Ontological Foundations for Trust Dynamics: The Case of Central Bank Digital Currency Ecosystems

In recent years, disruptive technologies have advanced at a rapid pace. These new developments have the power to accelerate the production and delivery, improve the quality, and reduce the costs of goods and services, as well as to contribute to individual and collective wellbeing. However, their adoption relies largely on user trust. And trust, due to its dynamic nature, is fragile. Therefore, just as important as to build trust is to maintain it. To build sustainable trust it is fundamental to understand the composition of trust relations and what factors can influence them. To address this issue, in this paper, we provide ontological foundations for trust dynamics. We extend our previous work, the Reference Ontology of Trust (ROT), to clarify and provide a deeper account of some building blocks of trust as well as the many factors that can influence trust relations. We illustrate the working of ROT by applying it to a real case study concerning citizens' trust in central bank digital currency ecosystems, which has been conducted in close collaboration with a national central bank.