Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique digital assets stored on a blockchain that can be used to transfer value without relying on traditional payment intermediaries. In this paper, we present a case study of an action research project in which we apply NFTs to raise funds for a children’s hospital. A total of 11 children’s drawings were digitized, and 10 copies of each were offered on the online marketplace OpenSea. From a technical perspective, the solution works reliably as a vehicle for donations, but user adoption was low. Here, we discuss the lessons learned and list 12 advantages and 8 disadvantages/barriers to using NFTs for fundraising based on feedback from 24 digital natives, supplemented by input from non-expert individuals. From a technological perspective, blockchain technology offers promising affordances for nonprofit organizations. However, important problems must be solved to gain widespread adoption, most notably usability and legal clarification.

Blockchain is frequently proposed as a solution to tenure insecurity, administrative inefficiencies, and corruption, where conventional land reforms have fallen short. However, evidence of its institutional effectiveness remains limited. Drawing on Williamsonian transaction cost economics and an analytical autoethnographic research design, we undertake a comparative analysis of blockchain’s ability to curb opportunism and safeguard the interests of land-transacting parties relative to Ghana’s customary and statutory land-governance structures. Our findings show that while blockchain performs well at some ex ante safeguards, it offers no clear advantage over existing governance structures at the ex post stage. Of the seven identified forms of post-transaction opportunism that buyers often face, blockchain was superior only in minimising hold-up risks. We conclude with implications for policymakers and technologists considering blockchain adoption.

Blockchain technology has gained immense popularity in enhancing the security and privacy of Information Systems (IS), reflected in exponential increases in published research articles. The rapid proliferation of published research presents significant challenges for manual analysis and synthesis due to the vast volume of information. To this end, we adopted the Computational Literature Review (CLR) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling techniques to analyze the impact of the pertinent literature. This study is among the first studies in the IS field to apply the CLR technique in the Legal-Tech context, focusing on security, privacy, and governance in blockchain systems. Using CLR and LDA topic modeling, we identified 10 topics related to security and privacy, each accompanied by an in-depth description aligned with relevant policies and regulations. Our findings identify both the strengths and current gaps in the literature, providing valuable insights into ongoing scholarly discourse. Through our analysis, we outline future research directions that align with the evolving dynamics of blockchain technology, data management, and policy implications, aiming to guide further academic and practical advancements in the IS field.

The blockchain economics literature often models consensus participants as anonymous, interchangeable agents operating without institutional context. This paper argues that this ‘permissionless’ assumption describes open admission but abstracts from governance over rule change. Once governance is restored, mutable blockchain systems face a standard commitment problem: rule-changing coalitions may revise protocol rules after participants make chain-specific investments. The paper develops this claim through a comparative-institutional analysis of eight public blockchain systems and two illustrative cases: the BTC Core governance episode and the Ethereum DAO intervention. TCP/IP provides the institutional comparator: technical systems can evolve extensively while preserving base-layer semantic fixedness. Once governance is included, blockchain security is constrained not only by consensus costs but also by institutional commitment conditions: base-layer fixedness, coalition concentration, coordination thresholds, and identity-linked accountability.

We introduce the concept of arbitrable stochastic games, which appears to be new. To do so, we consider a reward criterion different from the standard gamma-weighted criterion. This allows us to define the fair price to play a non-competitive stochastic game. We then illustrate the concept through three variations of the classical coin-toss game with chips, providing proofs via Doob’s theorem for supermartingales and practical algorithms. These examples deepen our understanding of the Bitcoin protocol.

The expanding application of financial technologies, as well as growing participation of consumer investors, has multiplied the forms and functions of finance, deepening its entanglement with social, political, and cultural processes. This interview responds to increasing interest within the journal’s community in the evolving intersections of finance, technology, and society. The conversation foregrounds the role of fintech – understood both narrowly as communication infrastructures and broadly as socio-technical environments – in reconfiguring these relationships. Also, by situating finance as an interdisciplinary pivot, the interview further highlights emerging research frontiers, including blockchain, venture capital, and the crypto economy, while also reflecting on the methodological challenges and academic struggles that accompany their study. Taken together, the discussion points toward an evolving research agenda across various relevant fields.

