Stewards and Gatekeepers : Human and Technological Agency in the Governance of DeFi Protocols

Decentralized finance (“DeFi”) is a fast-growing, under-explored sector in the cryptocurrency industry. DeFi leverages blockchain technology to facilitate financial transactions between users, as well as create the conditions for new forms of governance. This research focuses on the combination of technical and social processes of DeFi governance, using data collected from the technical documentation and online governance forums of the three largest lending protocols on the Ethereum blockchain: Aave, Compound, and MakerDAO. Through a textual analysis of this data, I describe the technologies and social interactions that constitute these new systems of governance. In doing so, I depict the processes of belief formation that underlie the emergence of shared “authoritative representations” (Jasanoff 2015a) concerning how technology and governance in DeFi functions and how it should function–including the relative roles that humans and technology undertake. I argue that these sociotechnical imaginaries impact the development of the technology and the formation of human and technological agency in DeFi, resulting in the co-production of the technology and social order of this nascent ecosystem. These findings both confirm and extend previous sociological work on sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) and co-production (Jasanoff 2004). By utilizing a co- productionist perspective, I bring social complexity back into the technical systems of DeFi and illustrate the considerable power humans possess in the evolution of the digital world