4.2. Trend Result Analysis
The horizontal axis of the strategic coordinate indicates the centrality, the vertical axis represents the density and the first quadrant is the upper-right corner, then moving clockwise, the second quadrant, the third quadrant and the fourth quadrant. As we can see from
Figure 8, clusters 0, 1, 2 and 7 are in the first quadrant, representing the corresponding category in the central and core field. The research maturity of these four subject categories is relatively high and will continue to be the mainstream direction and hot issue in the field of blockchain research in the future. Clusters 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 are in the third quadrant, indicating that their corresponding categories are in relatively peripheral cold fields (
Figure 8). These six types of topics are emerging topics in the blockchain field. Although the current research enthusiasm is not high, these topics are expected to become an important exploration direction in the future.
In the current era when computer technology continues to promote social changes, important changes in the financial field are always the combination of original technology and computer technology. Blockchain, as one of the latest innovations in the computer field, although there are still some technical shortcomings, with the continuous improvement in the future, its model will have an important impact on the financial field. It will also lead to major changes in the traditional financial system and will also have an impact on the existing trust mechanisms in the financial sector. It is believed that in the future, the existing bilateral trust or central trust mechanism will be replaced by a new type of credit mechanism of social common credit. Financial institutions can make full use of the technical advantages of blockchain technology to innovate new application models.
This paper discovers ten research topics of blockchain in the financial field through topic detection and data mining of related research literature. According to the trend prediction results, blockchain crowdfunding, financial technology, encryption currency and supply chain finance are distributed in the first quadrant. These four types of research topics will be the motor research themes. Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger technology with great development prospects in the financial field. In the next few years, this technology will play a more important role in the digital currency technology architecture, optimizing the financial credit system and influencing the financial technology architecture. The key role fully reflects the application value of blockchain technology in the financial market.
Secondly, the remaining six research topics are all distributed in the third quadrant and belong to emerging themes. For example, the third category of topics is the issue of consensus mechanisms. The consensus mechanism of the blockchain will generate an intelligent trust store that records various reliable information. The information cannot be tampered with through the consensus mechanism, which largely solves the trust problem in the financial industry. Internet trust has now become an important part of the entire social and economic trust system. Moreover, with the in-depth development of the digital economy, the share of consensus mechanisms will become higher and higher. Therefore, in the future, it is necessary to add Internet trust in addition to the traditional trust system and to add institutional arrangements that adapt to Internet trust, especially an algorithm-based consensus mechanism that is highly compatible with the Internet economy.
The fourth category of emerging themes is the field of intelligent manufacturing. Intelligent manufacturing is a human–machine integrated intelligent system composed of intelligent machines and human experts. Blockchain technology can solve the problems of information asymmetry and resource non-sharing in the traditional manufacturing industry. It can monitor all aspects of production and manufacturing for a long time, improve the safety and reliability of production and manufacturing and can also help the company’s internal operations. Production brings value. Therefore, in future research, blockchain technology will have a profound impact on the global economic structure and will have profound changes in corporate architecture, Internet industry ecology, social order and even production relations, and it will change the industry ecology of modern manufacturing.
The fifth category of emerging themes is the field of digital finance. Digital finance refers to the use of digital technology by traditional financial institutions and Internet companies to realize financing, payment, investment and other new financial business models. Digital finance breaks the time and space constraints, cost constraints, information barriers and customer exclusion of financial services, making finance better serve the real economy. As a cutting-edge digital technology, blockchain technology can provide powerful technical support for digital finance, making the economic development of digital financial services more inclusive and effective. Blockchain technology is still facing certain difficulties in the legal system, regulatory system, talent construction, technical level and other aspects of the digital finance field. In future research, it is necessary to continuously improve the blockchain technology and actively explore the depth of “blockchain + finance”. The integrated innovation model continuously improves the supply of digital financial products to better promote the high-quality development of digital finance.
In the sixth category of medical insurance topics, insurance business is affected by Internet information technology; secondly, the insurance industry is affected to a certain extent by blockchain technology. The application of blockchain technology in the insurance industry can optimize the untrustworthy problems caused by the Internet based on the conditions of the Internet. At the same time, the technology is also a driving force for the continuous innovation and development of the insurance industry. It is not only conducive to reducing transaction costs but also improving the level of trust in it. In future research, blockchain technology can be applied to optimize the insurance process and better construct the customer’s data information database, which will help business personnel to efficiently find all information about customers and to realize the intelligence of business processing and improve it. Second, the sharing of insurance information is affected by the blockchain, which can not only realize the openness and transparency of information but also realize the sharing of resources, which is particularly important for the overall development of the insurance industry.
In the eighth category of smart contract topics, the emergence of blockchain technology redefines the concept of smart contracts. Therefore, in future research, smart contracts can be embedded in various activities of traditional finance, providing innovative solutions for financial development. Smart contracts have the characteristics of automatic operation, self-management, etc., without third-party intervention and supervision, which not only saves manpower and material resources but also guarantees the fairness of the contract to a large extent. The smart contract is the activator of the blockchain, which provides a programmable operating mechanism for the static underlying data; the characteristics of the smart contract can also include the complex behavior of each node in the distributed system, which helps to promote the use of blockchain technology in manual labor and various applications in intelligent systems.
The last category of emerging topics is about financial innovation. Fintech provides new ideas for alleviating the financing problems of SMEs. Its core is to integrate information technology, big data, etc. into the decision-making process of financial institutions, so as to improve the information screening and risk control capabilities of financial institutions. As one of the representative technologies of financial technology, the importance of blockchain technology application in financial innovation is becoming increasingly prominent, especially in the field of supply chain finance. In the future of this research direction, a complete blockchain data governance system should be established, and information technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence should be used in the data chain link to ensure the quality and effectiveness of the application of blockchain in financial innovation.