Charting the Future of Blockchain in Operations and Supply Chain Management: Opportunities and Challenges

Blockchain technology, underpinned by distributed ledger systems, has evolved from a novel innovation into a transformative and integral component of enterprise digitization across industries. Since its inception with Bitcoin in 2008, blockchain has expanded beyond cryptocurrencies, with applications in operations management (OM) growing rapidly across industries. Despite its promise, however, the integration of blockchain into OM is not without challenges. Scholars have identified significant barriers to successful implementation, ranging from technological and organizational hurdles to regulatory complexities (Chod et al. 2020; Hanisch et al. 2025; Lin et al. 2022; Lumineau et al. 2021; Sodhi et al. 2022; Zhan et al. 2025). This Special Issue on Operational Perspectives on Blockchain Applications presents cutting-edge research that explores blockchain's opportunities, challenges, and implications for OM. The articles in this issue provide a diverse and empirically grounded examination of blockchain applications across industries and operational contexts. We will discuss each contribution in turn. However, prior to that, it is useful to dig into the operational nuances, opportunities, and challenges presented by the focal context. Our editorial discussion opens accordingly, outlining the technological, organizational, and regulatory challenges while identifying the conditions under which blockchain can deliver value. We also touch on the broader societal implications of blockchain, addressing its political, economic, social, environmental, and legal dimensions before describing how each of the papers in the special issue contributes to understanding, critical to operations management. Finally, our editorial discussion concludes by charting a research agenda, highlighting key questions and interdisciplinary approaches needed to advance both theoretical and practical understanding of blockchain in OM. Working processes need to be discovered, described, and understood before they can be improved, controlled, and prescribed. Quite a bit of work is needed merely to describe some of the important activities, practices, processes, and operating systems utilized in diverse organizations. Only then can we begin to sink our teeth into developing better theories about how best to manage them. For this purpose, Ilk et al. (2021) conceptualize the Bitcoin blockchain (and other mainstream permissionless blockchains) as a two-side dataspace market, where users demand a certain amount of dataspace in a future block to store their transactions, and miners compete to produce such dataspace by creating new blocks. To facilitate this market in a decentralized manner—that is, with no centralized party absorbing demand and controlling supply—users attach a transaction fee (which is higher for users with a higher waiting cost) that becomes one of the miners' sources of revenue. With the increasing popularity1 of Bitcoin and Ethereum, demand frequently exceeds supply, creating contemporaneous system congestions. The congested service pricing literature, which dates back to the management of highway tolls (Naor 1969) and electric power supply (Viswanathan and Edison 1989) and extends in modern days to subscription pricing of cloud services (Cachon and Feldman 2011) and surge pricing of gig economy platforms (Cachon et al. 2017), yields a generalized conclusion. Specifically, “offering multiple service grades that each render a different delay distribution at a different price” improves both perceived customer satisfaction and service provider profit (Van Mieghem 2000, 1249). Permissionless blockchains, as congested service systems, are no exception to this rule. Although no centralized party (i.e., firm or platform) sets the priority price menu, users bid transaction fees to differentiate the service grades (i.e., transaction confirmation speeds) they desire. More details on the process view of permissionless blockchain transactions can be found in Shang et al. (2023, 106–108). Although early Ethereum-based smart contract applications were rarely associated with OM or any other real-world assets, their ingenuity inspired a whole class of permissioned blockchains (also referred to as private or consortium chains), in which only an authorized group of users can participate, setting the stage for enterprise applications (Fan et al. 2024; Pun et al. 2021). While blockchain offers considerable potential, its successful implementation is hindered by technological, organizational, and regulatory barriers. Below, we highlight seven of the most critical challenges to blockchain implementation discussed in the press and in the literature. Low throughput and high transaction fees. The primary reason that mainstream cryptocurrency systems cannot be used for day-to-day payment is their throughput limits: 3 per second for Bitcoin and 13 per second for Ethereum.2 This limitation is in sharp contrast with the processing capacity of established financial systems like Visa, which is capable of handling approximately 5000 transactions per second (Malik et