Blockchain smart contracts automate agreements, replacing third-party intermediaries with immutable and enforceable algorithms. Despite their potential, the complexity of blockchain often undermines human trust and their wide adoption. To address this challenge, we systematise existing knowledge on three critical human-centric qualities: transparency, accountability and understandability. Although these qualities are frequently invoked as pillars of trust in decentralised systems, they remain ambiguously defined and inconsistently operationalised across the literature and platforms. To establish a clearer and more coherent understanding of these qualities in the context of public blockchains and smart contracts, we introduce a structured model that organises existing knowledge into five levels: output, algorithm, external data, process, and application, acquiring insights from literature. This structured approach provides a comprehensive understanding by revealing gaps and areas of consensus, aiding researchers in identifying areas requiring further investigation. To address unclear or conflicting interpretations, we incorporated insights from experienced blockchain developers. We also conduct a comparative analysis to examine whether the characteristics of public blockchains align with standard definitions of transparency, accountability, and understandability. Our findings show that smart contracts support visibility and traceability at low system levels but lack clarity, answerability, and ease of understanding at higher organisational and user interaction levels. These gaps highlight the need for improved communication practices, clearer governance disclosure, and more human-centred design approaches.
Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractThe freelance economy opens new ways for direct interaction between freelancers and customers without intermediaries. This study aims to systematize the forms of the freelance economy in the context of Industry 5.0. A structured review methodology focusing on technological progress and human-centric solutions of the freelance economy is used. Freelancing and Industry 5.0 are closely intertwined and complement each other, forming new economic models and work processes. Their relationship lies in the combination of technological development and human creativity, which allows for the formation of efficient and flexible economic structures. Personalization and customization of consumption within Industry 5.0 promote the freelancing (individualization) of the production sphere, building a win-win strategy both for consumers and producers. Freelancing economy focuses on information processing of work, enables remote communications, promotes creativity of work, provides opportunities for the synergistic combination of human cognitive abilities with AI, ensures the development of personalization and customization of consumption, and contributes to the social development of workers. The structure of the forms of the freelance economy is characterized by the integration of decentralized financial systems, the use of artificial intelligence and blockchain, and the transition to new forms of labor organization based on global digital platforms and self-regulated organizations. One of the key barriers to the freelance economy is the lack of legal regulation of cryptocurrencies and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), as well as the associated cybersecurity risks. To summarize, the significance lies in creating a more adaptive, flexible, and decentralized labor market that meets the challenges of todayâs digital world.AcknowledgmentsThis research was funded by a grant âFundamental grounds for Ukraineâs transition to a digital economy based on the implementation of Industries 3.0; 4.0; 5.0â (No. 0124U000576) and âDigital transformations to ensure civil protection and post-war economic recovery in the face of environmental and social challengesâ (No. 0124U000549). 
Recruitment and payroll processes in organizations often suffer from lack of transparency, fraud risks, verification delays, and diminished trust among stakeholders. Blockchain technology, through its decentralized, immutable, and smart contract-enabled features, provides a viable solution to these persistent challenges. This conceptual paper proposes an integrated framework for applying blockchain to recruitment and payroll management. The framework emphasizes transparency via auditable ledgers and trust through verifiable records and automated execution. It draws on distributed ledger principles and synthesizes recent literature to map blockchain layers to HR functions. Benefits include reduced fraud, faster verification, automated disbursements, and enhanced stakeholder confidence. Challenges such as privacy, scalability, and regulatory compliance are discussed with mitigation approaches. The model offers theoretical propositions and practical guidelines, particularly relevant for emerging economies like India with growing gig and digital workforces. This work contributes to blockchain applications in human resource management (HRM) and supports digital HR transformation.
