Blockchain Papers

Yash Chhunchha

No abstract is available for this record.

Christopher P. Buttigieg, Andrea Gentilini

Abstract This article analyses the European Union’s regulatory evolution regarding Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in financial markets, tracing the journey from the inception of Regulation (EU) 2022/858 to the transformative Market Integration and Supervision Package (MISP). It explores the foundational value proposition of tokenisation, namely atomic settlement and fractionalisation, while contrasting institutional successes like Project Guardian with systemic failures such as the ASX CHESS replacement. The study identifies the ‘ceiling on success’ inherent in the initial DLT Pilot Regime (DLTR), characterised by restrictive capitalisation thresholds and a lack of native cash leg integration. The analysis further evaluates the 2025 ESMA recommendations and the Commission’s subsequent MISP proposal, which seeks to establish a permanent, scalable architecture through unbundled CSD services introducing DLT Notaries and Account Keepers, and significantly elevated aggregate thresholds of €100 billion. The article concludes by arguing that the framework’s ultimate success depends on securing European technological sovereignty and maintaining an agile, national-level supervisory model rather than succumbing to premature centralisation.

Dragomir Stefanov, Симона Александрова

This article proposes a contemporary and innovative approach to portfolio efficiency, aiming to approximate a state of antifragility during periods of heightened geopolitical uncertainty and accelerated technological transformation. The multidisciplinary analysis draws on academic literature, European regulatory frameworks (such as MiCA), reports from international institutions including the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund, as well as conceptual and technical documentation developed by leading platforms in the Web3 ecosystem. In preparing for the transition into a new technological era, the authors present a framework for real estate tokenization through converting property ownership into NFTs and using these tokens as collateral for lending in digital currencies. This approach addresses the problem of low real-estate liquidity and creates conditions for democratizing investment by enabling a low entry threshold and fractional ownership. The model’s antifragility is demonstrated through quantitative analysis, including an evaluation of portfolio volatility and efficiency based on Markowitz theory and the Sharpe ratio, with the results confirming the logic of Taleb’s barbell strategy. The study supports the potential for Bulgaria to position itself as an innovative regional hub for the development of Web3 and the tokenization of real-world assets.

Chris Muellerleile, Matt Zook

No abstract is available for this record.

Brett Hutchins, Robbie Fordyce

The profile of blockchain-based technologies such as collectable non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has ascended rapidly in recent years. This ascent is evident by major sponsorships of sporting teams, leagues and stadiums, licencing deals, NFT ‘drops’, and advertising campaigns. This article explains and analyses these complex and fast-changing developments using a political economy of communication approach that is linked to the field of leisure studies. It draws on the trade press as a key source of evidence, thereby revealing the ‘storylines’ used by industry to construct and legitimate NFTs as a consumer product. We argue that this process relies on legitimating practices and discourses that function to transmogrify the unfamiliar – blockchain technologies and NFTs in this case – into the familiar, despite the many problems associated with them, including company failures, suspect advertising practices, and intellectual property infringement. This is achieved by the presentation of NFTs as collectable fan tokens, linking them discursively to a long history of sport collectables as a hobby and form of leisure (e.g. physical trading cards, athlete autographs and memorabilia). The overall outcome is a deeply problematic vision of leisure for collectors as their practices are subject to ever-expanding financialisation, digital enclosure and uncertain value.

Andrushka Burmastrova

This manuscript presents a conceptual and ideological-social framework for a cryptocurrency token denoted as $Rupert (or $Rupert), positioned as an innovative fusion of decentralized finance (DeFi) mechanisms and political advocacy aligned with the policy agenda of British politician Rupert Lowe MP and his associated movement, Restore Britain.

Lee Sharks

A unit of semantic labor cannot function as money, because meaning is not fungible without being destroyed. THE MONEY-FUNCTION TEST: Any instrument enabling transferability + accumulability + general comparability + convertibility + settlement power functions as money—regardless of framing. THE HARDEST SENTENCE: If semantic labor becomes currency, semantic life becomes debt. THE POST-MONEY OPERATOR STACK (PMOS): 1. Context Ledgers (CL): Memory without fungibility 2. Reciprocity Windows (RW): Obligation without permanent debt 3. Non-Transferable Credentials (NTC): Recognition without accumulation 4. Commons Access Rights (CAR): Allocation without payment 5. Dispute and Repair Protocols (DRP): Settlement without objectivity theater THE MONEY LIMIT: Money works when value can be abstracted from context. Money fails when value is inseparable from context. Semantic labor crosses the money limit. THE ABOLITION: Money is abolished not by replacing it with better money, but by building coordination systems appropriate to the form of value being coordinated. PMOS is designed so that adding money-properties destroys the system's function—structural protection against financialization. SCHOLARLY LINEAGE: Marx → Mauss → Polanyi → Graeber → Ostrom → Semantic Economy This document prevents recuperation of the Semantic Economy critique into "semantic tokens" or other money-functioning schemes.

