WEF Realizing Potential Blockchain

White Paper
Realizing the Potential

of Blockchain
A Multistakeholder Approach to
the Stewardship of Blockchain and
Cryptocurrencies
June 2017
White Paper Authors:
Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Contents
Preface 2
Executive Summary 3
The Blockchain as a New Global Resource 4
New Thinking in How to Steward a Global Resource: The Internet as a Case Study 5
Blockchain Governance Challenges 7
1. Stewardship of platforms 10
2. Stewardship of applications 24
3. Stewardship of the ecosystem as a whole 27
The Players in the Blockchain Ecosystem 32
The Global Solution Networks (GSN) Framework Applied to Blockchain 34
Standards networks: Dont deify differences; codify common ground 36
Networked institutions: Welcome stakeholders everywhere 37
Advocacy networks: Respect members interests and constraints 38
Watchdog networks: Do no harm 38
Policy networks: Participate in debate and coordinate regulation 39
Knowledge networks: Know what you dont know 40
Delivery networks: Keep incentives for mass collaboration in mind 41
Summary: What Needs to Be Done 42
About the Authors 45
Appendix: Global Solution Networks 46
Knowledge networks 46
Operational and delivery networks 48
Policy networks 49
Advocacy networks 49
Standards networks 50
Networked institutions 51
Acknowledgements 51
Notice 51
Endnotes 53
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REF 240617 00034436

Preface
Distributed ledger technology promises to have far-reaching economic and social implications. By
leveraging a global peer network to assure directly and transparently the integrity of value exchanged
between parties, blockchain appears likely to transform a number of important industries that
supply or rely upon third-party assurance. It could prove to be a broader force for transparency and
integrity in society, including in the fight against bribery and corruption. It could also lead to extensive
changes in supply chains and governmental functions, such as central banking.
The extent to which this new technology realizes its potential will depend in substantial part upon
how well stakeholders steward its development. There remain important open governance questions
regarding both the functioning of the technology and its current and potential applications.
The World Economic Forum and its new Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is pleased
to publish this foundational survey of blockchain governance challenges and multistakeholder
cooperation opportunities. Authored by Don and Alex Tapscott, leading experts on both blockchain
and multistakeholder governance, this White Paper provides a structured analytical framework
and taxonomy for use by industry, technical, governmental, civil society and other stakeholders in
considering how they might collaborate to resolve problems and unlock opportunities beyond the
reach of any single actor.
As Don and Alex emphasize, a distributed ecosystem need not be a disorganized one, and improved
governance need not imply formal governmental legislation or regulation. A cooperative process of
multistakeholder dialogue and stewardship can go a long way in improving trust and helping new
technological systems develop in a socially beneficial manner.
This is the animating purpose of the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: to provide an
international platform for public-private dialogue and cooperation in respect of the stewardship
and agile governance of new technologies. We thank the authors for their contribution, which we
believe provides a solid foundation for precisely such a process in respect of blockchain. We also
thank members of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on the Future of Blockchain
and others who provided feedback on the White Paper, which expresses the perspectives of the
authors alone and not necessarily those of the Forum as an institution or its individual Members and
constituents.
Richard Samans
Head of the Center for the Global Agenda and Member of the Managing Board
Zvika Krieger
Head of Technology Policy and Partnerships
Geneva and San Francisco, June 2017
Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 3

Executive Summary
Like the first generation of the internet, this second generation promises to disrupt business models
and transform industries. Blockchain (also called distributed ledger), the technology enabling
cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum, is pulling us into a new era of openness, decentralization
and global inclusion. It leverages the resources of a global peer-to-peer network to ensure the
integrity of the value exchanged among billions of devices without going through a trusted third
party. Unlike the internet alone, blockchains are distributed, not centralized; open, not hidden;
inclusive, not exclusive; immutable, not alterable; and secure. Blockchain gives us unprecedented
capabilities to create and trade value in society. As the foundational platform of the Fourth Industrial
Revolution,1 it enables such innovations as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, the internet of
things (IoT), robotics and even technology in our bodies, so that more people can participate in the
economy, create wealth and improve the state of the world.
However, this extraordinary technology may be stalled, sidetracked, captured or otherwise

