Blockchain has become a new frontier of venture capitals that has attracted the attention of banks, governments, and other business corporations. The recent blockchain related attempts included legal blockchains by Fadada.com and Microsoft and pork tracking blockchains by Walmart and IBM. Blockchain is poised to become the most exciting invention after the Internet; while the latter connects the world to enable new business models based on online business processes, the former will help resolve the trust issue more efficiently via network computing. In this paper, we give an overview on blockchain research and development as well as introduce the papers in this special issue. We show that while blockchain has enabled Bitcoin, the most successful digital currency, its widespread adoption in finance and other business sectors will lead to many business innovations as well as many research opportunities.

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In the last two decades, Internet technologies, such as cloud computing, mobile communications, social media, and big data analytics, have brought tremendous changes to our society and reshaped the business in various industries. Specifically, the mushrooming innovations in the financial area fertilized by information and communication technologies indicates the advent of the Internet finance era. Applying the exploratory research approach, we investigate major innovative Internet-based financial services and classify them into five categories, as of e-commerce, e-payment, e-money market, online loan services, and digital currencies. Then we propose a market structure of Internet finance extended from the traditional financial market. We claim that credit management is the key issue in the marketplace of Internet finance, characterized by big data analytics, in which cyber credit appears as whole-process, multi-dimensional, and holographic. We further suggest that cyber credit be represented in the form of vector to overcome the limits of traditional single-value measure in cyber credit management. Based on this framework, we raise main research issues in Internet finance from the perspectives of theory, technology, and governance.