Ledgered Trust and Industrial Integrity: Toward a Unified Framework for Blockchain-Enabled Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

This article presents a comprehensive theoretical and conceptual investigation into the integration of blockchain technology with industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS), with a specific emphasis on transactional integrity, concurrency control, and cybersecurity for fintech and core-banking parallels. Drawing strictly on the provided literature, the study synthesizes foundational principles of permissionless and permissioned distributed ledgers (Nakamoto, 2008; Antonopoulos, 2014), conceptual and socio-technical perspectives on blockchain as a new infrastructural paradigm (Swan, 2015; Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016; Iansiti & Lakhani, 2017), software engineering challenges in blockchain-oriented development (Porru et al., 2017), and the established state-of-the-art in industrial cyber-physical architectures and security (Lee et al., 2018; Wu et al., 2020; Qi et al., 2021). The paper situates transaction correctness and concurrency control concerns — traditionally explored in distributed databases and nested-transaction frameworks (Breitbart & Silberschatz, 1988; Du & Elmagarmid, 1989a, 1989b) — within the operational realities and security requirements of blockchain-enabled ICPS, and relates these to contemporary cybersecurity practices in fintech and core banking (Singh, 2025). Methodologically, this is a theoretical synthesis and conceptual framework-building exercise that draws rigorous linkages between the canonical design decisions of blockchain systems and the formal correctness criteria from distributed databases, identifying tensions, compatibilities, and design patterns for ensuring transactional integrity in industrial settings. The findings elucidate how consensus mechanisms, immutability, and smart contract semantics intersect with notions of serializability, quasi-serializability, and nested transaction value-dependencies, and how these interactions affect fault tolerance, recoverability, and regulatory compliance in industrial deployments (Nakamoto, 2008; Breitbart & Silberschatz, 1988; Du & Elmagarmid, 1989a). The discussion highlights practical trade-offs, attack surfaces, and governance arrangements necessary for secure, auditable, and performant ICPS deployments, and proposes a structured research agenda bridging blockchain software engineering, ICPS safety requirements, and database correctness theory. The paper concludes with theoretical prescriptions for architects and policymakers seeking to reconcile blockchains’ novel trust properties with rigorous transactional correctness and cybersecurity obligations in industrial contexts (Iansiti & Lakhani, 2017; Lee et al., 2018; Singh, 2025).