suboptimized depending on how all the stakeholders behave in stewarding this set of resources
i.e. how it is governed.
Like the first era of the internet, this blockchain era should not be governed by nation states, state-
based institutions or corporations. How we govern the internet of information as a global resource
serves as a model for how to govern this new resource: through a multistakeholder approach using
what we call global governance networks a concept developed in our previous multimillion-dollar
programme investigating multistakeholder networks for global problem-solving.2 We discuss seven
types of networks: standards networks, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force; knowledge
networks, such as the Internet Research Task Force; delivery networks, such as the International
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers; policy networks, such as the Internet Policy
Research Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); advocacy networks, such as
the Alliance for Affordable Internet; watchdog networks, such as the Electronic Freedom Forum; and
networked institutions, such as the World Economic Forum.
We explain the core differences between the internet of information as a network of similar networks
and the blockchain as a balkanized internet of value, where real assets are at stake. Then we cover
what we have found to be the most urgent threats to this resource, which we view as governance
challenges. By governance, we mean stewardship, which involves collaborating, identifying common
interests and creating incentives to act on them. We do not mean government, regulation or top-
down control. We explore governance needs at three levels: platform, application and the ecosystem
as a whole.
Unlike the internet of information, which is a vast network of similar networks, this internet
of value requires stewardship at not just one level but three. At the platform level, we look at
bitcoins scalability issue and energy consumption, Ethereums switch to proof-of-stake and crisis
management by consensus, and Hyperledgers call for both urgency and moderation around
standards. At the application level, we look at the need for oversight, skilled talent and user-friendly
interfaces. At the overall ecosystem level, we look at the need for a proper legal structure, regulatory
restraint, diversity of viewpoints and scientific research in tandem with business development. We
introduce each of the eight stakeholders in the ecosystem: innovators, venture capitalists, banks and
financial services, developers, academics, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government
bodies, and users or citizens.
We apply our previously developed global solution networks3 (GSN) framework to blockchain
governance. We urge stakeholders in the space to codify their common ground through standards
networks; welcome stakeholders with radically diverse views of what needs to be done through
networked institutions; respect members interests and constraints through advocacy networks;
ensure that no one does any harm through watchdog networks; participate in policy debates and
coordinate regulation through policy networks; get up to speed through knowledge networks; and
keep incentives for mass collaboration in mind through delivery networks. Finally, we outline the
most pressing governance work to be done, if we are to preserve and steward this new global
resource to achieve its vast potential.
4 Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

