Blockchain Technology Adoption in Trade Finance: Implications for Cross-Border Transaction Efficiency and Trust Among Emerging Market Enterprises

Cross-border trade finance remains one of the most friction-intensive domains of international commerce, characterized by documentary redundancies, prolonged settlement cycles, and persistent trust deficits among counterparties operating across heterogeneous legal and institutional environments. Blockchain technology, with its properties of immutability, distributed consensus, and programmable smart contracts, has been widely proposed as a structural solution to these inefficiencies. Yet rigorous empirical evidence on whether and how blockchain adoption translates into measurable efficiency and trust gains for enterprises in emerging markets remains limited. This study employs a longitudinal panel design spanning 36 months to examine blockchain adoption outcomes among 284 export-oriented enterprises in South Africa, India, and Taiwan. Difference-in-differences estimation with firm fixed effects is used to isolate the causal effect of blockchain platform adoption on three outcomes: trade document processing time, letter of credit discrepancy rates, and inter-firm trust scores. Results indicate that blockchain adoption reduces average document processing time by 61.4% (p < 0.001), letter of credit discrepancy rates by 44.2% (p < 0.001), and significantly improves inter-firm trust scores (Cohen's d = 0.79). Interoperability constraints, legacy system integration costs, and regulatory uncertainty are identified as primary barriers to scaling adoption. The study contributes to the nascent empirical literature on blockchain in trade finance and offers actionable recommendations for enterprises, financial intermediaries, and trade facilitation bodies.