This chapter reflects on the professionalisation of competitive electronic gaming both in traditional formats and within the immersive, fully digital realm of the Metaverse, and explores where and how blockchain technology underpins the Metaverseâs infrastructure, enabling new forms of identity, governance, incentives, and digital economies. Esports and multiplayer gaming platforms are blending Web3 tools with their traditional Web2 frameworks to create dynamic economies where digital assets like in-game currencies, avatar customisations, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can be created, traded, and monetised. These developments are reshaping esports into highly immersive, interactive experiences where players influence gameplay innovations and fans engage through digital ownership and interaction. By incorporating blockchain, tokenomics, and institutional reform, the Metaverse and esports can foster robust and equitable digital economies. These advancements promise enhanced professionalism, secure marketplaces, and innovative fan engagement, setting the stage for a transformative era in competitive gaming.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), including blockchain, is increasingly used within industry ecosystems to create a high-integrity, single source of truth of shared data and business processes across diverse parties. A major challenge in adopting DLT is the conflicting demands on data transparency for improved integrity, against hiding commercially sensitive data. To address this, some industry ecosystems use multiple ledgers shared only between relevant parties rather than using a single distributed ledger across the entire ecosystem. The design problem for this is: What parties should share which ledgers, and what data should be on those ledgers? In this article, we propose a method employing a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) and Domain Mapping Matrix (DMM) to derive candidate shared ledger combinations for industry ecosystems. The method also indicates, for certain data, centralized web services or point-to-point messages may be more suitable than shared ledgers. We discuss our experiences with applying this method while developing a prototype for an agricultural traceability platform. We also present a genetic-algorithm-based DSM and DMM clustering technique to derive candidate shared ledger combinations.
Rakesh Vohra of University of Pennsylvania reviews âThe Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Createâ by Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: âExplores how non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are changing the way that business is done, demonstrating the role and inevitability of NFT technology in everyday life.â
John Stephan, Matej Pavlovic, Antonio Locascio, Benjamin Livshits
Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups have become a popular solution for scaling blockchain systems, offering improved transaction throughput and reduced costs by aggregating Layer 2 transactions and submitting them as a single batch to a Layer 1 blockchain. However, the computational burden of generating validity proofs, a key feature of ZK rollups, presents significant challenges in terms of performance and decentralization. Current solutions rely on centralized infrastructure to handle the computational tasks, limiting the scalability and decentralization of rollup systems. This paper proposes CrowdProve, a prover orchestration layer for outsourcing computation to unreliable commodity hardware run by a broad community of small provers. We apply CrowdProve to proving transaction batches for a popular ZK rollup. Through our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that community proving can achieve performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, existing centralized deployments. Our results show that even systems utilizing modest hardware configurations can match the performance of centralized solutions, making community-based proof generation a viable and cost-effective alternative. CrowdProve allows both the rollup operator and community participants to benefit: the operator reduces infrastructure costs by leveraging idle community hardware, while community provers are compensated for their contributions.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have emerged as a transformative innovation within blockchain ecosystems, enabling decentralized ownership, governance, and community formation. However, their sustainability remains uncertain due to reduced community engagement, waning public interest, and declining market valuations. This thesis investigates the socio-technical transitions of NFT ecosystems to address these challenges using the multi-level perspective (MLP) framework, integrating insights from human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and visual analytics (VA). Employing a mixed-methods approach, this thesis explores the sustainability of NFT innovation across three socio-technical levels: At the niche level, it explores how collective intelligence emerges through stakeholder collaboration and algorithmic coordination in early-stage NFT communities. Content analysis of 776 social media posts, 223 survey responses, and 22 interviews identifies hybrid governance mechanisms that combine decentralized participation with intermediary facilitation, supporting bottom-up innovation. At the regime level, it examines how dominant cultural values, particularly Confucian traditions in our case, shape trust-building within Chinese NFT communities. Qualitative analysis of WeChat group discussions and 21 stakeholder interviews reveals culturally embedded guidelines for establishing trust within blockchainâs âdistrust infrastructures.â At the landscape level, it investigates how broader socio-economic forcesâsuch as market volatility, project migration, and social media trendsâreshape the rise, competition, and substitution of NFT projects. This analysis is supported by the Minimal Substitution (MS) model and NFTracer, an interactive visual analytics system that maps substitutive relationships between NFT projects using multi-attribute-aware node-link graphs and mechanism-based simulations. This thesis contributes by (1) empirically characterizing collaboration, trust, and migration across MLP levels; (2) developing tools to support stakeholder needs; and (3) extending MLP to algorithm-driven blockchain environments. These contributions provide a comprehensive understanding of NFT ecosystems and actionable strategies for sustainable development.
