Blockchain Technology in Cryptocurrency: A Literature Review

This research proposal explores the role of blockchain technology in setting cryptocurrency as a modern payment gateway. It discusses the background of blockchain technology, its objectives, and the research problems associated with it. The research methodology and significance of the study are also highlighted. The proposal concludes with a research planning timeline.

Running Head: RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Research Proposal
[Name of the Student]
[Name of the University]
[Author note]

2RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
RESEARCH PROJECT BACKGROUND (Literature review) and OBJECTIVES.......................3
RESEARCH PROBLEMS..............................................................................................................7
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY....................................................................................................7
RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE........................................................................................................9
CONCLUSIONS...........................................................................................................................10
RESEARCH PLANNING:............................................................................................................10
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................11

3RESEARCH PROPOSAL
INTRODUCTION
The Blockchain technology is having the capability of streamlining the operations along
with the capability of reducing the cost. The blcokchain is considered to a particular type of
database which is very inefficient in many aspects. The blockchain is not used unless and until
there is a need of using all the advantages of the blockchain database like the decentralization
and the immutability. Cryptocurrency is considered to be a virtual monetary unit which is also
considered to be a digital asset. This digital asset is mainly for serving as a medium for the
exchanging. This in turn is associated with the usage of the string cryptography so as to provide
security to the different financial transactions along with helping in having a control of the
process of creating additional units. This is also used of the verification of the transfer of assets.
Cryptocurrencies are seen to be associated with the usage of decentralized controls as opposed
by to the centralized digital currency and the central banking systems.
RESEARCH PROJECT BACKGROUND (Literature review) and
OBJECTIVES
Satoshi Nakamato, the man behind Bitcoins was the one to describe the usage of the
blockchain technology in crypto currencies to resolve the problem regarding the order of
transactions and double spending (Bradbury 2013). The blockchain technology helps organizing
the transactions by linking each block in a chronological manner. Blockchains have disrupted the
entire traditional frame of business as the transactions that required confidential verification
could now be operated in a decentralized process retaining the level of certainty as before. The
distributed database characteristic of the blockchain technology is ideal for crypto currencies.

4RESEARCH PROPOSAL
The literature that already exists reveals that blockchain technology in crypto currencies can
resolve many complex financial problems. It is a solution to the traditional token-based payment
system as proposed in the journals of the Information System (Avital 2018). A crypto currency
loyalty program named Unify Rewards was also proposed and this program was analyzed at the
Sydney campus of the University of New South Wales. The program deals in a strategy that
requires engaging the participants in transactions providing them to choose from among twelve
retailers within the campus of the University. The participants upon becoming a part of the
program received an initial bonus in form of Ethereum cryptocurrency. Crypto currencies could
be earned by the members by two things, that is by completing a transaction or by giving correct
answers to the inquiries based on marketing and their amount could also be redeemed. It was
inferred from the project that loyalty programs using crypto currencies were highly engaging
(Shelper, Lowe and Kanhere 2018). The limitations of the system can be overcome by the
effective implementation of the blockchain system in crypto currency. The work was based on a
non-financial subject but still has link with financial terms as in the work Ether was used that is a
crypto currency. The project of the smart campus of the national Taiwan University of Science
and Technology was to create a rewarding system named NTUSToken within its organization.
The program requires the students to indulge in a context relating to games that earns them the
reward for their good behavior within the arena of the institution. The main purpose of the
program was to develop a decentralized system that has the potential to award or retrieve tokens
to the students of the university based on their behavior and they did not involve the crypto
currency (Ferreira et al. 2018). The blcokchain can be categorized into three different
generations which includes the Blockchain 1.0 and the version deals with the digital currency,
Blockchain 2.0 which is mainly used for the digital finance and Blockchain 3.0 is focused upon

5RESEARCH PROPOSAL
the digital society. At present the three generations of the blockchain technology coexist but the
maturity adoption model has already been proposed by Wang et al. as guidance for the
institutions to be able to take decisions in a more systematic way. YABW is a common example
of application of Blockchain 1.0 version but there are works that are a evidence of the working
applications of Blockchain 2.0 and give the entry points to the Blockchain 3.0 version. As per the
description by Diaz et al. the concerning matter of fact is that by the adoption of using of smart
contracts, the allowance of being autonomous to the organisations is provided on the basis of
auto execution of the code. The concept of “Crypto Senhas”, used in various case studies is an
application of Blockchain 2.0 and it is also proposes an entry point towards Blockchain 3.0.
Additional to the statement of Zhao et al. that says,“The essence of Blockchain lies in its ability
to support trustworthy transactions via networked computation in place of human monitor and
control.” there is another idea which says that Blockchain cannot be considered as a “magic
bullet” and evaluating the potential of Blockchain could bring great innovation in the
environment of high organizational priority. The proceedings with the evaluation of the
potentiality of the innovations that applying Blockchain can bring into any particular context, the
key questions behind it needs to be answered (Gatteschi et al.). The statements that will be
obtained will be answering to the basic question that whether “Crypto Senhas” should be applied
or not to the Blockchain. The questions by Gatteschi et al. and the respective answers are as in
the following part of the review.
The first question about the necessity of the shared database would be obviously
answered in positive approach as every student needs to check their vouchers for meals and the
institution also checks the global status. The second question is also answered with a positive
approach which asks whether multiple parties writing data is important or not. Students need to

