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.

Neha Garg, Anoop Pandey, Nupur Tyagi

This chapter provides a critical exploration of the digital and alternative finance landscape, emphasizing innovative financing mechanisms and their growing influence on the global financial ecosystem. It begins by unpacking the concepts of crowdfunding and initial coin offerings (ICOs), explaining how these models have emerged as viable alternatives to traditional capital-raising channels by leveraging decentralized technologies and online investor communities. The discussion then extends to marketplace lending platforms, offering insights into their operational dynamics, scalability, and the unique risks they pose, such as credit default, platform dependency, and regulatory ambiguity. A significant focus is placed on the emergence of Chinese TechFins, whose data-driven models and rapid market penetration are reshaping global FinTech dynamics. The chapter analyzes how players like Ant Group and Tencent are transforming financial inclusion and service delivery through AI, digital wallets, and super-app ecosystems, while also sparking geopolitical and regulatory scrutiny. Finally, the chapter evaluates the regulatory and market challenges faced by digital finance platforms worldwide. Issues such as jurisdictional mismatches, consumer protection, cybersecurity, and compliance with evolving legal frameworks are critically examined. Through a multi-layered perspective, this chapter enables readers to understand both the promise and pitfalls of alternative finance, equipping them with the knowledge to assess its future direction and regulatory implications.

Doan B. L. Nguyen, Pham Khanh Nam, Nguyen Thi Hong Thu

This study examines factors considered in investor decisions to invest in physical and tokenized real estate in Vietnam using discrete choice modeling on data from 413 participants in Ho Chi Minh City. Results show that legality, transparency, transaction fees, and expected returns are key determinants of investment consideration. Older and higher-income investors exhibit lower preference for tokenized assets, while female, more educated, and blockchain-familiar investors show greater adoption tendencies. The findings highlight how legality and institutional quality shape emerging digital asset markets, underscoring the need for legal clarity, transparent data, and targeted education to foster tokenized real estate development.

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.

Benjamin M. Blau, Todd G. Griffith, Sarah G. Reese, Ryan J. Whitby

No abstract is available for this record.

Mallory E. SoRelle

Abstract This chapter describes how the institutional design of finance governance matters for picking winners. In the United States, responsibility for devising and implementing consumer financial protections is fragmented—both within and across levels of government. This decentralized and fluid system of finance governance shapes the degree to which different actors can influence US consumer financial protection by raising the costs of engaging with policymakers, decreasing the visibility of regulatory actors, and allowing industry interests to engage in venue shopping for favorable treatment. The result is that industry actors can exert greater power over regulatory outcomes at the expense of wage earners or consumers. The chapter also explores how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reshapes the landscape of finance governance by centralizing a greater degree of policymaking authority, generating the conditions for more robust financial protection even in the absence of underlying legislative changes to the system of financial regulation.

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.

John Edmunds

No abstract is available for this record.

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.

C. Coşkun Küçüközmen

No abstract is available for this record.

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.

Abbie Hardcastle, Jessa Loomis

Drawing on feminist scholarship on money and finance and ­geographical scholarship on everyday life and masculinities, this article examines the promises and futures that investment in and use of cryptocurrency represents for men in the UK. We explore the financial practices, logics and decision-making of ordinary crypto-users and examine how engagement with cryptocurrency shapes how these men understand themselves, their futures, and their place in the broader world. Through focus group and interview data we explore how research participants explain their rationale and motivations for their financial practices, including examining men’s perceptions of and relations to cryptocurrency, and how these shape and are shaped by the intimacies and moralities of everyday life. Based on our findings, we conceptualise crypto-masculinities as a historically and socially specific financial practice and gendered expression of the relations of (digital) money and finance. This article remedies the limited geographical attention that has been paid thus far to cryptocurrency ‘users’, and offers novel insights into the embodied dimensions of cryptocurrency use, including how cryptocurrency is experienced and lived.

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.

Chihsin Chiu, Shuwei Wu, Chiung-Ting Chen

No abstract is available for this record.