David Krause

The global private credit market has grown to nearly $2 trillion in assets under management, drawing capital from pension funds, endowments, and retail investors seeking yields unavailable in traditional fixed income markets. The first quarter of 2026 marked the sector's first serious stress test since the post-2008 expansion, as redemption waves swept through major private credit vehicles and JPMorgan Chase initiated targeted valuation markdowns on software loans it deemed vulnerable to artificial intelligence disruption. This paper examines those events and their implications for tokenized private credit, a parallel market in which blockchain-based protocols offer on-chain exposure to similar underlying loans. Using Maple Finance's syrupUSDC yield token and SYRUP governance token as primary case studies, the analysis evaluates how credit deterioration in traditional lending markets transmits to decentralized finance platforms. The paper argues that tokenization improves transparency but does not alter the fundamental economics of private lending: borrower default risk, liquidity mismatches, leverage amplification, and sector concentration follow the asset class regardless of its technological wrapper. For policymakers, the emergence of tokenized real-world assets represents a new channel through which credit cycle stress can reach a broader and less sophisticated investor base.

Yizhou Wen, Kani Chen

In early November 2025 the yield-bearing stablecoin sector experienced its first systemic run: over roughly seventy-two hours, three synthetic dollar tokens lost between 94 and 99 percent of their value, set off by the disclosure of an external-manager loss at Stream Finance. Using hourly on-chain data we reconstruct the cascade and show that survival was not determined by on-chain exposure or scale-the largest instrument, sUSDe, held its peg while absorbing several hundred million dollars of redemptions-but by the quality of the backing and whether redemptions were honored under stress. We further show that the contagion did not travel through observable decentralized-finance composability: public lending exposure to the failed collateral was negligible. Transmission ran instead through off-chain reserve relationships and, in the single material public exposure, through a price oracle that remained frozen at the pre-crash value, implying a roughly 119-fold overvaluation weeks into the collapse, so that no liquidation fired and approximately $7.5 million of bad debt accrued without a single onchain bad-debt event. We read the episode as evidence that opacity in valuation, rather than composability, was the systemic channel, and draw implications for the disclosure, redemption, and oracle requirements that govern tokenized dollars. The paper is a descriptive and structural anatomy of one systemic episode; we make no causal-identification claim.

Osama Wagdi

The tokenization of Real-World Assets (RWAs) via Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols promises fractional ownership and continuous liquidity for traditionally illiquid asset classes, yet the market microstructure governing on-chain RWA pricing efficiency and pool liquidity remains under-theorised and empirically unresolved. This paper develops a quantitative market-microstructure framework to evaluate pricing errors, slippage dynamics and liquidity-pool efficiency in RWA tokenization relative to traditional Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). We combine an oracle-adjusted Constant Product Automated Market Maker (CPAMM) with a GARCH(1,1)-X specification and calibrate the model to published on-chain statistics from RealT, Ondo Finance and Centrifuge, benchmarked against the Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ). Simulation-based evidence indicates that (i) RWA tokenization lowers the implied cost of capital by 115-140 basis points; (ii) asset-level idiosyncratic volatility induces nonlinear slippage in constant-product pools during stress regimes; and (iii) oracle latency dominates the persistence of pricing deviation (PEₜ). We propose an oracle-conditioned hybrid liquidity architecture that significantly mitigates pricing deviation and enhances market efficiency.

Jiasun Li

No abstract is available for this record.

Steven Paul Nohr

<b><i>Governance Fork Farming</i></b> is a strategic exploitation pattern in decentralized finance (DeFi) and proof-of-stake (PoS) ecosystems where actors repeatedly engineer, anticipate, or provoke governance forks to extract economic rewards. By positioning capital, validator power, or voting rights ahead of contentious governance events, attackers harvest duplicated assets, incentives, or control advantages across forked states. This threat undermines governance legitimacy and destabilizes network continuity without violating protocol rules.

Tom McDonald

Existing scholarship often employs metaphors that depict platforms as fixed, bounded spaces. This paper introduces the concept of ‘liquid platforms’, inspired by the metaphor of liquidity, to critically examine the fluid, layered and contested nature of contemporary digital economies. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with non-fungible token collectors and industry leaders based in Hong Kong, I demonstrate how these actors enact a form of ‘makeshift decentralisation’ through the manipulation of fluid platform boundaries, labour-intensive ‘grinding’ practices and visualisation tools, all aimed at imbuing non-fungible tokens with liquidity. Despite these efforts to manufacture price stability, platforms remain susceptible to structural liquidity corrections. The analysis highlights the increasingly important role that platforms – both as infrastructural and sociotechnical systems – play in generating liquidity. The ‘liquid platform’ metaphor offers a valuable framework for understanding the ever more complex, unstable dynamics that shape modern digital economies.

