Blockchain-enabled markets: a literature review with a focus on decentralised energy markets

More and more industries are being disrupted by the creation of electronic market platforms, which allow individual users to not only act as consumers, but to take a more active role as producers of goods or providers of services as well. Many of these marketplaces are enabled by digital platforms, which aggregate and manage supply and demand. Blockchain technology makes it possible to take this development one step further and to remove the central intermediary, thus enabling direct peer-to-peer trading. One particularly prominent use case for blockchain-based peer-to-peer trading is a market for distributed energy resources (DER). While DER are a potential solution for meeting future electricity demand, their integration into centralised power markets on the large scale is challenging. This chapter first investigates whether blockchain-enabled markets create an added benefit compared to centrally mediated platforms from a general perspective. To that end, we derive a research framework and conduct a theoretical literature review of the existing information systems literature on blockchain-enabled markets. Hence, we generate a structured overview of the characteristics of blockchain-enabled markets through an economic lens. In a second step, we discuss specifics of the energy domain in this context. Our findings identify challenges which blockchain systems need to overcome in general to provide an added value to electronic markets, and discuss domain-specific aspects for peer-to-peer energy trading.