This research presents a blockchain-enabled freelancing platform that integrates smart contract-based escrow, decentralized identity, and intelligent freelancer matching to promote trust, transparency, and automation in digital labor markets. The system uses an Ethereum-compatible smart contract called Freelance Escrow, which manages the funding of projects securely, restricts interactions between employers and freelancers to a few specific roles, and automates the release of payments based on the verifiable completion of work. A Python-based blockchain interface developed using Web3.py is used to deploy contracts, sign transactions, and retrieve the current states, while a Streamlit front end provides authentication for user, project, and wallet operations. The platform includes a TF-IDF similarity model that matches freelancers to projects based on relevant skills and semantic similarity, as well as a structured database using SQLite, in which all users, profiles, and project metadata are stored. Comprehensive analysis reveals that the application has strengths in automation, transparency, and enforcement of workflow, while addressing privacy concerns around private key handling, file path inconsistencies, and Web3 library compatibility. The research demonstrates a working end-to-end architecture for decentralized freelance contracting and establishes a foundation for building further secure, scalable, and trust-preserving digital marketplaces.
The rapid expansion of blockchain infrastructures, Web3 architectures, and immersive metaverse environments has reignited calls for a Universal Code of Digital Ethics. International organizations, technology leaders, and multilateral forums increasingly advocate for global standards capable of guiding decentralized innovation toward inclusion, transparency, and social good. Yet the normative ambition of universality confronts a structural contradiction: digital access, connectivity quality, and technological literacy remain profoundly unequal across the Global South.Ethical frameworks for Web3 and the metaverse often presuppose a baseline of connectivity, computational capacity, and institutional stability that large segments of humanity do not possess. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified these asymmetries, accelerating digital transformation in high-income countries while deepening infrastructural gaps elsewhere. Concurrently, geopolitical tensions and emerging techno-nationalist strategies have repoliticized digital infrastructure as a domain of strategic competition rather than global solidarity.This Opinion article argues that any claim to a "universal" digital ethics framework is normatively fragile unless it incorporates a structural critique of global capitalism, technological acceleration, and asymmetrical power. Drawing on critical theory-particularly Herbert Marcuse's concept of the "one-dimensional man"-as well as Marxian analyses of technology and capital, I contend that ethical discourse risks becoming ideologically functional to market expansion if it fails to address material inequalities in connectivity and digital capability (Marcuse, 1972;Marx, 2005;GarcĂa RamĂrez, 2021).proposals but also problematizes the concept of universality itself as a normative and political construct.Global ethics initiatives often frame digital transformation as inherently democratizing. Blockchain is described as decentralized, Web3 as user-empowering, and the metaverse as participatory. However, decentralization at the protocol level does not necessarily translate into equitable access at the societal level.In regions of the Global South, access to stable broadband remains limited, mobile data costs are disproportionate to income, and digital literacy gaps persist. Under such conditions, the ethical vocabulary of autonomy, self-sovereign identity, and tokenized participation becomes aspirational rather than operative.Marx's analysis of technology as a force embedded within relations of production remains instructive. Technology is not neutral; it is shaped by capital accumulation dynamics (Marx, 2005). Fumikazu (1983) similarly emphasized that technological evolution must be understood historically and politically. When applied to Web3 ecosystems, this suggests that blockchain infrastructures operate within global financial logics that may reproduce, rather than dissolve, structural dependency.Contemporary Science and Technology Studies (STS) and critical philosophy of technology further reinforce this perspective. Feenberg (1999) argues that technology is not merely instrumental but socially constructed and politically conditioned, shaped by dominant interests yet open to democratic transformation. Similarly, Yuk Hui (2020) challenges the presumed universality of technological rationality, proposing the concept of "technodiversity" to account for plural technological trajectories rooted in different cultural and cosmological traditions. These perspectives suggest that any ethical framework for digital technologies must recognize the multiplicity of socio-technical realities rather than assume a homogeneous global condition.Thus, a universal code of digital ethics risks functioning as what critical theory would describe as ideological abstraction-detached from the material preconditions required for ethical agency.Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1972) provides a compelling lens through which to interpret contemporary digital governance. Marcuse argued that advanced industrial societies generate a form of technological rationality that integrates dissent by absorbing it into the logic of efficiency and consumption.In the context of Web3 and the metaverse, ethical discourse may become one-dimensional when it focuses on procedural compliance (privacy standards, transparency metrics, algorithmic audits) while neglecting structural exclusion. The language of inclusion becomes embedded within market expansion strategies. As Daum (2018) argues, digital capitalism increasingly converts users into capital itself-data, attention, and participation become monetizable assets.From a constructivist perspective, technologies such as blockchain are not inherently emancipatory but acquire meaning through their social embedding (Bijker, 1995). This implies that ethical claims about decentralization and empowerment must be evaluated in relation to the socio-economic contexts in which these technologies are deployed. Without such contextualization, ethical discourse risks overstating the transformative potential of technological architectures. This dynamic is particularly visible when global institutions promote digital entrepreneurship and blockchain adoption in developing regions without parallel investments in public infrastructure, education, and regulatory sovereignty. The rhetoric of empowerment may conceal asymmetric dependency.Cañas QuirĂłs (2023) emphasizes that ethics cannot be separated from political structures; morality detached from power analysis risks legitimizing unjust arrangements. In this sense, digital ethics frameworks must confront the political economy of connectivity rather than merely codify behavioral norms for technology developers.Digital governance is increasingly entangled with geopolitical competition. Infrastructure financing, cloud sovereignty, semiconductor supply chains, and cybersecurity alliances shape technological ecosystems. In this context, international organizations often advocate regulatory harmonization to "facilitate innovation" and "reduce market friction".While harmonization may lower barriers for cross-border digital services, it can simultaneously constrain policy autonomy in developing nations. Ethical frameworks that prioritize market efficiency risk subordinating universal connectivity goals to investor confidence and capital mobility.GarcĂa RamĂrez (2021) calls for a "Marx in the South," reinterpreting technology through the lens of rights, education, and structural inequality. From this perspective, Web3 adoption without universal broadband is analogous to building virtual property rights atop infrastructural scarcity. The promise of decentralized finance or immersive governance becomes utopian-or dystopian-when foundational digital rights remain unrealized.The acceleration principle of technological evolution -where innovation in wealthy nations compounds exponentially-renders access in peripheral regions inversely proportional to global advancement. Ethical frameworks that ignore this asymmetry may inadvertently normalize a tiered digital citizenship.The assumption that a single set of ethical principles can be universally applicable across diverse socio-cultural and technological contexts has been widely debated. From decolonial and pluralist perspectives, ethical frameworks are historically situated and epistemically conditioned (Escobar, 2018). What is considered "ethical" in one context may not translate directly into another, particularly when technological infrastructures, cultural values, and political systems differ significantly.In this sense, the concept of a Universal Code of Digital Ethics may be inherently paradoxical. Rather than a fixed and homogeneous set of principles, digital ethics may need to be understood as a plural and adaptive framework, capable of accommodating different technological ontologies and social priorities. This does not imply abandoning normative aspirations, but rather rethinking universality as negotiated, situated, and contingent.If a global digital ethics framework is to be normatively defensible-whether universal or plural-it must integrate structural and contextual dimensions:If universality is to be normatively defensible, digital ethics must integrate at least five structural components:If universality is to be normatively defensible, digital ethics must integrate at least five structural components:1.Material Preconditions Clause: Ethical standards should explicitly recognize connectivity, affordability, and digital literacy as prerequisites for meaningful participation.Political Economy Transparency: Frameworks must disclose how market incentives shape technological deployment.Geopolitical Reflexivity: Digital governance should account for power asymmetries between states and corporations.Public Infrastructure Commitment: Ethical guidelines must prioritize universal broadband as a public good, not merely a commercial opportunity.Critical Participation Mechanisms: Inclusion must extend beyond tokenized representation toward substantive decision-making capacity.5.6. Epistemic Pluralism: Ethical frameworks must recognize diverse knowledge systems, cultural values, and technological imaginaries, particularly from the Global South.Such principles align ethics with transformative social justice rather than technocratic governance.The aspiration to develop a Universal Code of Digital Ethics for Web3 and the metaverse is commendable. However, without structural critique, universality risks becoming rhetorical. Critical theory reminds us that technological systems embed power relations (Marcuse, 1972). Marxian perspectives reveal how capital shapes technological deployment (Marx, 2005). Contemporary analyses from the Global South highlight the need to situate ethics within historical and geopolitical realities (GarcĂa RamĂrez, 2021;Cañas QuirĂłs, 2023). The ethical question is not merely how to regulate blockchain or ensure transparency in virtual worlds. It is whether digital transformation reproduces one-dimensional rationality-where market logic absorbs ethical discourse-or fosters multidimensional emancipation grounded in material equality.A truly global digital ethics must therefore begin not with code, but with conditions. Without universal connectivity and critical capacity, Web3 and the metaverse risk becoming architectures of selective participation. Ethics, to be universal, must first be infrastructural. Ethics, whether conceived as universal or plural, must first be infrastructural, contextual, and politically grounded.