al. 2022). Such scalability limits are largely inevitable for permissionless blockchains that aim to ensure decentralization and security, widely known as the “blockchain trilemma” in the industry.3 The throughput limit results in a frequently congested service system with transaction fee spikes (Ilk et al. 2021; Shang et al. 2023), which has been 2.87 USD per transaction for Bitcoin in 2020. This hinders the economic viability of small value transactions even in situations where network latency is less of a concern (e.g., users with high waiting tolerance). Meanwhile, permissioned blockchains typically do not face throughput limits, as dataspace suppliers are usually the blockchain owners and hence do not have to be incentivized via instruments such as transaction fees. However, due to the lack of public visibility and the corporate ownership of these blockchains, this solution is unlikely to be suitable for all applications. Algorithm fairness. Advocates of permissionless blockchains often highlight their morally significant goal of improving access to money transfer services for unbanked and underbanked populations (Andreasson 2022). Importantly, much of the wealth on permissionless blockchains is created through mining/staking revenue—that is, through participation on the supply side—and small users typically cannot meet the entrance threshold for this revenue stream. Further, while large senders can develop sophisticated algorithms to estimate the desired transaction fee more accurately, small senders typically rely on the free-to-use fee recommendation tools crypto wallets provide. Encouragingly, this disparity is somewhat alleviated by new transaction fee mechanism designs (Zhao, Wu, et al. 2025). Decentralization–efficiency tradeoff. The management of a cryptocurrency system is typically maintained by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). A DAO's daily operational tasks include the development of, voting on, and execution of crowdsourced proposals (Zhao et al. 2022). Yet, not all project decisions are strategic enough to warrant crowdsourcing of ideas from stakeholders, and the inefficiency of doing so affects operational agility and the quality of service provided by the DAO. Further, while decentralization can improve service levels for users and providers, it reduces profits for founders, reflecting a broader tension between decentralization and efficiency (Gan et al. 2023). Governance frictions are compounded by token-weighted voting, where those holding more tokens have greater influence, creating a mismatch between token ownership and subject expertise (Benhaim et al. 2023, 2025; Tsoukalas and Falk 2020). Cross-chain interoperability. A successful blockchain application often requires coordination of activities across multiple chains. This is especially true for enterprise applications, where material flow needs to be traced on a permissioned blockchain (for obvious business confidentiality reasons) and payment of goods should preferably happen on a permissionless blockchain. In general, the lack of universal standards creates a fragmented landscape in which disparate blockchain platforms are developed in isolation. This technical challenge of interoperability is further complicated by the need to integrate blockchain with legacy systems, which typically lack the flexibility to accommodate cryptographic protocols and distributed data synchronization (Babich and Hilary 2019). Standardization of input data. Many of the cargo tracking and supply chain traceability blockchain applications assume the existence of a data on-ramp that is accessible to and standardized across participants. This is far from reality. As Fan et al. (2024, 3) put it, “a small supplier, say, in India or China, is unlikely to have the resources or expertise to set up an arrangement to access blockchain.” Even if such access is set up by a large participant of the permissioned blockchain, such as a superstore retailer, the input data from thousands of small suppliers across the world might not be properly digitized and standardized. Both the invasive and non-invasive approaches to bridging the physical–digital interface in blockchain applications have merits and drawbacks (Klöckner et al. 2023). Buy-in from partner organizations. Lin et al. (2022) highlight buy-in from partners along with information complexity as two important drivers that determine the success of blockchain pilots in real life. They stress the importance of reducing information complexity as well as increasing buy-in among supply chain partners. Critically, the cost and hassle of implementation are borne by all organizations that the cargo passes through, including port authorities, customs agencies, shipment forwarders, trucking companies, and so on. Some of these organizations lack the basic incentive to even digitize their paperwork, let alone upload information onto a blockchain owned by another company. Regulatory uncertainty. Regulatory challenges present another significant barrier to blockchain adoption in OM. The regulatory framework for blockchain is still in a nascent stage, with many jurisdictions lacking clear guidelines regarding its