Blockchain and smart contracts in consumer transactions: implications for marketing and finance

Abstract

This paper assesses decentralized consumer transactions using blockchain and smart contracts with consideration to marketing and financial aspects. Security is also increased by using blockchain since it is decentralized, hence minimizing fraud and increasing the level of trust between consumers and other companies. Smart contracts also apply to basic transactions, contract compliance, and a variety of reward systems. To evaluate the efficiencies of the four algorithms, PoW, PBFT, DPoS, and Ethereum Smart Contracts, each algorithm was tested using custom set of consumer transaction data. The results of simple experiments show that the fastPBFT reached the greatest transaction vali- dation speed, 92.4%, then DPoS 89.1%, PoW 72.8% and Ethereum contracts 85.6%. The analysis of efficiency showed that DPoS had the highest efficiency at 90.3% and PoW had the lowest at 48.7 percent. Compared to related work, our framework achieved up to 16% percent improvement in the accuracy of the transactional data and 12% reduction in the time taken to process information. This paper attests that the use of blockchain and smart contracts will revolutionize the efficiency of financial transparency, marketing intricacy, and consumer trust. These insights are useful for implementing blockchain in industries that include the consumer, particularly industries that require high security and performances