Track: Industry 4.0

Abstract

What are Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies? Can they be used in the banking sector? Is South Africa using them? These are various questions this paper attempts to answer. This paper looks for an in-depth overview of blockchain and cryptocurrency applications over the years, their current trends and challenges, innovations, and how the technology brings value to the finance industry. The paper fills a gap in South Africa by providing more insights into blockchain applications. This paper used research tools to understand the topic better to obtain relevant literature reviews from articles, reviews, conference papers, and journals. One hundred forty-two sources were reviewed, and only 24 were retained and identified as suitable to aid the completion of this paper. These sources varied from 2018 to 2022 and included book chapters, conference papers, reviews, journals and articles. Results revealed that  Blockchain is a way of managing a dataset distributed across a global network of computers with no single point of control. It creates blocks of all records kept as chains on a distributed network. Each block corresponds to coins that people hold (Cryptocurrency). As much as blockchain and cryptocurrencies are technologies that have been used in other countries, South Africa still has a long way to go to fully adopting them. Factors such as education on these technologies and infrastructure readiness are still significant challenges in the country; nevertheless, there is still hope for the country to use those technologies as humans are dynamic continuously