Cryptoassets, while viewed by many as a significant innovation in the banking and investment industry, present exigent risks to investors, markets and possibly the financial system itself. Can these risks be managed appropriately using securities regulation? This article argues that securities regulation is appropriate to regulate a popular kind of cryptoasset, utility tokens, given the similarities between utility token risks and those found in traditional securities markets. This analysis begins to point to a consistent global regulatory response to cryptoasset regulation and has implications for future cryptoassets and financial innovation more generally.

Distributed ledgers, including blockchain and other decentralized databases, are designed to store information online where all trusted network members can update the data with transparency. The dynamics of a ledger’s development can be mathematically represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). In this paper, we study a DAG model that considers batch arrivals and random delay of attachment. We analyze the asymptotic behavior of this model by letting the arrival rate go to infinity and the inter-arrival time go to zero. We establish that the number of leaves in the DAG, as well as various random variables characterizing the vertices in the DAG, can be approximated by its fluid limit, represented as the solution to a set of delayed partial differential equations. Furthermore, we establish the stable state of this fluid limit and validate our findings through simulations.

Medieval lex mercatoria refers to the customary commercial law developed by merchants to govern cross-border trade, operating alongside and sometimes independently of territorial legal systems. This paper compares that historical form of autonomous ordering with contemporary blockchain governance. Both create institutional frameworks that facilitate exchange among diverse actors and provide mechanisms that function, to varying degrees, outside traditional state authority. The key difference lies in how rules are generated and enforced: medieval merchant law relied on flexible norms interpreted by merchant courts and other human adjudicators, whereas blockchain systems seek to reduce ambiguity by encoding rules ex ante in smart contracts and automating enforcement. Decentralized decision-making and emerging forms of on-chain adjudication further reimagine dispute resolution without centralized judicial power. The central claim is that both represent polycentric legal orders whose significance ultimately depends on how they interact with, complement, or challenge formal governmental institutions.

This Practitioner's Note considers the disruptive function of Little Phil, a mobile app that seeks to democratize philanthropic giving. Although many of the cultural aspects of philanthropy – such as increased control over donation, tracking the impact of one's giving, and building interpersonal relationships with receivers – can be opened to any person with an app-hosting device and internet access, it cannot supplant the role of big philanthropy and solve Rob Reich's problem: how to domesticate private wealth so that it serves democratic purposes… Little Phil's disruption has in concept gotten us halfway to legitimizing philanthropy. Perhaps the uptake of citizens’ panels by large philanthropic foundations will cover the remaining distance.

In this article, I place the blockchain within competing interpretations of the present as either an emerging technofeudal mode of production, or as a relatively unchanged capitalism. Drawing on a wide literature on zones – spaces in nation-states where the usual rules do not apply – I highlight three reconfigurations of territory, authority, and rights (TAR) associated with the blockchain today. These are: (1) the transnational expansion of crypto-related practices; (2) the national regulation and legitimation of cryptoassets; and (3) the reemergence of a liberal discourse linking human rights to the global exchange of private property. Through these examples, I demonstrate how the blockchain is part of a broader reshaping of accumulation and legal legitimation, mirroring the emergence of capitalism and the nation-state, but on a global scale. I conclude by arguing against the position that the reemergence of fascism is a red herring distracting us from the coming technofeudalism; instead, I claim that technofeudalism obscures the links between today’s techno-authoritarian shift and the enforcement of global corporate private property relations.

Blockchain technology has attracted attention from public sector agencies, mainly for its perceived potential to improve transparency, data integrity, and administrative processes. However, its concrete value and applicability within government settings remain contested, and real-world adoption has been limited and uneven. This raises questions regarding the conditions that promote or impede adoption at the institutional level. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is employed in this research to explore how the combined effects of national-level regulatory clarity, financial provision, digital readiness, and ecosystem engagement shape patterns of blockchain adoption in the European public sector. Rather than identifying any single factor as decisive, our findings reveal a plurality of institutional paths leading to high adoption intensity, with regulatory certainty and European Union funding appearing most frequently on high-consistency paths. In contrast, digital readiness indicators and national research and development budgets are substitutable, challenging resource-based perceptions of technology adoption and supporting a configurational understanding that accounts for institutional interdependence and contextuality. We argue that policy strategies cannot look for overall readiness but should place key institutional strengths relative to local conditions and public value objectives.