Apr 19, 2019 - This research explores how blockchain can improve global trade for all stakeholders—banks and financiers, corporations, logistics companies, regulatory bodies, insurance providers, and customs authorities—and lays out a road map for implementation on business and technical fronts. Deloitte’s technology consulting team provides provocative questions for enterprise leadership and practical analysis of blockchain opportunities and such challenges as governance, standards, scalability, interoperability, and integration.

Sep 16, 2021 - With decentralization as a key design tenet, distributed ledger technologies are difficult to govern with centralized models of organizational oversight. While cryptoassets, smart contracts, and blockchains create efficiencies and mitigate certain known business risks, they introduce a unique set of risks. This project outlines strategies for managing, measuring, and mitigating these risks. For enhancing controls, its authors map out an integrated control framework with standards, roles, and responsibilities. They also look at audit and assurance of Dapps, proof of solvency, and regulatory compliance. Finally, they present a new playbook with...

Feb 19, 2020 - This project underscores the importance of standards and governance of token innovation in managing digital assets. It takes an in-depth look at the Token Taxonomy Initiative, a new open standards effort championed by a who’s who of enterprise blockchain, from Accenture and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to Microsoft and Web3 Labs. Its members have taken a first-principles blockchain-agnostic approach to developing a Token Taxonomy Framework, which is expected to help unify our understanding of the token economy without sacrificing the decentralization that makes it so powerful. It starts with token types and progresses to token properties, w...

Feb 28, 2018 - This project looks at the three layers of the blockchain stack—protocol, consensus, and economic—from logical and technical points of view; and it distinguishes between two types of standardization, semantic and technological. It should help executives and investors to understand the implementation challenges—such as scalability, energy consumption, and governance of each layer—and the problems that the blockchain community is attempting to solve with each innovation.

Jun 28, 2021 - This project reports on the state of the enterprise blockchain space. It begins with commentary on the state of the world writ large—from the pandemic’s effects on the economy and the global need for vaccinations to the K-shaped recovery and the consequences of helicopter money (e.g., inflation). It covers a series of developments relevant to enterprise users: the price volatility of cryptocurrencies, the shortcomings of consensus mechanisms for enterprise needs, the growth of stablecoins, the status of tokenless blockchains and blockchain-as-a-service offerings, and the latest on central bank digital currencies (e.g., China’s digital c...

Sep 28, 2017 - A new phenomenon—initial coin offerings—enabled through blockchain technology is upending basic tenets of twentieth-century capitalism. This project frames the opportunity in terms of addressing the tragedy of the commons. He studies the development and ramification of the emerging token economy and walks through the landscape of token types. He previews the economic effects of digital scarcity, tokens as powerful incentives, and the legal and policy ramifications for securities law and property rights.