Blockchain at the Convergence of Digital Marketing, Decision Support Systems, and Decentralized Finance

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies have moved well beyond their original cryptocurrency context to reshape how organizations engage customers, support managerial decisions, and structure financial services. Three streams in particular have matured rapidly yet remain largely siloed in the literature. In digital marketing, tokenization, NFTs, and on-chain identity are redefining loyalty, attribution, and consumer–brand relationships. In decision support systems, immutable on-chain data, oracles, and the integration of blockchain with AI and IoT are creating new evidentiary bases for managerial and operational analytics. In decentralized finance, programmable smart contracts now intermediate lending, market-making, asset management, and governance at scale. Despite obvious complementarities, cross-disciplinary frameworks linking these domains are still scarce.

This Research Topic seeks to consolidate emerging knowledge at the convergence of blockchain-enabled digital marketing, blockchain-supported decision systems, and DeFi. The central problem is fragmentation: marketing scholars, IS researchers, and finance researchers each address blockchain through their own lenses, producing parallel insights that rarely inform one another. We aim to assemble contributions that bridge these conversations. For instance, work showing how DeFi-style mechanisms can power loyalty economies, how on-chain consumer data can feed DSS for real-time strategic decisions, or how marketing analytics can mitigate risk and improve user experience in DeFi protocols. The collection will support both theory development (e.g., trust, value co-creation, governance under decentralization) and applied research (e.g., tokenomics design, oracle-fed DSS architectures, regulatory and ESG implications). Our goal is a coherent reference point for scholars and practitioners working at this intersection, with clear implications for managerial practice, platform design, and policy.

We welcome conceptual, empirical, design-science, and case-based contributions on themes including, but not limited to:
- token-based marketing;
- NFT-driven loyalty and community building;
- on-chain consumer behavior and attribution;
- blockchain-augmented DSS, oracle and IoT data pipelines;
- AI–blockchain integration for managerial decisions;
- DeFi protocol design;
- risk and liquidity management;
- decentralized governance (DAOs);
- stablecoins;
- on-chain credit;
- cross-disciplinary issues such as privacy, regulation, ethics, sustainability, and adoption.

Methodological diversity is encouraged, including econometric analyses, smart-contract experiments, agent-based simulation, design-science prototypes, qualitative case studies, and systematic reviews. Suitable article types include Original Research, Review, Mini Review, Hypothesis and Theory, Perspective, Methods, Policy and Practice Reviews, and Technology and Code.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: blockchain economics, blockchain applications, governance, finance, AI/IoT integration, trust, privacy

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.