The Blockchain as a In many cases, blockchain is public: anyone can view it at
any time because it resides on the network, not within a
New Global Resource single institution charged with auditing transactions and
keeping records. No one can hide a transaction, and that
makes bitcoin more traceable than cash. It is open-source
code: anyone can download it for free, run it and use it to
The internet is entering a second era thats based on develop new tools for managing transactions online. Private
blockchain. The last few decades brought us the internet of blockchains have emerged that dont use cryptocurrency
information. We are now witnessing the rise of the internet for consensus.
of value. Where the first era was sparked by a convergence
of computing and communications technologies, this Blockchain is, for the most part, inclusive. Satoshi imagined
second era will be powered by a clever combination of that the typical person would be interacting with the
cryptography, mathematics, software engineering and blockchain through what he called simplified payment
behavioural economics. It is blockchain technology, also verification mode that can work on a mobile device.5
called distributed ledger technology. Like the internet Now anyone with a flip phone can participate in the global
before it, the blockchain promises to upend business economy; no documentation is required to be trusted.
models and disrupt industries. It is pushing us to challenge
how we have structured society, defined value and Blockchain is immutable. Within minutes or even seconds,
rewarded participation. all the transactions conducted are verified, cleared and
stored in a block that is linked to the preceding block,
Blockchain emerged in the wake of the global economic thereby creating a chain. Each block must refer to the
crisis, when a pseudonymous person or persons named preceding block to be valid. This structure permanently
Satoshi Nakamoto released a new protocol for A Peer- timestamps and stores exchanges of value, preventing
to-Peer Electronic Cash System using a cryptocurrency anyone from altering the ledger.
called bitcoin.4 Cryptocurrencies (digital currencies)
are different from traditional fiat currencies because no Blockchain is historical. If we wanted to steal a bitcoin,
government issues or controls them. Theyre not saved wed have to rewrite a coins or assets entire history on
in a file somewhere; theyre represented by transactions the blockchain in broad daylight. So the blockchain is a
recorded in a blockchain like a global spreadsheet or distributed ledger representing a network consensus of
ledger, which leverages the resources of a large peer-to- every transaction that has ever occurred. Therefore, we
peer bitcoin network to verify and approve each bitcoin must preserve the blockchain in its entirety. Thats why
transaction. Satoshis protocol established a set of rules storage matters.
in the form of distributed computations that ensured the
integrity of the data exchanged among billions of devices This is much more than the financial services industry.
without going through a trusted third party. This new Innovators are programming this new digital ledger
resource has six critical qualities. to record anything of value to humankind birth and
death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles
Each blockchain, like the one that uses bitcoin, is of ownership, rights to intellectual property, educational
distributed: it runs on computers provided by volunteers degrees, financial accounts, medical history, insurance
around the world; there is no central database to hack claims, citizenship and voting privileges, location of
or shut down. We can send money and soon any form portable assets, provenance of food and diamonds, job
of digitized value from stocks and bonds to intellectual recommendations and performance ratings, charitable
property, art, music and even votes directly and safely donations tied to specific outcomes, employment
between us without going through a bank, a credit-card contracts, managerial decision rights and anything else
company, PayPal or Western Union, social network, that we can express in code.
government or other middleman. Of course, this does not
mean that middlemen will disappear. Rather the technology So important is this new resource that some have called
provides profound opportunities for innovative companies the blockchain a public utility like the internet, a utility that
and institutions in the middle to streamline processes, requires public support. Paul Brody, principal and global
increase their metabolism, create new value and enter new innovation leader of blockchain technology at Ernst &
markets. Young, thinks that all our appliances should donate their
processing power to the upkeep of a blockchain: Thanks
Blockchain is encrypted: it uses heavy-duty encryption to the smartphone business driving very low-cost systems,
involving public and private keys (rather like the two-key your lawnmower or dishwasher is going to come with a
system to access a safety deposit box) to maintain virtual CPU that is probably a thousand times more powerful than
security. We neednt worry about the weak firewalls of the it actually needs, so why not have the appliance mine?
US Democratic National Party, a thieving staffer of Morgan Not to make money, but to contribute to the security and
Stanley or a perversely incentivized employee of Wells viability of the blockchain as a whole, he said.6
Fargo.

New Thinking in How
Weve never had this capability before trusted
transactions directly between two or more total strangers,
to Steward a Global
authenticated by mass collaboration, and powered by
collective self-interests, rather than by corporations
Resource: The Internet

motivated by profit or governments motivated by power.
It is the culmination of what Alan Turning started, a
as a Case Study
true paradigm shift ushered in by decentralized ledger
technologies.
In this report, our goal is not to provide specific proposals,

though we have suggested a few possible directions. Our
goal is to describe the landscape, provide a taxonomy for
rich discussions, map the diverse players to the taxonomy, The governance of critical global resources water, old
surface the topics of concern and identify the requirements growth forests, fisheries and the internet itself has been
for better stewardship. We encourage all players not a key focus of our research over the last five years. When
just those in financial services to think about whole we use the word, governance, we mean stewardship,
ecosystem and not simply their own narrow interests. We which involves collaborating, identifying common interests
believe that this rising tide should lift all boats. and creating incentives to act on them. We do not mean
government, which involves legislating and regulating
behaviour and punishing those who misbehave.
Since the end of World War II, state-based institutions have

administered most of the worlds important resources. Two
of the most powerful the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank were born at the Bretton Woods
Conference in 1944. The United Nations and other groups
under its umbrella the World Health Organization and
the World Trade Organization received a wide berth
to exercise their monopoly on global problem-solving.
These organizations were hierarchical by design, because
hierarchies were the dominant paradigm during the first
half of a war-torn century.
But while necessary, these industrial-scale solutions were

and still are insufficient for the challenges of the digital era.
The rise of the internet marked a significant departure from
the traditional culture of governance. We reject kings,
presidents and voting, said MIT computer scientist David
Clark in 1992. We believe in rough consensus and running
code.7 That was the mantra for stewardship of the first
generation of the internet when few could imagine how it
would transform human existence. Clarks words embodied
a philosophy for the leadership of a global resource that
was radically different from the Bretton Woods model, yet
one that engendered a remarkably effective governance
ecosystem. That the internet has become a global resource
in so short a time is astounding, in no small part thanks
to strong leadership and governance and despite the
powerful forces against it.
Governance means stewardship, not government or

