Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the long-run economic structure and economic policy consequences of wide-spread blockchain adoption. Design/methodology/approach: The approach uses institutional, organisational and evolutionary economic theory to predict consequences of...

Distributed ledger technology emerged in 2009 as the protocol behind bitcoin, a cryptocurrency with origins in the ‘cypherpunk' community who sought to use cryptography to secede from government control of money. Bitcoin's pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto said Bitcoin would be “very...

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...

Investment is a function of expected profit, which involves calculation of the cost of trust. Blockchain technology is a new institutional technology (Davidson et al 2018) that industrialises trust (Berg et al 2018). We therefore expect that the adoption of blockchain technology into the economy...

Identity is an input into economic exchange and contracting. The modern industrial economy has relies on cheap political identity to create trust and lower transaction costs. Market economies, however, have different identity needs than an administrative state. Economic efficiency in a digital...

This paper introduces the V-form organisation, a new form of firm organisation where vertical integration is outsourced to a decentralized distributed ledger (a blockchain). V-form organisations rely on the coordination of a (trusted) third party. It looks specifically at two instances of V-form...

What are the long-run economic and policy consequences of wide-spread blockchain technology adoption? We examine the structural economic effects of this institutional innovation as disintermediation in markets, dehierarchicalisation of organisations, and growing private provision of economic...

What are the long-run economic and policy consequences of wide-spread blockchain technology adoption? We examine the structural economic effects of this institutional innovation as disintermediation in markets, dehierarchicalisation of organisations, and growing private provision of economic...