## 6 Discussion
### Opportunities and Challenges  
From the analysis of the trends, focuses, and characteristics in three aspects, we found that blockchain technology in Thailand has a lot of room for development. Opportunities regarding trends arise as the number of blockchain-related works is still small. Recent studies deemed blockchain technology in Thailand as new [23] with a small number of research articles [20]. Even though the numbers are increasing, only 13 research articles, 50 courses, and 54 projects about blockchain technology were identified from 2017 to 2020. One possible reason for these modest numbers is the limited number of people who understand technology and experts who are able to execute the blockchain project implementation. This could be an opportunity for the authorities, event organizers, and educational institutes to increase the number of blockchain courses, especially for blockchain experts and in higher education. Establishing a degree related to blockchain should lead to an opportunity for possible novel research topics on blockchain and blockchain-based projects in Thailand. Opportunities regarding focuses of each aspect arise from directions and gaps in specific domains. As discussed in Section 6.2, blockchain studies in Thailand aimed at different directions with courses and projects. It can be said that the project implementation in Thailand did not utilize domestic studies and missed a chance to tackle the explicit issues that blockchain technology was needed in Thailand. This could be an opportunity for developing blockchain projects that are based on the research findings in Thailand landscape. So, blockchain technology could be applied directly to the local problems and established an originality of blockchain use cases for the blockchain community in Thailand. Domain-specific studies on blockchain in Thailand also have a lot of room for further research. For example, blockchain research on energy trading was not clearly presented [26]; the study of applications of cryptocurrencies in investment risk management was limited [25]; and the research on stakeholders' acceptance and understanding towards blockchain was rarely found [22]. More diverse blockchain research is needed since the domain could affect different data management and design of blockchain. Opportunities regarding characteristics of each aspect are varied. Blockchain studies mostly focused on a framework for blockchain applications, but rarely mentioned concrete instructions for the implementation. Furthermore, some blockchain-centric design and technology implementation frameworks, such as [21], might be too broad to cover the technical details of various types of collected data. As a result, there are opportunities for blockchain research in the technical presentation of articles, such as architecture design, and quantitative performance evaluation for the benefit of actual implementation. For blockchain courses, their main objectives mainly aimed to present the basic idea of blockchain within a short duration. Hence, there is an opportunity for longer courses with more in-depth knowledge. Unlike the studies and courses, opportunities regarding the characteristics of blockchain projects are not very clear. The biggest adopter of blockchain technology across domains in Thailand was banks, which is one reason that blockchain projects in Thailand mostly focused on financial domain. While we believe there is an opportunity for other entities to participate in blockchain projects, the participation could be difficult without sufficient local research works in a domain outside financial and blockchain experts to implement the projects. In spite of the small number of blockchain-related works in Thailand, the existing works were sufficient to display challenges in many aspects as follows:  
1. **Stakeholders**  
Blockchain is considered a new technology, even in the academic sphere. Hence, it was likely that the rejection of the technology could happen from the stakeholders with limited understanding and exposure to blockchain.