use, especially in non-financial contexts such as OM (Wagner et al. 2025). The cross-border nature of many supply chains makes it even more challenging to reconcile diverse regulatory environments; thereby complicating large-scale implementations (Wamba and Queiroz 2020). In summary, blockchain presents a range of unique characteristics, implementation challenges, and potential transformative impacts. Figure 1 captures many of these, as well as presenting new opportunities to apply common theoretical lenses used by researchers to understand this new technology, including Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), Principal Agent Theory (PAT), and Resource-Based View (RBV). These features are pushing the OM community to consider additional theoretical arguments regarding blockchain-related operational dynamics so as to more comprehensively understand, anticipate, and ultimately contribute to practice and scholarship in this domain. More specifically, traditional theoretical frameworks commonly applied in OM, such as transaction cost economics, principal–agent theory, and the resource-based view, have proven effective for analyzing centralized systems where information is controlled and trust is built through well-established interorganizational relationships. However, blockchain disrupts these conventional relationships by enabling peer-to-peer interactions governed not by a central authority but by cryptographic mechanisms and consensus protocols. For instance, the immutability of recorded transactions and the inherent decentralization of blockchain networks modify the traditional calculus of trust and coordination costs. These features create “trustless” environments where the need for intermediaries is significantly reduced. This shift calls into question the applicability of many preexisting theoretical models that assume reliance on centralized control and interpersonal trust (Lumineau et al. 2023). Given these fundamental differences, one promising direction for future research is to expand network theory and social capital theory in OM by integrating the notion of distributed trust. Whereas social capital theory has been used to explain performance improvements arising from strengthened interorganizational relationships (Saberi et al. 2019), blockchain technology challenges these premises by redistributing trust across the network without necessarily relying on strong personal or organizational ties (Lumineau et al. 2023). Similarly, although transaction cost theory provides insight into how blockchain can lower the costs of verification and contracting by obviating the need for costly intermediaries, the theory does not fully account for the dynamic interplays that arise when trust is engineered digitally and contractual obligations are embedded in smart contracts (Halaburda et al. 2024). As Babich and Hilary (2019) note, new theoretical models need to capture not only the cost-saving benefits of disintermediation but also the potential trade-offs in terms of data insecurity and operational inflexibility. There is also a growing recognition that hybrid frameworks, which merge elements of institutional theory and network governance with emerging blockchain paradigms, may be necessary to understand new organizational forms like DAOs (Zhao et al. 2022). The need for novel theoretical frameworks is particularly critical when considering the impact of blockchain on various stakeholders within the OM ecosystem. Traditional models generally emphasize dyadic relationships between buyers and suppliers, but blockchain enables multi-stakeholder environments in which data transparency, provenance, and auditability permeate complex, global supply networks. For example, Chod et al. (2020) show how blockchain can improve financing in agricultural supply chains by enabling farmers to use harvest inventory as loan collateral. Using multi-signature setups tied to an immutable blockchain, transactions require confirmation from both humans (e.g., lenders or warehouse operators) and automated systems (e.g., IoT sensors). This approach allows for real-time verification of collateral, reduces information asymmetry, and unlocks capital, particularly in settings prone to fraud. Together, the articles in this Special Issue make a multifaceted contribution to OM, demonstrating the impact of blockchain technology in various operational forms on strategic decision-making, worker participation, competitive and network dynamics, and intellectual property protection across different sectors. These studies use robust empirical methods and diverse theoretical frameworks to offer novel insights into the role of blockchain in OM. Some of the studies use qualitative methods for developing theory concerning conditions for successful and failed blockchain adoption. Zhan et al. (2025) develop theory through an inductive, multi-case research design revealing the influence of founder power on blockchain adoption. Meanwhile, Hanisch et al. (2025) use an in-depth, longitudinal case study to explore the centralization–decentralization paradox of a group of studies or designs at the of or a and et al. 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