Blockchain-enabled Traceability and Immutability for Financial Applications

The dissertation explores the efficacy of exploiting the transparency and immutability characteristics of blockchain platforms in a financial ecosystem. It elaborates on blockchain technology employing a succinct approach, which serves as the foundation to comprehend the contributions of the present research work. The dissertation gives a verified mathematical model, derived using Nash equilibrium, to function as a framework for blockchain governance. The work elucidates the design, implementation and evaluation of a management plane to monitor and manage blockchain-based decentralized applications. The dissertation also solves the problem of data privacy by the development and evaluation of a management plane for differential privacy preservation through smart contracts. Further, the research work discusses the compliance of the privacy management plane to GDPR using a permissioned blockchain platform. The dissertation is a pioneer in conducting an implementation-based, comparative and an exploratory analysis of tokenization of ethical investment certificates. The dissertation also verifies the utility of blockchain to solve some prevalent issues in social finance. It accomplishes this through the development and testing of a blockchain-based donation application. A qualitative review of the economic impact of blockchain-based micropayments has also been conducted. The discussion on the economic impact also includes a proposition for extending the access of blockchain-based financial services to the underbanked and unbanked people. The work concludes with a hypothetical model of a financial ecosystem, depicting the deployment of the major contributions of this dissertation.