The governance of new technology projects in remote and developing economies is frequently undermined by severe information asymmetry and fragmented telecommunications infrastructure. While theoretical public policy advocates for the deployment of distributed ledger technologies to enhance institutional design and regulatory transparency, evaluating the economic impact of these systems relies heavily on static, retrospective datasets. This paper proposes a cloud-native architectural framework utilizing Amazon Web Services to construct a real-time, serverless pipeline for telecommunications governance and blockchain integration. By deploying asynchronous Python middleware integrated with simulated smart contracts, the proposed system programmatically ingests high-frequency network telemetry and cross-border telecommunications data. The system translates these inputs into a dynamic Institutional Transparency Index, instantly identifying regulatory bottlenecks and pricing friction across public-private partnerships. Preliminary architectural evaluations demonstrate that decoupling the governance tracking from legacy, centralized state databases significantly reduces information asymmetry, providing policy researchers with a deterministic, highly scalable tool for modeling the economics of distributed ledgers in developing contexts.
Regulatory permissiveness is widely prescribed as the primary institutional lever for digital asset adoption. This study challenges that prescription. Analyzing NFT and DeFi adoption across 105 countries using Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-constructed composite indices and multivariate Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, we find that the Frontier Technology Readiness Index (FTRI) is the dominant structural correlate across all specifications, consistently outperforming competing explanatory variables. Regulatory environments neither independently explain adoption nor are associated with it linearly: both permissive and restrictive environments outperform mostly prohibited jurisdictions, suggesting that regulatory clarity rather than permissiveness is the operative institutional dimension. NFT and DeFi markets follow empirically distinct pathways: NFT adoption shows stronger associations with digital marketplace maturity while DeFi is more closely associated with technological infrastructure, suggesting that treating Web3 as a homogeneous policy category is unwarranted. National income conditions how effectively technological readiness is associated with adoption gains, with structural determinants exhibiting considerably reduced explanatory power in lower-middle-income economies. For policymakers, these findings reframe the debate: the primary structural correlate of digital asset adoption is technological capacity, not regulatory stance, and below a development threshold, neither intervention is reliably associated with adoption gains.
Introduction This study examines how decentralized social media platforms are reshaping participatory communication and platform governance in contemporary digital environments. Drawing on a socio-technical perspective, the analysis explores how blockchain infrastructures, token-based economies, and community-driven rule-making reconfigure established models of media control, participation, and authority. Methods Using a qualitative mixed-method approach that combines a structured review of prior research with expert interviews from the Web3 ecosystem, the study develops an integrative analytical framework that captures the evolving relationships between infrastructure, participation, and governance in decentralized platforms. Results By conceptualizing decentralization as a transformation in communicative power rather than a purely technical shift, the paper shows how user agency, trust, and visibility are negotiated through programmable infrastructures and collective governance mechanisms. While decentralized systems promise greater autonomy and transparency, the findings also highlight persistent tensions related to usability, equity, and regulatory ambiguity. Discussion By situating these tensions within broader debates on platform governance and digital communication, the study contributes to communication scholarship on emerging media systems and offers insights into the societal implications of decentralized digital infrastructures.
Platform monopolies have turned the contemporary internet into digital feudalism, extracting profit from human connection while enabling surveillance and censorship. Iran’s 2019 near-blackout, which cut connectivity to 5 %, exposed how centralized architectures become authoritarian chokepoints. Yet scholarship remains fragmented: most studies isolate protocols instead of synthesizing how technical design and political economy co-evolve. We compare federated systems such as ReP2P Matrix, Nostr’s peer-to-peer networks, Bluesky’s AT Protocol, blockchain communication hybrids, and Named Data Networking. Our multi-method study of decentralized internet alternatives blends traffic analytics of 4 million Nostr users on 600 relays, performance benchmarks, economic sustainability modeling, and architectural case studies. We ask whether these designs can fulfil the promise of a truly decentralized internet. The evidence is mixed. SendingNetwork scales group messaging linearly, and Waku proves spam-resistant peer-to-peer networks with <300 ms proof generation; however, no single protocol reconciles censorship resistance, usability, and economic sustainability. Nostr delivers uncompromising censorship resistance yet consumes 35 × the resources of centralized systems. Bluesky’s growth leaves 98.9 % of identities non-portable. Community mesh networks invite new hierarchies of technical privilege. Accepting irreducible trade-offs must guide emerging web3 governance. Communities will choose architectures aligned with their values, but meaningful decentralization will remain aspirational until funding models and accessibility gaps are resolved.
