Towards Valid Use Cases: Requirements and Supporting Characteristics of Proper Blockchain Applications

Practitioners from various fields discuss potential applications for Blockchain, often, without a clear understanding which class of use cases qualify for this technology. In this paper, we build a framework for classifying suitable Blockchain use cases. We present requirements (mandatory features of all Blockchain use cases) and supporting characteristics (features which make using Blockchain technology recommendable, if requirements are fulfilled) of possible applications, which we group in the stakeholders and objects “users of the system”, “oracles and information”, “agreement”, and “goods”. We justify our framework by applying it to four use cases from different fields: Proof of Publication, Cryptocurrencies, Lotteries, and Provenance Tracking. Our model can explain why those use cases are a good fit for implementation with Blockchain technology.