**8. Blockchain Adoption and Corporate Governance during the COVID-19 Crisis**

This section answers our Research Question 4: What are the advantages of blockchain adoption in corporate governance during and post-COVID-19? With an ongoing major worldwide health outbreak challenging and disrupting firms, individuals and many social aspects, corporate governance digitalization becomes increasingly important. Blockchains can play a central role in this setting. In our opinion, blockchain technology may be used to record firm data and ensure these data sources are transparent and traceable within each firm to effectively reduce errors, processing times and smooth firm administration. Thus, blockchains would provide management with a platform, to track progress of projects in real-time, and employees can register the relevant data on to the chain securely. The data links based on transparent monitoring and increased security via blockchains would result in an increase in accountability by employees and other stakeholders linked to the firm. This would further reduce mismanagement, security risks and errors during lockdowns and working-from-home environments. Moving firms day-to-day operations and transactions onto a blockchain platform would aid in corporate boards having better oversight. With blockchain platforms updated in real time, boards would possess increased visibility of business operations and better understand the risks faced by the firm and the impact of the ever-evolving pandemic situation, thus resulting in improved day-to-day and strategic decision-making. Additionally, blockchains can facilitate efficient coordination of information sharing, planning, implementation and communication to employees and other stakeholders.

Moreover, the pandemic has highlighted the fragilities in the traditional financial markets and fiat currencies, with many advocating for digital currencies. Cryptocurrency is a key theme of blockchain applications and is relevant to corporate governance as identified by our study. Two major reasons behind this renewed interest in digital or crypto currencies stem from inflation of traditional fiat currencies and the decrease in interest rates of traditional assets such as bank deposits. Thus, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the development of central bank digital currencies. For example, the People's Bank of China has already completed basic function development for a digital yuan. Moreover, the development of Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), which is backed by an alliance of Chinese state-owned firms, government agencies, banks and technology firms further highlight the importance of corporate governance with regard to blockchains. The BSN is expected to reduce the costs of doing blockchain-based business in China by 80%. Alibaba subsidiary Ant Financial also grabbed the spotlight by announcing its new consortium chain called Open Chain. The COVID-19 outbreak is a common challenge faced by businesses across the world. Thus, blockchain can be the new tool for corporate governance to overcome this unprecedented disruption for our way of conducting business and traditional corporate governance.

#### **9. Limitations of Our Study**

This section discusses several limitations of our study. With regard to the empirical analysis section, a major limitation is the small sample period of 2012 to 2020. Most firms are secretive in their nature on investment breakdown into new technologies. Thus, it is difficult to obtain investments only relating to blockchains. Another limitation is that of sample selection bias, which can occur in systematic reviews due to distortions in the search and selection criteria. In order to overcome this issue, we used various permutations of our search topics, backtracked from key words in other survey articles on blockchain unrelated to finance and used refinements in our search databases. In addition, we further perused the reference lists of articles selected to identify relevant articles (snowball effect). Inconsistent coding of themes may be another limitation of our study. Thus, we supplemented our manual review process through textual analysis and by carefully re-assessing the articles in our final sample manually with special focus on the abstract, keywords, introduction and conclusion.

#### **10. Conclusions**

Blockchain technology has great potential to provide efficient solutions to many issues that adversely affect current systems in corporate governance. However, several issues of permissioned versus public blockchains, capital required, possibilities of hacking, lack of extensive research and understanding, to name a few, still persist. Our study differs from its contemporaries by systematically reviewing prior scattered literature, conducting a textual and empirical analysis to develop a framework for blockchain adoption in corporate governance, differentiating between industry and academic literature over time and key themes and forecasting future investments. In addition, our study provides a behavioural and ethical perspective to blockchain adoption in corporate governance. A systematic review of 851 records and a final article sample of 183 for the sample period 2012 to 2020 resulted in the identification of nine primary themes from prior literature with relevance to blockchain adoption in corporate governance. Academic articles mostly focus on regulation (49 studies) and ICOs (46 studies), while industry articles primarily focus on exchanges (10 studies) and cryptocurrencies (9 articles). Significant growth in academic and industry literature is observed for 2017 (48 studies) and 2018 (42 studies) in aggregate.

Through our textual analysis, we identified that the industry and academic literature pursue common themes, such as 1. Bitcoin, 2. markets, 3. technology and 4. fintech related to blockchain. However, their interests diverge, where industry focuses more on 1. privacy, 2. business and 3. Global, and the academia concentrates on 1. governance, 2. networks and 3. ledger. Based on our empirical analysis, we forecast investments and deal counts in blockchain for 2020 and 2021 reaching up to 6.173 and 6.051 USD billion and 822 and 937, respectively. Finally, we conclude that with regard to corporate governance, permissioned blockchains may still be used to limit transparency, yet absolute transparency may cause unwarranted shareholder panic. Thus, firms would most likely implement different accessibility levels. A key question is whether regulators should allow firms to limit transparency. Blockchains may result in better corporate governance models with higher accuracy, accessibility and efficiency, resulting in improved decision making by shareholders. Smart contracts on blockchains in the future can provide novel ways of governing corporates. However, as highlighted by this study, such progression should go hand-in-hand with the corresponding regulatory developments. Moreover, COVID-19 environment driving most firms to digital transformation including China's massive investments in Blockchain technology (BSN) and the digitalisation of the Yuan and interest in blockchains is most likely to further increase significantly in the future.

**Author Contributions:** The authors contributed equally to the article. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.





#### *Int. J. Financial Stud.* **2020**, *8*, 36