Patrick Spiesberger, Nils Henrik Beyer, Hannes Hartenstein
Ethereum's ideal of censorship resistance, together with related fairness properties, is undermined in practice, motivating fairness mechanisms that aim to restore these properties. Several of these mechanisms hand control over block contents to a committee of proposers under a 1-of-n honest assumption: at least one committee member complies with the mechanism even when deviating would increase personal revenue. We refer to such proposers as altruistic. Yet prior work shows that roughly 91 percent of blocks are constructed by centralized block-building services that demonstrably take user-adverse actions for financial gain; the responsible proposers sign these blocks blindly, without any means of intervention. A common reading of this figure is that 9 percent of proposers forgo these gains and act altruistically. Our empirical analysis of the full year 2025 shows that this share is far smaller: at most 1.55 percent of proposers can plausibly be regarded as altruistic, whereas the remaining 98.45 percent of proposers exhibit observable non-altruistic behavior. We interpret 1.55 percent as an upper bound on the prevalence of altruistic proposers. These results imply that committee-based fairness mechanisms that rely on altruistic members would require substantially larger committees than currently proposed. This raises concerns about their practical viability and motivates mechanisms in which fair behavior is the rational choice.
The classic digital divide theory asserts that unequal access to and unequal experience with information technologies may lead to unequal user outcomes. This paper introduces a new perspective to extend this theory: outcome divides can persist despite equal access and equal experience if users differ in their analytical ability to analyze and interpret available data for decision-making. We term this new data-to-decision skill as analytical ability and integrate it into the classic digital divide framework. We develop a new approach to operationalize analytical ability by contrasting humans’ actual performance against that of a standard machine learning model that makes similar analytical decisions based on the same information available to humans, essentially emulating a quasi-random counterfactual setting. To minimize the confounding impact of other divides, we validate the role of analytical ability in information-transparent environments like the blockchain-based trading markets, where all historical trading data is equally available to all users on the blockchain. We leverage data from EnjinX, a blockchain-enabled non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace that records all historical NFT transactions. We measure user outcomes by their flip trading performance, a standard metric captured via the percentage of exploited flipping opportunities. Our empirical analysis reveals that disparities in analytical ability may become the new bottleneck for outcome equity: flip trading performance could decrease by 66.86% when traders are incapable of analyzing the available blockchain information effectively. Our study contributes to the literature by extending the digital divide theory with the notion of the analytical ability divide. Moreover, we are among the first to rigorously quantify analytical ability and empirically test its impact based on the extended digital divide framework. Our study also offers important practical implications for platforms and policymakers to bridge this new divide in order to foster outcome equity.
This paper studies whether fast-settlement payment layers can replace secure baselayer blockchains in a search-theoretic monetary model. The Chain provides secure but costly and probabilistic settlement, while the Network provides instant, cost-free payments but exposes users to cyberattacks and requires sellers to incur adoption costs. In the Chain-only benchmark, buyers choose settlement intensity after bargaining. Because they do not internalize the full trade surplus, settlement intensity is inefficiently low, reducing trade efficiency and weakening the monetary value of tokens. Introducing the Network generates multiple payment equilibria. Under exogenous cyberattack risk, Chain and Network payments may coexist: the Network provides fast settlement and fallback liquidity when Chain settlement fails, while the Chain remains valuable for its security and universal acceptance. If cyberattack risk is sufficiently low, pure Network payments can arise, although pure Chain payments may also persist because Network acceptance is costly for sellers. When cyberattack risk is endogenous, broader Network adoption increases exposed balances and strengthens hackers’ incentives. This security externality weakens the Network’s value as fallback liquidity and eliminates the pure Network-payment equilibrium. The Chain, therefore, survives as a secure settlement anchor. The welfare analysis shows that Network adoption is not always welfare improving: its payment-efficiency gains must outweigh seller adoption costs and, under endogenous attacks, the resource costs of hacking. Fast-settlement layers can improve payment efficiency, but they do not generically replace secure base-layer settlement.