regulation.
In our 2013-2015 research, we set out to do the definitive

investigation into internet governance who exactly was
providing this stewardship to ensure the development
and continuance of the internet and what made the
ecosystem tick. No government or group of governments
controls the internet or its standards, though several U.S
government agencies once funded it.8 Instead, a vast
ecosystem of companies, civil society organizations,
software developers, academics and state-based

institutions were collaborating in transparent, distributed 5. Advocacy networks
forums that defied measurement by traditional command- Advocacy networks seek to change the agenda or policies
and-control frameworks. In the infancy of the internet as of governments, corporations and other institutions.
a global resource, this ecosystem has proven that diverse Among them are internet.org and the Alliance for
stakeholders, loosely organized in seven types of open Affordable Internet, which advocate for greater inclusion.
networks that operate by consensus, could effectively The Industrial Internet Consortium, a relatively new open
steward a global resource. group of researchers, companies and public agencies, is
advocating the adoption of internet applications across
1. Standards networks various industries to accelerate the IoT.11
Standards networks are non-state, non-profit organizations
such as the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the 6. Watchdog networks
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that develop These networks scrutinize organizations to ensure that they
technical specifications and standards, the building blocks behave appropriately. Topics range from human rights,
of the product, and infrastructure development that leads corruption and the environment, to financial services and
to mass adoption. To succeed as standards networks, the commercial practices. In the process, they drive public
IAB and IETF regularly engage the expertise of individuals, debate, boost transparency and ignite movements for
civil society organizations and private-sector enterprise. change. Perhaps the most vocal watchdog of civil liberties
Similarly, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops, online is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.12 It scrutinizes
tests and implements standards that promote the webs corporate and government policies and holds them
evolution and ensure its interoperability. accountable through litigation and grass-roots activism.
2. Knowledge networks 7. Networked institutions

The primary function of knowledge networks is to conduct Some networks provide such a wide range of capabilities
research and develop new ideas that can help solve global that we describe them as networked institutions. They
problems. For example, the Internet Research Task Force are not state-based but true multistakeholder networks.
(IRTF) investigates emerging technologies of potential The value they generate can range from knowledge,
relevance to the internet. If IRTF creates a specification advocacy and policy to the actual delivery of solutions. The
suitable for standardization, then it proposes it to the IETF. Internet Society, for example, excels at incorporating the
More savvy users can realize the upside of new global many views of diverse stakeholders, not just the efforts of
resources while minimizing the downside. Internet2 (www. the IAB, the IETF and the IRTF, but also the International
Internet2.edu) is a global research and education network Telecommunications Union, the Organisation for Economic
designed to remove barriers to discovering new knowledge Co-operation and Development, the World Intellectual
and its impact. Property Organization and several other United Nations
commissions.13The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) also
3. Delivery networks engages participation across stakeholder groups.
This class of networks actually delivers the change it seeks,
supplementing or even bypassing the efforts of traditional Most governments showed both restraint and foresight in
institutions. For example, the International Corporation for regulating the internet.
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) delivers domain
names. Supporting delivery networks include African In the early days of the internet, governments
Network Information Centre (AfriNIC), American Registry for demonstrated both restraint and foresight. They showed
Internet Numbers (ARIN), Asia-Pacific Network Information restraint by limiting regulation and control throughout
Centre (APNIC), Latin America and Caribbean Network the internets evolution and they showed foresight by
Information Centre (LACNIC), and Rseaux IP Europens allowing the system to flourish before trying to impose
Network Coordination Centre (RIPE). rules and regulations. Now that the internet has permeated
every aspect of our lives, courts and legislators have
4. Policy networks started recognizing new claims, such as the right to be
These networks support policy development or seek forgotten, and imposing local rules that often conflict in the
alternatives for policy, whether governments support them global realm of the digital. As the best example of a true
or not. The goal is to inform, if not shape, the policy-making networked institution (not controlled by nation states), the
process of corporations and governments so that it is more World Economic Forum has stepped up to caution against
transparent, shared and inclusive. For example, Internet such uncoordinated legal efforts that only fragment the
& Jurisdiction facilitates transnational cooperation on internet, creating what some are calling the splinternet,
cybersecurity, human rights, and other legal and economic and thereby stunting the internets enormous capacity to
policies.9 The Internet Policy Research Initiative at the facilitate human progress.14
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab also
works with technologists and policy-makers to increase
the integrity of interconnected digital systems. In 2016, 17
public interest groups collaborated to develop the Internet
Policy Platform, which featured specific policy initiatives
on internet access, choice, free speech, privacy and
transparency.10

