Blockchain as a Strategy for Enhancing Transparency and Trust in Digital Business

Digital business depends on transactions between parties who rarely meet, across platforms, firms and borders, so the capacity to see what has happened in a transaction and to rely on the parties behind it becomes a strategic resource. This paper examines blockchain technology as a strategy for enhancing transparency and trust in digital business, treating the two outcomes as distinct constructs rather than as synonyms. Transparency is understood here as the visibility, accessibility and integrity of records about products, transactions and obligations, while trust is understood as a willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on expectations of ability, benevolence and integrity. Drawing on a systematic review of the peer reviewed literature and on conceptual framework building, the paper analyzes four affordances of blockchain systems, namely immutability of records, provenance tracking, smart contract execution and disintermediation, and sets them against five structural limits, namely the oracle problem, the persistence of inaccurate input data, scalability and energy constraints, and unresolved questions of governance. Evidence from four application domains, covering supply chains, finance, certification and digital platforms, shows that documented value concentrates in multi party settings where records are shared, disputed or audit intensive, and that failures such as the TradeLens discontinuation trace back to governance and adoption problems rather than to cryptographic weaknesses. The paper therefore proposes a decision framework that tests whether a use case involves multiple writers, an absent or costly trusted intermediary, a need for a shared and tamper evident history, and data that can be verified at the point of entry, before blockchain is preferred over a conventional database. The Indonesian context shows why adoption strategy must separate the trading of crypto assets from enterprise blockchain deployment, which faces barriers of skills, infrastructure, legal fit and organizational readiness rather than prohibition.