As Web3 architecture, artificial intelligence (AI), immersive environments, and connected devices converge, societies are moving from digitally mediated interaction to digitally programmed organisations, reshaping how value, labour, identity, learning, and participation are produced and governed. Programmable money, decentralised identity, AI-driven avatars, digital twins, and immersive environments illustrate how programmability collapses traditional distinctions between infrastructure, governance, and social behaviour. While these systems offer significant potential for inclusion, efficiency, and innovation, they also introduce profound ethical risks. This means that ethical challenges should become core governance elements, as code, data, and automated systems increasingly mediate trust, agency, and power at scale. Ethical failures in digital systems can scale across platforms, populations, and jurisdictions. This paper conceptualises a structural shift in which institutional rules, incentives, and governance functions are increasingly executed directly within programmable digital infrastructure, making ethics, accountability, and trust intrinsic properties of system design.
Mohamad Kassab, Rabeya Zahan Mily, Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto
We report a five-year, construct-preserving longitudinal replication of a 2020 empirical study of blockchain-engineer job advertisements, extended to a global 2025 cohort. Using mixed text-mining and expert-validated coding grounded in established competency taxonomies, we analyze 235 postings from 31 countries to examine how blockchain-specific, general technical, and soft-skill demands have evolved under an aligned measurement protocol. The findings indicate professional maturation from single-platform prototyping toward multi-chain, production-grade engineering that integrates back-end development, deployment operations, and security. Ethereum remains the most frequently cited platform, while Solana and other ecosystems increase platform diversity. Smart-contract development becomes a baseline expectation, with Solidity remaining central and Rust and Move becoming mainstream. Operational tooling such as cloud and containerization, alongside security-oriented practices including audits and zero-knowledge proofs, appears as recurring demand signals. Soft-skill mentions rise substantially, while formal degree requirements decline in favor of experience-based qualification. We contribute an updated 2025 competency atlas and empirically grounded implications for software engineering research, hiring, and curriculum design, while acknowledging comparability limits inherent to global sampling and cross-period labor-market conditions.
Konduri S P S Narayana Murthy, Tirumala Anand Kumar, R.Nivedha, B Balasaigayathri
In this paper, I introduce a decentralized freelancing site that combines blockchain-based smart-contract escrow with AI-based matching of talents to improve the level of trust, transparency, and efficiency in digital labor markets. Conventional freelancing models make use of centralized middlemen, which introduce vulnerability to the system in the form of payment conflicts, recommendations of jobs, manipulation of data and single point failure. The suggested system will resolve these concerns by implementing an unchanging Ethereum smart-contract escrow, which automates the processes of hiring, funds locking, and milestone payments without the involvement of third parties. The hybrid backend application with FastAPI, the SQLite data store, and the Web3 interaction provides the security of the requests processing and the state of the contract retrieval in real-time. Also, there is an AI ranking module with TF-IDF vectorization and cosine similarity that offers personalized matching of freelancers and jobs based on skill-relevant and experience characteristics. An up-to-date React/Tailwind frontend provides an easy user flow of posting jobs, hiring freelancers, depositing escrow funds, and approving task completion. Experimental analysis using live contract deployment shows that the transparency of transactions is more optimal, the probability of dispute is lower, and the accuracy of the matching is much higher. This site is an example of how the next-generation decentralized freelance ecosystems can be practiced.