Federated Learning enables collaborative model training across distributed clients without requiring direct access to their private data. However, effective deployment faces critical challenges, including heterogeneous data quality, unbalanced participation, and the lack of incentives. In this paper, we propose a federated learning network structured as a decentralized marketplace, where clients are financially rewarded based on the quality and utility of their contributions. Our framework enhances client selection through utility-driven mechanisms and offers strong incentives that promote sustained, high-quality participation. It also ensures security and transparency for the Task Owner while maintaining data privacy. The architecture can support a wide range of collaborative scenarios; spanning from healthcare and finance to consumer applications; where data privacy, fairness, and scalability are paramount. We demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of our approach through experiments, showcasing improved global model accuracy, and equitable participation.
Abstract This article critically examines how Web3 decentralization policy trends impact global digital governance, questioning whether they genuinely distribute power or merely shift influence to a new, tech-savvy elite. Based on fieldwork in Silicon Valley since August 2022 and engagement with scholars and practitioners up to December 2025, the article provides a conceptual analysis with emerging empirical insights around the nascent global Web3 movement. While Web3 advocates challenge centralized data monopolies and traditional state structures, this analysis critiques the assumption that Web3 democratizes power, highlighting both its potential for inclusion and risks of exclusion, insofar as it may reinforce hierarchies rooted in technical expertise and digital access. While acknowledging the broader landscape of Web3 governance (including hybrid and federated models) and scoping the Global North and Global South contexts considering global adoption cases, the article particularly focuses on three post-Westphalian paradigms: (i) Network States, (ii) Network Sovereignties, and (iii) Algorithmic Nations. While Network States advocate for crypto-libertarian governance, Network Sovereignties and Algorithmic Nations emphasize cooperative governance aimed at empowering minority communities, such as indigenous groups, stateless nations, and e-diasporas, through decentralized, data-driven systems. By engaging with both the limitations and some promises, prospects, and pitfalls of Web3, this article questions whether Web3 can create a more inclusive global order or if influence is increasingly concentrated among a new elite. This article contributes to debates on sovereignty, governance, and citizenship by advocating hybrid policy frameworks that balance global and local dynamics, emphasizing solidarity, digital justice, and international cooperation for equitable Web3 governance.
Dec 23, 2025·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Tejas Kotha, Kushagra Bhatnagar, Leona Chandra Kruse, Matti Rossi
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) promised the interaction of artists/creators directly with their collectors without the need for any intermediaries, but the realisation was quick that such a technology, instead of getting rid of intermediaries, reintroduced new intermediaries in the form of NFT marketplaces. These marketplaces exhibit diverse features and cater to different user groups. A wide array of governance strategies, such as curation and gatekeeping, are used to steer creativity and interactions in the marketplace, informed by the marketplace's strategy. We examined this diversity by identifying the 'ideal types' of marketplaces based on these strategies alongside the motivations of the creators to make sense of the growing NFT market and constructed a typology that distinguishes four kinds of NFT marketplaces: Avant-garde, Canonical, Mass Culture, and Coterie. The article also offers practical implications for creators and collectors looking to make informed choices when deciding to participate in a particular marketplace.
Dec 5, 2025·PROCEEDINGS. III Congreso Internacional Multidisciplinario “Innovación, Equidad y Sostenibilidad en la Era Digital: Nuevas Fronteras para América Latina”
Remigio Santiago Siguencia Montero, Miriam Carmita Mora Urdiales
With the significant advancement of technology and networks at the global level, it can currently be observed that there is a wide digital access gap between urban and rural areas, a situation that creates a major obstacle to guaranteeing the right to education, especially for children and adolescents who live in areas where there are no internet connectivity towers and who, in addition, face extreme poverty that prevents them from acquiring an electronic device for their academic activities. Various statistical data on connectivity in rural areas identify the main factors that perpetuate inequality in access: infrastructure, affordability, and digital skills, situations that affect educational equity. According to evidence from studies carried out by international and regional organizations, several aspects that generate this problem are discussed, such as regulatory implications and, mainly, the poor implementation of public policies by the Central Government and the Autonomous Decentralized Governments. Based on this, recommendations are proposed for state institutions and multilateral actors aimed at ensuring meaningful connectivity and, in this way, guaranteeing the right to education in rural areas.
