Blockchain in business: a systematic mapping of the research

Abstract

Accompanying the accelerated progress of communication and storage technologies, and adapting to information structuring models, new technologies emerge with the aim to innovate in many areas. One of them, to be highlighted in this work, is the blockchain, which emerged as the basic technology to sustain the modality of cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin as the pioneer. However, the financial means is not its only application, because it serves for any situation where it is necessary to register or transfer information, following an order of events. Therefore, this research seeks to apply a search protocol in some databases in order to perform a systematic mapping of articles published between 2016 and 2019 containing applications of blockchain technology in the context of organizations, as well as its evolution, in order to obtain an overview of the contributions of this technology, and how it can modify the current context of the most diverse business models. The research methodology is a systematic mapping of the literature through a search string. The articles were extracted from the scientific bases described in the work, and the primary studies that fit the planned scope were filtered, in order to answer the proposed research questions. The results pointed out several projects using blockchain, mostly applied to the area of supply chain management, medical records and Internet of things devices, with excellent benefits, such as immutability and reliability of records, network security and decentralization in the control of relationships