Adoption Visibility and Equity Market Responses to Blockchain Adoption Announcements

This paper examines stock market reactions to corporate blockchain adoption announcements and explores whether the visibility of such initiatives shapes investor response. While prior research documents strong valuation effects during early phases of technological hype, evidence from more mature stages of diffusion remains limited. Accordingly, this study provides exploratory evidence on investor behavior in a later-stage adoption context. We construct a hand-collected dataset of 51 announcements by publicly traded firms across multiple industries and employ a standard event-study methodology to estimate abnormal returns over short announcement windows, using both market-model and Fama–French factor specifications. Adoption visibility is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct capturing (i) the intensity of communication surrounding the initiative and (ii) whether the application is customer-facing or internally oriented. The results indicate that average abnormal returns around announcement dates are positive but economically modest and statistically insignificant. These findings suggest that blockchain adoption announcements no longer trigger uniform market repricing effects. Instead, investors appear to respond more selectively, potentially differentiating based on the perceived informational content and strategic relevance of the initiatives. Overall, the analysis offers exploratory evidence consistent with a shift in investor response as emerging technologies move beyond hype-driven phases toward more mature stages of diffusion. The results should be interpreted with appropriate caution and motivate further research using larger samples and complementary empirical approaches.