Deepak Gupta, K. R. Shobha, D. Hariprasad, Rakhi Chawla · 7 authors
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) represents a transformative paradigm for emerging economies, providing foundational systems for identity verification, payment processing, and data exchange. The convergence of DPI with Web3 technologies and decentralized infrastructure creates unprecedented opportunities for inclusive economic development. This chapter examines how blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, and decentralized protocols enhance traditional DPI frameworks, analyzing implementations across emerging markets with emphasis on India's pioneering India Stack model. Through examination of 220 million active blockchain addresses globally and DPI implementations reaching 1.3 billion citizens, this research demonstrates that Web3-enabled DPI can overcome institutional voids, reduce transaction costs by up to 70%, and facilitate financial inclusion for 730 million unbanked adults. The chapter analyzes technical architectures, governance models, security frameworks, and socioeconomic impacts while addressing challenges including digital divides, regulatory gaps, and sustainability concerns. Key findings reveal that DPI integrated with Web3 infrastructure contributed 0.9% to GDP in 2022, projected to reach 4.2% by 2030, with the global blockchain market valued at $31.18 billion in 2025 and forecasted to reach $393.42 billion by 2032.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) represents a paradigm shift in financial services by enabling trustless, peer-topeer transactions through blockchain technology. This study conducts a comparative analysis of four high-traffic DeFi platforms-PancakeSwap, Uniswap, Aave, and Compoundfocusing on their core architecture, transaction costs, scalability, security, and governance models. The analysis reveals that Uniswap has the highest Total Value Locked (TVL), exceeding $4.5 billion, while PancakeSwap offers the lowest average transaction fees at approximately $0.10. Aave stands out for its innovation in flash loans, whereas Compound maintains algorithmic stability in interest rate adjustments. Our findings indicate that user adoption is significantly influenced by fee structure and network efficiency, with platforms on Binance Smart Chain showing higher retail participation due to lower costs. This paper highlights the need for improved cross-chain interoperability and standardized risk assessment frameworks. The insights contribute to a deeper understanding of how functionality and design choices drive platform growth, offering guidance for future DeFi development.
The escalating cost of higher education has rendered access to quality education a significant challenge for students worldwide.Traditional student loan systems often involve intermediaries, leading to delays, increased costs, and limited accessibility.Block chain technology, with its decentralized and transparent nature, presents a transformative solution to these challenges.This paper explores the potential of decentralized student loan systems powered by block chain technology, aiming to enhance accessibility, reduce costs, and increase transparency in educational financing.
This paper introduces Web 3.0 NEXT , a network design that pushes Web3 decentralization even further by reducing the dependency on centralized or traditional internet service providers (ISPs) and data centres. By integrating peer-to-peer mesh networking, decentralized storages, blockchain-based authentication and verification system, and a suite of emerging off-grid connectivity technologies like Wi-Fi mesh, LoRaWan, and satellite networks, the suggested system seeks to establish a strong, self-sustaining network infrastructure. This paper explores the benefits and technical challenges of such a system. That area can be used in a disaster-prone area, national security and economic innovations, which may force centralized authority from suppressing it. We will also discuss ethical, legal, financial, energy, user adoption, and security considerations, alongside relevant case studies and provide a holistic view of the potential challenges faced in deploying WEB 3.0 NEXT.