Blockchain Governance permissionless blockchain is that no one has the right to
anything. There are really just powers, what you have the
Challenges power to do, what you can do. Joichi Ito put it in these
terms: You can regulate networks, you can regulate
operations, but you cant regulate software.17 On the
internet of value, people will have the power to express
themselves and the power to preserve their expression
without restriction.
In our previous research, we determined that the But these differences dont require government to control,
stewardship of the internet of information was relatively oversee or somehow govern the blockchain revolution. The
simple compared to what this nascent internet of value genius of distributed ledgers is that the technology (and
would need. True, the internet has been a vast network everything that happens with it) is and must be distributed.
of networks with intricate issues of standards and other Power is distributed. Heavy-handed government
governance challenges. But we all use basically the same intervention would kill this embryonic technology in its egg.
coherent platform globally. On it rests the world wide web
and countless other applications. Rather, we need self-organizing, bottom-up and
multistakeholder governance. In fact, this type of
Blockchain, at least at this stage of its development, is governance is the best protection from government
more balkanized and complex. The economic stakes interference and subjugation. According to Primavera
are higher. This is very different from the somewhat De Filippi, faculty associate at the Berkman Center for
hippy style that the open-source, free software internet Internet & Society at Harvard and a permanent researcher
movement had, Joichi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab at the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris, the
said. Were going a little too fast in promising our investors absence of a formalized governance structure has two
a functioning infrastructure. Many companies are raising possible effects: either blockchain-based communities
money as if theyre ready for production. ... These guys are have difficulty acting or reacting expeditiously or else
all under the microscope, under the gun. Many of them are informal and invisible power dynamics emerge, often more
heavily funded and its really hard.15 centralized than they appear.18 That bears repeating:
without governance, invisible powers could emerge.
The internet is a network of similar networks.
The blockchain is a ledger of different and sometimes In our research, we found ourselves exploring three levels
competing ledgers. of blockchain that warrant stewardship (see Figure 1). The
first is the platform level, the protocols of blockchains such
Bitcoin is a car going down the road at 1,000 mph, said as bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple or Hyperledger. While people
Matthew Roszak, Co-Founder of Bloq Inc. Developers are often speak of virtual currency as a financial instrument
not the drivers of this car, yet they are tasked with repairing and blockchain as a payment system and, therefore,
and upgrading this car without turning it off, stopping it relevant narrowly to banking and finance we think of
or rebooting it.16 Most developers prefer it that way. They them more broadly as an ownership claim on a particular
think bitcoin is already very well regulated by mathematics, technology platform, a claim represented by a token that
which are not up to the whims of governments. Other comes with decision rights and usually an incentive to
developers take issue with the word, governance, because ensure the platforms long-term success. So what we
they associate it with the belief that the technology is discuss throughout this report applies to all domains, not
broken and needs to be fixed or that the process has just finance.
stopped working and needs to be saved. They prefer the
word, stewardship and appropriately so.
Where the internet democratized information, the

blockchain democratizes value and cuts to the core
of legacy industries like banking. It also pertains to the
management of money, wealth, intellectual property and
other forms of value for which many societies expect
government to protect the public interest. So we all need
to acknowledge that, while governments and regulators
alone lack the knowledge, resources and mandate to
govern this technology effectively, government participation
and even regulation will likely have a greater influence over
blockchain technologies to ensure that we preserve both
the rights and powers of consumers and citizens.
People in free societies have the right to free speech and
have the power to express it on the internet of information
but not the power to protect it from piracy, hacking or
censorship. One of the defining characteristics of an open