This study explores how digital technologies can support and enhance democratic governance within organizations. It examines the shift from autocratic structures to more decentralized models, such as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), which promote participatory decision-making. By analyzing how digital tools can strengthen knowledge sharing, collective decision-making, and innovation, we look into the potential of technology to bolster democratic governance. Overall, the study aims to create theoretical frameworks and address key challenges of digitally enabled democratic practices in organizations.
Giacomo Vella, Valeria Portale, Daniel Trabucchi, Luca Gastaldi
This study investigates how blockchain-based platforms redefine traditional innovation platform models by analyzing Ethereum as a paradigmatic case.While classical platforms are characterized by centralized governance and selective openness, Ethereum introduces a decentralized architecture that structurally embeds openness, composability, and permissionless participation into its protocol.Drawing on a qualitative single-case study based on over 100 secondary sources, this research explores three dimensions: governance and orchestration, complementor engagement, and architectural modularity.Findings highlight that Ethereum operates through multi-actor orchestration, where governance is distributed among core developers, the Ethereum Foundation, decentralized autonomous organizations, and community contributors.Complementors engage directly with the platform, leveraging smart contracts and token-based incentives to build interoperable applications without the need for approval from a central authority.Moreover, Ethereum extends composability beyond core-periphery dynamics, enabling peer-level recombination of complements through public, reusable smart contracts.A comparative analysis with traditional platforms and open-source ecosystems positions Ethereum as a novel archetype of innovation platform, blending open-source governance with blockchain-enabled modularity and decentralized economic coordination.The study advances platform theory by proposing new conceptualizations of openness, modularity, and governance in decentralized digital ecosystems.
Ensuring the reproducibility of scientific simulations is a persistent challenge, despite current best practices like version control and containerization. Factors such as floating-point arithmetic variations, hardware differences, and concurrency issues often prevent bit-for-bit replication of results. This paper investigates the techniques that distributed ledger technologies employ to achieve deterministic computations and application of these techniques to enhance the reproducibility, trustworthiness and verifiability of scientific simulations. We explore two primary approaches: executing simulations directly âon-chainâ for complete transparency and deterministic replay, and performing computations âoff-chainâ while anchoring their integrity to a blockchain via cryptographic proofs, such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and Merkle trees.
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) crowdfunds to invest in various projects. The decentralization feature of DAOs submits that decision-making is a collective democratic action of all DAO members. The autonomy feature of DAOs suggests that decision-making is an algorithmic process governed by self-executing smart contracts. However, in reality, DAOs are neither perfectly decentralized nor completely autonomous. Our empirical analysis shows that deviations from the ideals of decentralization and autonomy are costly. Non-algorithmic off-chain voting governance of decision-making leads to a substantial discount in DAO value. Non-decentralized aspects such as large voting coalitions also affect DAO value. Interaction effects are also shown. The study implies that platform governance design choices are crucial for DAO success. ⢠DAOs with off-chain voting raise 87% less funding. ⢠Larger communities worsen the valuation hit from off-chain voting. ⢠Big voting coalitions deepen off-chain governance drawbacks. ⢠On-chain transparency is key to DAO successâespecially in large technical teams.