The enactment of the Nigeria Tax Act (NTA) 2025 represents a significant restructuring of the nationâs fiscal framework, aimed at capturing value within the borderless digital economy. This study provides a legal analysis of the updated "Significant Economic Presence" (SEP) rule under Section 17 of the Act, which shifts the taxable nexus from traditional physical presence (Permanent Establishment) to economic participation. By expanding the SEP framework, the NTA 2025 formalises the "digital shadow" of the workforce, explicitly including remote freelancers, digital consultants, and content creators within the tax net while mandating residency-based taxation on worldwide income. Additionally, the Act classifies profits from digital asset transactions, including cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as taxable income. The analysis also examines the institutional transition from the Federal Inland Revenue Service to the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS), emphasising the deployment of automated technologies for real-time reporting and collection. Despite these advancements, persistent challenges remain, including infrastructure deficits, enforcement complexities in peer-to-peer transactions, and the need to align with global standards such as the OECDâs Two-Pillar Solution. Ultimately, the study concludes that although the NTA 2025 modernises the fiscal social contract, its effectiveness in optimising revenue depends on institutional capacity and clear regulatory guidance.
The decentralisation of authority and automated trust are the main reasons blockchain receives widespread praise. Token-based governance systems tend to maintain centralised control because early adopters and institutional stakeholders maintain most of the influence. Blockchain governance presents itself as an ethical and institutional problem instead of a technical issue. The paper uses deliberative democracy and democratic innovation theory to demonstrate that decentralised systems need to establish legitimacy through inclusive processes that combine reason and participation. The analysis evaluates Proof-of-Stake and DAOs as dominant governance models because they contain structural barriers and procedural weaknesses. The paper introduces design interventions such as sortition and quadratic voting, participatory panels and modular deliberation layers as potential solutions to embed democratic legitimacy into blockchain infrastructure. Blockchain technology enables the creation of new institutional frameworks which base their operations on democratic principles. The paper establishes that future governance needs to combine contestation and collective reasoning with consensus and coordination.
Academic, practitioner, and policy interest in digital labor platforms (DLPs)âbusinesses that use their digital infrastructure to intermediate transactions between workers and clients who need their servicesâis surging. While these transformational platforms have brought many benefits, there are growing concerns about the harms and entrepreneurial risks they create for workers. As such, there is a growing interest in problematizing the ownership and governance of DLPs. Our paper critically compares three increasingly common archetypesâCorporate DLPs, Cooperative DLPs, and Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) DLPsâto discern their likelihood of addressing or exacerbating platform workersâ exposure to harms and entrepreneurial risks. Our analysis identifies promising new opportunities for those interested in cultivating a digital solidarity economy by highlighting the merits and demerits of different alternatives to Corporate DLPs, as well as promising new hybrids like Cooperative DAO DLPs. Furthermore, it advances our understanding of factors that contribute to DLPsâ being structured in particular ways and how choices about DLPsâ structures, in turn, prompt the evolution of organizational archetypes. âą Calls for regulating a plurality of organisational archetypes in the digital economy to mitigate harms and risks to workers. âą Evaluates the harms and entrepreneurial risks of workers across 3 archetypes: Corporate DLPs, Cooperative DLPs, and DAO DLPs. âą Identifies two variants of DAO DLPs, the Non-Cooperative DAO DLP and the Cooperative DAO DLP. âą Furthers our conceptual understanding of the benefits, risks, and harms of the burgeoning digital solidarity economy.
This article examines how a decentralized digital approach can support employment generation in the public sector. It introduces the idea of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and explains the DAONATION model as a decentralized workforce system built on distributed ledgers, smart contracts and verified digital identities. The study uses a straightforward analytical approach based on available talent baselines, participation assumptions and sensitivity checks to estimate the employment potential of the model. A 19-month implementation plan is described, covering the design stage, the pre-production phase and pilot testing in selected government departments. Important elements such as identity verification, treasury management and data protection are included as core parts of the system. By linking the indicators from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) framework with the functional features of DAO architecture, the article shows how the model can be useful for policy planning. Overall, the DAONATION model indicates that decentralized systems can help improve transparency, reliability and inclusion in public-sector employment programmes.
The metaverse economy represents a major transformation in the digital era, powered by blockchain, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, creating new forms of value through decentralized finance, digital assets, and immersive work environments. Yet, its rapid expansion brings complex ethical, legal, and technological challenges. Key risks include the misuse of digital identities, data privacy violations, algorithmic bias, labor exploitation in virtual economies, and vulnerabilities in decentralized finance and smart contracts. Manipulative design patterns and weak legal oversight further threaten user autonomy, fairness, and trust. This chapter critically examines these challenges and the systemic risks shaping the metaverse economy while emphasizing the need for ethical governance, transparency, and inclusive regulation. It concludes with recommendations for building a resilient and equitable metaverse ecosystem that balances innovation with accountability, safeguards user rights, and promotes sustainability in digital economic transformation.