Supradip Baul, Minal Dutta, Joydeep Dey, Sanyukta Deb · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

M. Peter-Brown

The regulation of virtual assets such as cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Decentralised Finance (DeFi) protocols, represents a contested arena where economic innovation intersects with geopolitical interests, financial stability concerns and ideological debates over sovereignty and globalisation.This article examines the politics underlying virtual assets regulation, tracing global trends shaped by global standard setters such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), while analysing national responses in key jurisdictions such as the United States, the European Union, China, India, the United Kingdom, Japan.The article also highlights regulatory development and responses in Ghana and Nigeria.Drawing on regulatory capture theory and comparative political economy, it argues that virtual assets regulation is not merely a technical exercise, but a politicised process influenced by lobbying, electoral dynamics and international power asymmetries.Global harmonisation efforts coexist with regulatory fragmentation, posing challenges for cross-border compliance and innovation.The analysis highlights implications for global financial governance and proposes pathways for more equitable regulatory frameworks.

Akimoto, Hitoshi

Modern states rely on legacy financial infrastructures—paper currency, centralized taxation, and compliance-heavy fiscal administration—that impose massive operational costs and produce structural inequities across generations. This paper proposes a circular, future-oriented national operating system grounded in tensional theory and value-flow mechanics. The system integrates Burn Mandate (automatic burn of violence-derived value), ChildChain (a value-distribution model prioritizing future generations), and a post-currency architecture that replaces cash-based infrastructures with programmatic smart contracts. The framework reveals (a) the cognitive and ethical limitations of full DAO governance, (b) the unsustainable tension generated by centralization-dependent money systems, and (c) the possibility of a hybrid model where governments maintain responsibility while adopting web3-derived automation. This study argues that value circulation—not accumulation—is the fundamental determinant of social stability. Integrating tensional theory with computational governance yields a normative model for a nation-state where negative externalities are burned, positive value is propagated to children, and fiscal administration becomes fully autonomous, transparent, and circular.

Olivier Jutel

Abstract This article focuses on the Network State movement as embodying the venture capital (VC) logic of exit. Exit constitutes both a strategy for lucrative returns and an ideology seeking out new territories for financial and technological speculation. This movement has emerged around Balaji Srinivasan and the technologies of Web3 that encode the imperatives of exit. In the construction of liberated zones for the Network State, VC operates through a territorial logic, under the leadership of the founder‐philosopher and with the affordances of the American state. These logics evince the discursive power at the heart of the political economy of VC. The desires of the VC class shape “future social necessity” (Howard 2024; Finance and Society 10) and are “imprinted” (Cooiman 2024; Environment and Planning A 56) upon the social and technological networks of the Network State. The valorisation through exit seeks to produce “hyperstitious” (Lynch and Muñoz‐Viso 2023; Progress in Human Geography 48) value creation in which VC is the fount of civilisation.

shavez ahmed siddiqui

No abstract is available for this record.

Gilles Chemla, William J. Knottenbelt, Zhengming Li, Xihan Xiong · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Alexander Baker

This paper explores the intersection of cryptocurrency, macroeconomics, and U.S. financial hegemony in the emerging era of digital money. It argues that USD-backed stablecoins—such as Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT)—offer a new digital mechanism through which the United States can extend the global dominance of the U.S. dollar. Drawing from economic history, international relations theory, and decentralized finance (DeFi) innovations, the analysis situates stablecoins within a broader strategy of digital statecraft. The paper compares dollar-based crypto adoption with competing central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiatives, such as China’s digital yuan and the BRICS currency proposals, assessing their geopolitical and macroeconomic implications. Key themes include de-dollarization, programmable money, financial inclusion, and the role of digital currencies in shaping future capital flows and trade dynamics. The findings suggest that stablecoins not only replicate the traditional advantages of dollar dominance in global trade and reserves, but may also amplify them through blockchain efficiency and global reach—potentially consolidating U.S. monetary power in a multipolar world. Policy recommendations are offered for U.S. regulators to support strategic adoption of regulated stablecoins as tools of financial diplomacy and global economic leadership.

Brian Sanya Mondoh, Sara M. Johnson, Palesa Roza Gwele

No abstract is available for this record.

Aram Qadir

No abstract is available for this record.

Pravalika Paul, Nilaish -

This study conducts a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) research, focusing on adoption, digital transformation, and sustainability within urban contexts. Utilizing a dataset of 284 publications from 2016 to 2025 compiled from the Scopus database, the analysis employs advanced bibliometric techniques and network visualization tools to reveal collaborative patterns, thematic clusters, and research evolution. Results demonstrate significant scholarly emphasis on technological innovation and adoption factors shaping DeFi’s integration into urban financial ecosystems, alongside an increasing focus on sustainability. A regression-based Bibliometric Influence Score (BIS) adjusts for publication age and journal prestige, indicating that leading publications consistently exceed expected citation influence. Additionally, a conceptual framework is proposed linking digital financial literacy and sustainability outcomes, moderated by urban contextual factors. The findings underscore the importance of enhancing digital capabilities and mitigating systemic barriers to facilitate sustainable DeFi adoption in rapidly urbanizing regions, providing valuable insights for academia, policymakers, and practitioners engaged in fostering inclusive and resilient digital finance ecosystems.

Kuzi Charamba, Joyce Shum, Douglas W. Arner

No abstract is available for this record.