Paperless Everything: A Systematic Literature Review for the Design of Blockchain-based Document Management Systems

Digitalization pushes organizations to increasingly rely on digital documents over physical documents. They offer unprecedented scalability and provide the foundation for fully digital processes. Despite their advantages, digital documents also have drawbacks compared to physical documents. Two key drawbacks are ownership transfer and document integrity. Blockchain technology can address these drawbacks. First, blockchain immutability characteristics enable tamper-proofing of digital documents. Second, consensus algorithms solve the “double-spending problem” for the ownership transfer of digital assets.

The technical feasibility of such blockchain-based document management systems has been prototyped in different domains. However, these studies focus on their respective domain only and do not communicate their insights back to the blockchain community. As a result, insights into the design and architecture of blockchain-based document management systems are scattered across domains. Best practices remain inaccessible to the blockchain community at large, impeding the gradual accumulation of knowledge and lasting impact.

This study reports on a systematic literature review of the architectural building blocks and patterns of blockchain-based document management systems. It is based on 1737 initially identified papers, of which 113 papers were analyzed in detail. The findings show that the commonly used architectures are proxy-based (48%) and dApp-based (38%), along with a favor for off-chain storage (68%). It is also shown that only 22% of papers mentioned best practices when it comes to testing and that the majority do not report implementation details. Based on the findings, this study recommends more rigorous justification and documentation of the architectural building blocks. Addressing concerns related to smart contract descriptions, storage, testing, and legal regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation is encouraged, and future research opportunities for the design of blockchain-based document management systems are outlined to achieve impact in practice.