Foundational results in machine learning establish that all human labor may in principle be automatable. Without deliberate intervention, this trajectory risks concentrating productive capacity in a handful of corporations, resulting in techno-feudalism: mass economic redundancy, surveillance-based control and dependence on corporate benevolence for survival. To avert this outcome, this paper introduces anarchist automation, a rigorously defined sociotechnical framework grounded in the 200-year anarchist tradition from Godwin through Kropotkin to Bookchin for ensuring that full automation is decentralized and oriented toward universal care. Specifically, I state five formal hypotheses and six research objectives, present a formal definition through analytical categories of interdependent spheres, and propose the Liberation Stack as a layered technical architecture with explicit preconditions and gate conditions for each layer, incorporating crypto-economic coordination tools appropriated from the crypto-anarchist tradition for commons financing and governance. Furthermore, I introduce Universal Desired Resources as a post-monetary design principle that eliminates the material basis of intersectional oppression, and address the Mises-Hayek economic calculation problem by arguing that AI-based distributed optimization and federated preference elicitation can substitute for market price signals under conditions of material abundance. I develop a framework for progressive state dissolution through incremental, reversible commons-building compatible with existing democratic institutions. Empirical evidence from Linux, Mondragon and contemporary commons initiatives confirms that commons-based systems already operate at scale. Finally, I conclude with a phased roadmap specifying explicit assumptions, hard constraints, gate conditions between phases, and detailed limitations.
The gig economy faces significant challenges with centralized platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, including high service fees (10â20%), opaque algorithms, unreliable reviews, and frequent payment disputes. To address these issues, this work proposes Work Bounty, a decentralized freelancing marketplace powered by Web3 and blockchain technologies. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, the platform utilizes smart contracts to automate critical processes such as job creation, bidding, work delivery, and escrow-based payments, thereby eliminating intermediaries and enhancing trust. Authentication is streamlined using MetaMask wallets, enabling secure, passwordless access tied to unique cryptographic addresses. Job details and deliverables are stored on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to ensure immutable and tamper-resistant data storage, while a blockchain-based reputation system provides transparent, unalterable user ratings. Experimental evaluation on the Ethereum test network demonstrates that the system achieves a 100% success rate in smart contract executions and reduces overall transaction costs to 2â3% equivalent gas fees, compared to the 10â20% fees on centralized platforms. MetaMask authentication achieved a 98.7% success rate, and beta testing with freelancers and clients revealed 92% user satisfaction with the platform&s;s ease of use and trustworthiness. These results highlight the system&s;s potential to provide a secure, transparent, and cost-effective alternative to traditional freelancing platforms, fostering a more equitable and globally accessible gig economy aligned with Web3 principles.
This study examines how Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) could be incorporated into municipal administration to improve citizen participation and transparency. As DAOs in governance are attracting growing academic and practical attention, this research uses scenarios to analyze the conditions for their application at municipal and regional levels. It takes a conceptual, scenario-based approach to develop a model for DAO-based e-participation, identifying key concepts and their relationships to explain how DAOs operate as self-regulated systems for digital participation. The research is structured into three phases: First, in the foundational phase, this study synthesizes existing research on DAOs and participatory governance models, contrasting blockchain-based and traditional processes to establish a framework for DAO integration. Second, the application phase uses illustrative scenarios to explore how DAO mechanisms might influence participation and decision-making in municipalities. Third, the evaluation and recommendation phase consolidates insights into a structured model for implementation, highlighting task characteristics, contextual conditions, and organizational capacities that shape DAO feasibility. The analysis suggest that DAOs may enable new forms of participation and more transparent procedures, but only when antecedent conditions such as digital literacy, administrative capacity, and infrastructure stability are sufficiently met. Future work should look at long-term effects, compare cases across municipalities, and examine the role of legal and regulatory frameworks.
