Digital Islands in Trade Finance: Can a Decentralized System Solve the Network Problem?

Blockchain has the potential to eliminate data siloes in trade finance and enable existing innovations to scale if application builders incorporate the lessons from past attempts at innovation. This paper uses a network model of technology diffusion to explain the persistence of digital islands, then applies this model to blockchain in trade finance. This enables us to draw conclusions about the conditions which facilitates global diffusion, and to answer the question “why blockchain?”.