Blockchain and Financial Market Innovation

Rebecca Lewis, John McPartland and Rajeev Ranjan

Policy Discussion Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: Blockchain technology is likely to be a key source of future financial market innovation. It allows the creation of immutable records of transactions accessible by all participants in a network. A blockchain database is made up of a number of blocks “chained” together through a reference in each block to the previous block. Each block records one or more transactions, which are essentially changes in the listed owner of assets. New blocks are added to the existing chain through a consensus mechanism in which members of the blockchain network confirm transactions as valid. While all are in the early stages of development, there are many promising applications of blockchain technology in financial markets. This paper seeks to give the reader an overview of what the technology is, how it works, and some potential applications for and challenges posed by blockchain technology.

Keywords: Blockchain; Cryptocurrency; Financial Market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D53 G32 Q55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18
Date: 2017-06-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.chicagofed.org/-/media/publications/po ... /pdp-2017-03-pdf.pdf full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Blockchain and Financial Market Innovation (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedhpd:93559

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Discussion Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lauren Wiese ().