This article examines the dynamics of domestic video-on-demand (VoD) platforms in Brazil. While global streaming giants increasingly dominate the market, local platforms continue to emerge in response to specific cultural and economic contexts. Building on sectoral data and a qualitative case study, the paper analyses the strategies adopted by a local service called Filme Filme, seeking to compete with global players through curation, audience engagement and innovative features such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and gamification. Despite these efforts, Filme Filme ultimately ceased operations after four years of its launch, revealing the structural barriers that constrain the growth of domestic platforms in highly concentrated markets. By situating this case within the broader debate on platformization and the industrial organization of cultural industries, the study offers insight into the challenges of sustaining local streaming initiatives in emerging economies and discusses implications for public policy aimed at promoting digital sovereignty and cultural diversity.
This essay examines a âbecoming-curatorialâ of digital artworks that are augmented with blockchain-enabled smart contracts. It argues that embedding executable code in digital objects enables artworks to exhibit quasi-autonomous, self-governing behaviours that can displace the curatorial agency of human intermediaries and redistribute it to computational agents. By analysing projects such as Sarah Friendâs <i>Lifeforms </i>and Harm van den Dorpelâs <i>Mutant Garden Seeder</i>, the essay shows how programmable tokens can inspire (and enforce) non-financial value propositions such as stewardship and care. I situate these works as agential assemblages that involve artists, audiences, markets, and software objects, and which thereby challenge inherited notions of authorship and private ownership. Against the commodity logic often associated with âcrypto art,â the essay reads programmability as a curatorial instrument for imagining more-than-human art ecologies, while also making visible the ways in which speculative tendencies can short-circuit such ambitions. Ultimately, these technologies are described as social experiments that interrogate existing value regimes and test recalibrations of agency within the hyper-financialised Web3 landscape.
Abstract This article examines how bitcoin has acquired religious significance among many techno-libertarians, who hold it as a symbol promising deliverance from a fallen world. Drawing on both participant observation at bitcoin meetups and the 2023 Bitcoin Conference, as well as digital ethnography on X, the article presents a thick description of how bitcoiners construct specific beliefs about the world and their place in it, as well as ritual practices that vivify these beliefs and sanctify those who hold them. These beliefs and practices constitute bitcoin, in turn, as a distinct moral community in which bitcoin is symbolized as an instrument of salvation from a failing institutional order. This Durkheimian analysis contributes to understanding how money in modern society carries with it religious meanings about the world and human history. And it also contributes to an understanding of the specific ideological formation driving techno-libertarianism as an ascendant political interest today.
This article builds upon previous research on the ethical tokenization of emotions and the concept of a âSentiment Exchange,â advancing it into a broader normative framework termed Emotional Economics 2.0. That initial contribution demonstrated how affective signals could be measured, exchanged, and governed to ensure dignity and fairness within digital economies. The present paper extends this framework into a broader theoretical model termed Emotional Economics 2.0, articulated through three normative laws. The First Law conceptualizes human attention as a conserved and finite resource, grounding emotional value in cognitive limitations rather than artificial scarcity. The Second Law introduces emotional flow as the basis of value creation, operationalized through a dual-channel system: a fixed universal allocation of 20 tokens per day to each individual and a variable issuance tied to the measurable emotional impact of registered entities. The Third Law formulates a global emotional sovereignty contract, envisioning emotional tokens as a universal right akin to a digital basic income embedded at the protocol level. The paper further explores Scenario 4, where emotional tokens function as a universal unit of account in a post-scarcity âpost-economy.â Illustrative examplesâsuch as housing, food, and luxury goods denominated in tokensâdemonstrate how this model reframes wealth, value, and redistribution. Legal challenges, governance mechanisms (Global Ethical-Scientific Committee and Decentralized Autonomous Organization), and risks of manipulation are addressed as integral to the modelâs design rather than as afterthoughts. By explicitly linking the original Sentiment Exchange proposal with the Three Laws of Emotional Economics, this work positions itself as a second step in an evolving research program. Rather than a predictive claim, it advances a normative horizon: an alternative to neoliberal scarcity logics that places dignity, emotions, and collective well-being at the center of economic thought.
