Risks and Transaction Costs of Distributed-Ledger Fintech: Boundary Effects and Consequences

Fintech business models based on distributed ledgers – and their smart-contract variants in particular – offer the prospect of democratizing access to faster, anywhere-accessible, lower cost, reliable-and-secure high-quality financial services. In addition to holding great, economically transformative promise, these business models pose new, little-studied risks and transaction costs. However, these risks and transaction costs are not evident during the demonstration and testing phases of development, when adopters and users are drawn from the community of developers themselves, as well as from among non-programmer fintech evangelists. Hence, when the new risks and transaction costs become manifest – as the fintech business models are rolled out across the wider economy – the consequences may also appear to be new and surprising. The present study represents an effort to get ahead of these developments by delineating risks and transaction costs inherent in distributed-ledgerand smart-contracts-based fintech business models. The analysis focuses on code risk and moral-hazard risk, as well as on mixed-economy risks and the unintended consequences of replicating bricks-and-mortar-generation contract forms within the ultra-low transaction-cost environment of fintech.