Blockchain for Next-Generation Digital Platforms: A Systematic Review of Decentralized Trust, Interoperability, and Governance

Blockchain technology is expanding beyond cryptocurrency into broader digital platform infrastructure. Existing scholarship remains highly fragmented: trust, interoperability, and governance occupy separate disciplinary traditions, with little integrative analysis across dimensions. This paper systematically reviews blockchain research in these three areas, identifies core findings, theoretical disagreements, and knowledge gaps, and proposes an integrative analytical framework for blockchain applications in next-generation digital platforms. Following PRISMA guidelines, we searched six academic databases and included 137 peer-reviewed studies after screening. In the trust dimension, blockchain relocates the basis of trust from credible institutions to verifiable protocols, yet it does not eliminate the need for trust itself. Algorithmic trust and institutional trust are complementary rather than substitutable. In the interoperability dimension, cross-chain solutions have diversified considerably, but governance arrangements lag substantially behind technical progress, and standardization trajectories differ systematically between Europe and the United States. In the governance dimension, on-chain governance practices such as DAOs expose structural contradictions between participation failure and power concentration. Effective governance requires co-designing on-chain mechanisms with off-chain norms. All three dimensions are mutually dependent in practice. Blockchain platform success depends on their coordinated configuration rather than the optimization of any single dimension. This paper proposes five priority research directions: multi-level trust modeling, interoperability governance, comparative institutional analysis, hybrid platform architecture, and cross-study measurement framework development. Governance arrangements must also address mounting regulatory compliance requirements, including securities regulation, data protection, and anti-money laundering obligations, which vary substantially across jurisdictions. The emergence of re-intermediation—where influential validators, platform operators, and consortium coordinators assume coordination roles—poses fundamental questions about the substantive decentralization of blockchain governance.