Blockchain for Finance: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews blockchain technology's role in finance, focusing on securities trading, analyzing platforms, applications, and security issues to provide a comprehensive overview of its current ecosystem and practical implementations.

Contribution

It offers a detailed analysis of blockchain platforms and applications in financial securities trading, highlighting how blockchain addresses key challenges in FinTech.

Findings

Identifies 12 popular blockchain platforms with 6 related to finance

Categorizes blockchain-based securities trading applications into four groups

Discusses security issues in decentralized finance applications

Abstract

As an innovative technology for enhancing authenticity, security, and risk management, blockchain is being widely adopted in trade and finance systems. The unique capabilities of blockchain, such as immutability and transparency, enable new business models of distributed data storage, point-to-point transactions, and decentralized autonomous organizations. In this paper, we focus on blockchain-based securities trading, in which blockchain technology plays a vital role in financial services as it ultimately lifts trust and frees the need for third-party verification by using consensus-based verification. We investigate the 12 most popular blockchain platforms and elaborate on 6 platforms that are related to finance, seeking to provide a panorama of securities trading practices. Meanwhile, this survey provides a comprehensive summary of blockchain-based securities trading applications. We gather numerous practical applications of blockchain-based securities trading and categorize them into four distinct categories. For each category, we introduce a typical example and explain how blockchain contributes to solving the key problems faced by FinTech companies and researchers. Finally, we provide interesting observations ranging from mainstream blockchain-based financial institutions to security issues of decentralized finance applications, aiming to picture the current blockchain ecosystem in finance.