Scaling Up “Sustainability Development”

Blockchains are currently recognized as a new area of digitization with difficulties in attaining sustainability. The research has not yet produced a unified framework for understanding the characteristics of blockchains that allow the development of financial trading markets over the long term. The topic of how blockchains support the growth of sustainable financial trading platforms and services still exists. A qualitative and iterative investigation was done to compile the basic concepts found in the literature to provide a conceptual framework with four sustainability themes and eleven types of affordances. The results are significant because they show how closely related these categories are, leading to conflicts between various sustainability-related concepts.