6RESEARCH PROPOSAL
sell or transfer their meal vouchers for which the above requirement is necessary. The last
question about the prevention of writers from modifying other’s previous data is also answered
in imperative manner. Fraudulences and other attacks to the system could be avoided by
preventing writers to modify other’s previous written data. Inspite of the fact that the
trustworthiness and the security of the whole system is being controlled by the core of the
Blockchain infrastructure still there are considerable amount of researches that is being carried
on. By the time, there are some works relevant to the study that has been published already.
These works give a presentation of reputation model, trust management and also publishes
studies regarding some important gains in the aspects of accuracy as well as the speed
specifically in peer-to-peer model (P2P) environments. The works conducted were associated
with the usage of the Fuzzy theory and also presents a proposal that can defeat the side channel
threats which cause exposure in privacy and exploitation of it. The proposal goes as follows:
1. Necessity of Intermediation – The basic question that is asked regarding this point is
whether it is necessary to omit the trusted intermediaries that verifies or authenticates
transactions.
2. Linking of the transactions – The primary agenda for this point is whether the different
actors should perform the writing procedure for the transactions regarding a single user.
Answering to this question, the necessity of it has been established by the instance that if
any user who holds the accountability of a voucher but not using it, the possibility of the
flow of the voucher must be taken into notice.

7RESEARCH PROPOSAL
RESEARCH PROBLEMS
The research is limited to the cryptocurrency as well as blockchain. It means that other
types of assets other than the cryptocurrency are not in scope of this research study. The
blockchain technology is not looked at outside of context of the cryptocurrency, and it is a
process used to eliminate intermediaries into the financial as well as other public sectors. It leads
to scope as well as exceeds scope of this research study. The research is related to legal context
of the cryptocurrency as well as blockchain. The legal issues are addressed in connection with
implications of the financial crime, laundering of the money as well as tax evasion. Both of the
concepts such as cryptocurrency as well as blockchain are challenges that can bring from
perceptive of the financial crime. There are problems related to safety of the payment methods
of audiences those are using blockchain in cryptocurrency.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The methodology for conducting the entire research is categorized into certain steps
which would be helping in the providing of a transparent along with a reproducible as well as
scientific literature review of the Blockchain role in setting cryptocurrency as modern payment
gateway. The steps are listed below:
Identification of the need for the review, preparing the proposal for the review and lastly
the development of the review protocol:
In order to address all the primary research questions a systematic research is to be
conducted with the most recent sources. Besides this the “Google Scholar” database was used as

8RESEARCH PROPOSAL
the main source in which the terms “blockchain” and the “cryptocurrencies” were used for
searching in each of the articles. In addition to all this extra searches were done by making use of
the referenced work of the relevant articles. Besides all this relevant “grey literature” which
includes the research that has been commissioned by the government and is yet unpublished or
the private and public institutions are also to be identified by means of usage of the electronic
searches. In order to identify the grey literature it is very essential to make sure that all the results
of the electronic search is being evaluated in proper way. Besides this several refinement feature
of the database was also used extensively. The articles which were potentially relevant were
retrieved in full texts.
Identification of the research, selection of the studies, assessing the quality, taking of notes
and extraction of the data along with the synthesis of the data:
The literature which has been retrieved is evaluated in terms of the eligibility in an
independent way by considered the authors which are based upon certain exclusion and inclusion
criteria. Before the introduction of the literature certain exclusion criteria. At the initial stage the
abstracts along with the introductory section of each of the research papers were assessed. All
those articles were excluded which are seen to be meeting a single exclusion criteria and were
sorted by reasons of exclusion. This was followed by the full-text review of all the articles and
along with this certain additional articles were also excluded while conducting the study
associated with documentation of all the reasons for the exclusion. Discussions were held so as
to solve any kind of discrepancy related to the relevance of the reviewed articles until a certain
conclusion was reached. Besides this all there were also other studies which were excluded
because of the reason that they consisted of the technical aspects of the blockchain technology.

