🤖 AI Summary
The blockchain community lacks a consistent, systematic definition and conceptual boundary for Triple-Entry Accounting (TEA), leading to interpretive ambiguities and the neglect of critical technical distinctions.
Method: This paper introduces the first TEA terminology standardization framework tailored to blockchain contexts, integrating accounting theory, distributed systems principles, and information science. Through rigorous conceptual analysis and terminological modeling, it constructs a hierarchical, extensible classification skeleton for TEA.
Contribution/Results: The framework explicitly delineates TEA’s conceptual scope relative to conventional double-entry accounting, distributed ledgers, and append-only log systems—establishing precise demarcation criteria and resolving terminological conflations and conceptual contradictions. It thereby fills a foundational theoretical gap in blockchain accounting semantics and provides a reusable, interoperable semantic foundation for protocol design, cross-chain interoperability, and regulatory framework development.
📝 Abstract
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.
