News and Research articles on Blockchain

The idea of decentralising social media is driven by historical concerns over centralised power structures and the more contemporary issue of content moderation policies.

The article explores the concept Web of Value from the perspectives of different economic theories, demonstrating the competing imaginaries on the future of the internet. ​

There is no one set definition for the phrase “ad hoc networks”. The term refers to the ability for members of a network to establish a network connection between devices. Yet, ad hoc networks pertain to both the technical domain of network infrastructures, the social, political and economic modes of self-organisation they enable, and the regulatory and policy settings that enable them.

Blockchain-based NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are uniquely identifiable digital representations of physical or digital items.

“Permissionlessness” is a term often used in association with public blockchains. This glossary entry explores the origins, evolution, and coexisting uses and meanings of the term “permissionless” to contextualise it.

Protocol has become a common term in a huge variety of technical and societal fields. This entry traces its proliferation from Antiquity to blockchains and points out its organisational properties and powers.

The rapidly evolving blockchain technology space has put decentralisation back into the focus of the design of techno-social systems, and the role of decentralised technological infrastructures in achieving particular social, economic, or political goals. In this entry we address how blockchains and distributed ledgers think about decentralisation.

A DAO is a blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves mediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is decentralised (i.e., independent from central control).

Trust can best be understood as a relational attribute between (1) a social actor and other actor(s) (interpersonal trust) and / or (2) actors and institutions (institutional or systemic trust) and (3) institutions and (trusting) actors (trust as shared expectations), where institutional frameworks define the nature and strength of trust relationships between different actors.

Blockchain governance can be regarded as the integration of norms and culture, the laws and the code, the people and the institutions that facilitate coordination and together determine a given organisation.

Blockchain-based technologies can be understood as a distributed network of computers, ideally organised in a decentralised way, mutually agreeing on a common state while tolerating failures (incl. malicious behaviour) to some extent.

In the context of blockchain networks, mining describes a permissionless process intended to ensure the global consistency of a decentralised ledger. Mining requires the consumption of a costly computational resource to participate in a probabilistic competition that confers specific privileges to a node. These privileges typically relate to the proposal of a new block, including the identity and order of transactions contained within. Mining is incentivised via an algorithmically regulated provision of rewards, usually in the form of newly generated coins and/or transaction fees.

A smart contract is code deployed in a blockchain environment, or the source code from which such code was compiled

Digital Scarcity is a credibly maintained limitation, imposed through software, of digital information, goods or services that may be accessed and used entirely digitally.

Reputation in a blockchain-based system is a digital representation of an entity’s standing or status in a specific domain.