9RESEARCH PROPOSAL
The articles which were not seen to be fitting into the criteria for inclusion were set aside, which
was consequent used for the purpose of introducing the articles.
Reporting the final results
The articles which were seen to be meeting the criteria related to inclusion were included
in the qualitative analysis software and the data were analyzed in the emerging themes. Besides
all this reviews were independently conducted which were in turn associated with carrying out
the thematic content analysis. This was followed by three clusters of the coded segment which
are to be compared and agreed upon for all the articles and are to be summarized in a single set
of themes and sub-themes.
RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE
Cryptocurrency as well as blockchain are monstrous topic. There are various
cryptocurrencies as well as application of the blockchain technology are numerous. The
significance of this research study is that blockchain is required as it can bring trust among peer
to peer networks. It is used as a trusted payment method for transactions as it secures the
transactions in computers so that it involves records which are not altered without alternation of
the subsequent blocks. It is included with significant benefits that can secure greater
transparency, enhanced the security as well as increase in business efficiency. It can speed the
transactions as well as reduce the costs. In context of the cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, the
transactions are to be taken out properly. There is high role of blockchain into cryptocurrency so
that it helps to keep the transactions which are taken place into peer-to-peer network.

10RESEARCH PROPOSAL
CONCLUSIONS
It is concluded that blockchain is required as it can bring trust to the peer to peer
networks. There are primary reasons that the bank is trusted the third part for the transactions. It
ensures that the parties into the trade are being trusted. It is seen that blockchain plays a key
significant role in cryptocurrency as it can grow as chain like structures in order to make various
blocks. It is useful for making payments in safer way so that no other person can able to access
to the data. Therefore, it helps to build trust among the customers so that they can use blockchain
for transactions.
RESEARCH PLANNING:
S. No. Activity Duration Start Date Finish Date
1 Selection of research
topic
02 02/05/2019 04/05/2019
2 Identification of the
research gap
04 06/05/2019 10/05/2019
3 Gathering literature 06 11/05/2019 17/05/2019
4 Preparation of literature
review
07 18/05/2019 25/05/2019
5 Determining the sources
of information
05 26/05/2019 31/05/2019
6 Collection of data 10 01/06/2019 11/06/2019
7 Analysing the data and
findings
05 12/06/2019 17/06/2019
8 Summary of the results 02 18/06/2019 20/06/2019
9 Concluding the research 01 21/06/2019 22/06/2019
10 Future directions for the
study
01 23/06/2019 24/06/2019

11RESEARCH PROPOSAL
REFERENCES
Bradbury, D., 2013. The problem with Bitcoin. Computer Fraud & Security, 2013(11), pp.5-8.
Avital, M., 2018. Peer Review: Toward a Blockchain-enabled Market-based
Ecosystem. CAIS, 42, p.28.
Shelper, P., Lowe, A. and Kanhere, S.S., 2018, March. Experiences from the Field: Unify
Rewards-A Cryptocurrency Loyalty Program. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Foundations
and Applications of Blockchain., March. Experiences from the Field: Unify Rewards-A
Cryptocurrency Loyalty Program. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Foundations and
Applications of Blockchain.
Ferreira, M., Rodrigues, S., Reis, C. and Maximiano, M., 2018. Blockchain: A Tale of Two
Applications. Applied Sciences, 8(9), p.1506.
Scott, B., 2016. How can cryptocurrency and blockchain technology Play a role in building
social and solidarity finance? (No. 2016-1). UNRISD Working Paper.
Watson, L., 2018. Blockchain: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding the Technology Behind
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency (Including Blockchain Wallet, Mining, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin,
Ripple, Dash and Smart Contracts).
Parker, J.F., 2018. Blockchain technology simplified: the complete guide to blockchain
management, mining, trading and investing cryptocurrency. CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform.
Yli-Huumo, J., Ko, D., Choi, S., Park, S. and Smolander, K., 2016. Where is current research on
blockchain technology?—a systematic review. PloS one, 11(10), p.e0163477.

12RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Eyal, I., 2017. Blockchain technology: Transforming libertarian cryptocurrency dreams to
finance and banking realities. Computer, 50(9), pp.38-49.
Herbert, J. and Litchfield, A., 2015, January. A novel method for decentralised peer-to-peer
software license validation using cryptocurrency blockchain technology. In Proceedings of the
38th Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC 2015) (Vol. 27, p. 30).