Rethinking Finance for a Circular Future: Speaking at the Austrian Blockchain Conference
- schranzraphael205
- Jun 20
- 4 min read
What happens when cutting-edge blockchain technology meets circular economy principles?
At the Austrian Blockchain Conference, I had the opportunity to showcase how decentralized technologies like blockchain are unlocking the future of zero-waste, service-based business models. As a Certified Circular Economy Specialist and Blockchain Investor with multiple years of experience, I emphasized that blockchain isn't just reshaping digital finance—it’s also becoming a critical enabler of circular business models and resilient supply chains designed to thrive in a world of limited resources.
Outdated financial rails are holding back the Circular Economy
Our current financial infrastructure is fundamentally not designed for circularity. It is:
Slow: International transactions often take 1-5 days to settle.
Costly: Transactions often involve multiple intermediaries, each adding fees—driving up costs per transaction.
Error-Prone: Reconciliation errors and settlement mismatches plague even simple transactions.
Centralized: Power is concentrated in a few institutions, creating single points of failure - technical, regulatory, or geopolitical.
Opaque: A lack of transparency leads to friction in global value chains.
In this environment, small circular businesses, which often rely on flexible, service-based models and real-time asset usage data, struggle to scale. This rigidity of the financial system creates friction exactly where circular models demand agility.
Advantages of Blockchain in financial transactions
Blockchain technology offers a fundamentally new financial infrastructure - one that aligns seamlessly with the demands of a circular economy.
Here’s why:
Real-Time Payments: Transactions settle within seconds or minutes, enabling dynamic financial models like real-time micropayment streaming, a key mechanism for circular business models and supply chains based on product as a service models.
Low-Cost: Without intermediaries, fees are drastically reduced - empowering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Trustless Systems: Smart contracts remove the need for middlemen and manual reconciliation, boosting both reliability and transaction speed.
Decentralization: This decentralized structure builds inherent resilience into the financial system and reduces single points of failure risks.
Programmability: Financial flows can be tied directly to product lifecycles, usage data, or maintenance schedules, enabling the onboarding of circular design choices.
Tokenization: Blockchain allows physical assets—or their economic rights—to be represented as digital tokens, enabling traceability, programmability, and fractional ownership.
Enabling Circularity through Blockchain
In my talk, I demonstrated how DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) enables new forms of value exchange that align with the principles of a circular economy.
Tokenized Product-as-a-Service models: In a tokenized Product-as-a-Service model, the product is represented by a digital token on a blockchain. This token can then be traded, tracked, and programmed—unlocking entirely new ways to manage product ownership and usage.
In a circular business model, ownership of the product doesn't remain fixed. Instead, it shifts between the provider and the user throughout the product's lifecycle. This creates two powerful loops:
An ownership loop, where control of the product circulates.
An invisible liability loop, which activates at key moments—like the start of use (point of sale) and end of use—ensuring responsibility is clearly defined.
With blockchain, users don't need to pay upfront for a product. Instead, they pay based on the product's performance or usage (e.g., hours of light, kilometers traveled). These payments are made in real time using tokens on a decentralized ledger (DLT) network.
By tying streamed payments directly to usage, blockchain ensures transparent, efficient, and fair value exchange across the entire circular value chain.
Circular Design Choices: Designing products for longevity, modularity, and repairability allows businesses to retain ownership of physical assets while monetizing them through usage-based microtransactions. These payments are securely processed and recorded on the blockchain, enabling transparent and scalable Product-as-a-Service models.
Circular Supply Chains: With blockchain, materials and components moving through global supply chains can be tracked, authenticated, and exchanged in real time. This capability supports reverse logistics and makes it easier to implement take-back programs, repair networks, and refurbishment processes—all critical for a truly circular economy.
Final Thoughts
We are at the tipping point where technological innovation meets ecological necessity. The traditional financial system is too rigid to support the fluid, service-based, resource-conscious business models that the circular economy demands.
Blockchain offers an agile, cheap, fast and resilient alternative - one that empowers a new generation of businesses to design out waste, retain value, and regenerate resources.
I was proud to share these insights at the Austrian Blockchain Conference, and I look forward to continuing this conversation with innovators who are as passionate as I am about building a truly circular, inclusive, and decentralized future.
💡 Are you ready to move from sustainability talk to circular impact? Let’s connect and take the next step toward real change—together.
📩 Visit the website: www.ceconomyc.com
📅 Book a free consultation: www.calendly.com/raphaelschranz
Raphael Schranz is a certified Circular Economy Specialist and Blockchain investor with nearly a decade of practical experience in the field of sustainability. He has multiple years of practical experience as a waste management and reverse logistics expert, where he provided advice and action plans on waste management (collection, prevention, disposal) and environmental protection to communities, households, businesses, educational institutions, and organizations. Following this, he founded his own company, where he now collaborates with clients worldwide to assist them in transitioning to circular value loops and towards a global circular economy. He has worked on the Circular Economy Complexity Analysis for the Green Deal. He serves as the Chief Circular Economist at the AGR Project, the world's largest nature-based climate solution. He holds the esteemed position as Senator in the Senate of Economy Austria and is a former Ambassador and Board member of the European Technology Chamber. Moreover, he is a member of the Circular Economy Forum Austria and the African Circular Economy Network (ACEN).
Contact Details
Raphael Schranz
Telefon: +43 676 9222527
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