Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editorial Board Members
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Institutionalisation of Digital Assets
- Part II Digital Assets and Decentralised Finance
- Part III Regulations and Compliance of Digital Assets
- 7 Call for a Global Crypto-assets Regulatory Framework
- 8 UK Anti-money Laundering Regulation of Crypto-assets
- 9 Triple-Entry Accounting, Blockchain, and Next of Kin
- Part IV Cryptocurrency Economics and Monetary Policies
- Abbreviations
- Index
- References
9 - Triple-Entry Accounting, Blockchain, and Next of Kin
Towards a Standardisation of Ledger Terminology
from Part III - Regulations and Compliance of Digital Assets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2025
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editorial Board Members
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Institutionalisation of Digital Assets
- Part II Digital Assets and Decentralised Finance
- Part III Regulations and Compliance of Digital Assets
- 7 Call for a Global Crypto-assets Regulatory Framework
- 8 UK Anti-money Laundering Regulation of Crypto-assets
- 9 Triple-Entry Accounting, Blockchain, and Next of Kin
- Part IV Cryptocurrency Economics and Monetary Policies
- Abbreviations
- Index
- References
Summary
Triple entry accounting (TEA) is simultaneously a novel application in the blockchain universe and one of the many concepts applied in blockchain technology. Its Wild Wild West status is accompanied by a lack of consistent and comprehensive set of categories, a state of play that impedes a proper apprehension of the technology, leading to contradictions and oversight of important nuances. To clearly delineate the confines of TEA within the world of blockchain, we provide building blocks to standardise its terminology. Particularly, we distinguish between essential elements such as accounting and bookkeeping, as well as between decentralised systems, distributed ledgers, and distributed journals.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Digital AssetsPricing, Allocation and Regulation, pp. 198 - 226Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
References
Aste, T., Tasca, P., and Di Matteo, T. (2017). Blockchain technologies: The foreseeable impact on society and industry.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Auditchain (2018). Auditchain: Decentralized continuous audit & reporting protocol ecosystem.Google Scholar
Ballandies, M. C., Dapp, M. M., and Pournaras, E. (2018). Decrypting distributed ledger design-taxonomy. Classification and Blockchain Community Evaluation.Google Scholar
Baran, P. (1964). On distributed communications networks. IEEE transactions on Communications Systems, 12(1):1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barett, J., Sheth, S., and Vile, A. (2019). From PoC to production: Implementing an enterprise blockchain solution. Thought Works.Google Scholar
Beinke, J. H., Nguyen, D., and Teuteberg, F. (2018). Towards a business model taxonomy of startups in the finance sector using blockchain.Google Scholar
Boyle, T. (2003c). The argument to abolish double-entry accounting and abolish the assets=liabilities + owner’s equity equation.Google Scholar
Boyle, T. (2003d). File-based commerce (FBC) architecture ver. 0.31 spec. business requirements viewpoint.Google Scholar
Boyle, T. (2003g). Shared transaction repository (STR) . . . a high level software specification.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (2016). On distributed databases and distributed ledgers. Richard Gendal Brown: Thoughts on the Future of Finance, pages 18–23.Google Scholar
Cai, C. W. (2019). Triple-entry accounting with blockchain: How far have we come? Accounting & Finance, 61(1):71–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, J. D. (1960). Early bookkeeping and its development into accounting. Business History Review, 34(4):446–458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faccia, A., Moşteanu, N. R., and Leonardo, L. P. (2020). Blockchain hash, the missing axis of the accounts to settle the triple entry bookkeeping system. In Proceedings of the 2020 12th International Conference on Information Management and Engineering, pages 18–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garay, J. and Kiayias, A. (2020). Sok: A consensus taxonomy in the blockchain era. In Cryptographers’ track at the RSA conference, pages 284–318. Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glaser, F. and Bezzenberger, L. (2015). Beyond cryptocurrencies-a taxonomy of decentralized consensus systems. In 23rd European conference on information systems (ECIS), Münster, Germany.Google Scholar
Grange, E. (2016). Mesh world P2P simulation hypothesis. DelphiTools. Available at www.delphitools.info/DWSH/(25/01/2020).Google Scholar
Grigg, I. (2016). Yup – Todd Boyle’s concept could not work without a server, a quorum or a blockchain. That’s why it’s called triple entry.Google Scholar
Grigg, I. (2017a). Eos-an introduction. White paper. whitepaper database.com/eos-whitepaperGoogle Scholar
Grigg, I. (2017b). Oddly, Yuji called it 3E bookkeeping, we called it 3E accounting, and arguably we should have reversed.Google Scholar
Grigg, I. (2019). It’s tricky – term was coined 20 years ago by Todd Boyle. My paper was 2004 or so. Oddly – paper is “3E accounting” but techniques are really bookkeeping. Yuri Ijiri’s work was originally labelled “triple entry bookkeeping” but is really accounting. . . Confusion abounds. . .Google Scholar