This article examines how âbrandless by designâ strategies in Web3, particularly among digital nomads and creators of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), reshape consumer behavior, market intermediation, and governance. Using a structured thematic synthesis of interdisciplinary academic and gray literature, we integrate five analytical lenses: affordances (provenance, programmability, composability, and token-gated access), signaling (credibility through on-chain histories and disclosures), consumer identity (the extended self in digital ownership and display), parasocial interaction (attachment without human embodiment), and governance (smart contract terms, platform policies, and community charters). Three primary themes emerge. First, creative autonomy and disintermediation, as NFTs enable direct creator-to-consumer exchange and programmable provenance. Second, engagement and authenticity, as communities cohere around transparent access and shared utility rather than traditional brand logos. Third, sustainability and decentralization, which highlight tensions around environmental impact, intellectual property, cultural legitimacy, and consumer protection. Cross-cutting subthemes, including parasocial credibility, accessibility and cultural sensitivity, and brand control versus co-creation, explain why brandlessness can appear simultaneously intimate and precarious. We propose a conceptual framework that links brandlessness to decentralized identity and on-chain governance, clarifying when provenance signals, token-bound permissions, and community norms substitute effectively for legacy brand cues. The review concludes with implications for practice and policy, such as standardized licenses, clear disclosures, participatory design, on-chain royalty registries, and interoperable memberships that balance value capture with oversight. Future research should prioritize cross-cultural adoption, sustainability auditing that incorporates off-chain infrastructure, and mixed-methods designs combining on-chain telemetry with ethnography and experiments to assess trust, authenticity, and wellbeing.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly framed as a driver of economic transformation, yet its capacity to alleviate poverty in the Global South remains contested. This article introduces the notion of AI Economicsâthe political economy of value creation, extraction, and redistribution in AI systemsâto interrogate h ow innovation agendas intersect with structural inequalities. This article examines how Social Innovation (SI) systems, when coupled with decentralized Web3 technologies such as blockchain, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and data cooperatives, may challenge data monopolies, redistribute economic gains, and support inclusive development. Drawing on Action Research (AR) conducted during the AI4SI International Summer School in Donostia-San SebastiĂĄn, this article compares two contrasting ecosystems: (i) the Established AI4SI Ecosystem, marked by centralized governance and uneven benefits, and (ii) the Decentralized Web3 Emerging Ecosystem, which promotes community-driven innovation, data sovereignty, and alternative economic models. Findings underscore AIâs dual economic role: while it can expand digital justice, service provision, and empowerment, it also risks reinforcing dependency and inequality where infrastructures and governance remain weak. This article concludes that embedding AI Economics in context-sensitive, decentralized social innovation systemsâaligned with ethical governance and the SDGsâis essential for realizing AIâs promise of poverty alleviation in the Global South.
This article investigates how Web3 decentralization unfolds in practice and asks two guiding questions: (i) How democratic are decentralized governance systems in practice? (ii) Under what institutional conditions can technological decentralization translate into social inclusion? Based on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork (2022â2025) across Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., Europe, and the Global South, this study draws on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and comparative analysis of seven ecosystemsâEthereum, MakerDAO, Uniswap, Mastodon, Celo, Grassroots Economics, and GoodDollar. The findings show that participation asymmetries are structural: token-based governance is dominated by a small group of technically skilled or capital-rich actors, while voter turnout often remains below ten percent. Intermediaries such as foundations, developers, NGOs, and cooperatives are indispensable for coordination, contradicting the idea of hierarchy-free decentralization. In contrast, projects that institutionalize clear membership, monitoring, and accountabilityâparticularly in cooperative and federated settingsâdisplay stronger democratic resilience. Comparative evidence also reveals oligarchic consolidation in Global North ecosystems and infrastructural exclusion in the Global South. These results substantiate what Richard R. Nelson termed âthe Moon and the Ghettoâ paradox: extraordinary technical innovation without corresponding social progress. Interpreted through innovation systems theory, the study concludes that advancing decentralized technologies requires parallel investment in mission-oriented institutions that ensure participation, equity, and accountability in digital infrastructures.
Web 3.0's rise has sparked the proliferation of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), transforming design management practices. This study investigates how DAOs reshape design processes, focusing on the concept of meta-design in Web 3.0 environments. Through multi-case studies of four DAOs (Astrogirls NFT and three Kambria Open Innovation Platform projects), we conducted semi-structured interviews with eight contributors to examine the application of meta-design principles, the impact of token-based voting on design governance, and shifts in designer roles and user participation.
Open Source Software Innovations
Innovative Approaches in Technology and Social Development
Mark C. Ballandies, Dino Carpentras, Evangelos Pournaras
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have transformed organizational structures by shifting from traditional hierarchical control to decentralized approaches, leveraging blockchain and cryptoeconomics. Despite managing significant funds and building global networks, DAOs face challenges like declining participation, increasing centralization, and inabilities to adapt to changing environments, which stifle innovation. This paper explores DAOs as complex systems and applies complexity science to explain their inefficiencies. In particular, we discuss DAO challenges, their complex nature, and introduce the self-organization mechanisms of collective intelligence, digital democracy, and adaptation. By applying these mechanisms to refine DAO design and construction, a conceptual framework for assessing a DAOâs viability is created. This contribution lays the foundation for future research at the intersection of complexity science, digital democracy and DAOs.
