Each month, the MIT SMR Strategy Forum poses a single question to our panel of experts in the fields of business, economics, and management. This month’s question asks our panel whether, in the next five years, blockchain technology will have a transformative effect on emerging markets in the global economy.

Blockchain represents more than just cryptocurrencies and digital cash. The decentralized ledger system provides a platform for smart contracts, which are digital agreements that are fast, secure, and require no third party.

A study of cryptocurrency markets provides some new insight into why people make the choices they do online. Crypto-currency traders used bots that executed over 100,000 small trades in 217 cryptocurrencies over the course of six months. Analysis reveals that traders are very susceptible to peer influences. The design of the online exchanges also appears to contribute to activity if functionality, graphical user interfaces, or application programming interfaces promote collective excitement.

Blockchain has recently taken center stage in the conversation about management’s digital makeover. Many believe the impact of blockchain on the ways organizations function and produce value may be greater than other technologies that have grabbed most of our recent attention — data and analytics, the cloud, even artificial intelligence.

How blockchain could transform management; the Internet’s effect on innovation hubs; putting data to work with knowledge graphs.