Developing Large Scale B2B Blockchain Architectures for Global Trade Lane: Are the design principles derived based on the upscaling of the Internet applicable for upscaling global blockchain-enabled infrastructures?

Blockchain technologies offer new ways of organizing information architectures for information sharing amongst a multitude of agents in complex socio-technical systems. However, transferring the experience gained with blockchain from the crypotocurrency domain to business-to-business (B2B) setting is challenging and some of the blockchain inherent characteristics hamper pilots from scaling up towards a global blockchain-enabled information sharing business-to-business (B2B) architecture. In this paper we derive specific design principles and rules to explicitly address these blockchain scalability issues in a B2B context. To do so we analyse the evolution of the Global Trade Digitization (GTD1) blockchain architecture that is developed to share data in international supply chains all over the world by taking an information infrastructure perspective and by means of the design principles and rules of Hanseth and Lyytinen (2010) which were derived using the case of the Internet. Our longitudinal analysis represents the dynamics in the implementation of the global GTD B2B blockchain-enabled architecture. Building on the design principles of Hanseth and Lyytinen (2010) we position especially that the design principles that address the use of the installed base capabilities to offload the blockchain infrastructure, the reduction of IT capabilities to simplify its technical and social complexity, and the modularization of the blockchain-based information architecture to address separate functionalities of the information sharing process appear to be important aspects to address the scalability issues of blockchain-based applications, also in other B2B domains.