Developing Large Scale B2B Blockchain Architectures for Global Trade Lane

Abstract

Blockchain technologies offer new ways of organizing information
architectures for information sharing amongst a multitude of agents in complex
socio-technical systems. However, transferring the experience gained with
blockchain from the crypotocurrency domain to business-to-business (B2B)
setting is challenging and some of the blockchain inherent characteristics
hamper pilots from scaling up towards a global blockchain-enabled information
sharing business-to-business (B2B) architecture. In this paper we derive
specific design principles and rules to explicitly address these blockchain
scalability issues in a B2B context. To do so we analyse the evolution of the
Global Trade Digitization (GTD1) blockchain architecture that is developed to share
data in international supply chains all over the world by taking an information
infrastructure perspective and by means of the design principles and rules of Hanseth
and Lyytinen (2010) which were derived using the case of the Internet. Our
longitudinal analysis represents the dynamics in the implementation of the
global GTD B2B blockchain-enabled architecture. Building on the design
principles of Hanseth and Lyytinen (2010) we position especially that the
design principles that address the use of the installed base capabilities to
offload the blockchain infrastructure, the reduction of IT capabilities to
simplify its technical and social complexity, and the modularization of the
blockchain-based information architecture to address separate functionalities
of the information sharing process appear to be important aspects to address
the scalability issues of blockchain-based applications, also in other B2B
domains.