Figure 1: Blockchain: Three Levels of Governance Consider the Belt and Road project the new Silk Road
railway linking Hong Kong SAR and Rotterdam. The
Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) led an initiative
to develop a proof-of-concept distributed ledger platform
for trade finance. The goal was to increase efficiency
and productivity by enhancing the transparency and
trustworthiness of information for regulatory reporting
by putting it on the blockchain, thereby eliminating the
need for a central authority. The HKMA continues to sort
through the legal, regulatory and governance issues of
using blockchain.19 Launching this type of application
requires massive collaboration among companies,
governments and other entities. Similarly, this resource
will need constant care and tending to onboard more and
more users over time. It illustrates the profound differences
between managing information creation versus value
Source: Authors creation activities. The latter require deep negotiation,
contractual and jurisdictional understandings, and the
ongoing stewardship of application-level ecosystems.
The second is the application level, the tools that run on
platforms, tools such as smart contracts, that require The third is the overall ecosystem, the ledger of ledgers
massive cooperation between stakeholders to work. connecting (or not) bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, Ripple,
As with the internet, entrepreneurs have been quick to Tendermint and other platforms. We found that many of
seize blockchain business opportunities and innovate these are quite different in their world views and choice
business practices. The recent rise of so-called initial of protocols but present a common set of issues that we
coin offerings is turbocharging growth at the application think a variety of stakeholders including consumers and
layer, raising regulatory questions and accelerating the citizens should understand and be able to discuss. In this
need for multistakeholder governance. With the internet section, we cover what we have found to be most urgent
of information, various companies, governments, NGOs for survival in the near term and critical for sustainability in
and individuals could simply build an application using the long term, so this list is by no means exhaustive.
either the web or more proprietary mobile platforms like
the iPhone or Android. However, because blockchain is all
about value, developers are building applications, networks 1. Stewardship of platforms
and projects within particular ecosystems sometimes
with a complex assembly of stakeholders who create, Countless blockchain platforms exit and countless more
exchange and manage value. are in development. Consider Table 1, showing the top 10
platforms where cryptocurrency represents both value and
ownership in the platform. For this paper, we review the
top two platforms with tokens trading on the marketplace,
bitcoin and Ether, and two platforms, Cosmos and
Hyperledger, that seek to provide interoperability among
other platforms.
Table 1: Top 10 Cryptocurrencies, as of 17 June 2017

Rank Name US$ Market Cap US$ Price Circulating Supply
1 Bitcoin 43,630,891,619 2660.98 16,396,550 BTC
2 Ethereum 34,736,739,597 375.25 92,569,593 ETH
3 Ripple 10,215,346,626 0.266787 38,290,271,363 XRP
4 Litecoin 2,428,105,598 47.06 51,592,007 LTC
5 Ethereum Classic 1,950,098,114 21.04 92,694,964 ETC
6 NEM 1,848,834,000 0.205426 8,999,999,999 XEM
7 Dash 1,295,180,283 175.78 7,368,399 DASH
8 IOTA 1,177,470,178 0.423622 2,779,530,283 MIOTA
9 BitShares 888,444,894 0.342215 2,596,160,000 BTS
10 Stratis 766,295,675 7.79 98,428,282 STRAT
Source: CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations, https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies, accessed 17 June 2017

