Towards Mainstream Adoption of Blockchain for Socio-economic Transformation: A Proposed Framework

Blockchain technology (BT) has numerous appealing characteristics for which various stakeholders have taken keen interest in it. It has gained significant attention from sectors such as supply chain, healthcare, finance, etc. Despite the huge potential BT promises, it has still not received mainstream adoption outside cryptocurrencies, for well over a decade since its invention. In this study, we have performed a systematic literature review to identify 13 key barriers to blockchain adoption and 3 broad possible solutions. Interoperability and integration with legacy systems, scalability and performance concerns, technical complexity, regulatory uncertainty, ecosystem readiness, and business model alignment, are some of the key challenges confronting general adoption of blockchain. An integrated framework is developed which is expected to encourage the mainstream adoption of BT. A key takeaway from this study is a clear roadmap of how organisations may proceed with their migration steps towards adoption of blockchain based solutions.