Blockchain technology acts as infrastructure for self-executing smart contracts. Because contracts are incomplete and some parties are opportunistic, these new contracting possibilities have created challenges of dispute resolution. For instance, will smart contracts be recognised, and any...

Critical effects of global climate change urgently call for socio-technical transitions towards more efficient, flexible and cleaner energy systems. However, adequate regulatory frameworks and policy incentives are lagging behind. This paper focuses on the governance dynamics shaping...

Addressing the shortcomings of the Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCMs), a nascent blockchain industry has disrupted this area with an ever-growing number of projects leveraging open-source, decentralised base-layer platforms (i.e. Ethereum, Cosmos) and business-oriented decentralized applications...

The 2020 global pandemic abruptly brought into question many of our social, economic and political institutions. COVID-19 is more than a public health crisis—as economies and states falter there are deep questions about the resilience and robustness of our political and economic systems. Are...

The problem of regulatory accumulation has increasingly been recognized as a policy problem in its own right. Governments have then devised and implemented regulatory reform policies that directly seek to ameliorate the burdens of regulatory accumulation (e.g. red tape reduction targets). In...

Democracy is an economic problem of choice constrained by transaction costs and information costs. Society must choose between competing institutional frameworks for the conduct of voting and elections. These decisions are constrained by the technologies and institutions available. Blockchains...

Blockchain treasuries are pools of collectively owned cryptocurrency earmarked for the purpose of funding ‘local public goods’ (e.g., protocol fixes, research, bridging infrastrastructure). Ecosystem participants face a trust problem in ensuring that the treasury is robust to opportunism...

Special jurisdictions are testbeds for institutional experimentation that require voting mechanisms to make complex and evolving policy decisions. In this paper we explore how blockchain technology—as a new infrastructure for voting rights—might be applied in special jurisdictions. In a...

A cryptocurrency token airdrop is a novel means of distributing rights over a blockchain project to a community of users and owners for free. The market value of these airdrop giveaways is often upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars. This paper considers why projects might choose this...

Blockchains have enabled innovation in distributed economic institutions, such as money (e.g. cryptocurrencies) and markets (e.g. DEXs), but also innovations in distributed governance, such as DAOs, and new forms of collective choice. Yet we still lack a general theory of blockchain governance....