With the growth of the Web3 domain, there has been a significant rise of third-party software packages. These range from basic blockchain interaction tools and contract development aids to front-end development packages for Decentralized Applications (DApps), with the diversity and inter-dependencies of these packages continuing to grow. However, despite these advancements, the security of these packages has not kept pace, highlighted by several significant Web3 supply chain attacks. It underscored the urgent need for a deeper understanding of the Web3 third-party library supply chain. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive analysis of the Web3 third-party package supply chain using knowledge graphs, which detail the structure, themes, and evolving dynamics within this domain. Further, we analyze the characteristics of vulnerabilities and their propagation through knowledge graphs in the Web3 ecosystem. We also extend our findings to practical applications, providing valuable insights for Web3 community stakeholders and creating an extensive dataset that includes 695,642 versions of Web3 packages and 270,217,326 dependency links. This research is aimed at reinforcing the foundation of Web3 development, promoting enhanced security practices, and supporting informed decision-making within the DApp landscape.
Blockchain and Smart Contracts (SCs) have emerged as a promising avenue for organizations looking to innovate. Similar to other fields of software engineering, collaborative platforms, such as GitHub, are gaining attention in SCs development. Moreover, public blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, commonly serve as a medium to deploy SCs. This ecosystem serves as the basis on which the sociotechnical phenomenon of SC development emerges. Despite the growth of research regarding SCs, there is a gap in understanding the sociotechnical factors involved in their development, specially the ones with high market value. To address this issue, we leveraged Sociotechnical Theory and Data Analysis to investigate the sociotechnical dynamics in open source repositories of SCs deployed on Ethereum. To ensure suitability for our analysis, we curated a list of 16 high market value SCs deployed on Ethereum. Our research yielded four primary analyses. First, we unveiled how collaboration aspects are impacted by the deployment of SCs. Second, we explored the characteristics of contributors participating in these projects. Third, we looked into commit messages to categorize commonly performed software changes. Fourth, we investigated the relationship between market metrics and SC evolution. These analyses help to deepen the understanding of sociotechnical dynamics within SC repositories, assisting organizations in designing better strategies to support their development efforts.
Abstract Ethereum, as a leading blockchain platform, has attracted a significant number of practitioners. These practitioners require a platform for communication and collaborative problemâsolving, which led to Ethereum Stack Exchange (ESE), a Q&A site dedicated to Ethereumârelated issues. While the Q&A site facilitates communication among practitioners, it also introduces new challenges. Practitioners adopt code snippets from Q&A sites to address problems encountered. However, the quality of code snippets on ESE remains largely unexplored. Vulnerabilities and gasâinefficient patterns in ESE may spread to the code in Ethereum and threaten its regular operation. In this article, we conduct an empirical study investigating the distribution of vulnerabilities and gasâinefficient patterns in ESE. Further, we analyze the potential impact of vulnerabilities and gasâinefficient patterns from ESE on Ethereum. However, we encounter a problem during the vulnerability and gasâinefficient pattern detection. Established smart contract analysis tools in the mainstream realm necessitate complete source code files for thorough analysis, while codes on ESE are often incomplete code snippets. To address this, we introduce the ASTâbased code clone detection technique to construct detectable files corresponding to code snippets. This enables us to detect vulnerabilities and gasâinefficient patterns in code snippets. In the end, our findings demonstrate that 11.18% of the contractâlevel code snippets and 4.06% of functionâlevel code snippets in ESE have vulnerabilities. And 27.21% of contractâlevel code snippets and 17.89% of functionâlevel code snippets contain gasâinefficient patterns. The additional consumption caused by the gasâinefficient pattern in ESE is approximately $1,695,002. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations for both ESE and its users, aiming to foster collaborative efforts and create a more reliable Q&A site for practitioners.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an emerging alternative financial infrastructure to the existing centralized financial system built on top of public and permissionless blockchains. In the last year, DeFi has grown rapidly and is considered one of the hot topics in blockchain. It may offer promising solutions to the key problems inherent in the existing financial system: inefficiency, limited access, opacity, centralized control, and the lack of interoperability. To examine the existing DeFi ecosystem, this paper gives an overview of the current status quo by exploring the existing applications and evaluates the benefits and risks in order to draw a comprehensive picture. Additionally, this paper gives an outlook on DeFiâs potential impact on the existing financial system, opportunities for collaboration, and the hurdles it is facing for widespread adoption.