This paper examines the potential transformation of Venezuela into a significant IT offshore hub in the context of anticipated political regime change. Using a multi-dimensional analytical framework that integrates labor economics, financial technology adoption, enterprise software markets, and critical infrastructure security, we investigate how Venezuela's prolonged isolation has paradoxically produced unique conditions for technology sector growth. We identify four critical impact vectors shaping this potential transition: Remote labor arbitrage normalization â Venezuela's highly educated yet underemployed workforce, coupled with global remote work trends, creates a compelling labor cost advantage in international IT services markets. Cryptocurrency-native population as a fintech catalyst â Years of hyperinflation and sanctions have driven widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins as alternative financial infrastructure, positioning Venezuelans to lead in fintech innovation and digital payments integration. Technology infrastructure deficit as a SaaS expansion opportunity â Although national telecommunications and digital infrastructure lag regional peers, planned post-transition investment in fiber optics, 5G, and connectivity could accelerate Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) consumption and development. Cybersecurity challenges in legacy system modernization â Legacy systems and weak institutional cybersecurity create both risks and service demand, underscoring the need for secure IT modernization strategies in public and private sectors alike. We argue that Venezuela's forced technological experimentation during economic collapse â including informal digital payment systems and decentralized finance adoption â has unintentionally cultivated technological resilience and local digital proficiency unprecedented in Latin America. By situating Venezuela's tech transition within broader geopolitical disruption and global technology labor markets, this research contributes new frameworks for analyzing emerging offshore IT markets in post-crisis economies and highlights actionable pathways for stakeholders targeting digital services growth in transitional states.
Traditional Human Resource Management (HRM) systems are criticized for lacking transparency, being inefficient, and offering ample opportunities for fraud because of their centralized design and reliance on manual processes. This work proposes a blockchain-enabled framework for HRM that enhances the transparency, trust, and global mobility of talents by integrating distributed ledgers, consensus protocols, and smart contract networks into Human Resources (HR) functions. A four-layer theoretical modelâdata, consensus, smart contract, and application layersâis developed and comparatively examined against traditional HR systems to show how blockchain principles can be systematically mapped into HR processes. This study shows how blockchain-driven HRM can ensure tamper-evident employee records, automate contractual and payroll operations, and enhance auditability and compliance. By informing the framework with established technology adoption perspectives, this paper extends both the theoretical and managerial understanding of blockchain in HR. In comparison with previous studies that were limited to either recruitment or credential verification, this article presents an overarching, cross-layer synthesis that connects blockchain architectures with end-to-end HR functions, thus providing a clear conceptual foundation for its future enterprise adoption in the digital economy.
Millions of informal workers are able to work in the economy without the ability to be subjected to formal fiscal recognition or empirical employment history. The Majdoor Digital Trust-Ledger (MDTL) is a decentralized and privacy-sensitive framework according to which evidence of informal labor is converted into self-sovereign digital assets. MDTL combines Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials (VCs), escrows based on smart contracts, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to implement verifiable, but confidential proof-of-work. The system proposes a 5-layer architecture, i.e. Identity, Credential, Ledger, Privacy, and Verification, which is designed to be scalable, interoperable, and it can be run on resource-constrained deployment. MDTL progresses the agency of workers by creating portable and tamper-evident labor records to allow financial inclusion without degrading privacy.
Digital systems execute at speeds that governance systems cannot match. This paper develops the concept of "institutional latency," the structural friction between algorithmic velocity and the response capacity of the legal, normative, and organizational systems required to govern it. Drawing on institutional economics, including North's rules-norms distinction, Williamson's governance form selection logic, Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development framework, and Bromley's volitional pragmatism, I analyze Bitcoin as an institutional phenomenon whose governance architecture generates characteristic friction points. I draw on the ongoing 2024-26 Core v30/Knots dispute over OP_RETURN relay policy defaults to illustrate how that dispute is conducted entirely within the informal norm layer. I argue that institutional latency is durable at the informal norm layer, that permissionlessness is a specific configuration of boundary rules, not their absence, and that Bitcoin's political-level transactional attributes generate demand for deliberative governance the protocol cannot supply. The computational knowledge versus volitional knowledge distinction specifies the mechanism: as computational knowledge and technological development expand rapidly, the volitional questions they generate proliferate faster than governance capacity to address them. While I use a Bitcoin example, the framework is designed to travel to AI governance and algorithmic governance more broadly.