Diffusion of blockchain technology: Insights from academic literature and social media analytics

Although blockchain is often discussed, its actual diffusion seems to be varying for different industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the blockchain technology diffusion in different industries through a combination of academic literature and social media (Twitter).

The insights derived from the academic literature and social media have been used to classify industries into five stages of the innovation-decision process, namely, knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation (Rogers, 1995).

Blockchain is found to be diffused in almost all industries, but the level of diffusion varies. The analysis highlights that manufacturing industry is at the knowledge stage. Further public administration is at persuasion stage. Subsequently, transportation, communications, electric, gas and sanitary services and trading industry had reached to the decision stage. Then, services industries have reached to implementation stage while finance, insurance and real estate industries are the innovators of blockchain technologies and have reached the confirmation stage of innovation-decision process.

Actual implementations of blockchain technology are still in its infancy stage for most of the industries. The findings suggest that specific industries are developing specific blockchain applications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first study which is using social media data for investigating the diffusion of blockchain in industries. The results show that the combination of Twitter and academic literature analysis gives better insights into diffusion than a single data source.