Mark C. Ballandies, Valentin Holzwarth, Barry Sunderland, Evangelos Pournaras ¡ 5 authors
Abstract Organizations have to adjust to changes in the ecosystem, and customer feedback systems (CFS) provide important information to adapt products and services to changing customer preferences. However, current systems are limited to single-dimensional rating scales and are subject to self-selection biases. The work contributes design principles for CFS and implements a CFS that advances current systems by means of contextualized feedback according to specific organizational objectives. The authors apply Design Science Research (DSR) methodology and report on a longitudinal DSR journey considering multiple stakeholder values by utilizing value-sensitive design methods. They conducted expert interviews, design workshops, demonstrations, and a four-day experiment in an organizational setup, involving 132 customers of a major Swiss library. In the process, the identified design principles and the implemented software artifact were validated qualitatively and quantitatively, leading to conclusions for their efficient instantiation. The authors found that i) blockchain technology can afford four design principles of effective CFS. Also, ii) combining DSR with value-sensitive design methods explicitly provides rationale for design principles in the form of identified important values. Moreover, iii) combining DSR with value-sensitive design methods makes the construction of software artifacts more efficient it terms of design time by restricting the design space of a software artifact to those options that align with stakeholder values. The findings of this work thus extend the knowledge about the design of CFS and offer both researchers a theoretical contribution to reasoning about design principles and managers and decision makers a guide for the efficient design of software artifacts.
Andrea PeĂąa-Calvin, Javier Arroyo, Andrew B. Schwartz, Samer Hassan
Blockchain technology enables a new form of online community: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), where members typically vote on proposals using tokens. Enthusiasts claim DAOs provide new opportunities for openness, horizontality, and democratization. However, this phenomenon is still under research, especially given the lack of quantitative studies. This paper presents the first census-like quantitative analysis of the whole ecosystem of DAOs, including 30K DAO communities on the main DAO platforms. This enables us to provide insights into the allegedly "democratic'' nature of DAOs, building metrics concerning their lifespan, participation, and power concentration. Most DAOs have a short lifespan and low participation. There is also a positive correlation between community size and voting power concentration. Like other online communities, DAOs seem to follow the iron law: becoming increasingly oligarchic as they grow. Still, a significant amount of DAOs of varying sizes defy this idea by being egalitarian by design.
Che Wang, Yue Li, Jianbo Gao, Ke Wang ¡ 7 authors
The open-source nature of smart contracts provides the facility for developers to clone contracts and introduces the risk of vulnerability proliferation as well. Despite intensive research on smart contract clone detection in recent years, existing techniques are still unsatisfactory in detecting Solana smart contracts. To fill this gap, in this paper, we designed a clone detection tool SolaSim for Solana smart contracts and conducted an empirical study to understand the code reuse in the Solana ecosystem. Specifically, SolaSim is based on the semantic metadata extractor and the similarity checker. For each contract, the semantic metadata extractor generates an instruction-level weighted Attributed Control Flow Graph (ACFG) and its semantic metadata (i.e., a combination of high-level semantic and structure information) based on Rust Mid-level Intermediate Representation. The similarity checker adopts a combinatorial optimization algorithm to compute the statistical similarity of a pair of contracts. The evaluation results demonstrated the effectiveness of SolaSim in identifying clones with 94.3% accuracy and it can identify up to Type-3 clone level. Notably, we found there are over 50% clone ratios in the Solana smart contracts ecosystem, in which most of them are cloned from famous open-sourced projects.
The term âweb3 developmentâ refers to the practice of creating and building applications, platforms, and technologies that are designed to operate on the decentralized web, also known as web 3. This new paradigm of web development aims to leverage blockchain technology, decentralized networks, and cryptographic protocols to enable greater user control, privacy, and security. Web 3 development refers to the systematic creation of applications, platforms, and decentralized systems that leverage blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and decentralized networks. This procedure additionally involves implementing these applications and platforms. This chapter discusses the web 3 development importance and the driving forces behind web 3 development.