Applications of blockchain solutions have been of great interest to both researchers and entrepreneurs for years. There have been created lists of dozens of examples of potential blockchain applications covering areas such as finance (Ali et al., 2020), public administration (Schulz, 2020), voting (Dunietz, 2018), legal contracts (Governatori, 2018), public documents (Jeong & Ahn, 2021), healthcare (Santos Rutschman, 2018), property access management (Singh et al., 2019), intangible assets (Zeilinger, 2016), energy sector (Wang et al., 2021) or military (Ledra Capital, 2014).
Despite the wide range of potential applications, blockchain-based solutions have found practical use in only a few areas (electronic money systems, distributed virtual machines, and technology layer for blockchain external systems). The purpose of this paper is to identify the technical properties of public blockchain networks in order to substantiate their practical application areas. This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary analysis from the fields of computer science and management science to assess the usefulness and application scope of public blockchain networks in organizations. In this paper, a formal model of a public blockchain network is presented to briefly define its properties. With concise definitions, it is possible to evaluate the extent to which the public blockchain network meets the requirements of management information systems. This paper demonstrates the thesis that, despite the limited practical area of application of public blockchain networks, they provide a sound foundation for blockchain external information systems. Blockchain external information systems take advantage of the immutability, transparency, and distributed control available in public blockchain networks to ensure consistency and control of the data stored in these systems (outside the public blockchain database).