Since 2008 blockchain technology has been developed not only for the financial sector, but also for logistics, energy, supply chain, identity certification, health and medical records and other fields.

The most prominent of the many application fields is the financial sector. There, blockchain is applied not only to payments, but also to securities and derivatives, trade finance and crypto-asset finance. Among others, the most important is its effect on the financial system architecture. The innovation by FinTech transforms the financial system from "bank-centric system" to "payment-centric system." This new system will build "digital economic area" based on its own network without being restricted by borders. Even more striking is the announcement of Facebook's Libra publication plan. Libra is a "stable coin" issued by the private sector, which may become "world synthetic currency" supported by reserve assets denominated in different currencies. Libra will promote the digital currency issuance by central banks.

Remaining issues in blockchain technology may include the scalability, the enormous power consumption required for calculations, interoperability between different blockchains and networks, and privacy protection.

Blockchain technology collects huge amount of attention as a new foundation of innovation like the Internet after the Bitcoin paper published in 2008. On the other hand, we need to understand the true nature of Blockchain technology toward innovation because there are many extravagant advertisements for this technology. In this article, explanations on Blockchain technology for right understanding toward a foundation of innovation, issues for wide adoption and solution for the issues are provided.

As an infrastructure layer technology, Blockchain technology could have an impact on a broad range of industries, and we discussed the implication to the human resource industry in this paper. We already see a few cases where Blockchain technology is used for issuing and verifying academic certificates outside of Japan. Active research has been undergoing on decentralized ID and private data management, and there is a possibility as a core technology for trust sharing and management platforms. Despite various challenges the technology faces today, we might see a certain level of disruption in the human resource industry in the near future and would need to continue to watch the evolution of the technology.

The expectation for Blockchain technology has been continued, although its social implementation has not so widely progressing yet. Blockchain is thought as a general-purpose technology, it has been expanded with being subdivided. Art market is expecting especially for the robustness in falsify in characteristics of Blockchain technology. They hope its early implementation in the art market and activation of the market.

Blockchain use cases have been expanded from crypto currency to the area of finance (such as money transfer), and industry (such as supply chain, digital ID, art trade). This article presents these cases abroad, especially by the Japanese startup and aims to show its contribution to the global blockchain development. Hyperledger is one of the platformers in blockchain fields and Soramitsu, a Japanese startup, is a key developer for Hyperledger Iroha, a certified production-ready Hyperledger platform. This Japanese startup develops National Banking System in Cambodia, the Decentralized Digital Depository with Moscow Stock Exchange, and KYC system for BCA, the third largest Indonesian commercial bank.

Although there is no established definition of blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology (DLT), it is generally said that DLT refers to a technology in which a large number of participants share the same ledger while avoiding discrepancies between ledgers and double transfers, etc., and that blockchain technology refers to one of the technologies for the purpose. The blockchain itself is just a tool, and fundamentally, legal problems do not arise in itself.

Therefore, we should analyze business schemes, rights and obligations, application of laws such as civil law and business law for each case.

In this paper, we discuss legal issues relating to smart contract and several tokens under the current Japanese law.

Blockchain technology has been regarded as a developing area in science and technology, which has possibilities causing some changes in social systems. It is also eagerly expected as a technology which gives impact on some issues of SDGs. In spite of remaining many discussions in innovation ecosystem, many applications in management and dealings of variable public values have being developed. After ten years from its proposal, this technology has reached at a stage where it should be discussed on its social acceptability.

This paper explored the factors leading to the success of publicly-funded private R&D projects by analyzing survey data obtained from 506 projects supported by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization). We particularly examined how involvement of both the funded firm and the funding organization in the project affects the project's commercialization performance.

Our analyses showed that the project with higher strategic importance and stronger executive's involvement tended to be successful since it enabled the project to effectively leverage company's internal resources. On the other hand, funding organization's involvement had positive effects on performance only when the company showed low commitment to and weak involvement of the project; it had no or rather negative effect on performance with higher commitment and involvement in the company side.

Our findings suggest that the success or failure of the publicly-funded private R&D is greatly related to the strategic position of the project within the company. This implies that the assessing the company's in-house factors besides potentials of the technologies is important in selecting funding projects, and that the funding organization should find an appropriately way of managin g the project depending on project's strategic position.