Decentralized Finance (DeFi) represents one of the most prominent manifestations of the Web 3.0 paradigm, combining blockchain infrastructures, smart contracts, and token-based governance to enable new forms of financial intermediation. Despite growing scholarly interest, research on DeFi remains fragmented across technical, financial, and legal domains, limiting a coherent understanding of how Web 3.0–enabled financial systems are positioned within the academic literature, particularly in regulated sectors such as banking. Drawing on a corpus of 290 peer-reviewed articles spanning 2020–2025, this study provides a systematic bibliometric mapping of the DeFi literature, with a focus on governance and intermediation in banking. The analysis integrates performance analysis, science mapping, and machine-learning–based semantic clustering using Sentence-BERT. The results reveal an interdisciplinary research landscape structured around seven major thematic clusters, including decentralized governance models, tokenized financial architectures, regulatory and institutional challenges, and the convergence of DeFi with programmable and data-driven infrastructures. Semantic analysis further identifies emerging research trajectories related to CBDCs, hybrid DeFi–TradFi configurations, and multi-layer DLT architectures. By mapping established themes and underexplored frontiers, the study clarifies how governance and intermediation issues associated with Web 3.0 technologies are addressed in the banking-related DeFi literature, and derives implications for future research, regulatory design, and institutional strategy.
Web 3.0–enabled innovation through DeFi: A bibliometric mapping of governance and intermediation in banking
Carè, R.Conceptualization
;
2026-01-01
Abstract
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) represents one of the most prominent manifestations of the Web 3.0 paradigm, combining blockchain infrastructures, smart contracts, and token-based governance to enable new forms of financial intermediation. Despite growing scholarly interest, research on DeFi remains fragmented across technical, financial, and legal domains, limiting a coherent understanding of how Web 3.0–enabled financial systems are positioned within the academic literature, particularly in regulated sectors such as banking. Drawing on a corpus of 290 peer-reviewed articles spanning 2020–2025, this study provides a systematic bibliometric mapping of the DeFi literature, with a focus on governance and intermediation in banking. The analysis integrates performance analysis, science mapping, and machine-learning–based semantic clustering using Sentence-BERT. The results reveal an interdisciplinary research landscape structured around seven major thematic clusters, including decentralized governance models, tokenized financial architectures, regulatory and institutional challenges, and the convergence of DeFi with programmable and data-driven infrastructures. Semantic analysis further identifies emerging research trajectories related to CBDCs, hybrid DeFi–TradFi configurations, and multi-layer DLT architectures. By mapping established themes and underexplored frontiers, the study clarifies how governance and intermediation issues associated with Web 3.0 technologies are addressed in the banking-related DeFi literature, and derives implications for future research, regulatory design, and institutional strategy.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
