A common narrative of cryptocurrencies presents them as "trustless," decentralized, and autonomous systems. The "trustlessness" is meant to suggest lack of need for third-party verification in blockchain technologies, but the term has been somewhat conflated with broader connotations of "trust."...

The public discourse on blockchains and cryptocurrencies has been influenced by a range of domains, but there is a “leisured” aspect to blockchains that warrants the attention of academics and practitioners, as this aspect serves to enrich the public engagement with this emergent branch of...

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have garnered remarkable investor attention recently, with some NFTs securing selling prices that may have seemed unthinkable for a non-fungible virtual asset. This raises fascinating questions about “value” and “scarcity” with respect to blockchain technology,...

Non-fungible tokens : blockchain, scarcity, and value / Usman W. Chohan -- NFTs and their core technologies / Narmeen Bawany -- A thematic history of NFTs / Usman W. Chohan -- Discoveries from the NFT market / Hong Bao and David Roubaud -- NFT communities as societies of producers / Alesha...

This discussion paper considers the possibilities for bolstering political accountability using blockchain systems, and uses the 2018 Sierra Leonean elections to illustrate the case for enhanced transparency and accountability through the installment of blockchain-based technologies. The...

This discussion paper examines a possible limitation to the advancement of blockchain: the intrinsic tradeoff between scaling to a larger size, and the need to maintain a decentralized and distributed architecture. The scaling vs. decentralization trade-off, the paper argues, may impose a...

This discussion paper considers the role that blockchain-based technologies can play in advancing initiatives pertaining to environmental sustainability, using the case study of IBM's water management blockchain development in California. The paper finds that there is substantial room for...

This discussion paper examines the possibilities of relationships between two seemingly disparate industries, blockchain and the extractive sectors, by considering the potential for blockchain solutions in the mining of high-value diamonds, looking in particular at the supply chain, oversight,...

This discussion paper examines the possibilities of relationships between two seemingly disparate industries, blockchain and the extractive sectors, by considering the potential for blockchain solutions in the mining of Cobalt, a precious metal, looking in particular at the supply chain,...