Priyanka Kaushik, Faris Thazhethoolayil Abdul Kadar, Rachna Rathore, Saurabh Pratap Singh Rathore · 6 authors
The rise of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has transformed the landscape of digital asset ownership, introducing new platforms for content creation and consumption. This research delves into the changing content dynamics within NFT marketplaces, focusing on the evolution of digital asset characteristics and consumer behavior. By studying established categories such as visual arts, music, and collectibles, we analyze shifts in demand patterns over time. Furthermore, we explore the significant impact of celebrities and social media influencers on specific NFT projects and broader market trends. While their involvement can generate interest, we critically assess potential drawbacks, including the susceptibility of hype-driven markets to fraudulent activities. Through data analysis, our goal is to shed light on the dynamic nature of NFT content, offering insights into its status and future direction.
Urban-rural dichotomy is a poaching challenge to inclusive economic growth and sustainable development across the world. Such imbalance is commonly defined by unequal access to infrastructure, economic opportunities and good public services. This paper discusses how digital technologies, such as broadband, mobile applications, e-commerce, and precision farming tools, are transformative solutions that can be important tools in bridging this gap, economic opportunities, and sustainable livelihoods in rural society. The main hypothesis is that the traditional "urban bias" can be reversed by using specific digital interventions to reduce the transaction costs, widen the market reach, and decentralize the access to knowledge and finance.
Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap assumes that adoption of layer-2 (L2) rollups will relieve congestion on the layer-1 (L1) mainnet, but there is little causal evidence on how large that relief is across major protocol changes. We construct a daily panel for Ethereum from August 2021 to December 2024 and estimate the total effect of L2 adoption on L1 congestion using a regime-aware interrupted time-series design that spans the London, Merge, and Dencun upgrades and adjusts for macro demand. In the pre-Dencun regime, a 10 percentage point increase in L2 adoption reduces median L1 base fees by about 11%—roughly 4–5 Gwei per 21k-gas transfer—and yields similar declines in a harmonized congestion index, with only modest changes in block utilization. Combining these elasticities with a Merge-era counterfactual path for L2 adoption, we estimate that observed adoption avoided about $80–$90 million in base and priority fees over 137 days, or roughly $0.6–$0.7 million per day. These effects are precise while L2 adoption is still ramping up but become statistically local once adoption exceeds 85% after Dencun, implying that congestion relief is economically meaningful yet regime-specific. Our findings support continued investment in L2 infrastructure alongside L1 mechanism design and illustrate how to benchmark congestion relief in other multi-layer digital platforms.
The digital innovation accompanied by explicit economic incentives have fundamentally changed the process of innovation diffusion. As a representative of digital innovation, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) potentially offer new revenue streams in the digital space. However, current researches mainly focus on transaction networks and community culture, leaving the interplay among diffusion dynamics, economic dynamics, and social constraints on Twitter. By collecting and analyzing NFTs-related tweet dataset, the motivations of retweeters, the information mechanisms behind emojis, and the networked-based diffusion dynamics is systematically investigated. Results indicate that Retweeting is fueled by Freemint and trading information, with the higher economic incentives as a major motivation and some potential organizational tendencies. The diffusion of NFTs is primarily driven by a “Ringed-layered” information mechanism involving individual promoters and speculators. The presentation of content contribute positively to the growth of the retweet network. This study contributes to the innovation diffusion theory with economic incentives embedded.
The integration of technology into daily human lives has become indispensable, shaping society and emphasizing the role of humans in the development of society. This indispensable integration is illustrated by the global rise of Web3, a decentralized application ecosystem that utilizes advanced technologies, such as crypto assets, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and the Metaverse. These technologies offer significant benefits alongside unique risks and challenges, necessitating innovative regulatory strategies to address them. The inherent tension between promoting innovation and safeguarding citizens’ interests requires a flexible and comprehensive regulatory framework for Web3 in Kenya, capable of adapting to the rapidly evolving technological landscape while simultaneously managing emerging risks. This research aims to identify key principles for developing effective Web3 regulations and argues for Kenya’s regulatory recognition of Web3 technologies, emphasizing potential benefits such as increased innovation, digital sovereignty, financial independence, and economic development. It also explores different regulatory strategies, such as self-regulation, co-regulation, and the implementation of co-regulatory tools like public-private dialogue (PPD). The findings propose that Kenyan regulators should adopt flexible, forward-thinking regulatory strategies that can navigate the complexities introduced by these transformative technologies.