns.

Overall, blockchain is analyzed not only as a technical tool but as a strategic instrument of digital transformation, reshaping business models, trust dynamics, and global economic interactions.