Gröblacher, M. and Mizdraković, V. (2019). Triple-entry bookkeeping: History and benefits of the concept. Digitization and Smart Financial Reporting, page 58.Google Scholar
Haugen, R. and McCarthy, W. E. (2000). Rea, a semantic model for internet supply chain collaboration. In OOPSLA Workshop on Business Object Components: Enterprise Application Integration, OOPSLA.Google Scholar
Hildebrand, G. (2018). The strikingly simple new way to get paid in cryptocurrency. Medium. Available at medium.com/gilded/the-strikinglysimple-new-way-to-get-paid-incryptocurrency-609ecbd8a80a (30/01/2020)Google Scholar
Ibañez, J. I. (2022). Triple-entry accounting with blockchain. In Blockchain Technology: Advances in Research and Applications. Nova, New York.Google Scholar
Ibañez, J. I., Bayer, C. N., Tasca, P., & Xu, J. (2023). REA, Triple-Entry Accounting and Blockchain: Converging Paths to Shared Ledger Systems. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 16(9), 382. https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm16090382Google Scholar
Ibañez, J. I., Bayer, C. N., Tasca, P., and Xu, J. (2021). The efficiency of single truth: Triple-entry accounting. Available at SSRN 3770034.Google Scholar
Ijiri, Y. (1982). Triple-entry bookkeeping and income momentum. American Accounting Association.Google Scholar
Ismail, L., Hameed, H., AlShamsi, M., AlHammadi, M., and AlDhanhani, N. (2019). Towards a blockchain deployment at uae university: Performance evaluation and blockchain taxonomy. In Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Blockchain Technology, pages 30–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labazova, O., Dehling, T., and Sunyaev, A. (2019). From hype to reality: A taxonomy of blockchain applications. In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liu, X. and Yu, T. (2018). An automatic pattern recognition value system with listed banks based on blockchain. In 2018 IEEE 3rd Advanced Information Technology, Electronic and Automation Control Conference (IAEAC).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, W. and Holman, G. (2019). Blockchain and eBusiness. The open-edi distributed business transaction repository. ISO/IEC 15944-21 OeDBTR. E-Invoicing Exchange Summit Singapore 2019.Google Scholar
Mehmood, F., Cheah, I., Golash, R., and Ma, L. (2019). Ledgerium whitepaper, version 2.2.Google Scholar
Mohsin, A. H., Zaidan, A., Zaidan, B., Albahri, O. S., Albahri, A. S., Alsalem, M., and Mohammed, K. (2019). Blockchain authentication of network applications: Taxonomy, classification, capabilities, open challenges, motivations, recommendations and future directions. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 64:41–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Platonova, N. V. (2016). FV Ezersky and the development of accounting thought and practices in Russia. Vestnik NSUEM, (4):160–170.Google Scholar
Pompliano, A. (2019). Funding the future of finance. Off The Chain. pomp.substack.com/p/funding-the-future-of-financeGoogle Scholar
Rauchs, M., Glidden, A., Gordon, B., Pieters, G. C., Recanatini, M., Rostand, F., Vagneur, K., and Zhang, B. Z. (2018). Distributed ledger technology systems: A conceptual framework. Available at SSRN 3230013.Google Scholar
Rukhiran, M. and Netinant, P. (2018). The house bookkeeping conceptual framework for supporting adaptability using three dimensions layering. Advanced Science Letters, 24(7):5234–5238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saia, A. R., Buckleya, J., Fitzgeralda, B., and LeGearb, A. (2021). Taxonomy of centralization in public blockchain systems: A systematic literature review. Information Processing & Management, 58(4).Google Scholar
Sarkintudu, S. M., Ibrahim, H. H., and Abdwahab, A. B. (2018). Taxonomy development of blockchain platforms: Information systems perspectives. In AIP Conference Proceedings, volume 2016, page 020130. AIP Publishing LLC.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schollmeier, R. (2001). A definition of peer-to-peer networking for the classification of peer-to-peer architectures and applications. In Proceedings First International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, pages 101–102. IEEE.Google Scholar
Tasca, P. and Tessone, C. J. (2019). A taxonomy of blockchain technologies: Principles of identification and classification. Ledger 4 (2019). arXiv preprint ArXiv:1708.04872.Google Scholar
Tholen, J., de Vries, D., Daluz, A., Antonovici, C.-C., Van Brug, W., Abelson, R., and Lovell, D. (2019). Is there a role for blockchain in responsible supply chains. In Joint document by the OECD and KPMG. OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum.Google Scholar
van Steen, M. and Tanenbaum, A. S. (2016). A brief introduction to distributed systems. Computing, 98(10):967–1009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vollmer, H. (2003). Bookkeeping, accounting, calculative practice: The sociological suspense of calculation. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 14(3):353–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walsh, C., OReilly, P., Gleasure, R., Feller, J., Li, S., and Cristoforo, J. (2016). New kid on the block: A strategic archetypes approach to understanding the blockchain.Google Scholar
Wild, J. J., Shaw, K. W., and Chiappetta, B. (2011). Fundamental accounting principles.Google Scholar