The platforms that will win will be the ones that can fulfil importance of this technology, MIT created the Digital
both the operational and the governance requirements Currency Initiative (DCI), which gave a home to some of
of a range of applications because you are not going to the Bitcoin Core developers (core devs). We stepped in
move equity settlement, for example, to an environment immediately and provided them with positions at the MIT
that cannot meet the disclosure requirements of capital Media Lab, so they could continue to independently work
markets regulators, said Jesse McWaters of the World on supporting the core development of bitcoin, said Brian
Economic Forum. Capital markets regulators are not going Forde, the former White House insider and blockchain
to change their view on what should and should not be advocate who until recently headed the DCI.23 For core
disclosed simply because the process is now occurring on devs, their ability to work autonomously was central to
a blockchain.20 the design. Joichi Ito at the MIT Media Lab said, We
are now supporting Cory Fields, whos one of the core
Perianne Boring, founder and president of the Chamber devs; Wladimir van der Laan, whos the lead developer of
of Digital Commerce, which has over 100 members from bitcoin; Tadge Dryja, who was the inventor of the Lightning
the digital asset, blockchain and traditional capital markets Network. He had originally done a start-up, but now hes
industries, said, At the platform level, efforts to assist with joined us to be a researcher. And hes hired Robleh Ali,
scaling and interoperability are in most high demand.21 who was the head of digital currencies from the Bank of
Bitcoin England.24 It is a formidable group.
Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency and platform by value, Making decisions in a decentralized system is not
volume and hashing rate (a measure of participation), easy, said Roszak of Bloq Inc. The bitcoin ecosystem
started as an experiment in monetary theory, where the is currently facing some significant growing pains as the
network functioned in service of the bitcoin token of number of transactions has been growing exponentially
value. Satoshi Nakamoto attempted to align stakeholder over 200,000 transactions per day. Roszak views this
incentives through the code itself, and the technology growth as a clear measure of success and a testament
thrived in its early years, blossoming into the ecosystem we to bitcoins adoption and evolution. He told the US House
know today. of Representatives, As it grows, it faces governance
challenges which it is currently struggling to overcome.
In our research, we found that code alone has been These challenges, I would imagine, are similar to those
insufficient. Open-source collaboration is a great organizing faced by the US Congress on a daily basis. This industry
principle but its not a modus operandi for making big needs a *call to action* to resolve its differences and find a
decisions and moving forward. Open-source projects like path forward.25
Wikipedia and Linux, despite their meritocratic principles,
still have benevolent dictators Jimmy Wales and Linus Just because youre decentralized doesnt mean youre
Torvalds. To many observers, bitcoin has a governance disorganized, said Pindar Wong, Chairman of VeriFi
crisis. As with all disruptive technologies, competing (Hong Kong), former Vice-Chair of ICANN and Trustee
interpretations of Satoshis vision have emerged. Even of the Internet Society. People believe, mistakenly,
the core blockchain contingent has begun splitting into that the blockchain ecosystem, specifically the bitcoin
different cryptocamps, each advocating a separate system, is disorganized. They get that impression from
agenda. the very voluminous and heated debates around this very
contentious technology. These disputes, the so-called
Some experts interviewed argued that all will be well, that scaling wars, the block-size debate, are examples of a
debate is good and that as the song goes Dont worry, be healthy ecosystem.
happy. But virtually all agreed that most recent attempts to
get the parties together have been distasteful and deeply Decentralized doesnt mean disorganized.
unproductive events.
In our decades of research in technology and innovation,
The open war, as some called it, is clearly hurting bitcoin. deadlock has rarely been a positive, particularly when
This is likely one of the factors in the looming blockchain both sides are accusing the other of spreading falsehoods,
flippening where the upstart blockchain Ethereum is censoring opinion and trolling (that is, making provocative
about to eclipse bitcoin in value. The community is not so or deliberately offensive comments online with the primary
happy about the state of bitcoin. For example, blockchain intent of upsetting or angering an individual or group and
publishing company CoinDesk reported that in a survey of the secondary intent of sounding unnecessary alarms,
1,100 virtual currency users, 94% stated they were positive raising baseless doubt or distracting attention from real
about the state of Ethereum, while only 49% were positive issues) rather than seeking common ground on which to
about bitcoin.22 have a civil conversation. Any consensus mechanism that
you have is going to be susceptible to marketing where
At one time, the Bitcoin Foundation funded development powerful interests spend money trying to convince people
of the Bitcoin Core protocol (the common standards to do a certain thing, said Stephen Pair, Chief Executive
used by the community), but it nearly collapsed from its Officer of BitPay.26 Consider this April 2017 exchange on
own mismanagement: board member Mark Karpeles Twitter regarding upgrades to the bitcoin protocol:
was arrested in Japan for embezzlement through his Mt.
Gox cryptocurrency exchange. Recognizing the profound

Bitcoin Unlimited is production ready. Its already bandwidth Chinese miners at a disadvantage compared
producing 40% of all the blocks. More than any other with miners in other parts of the world. Receiving new
version of Bitcoin, tweeted Roger Ver, bitcoin angel blocks to build upon would take longer, and when they
investor.27 did find a new block, they would take longer to send it out
to the rest of the network. These delays would ultimately
Philip Francis, a digital assets investor, replied, Come result in the networks rejecting some of their blocks. They
on Roger, you cant actually believe BU [Bitcoin would lose out to miners with more bandwidth whose
Unlimited] is production ready. Its either pure delusion blocks propagated faster.
or youre purposely trying to break Bitcoin.28
Opponents of larger block sizes argue that people
Adam Back, Chief Executive Officer of bitcoin-based shouldnt be using bitcoin to buy cups of coffee or other
Blockstream, responded to two Twitter users, [Ver]s everyday purchases. Some developers want every single
paying people to put BU coinbase string. Then person in the world to be running a fully validating node
trumpeting stats. Its bug filled, untested, far from that sees every single transaction and has absolutely no
production. Even algo[rithm] is defective.29 trust on anybody else, said Andresen. The volunteer
contributors who have been actually making the software
Ver retweeted Back with this comment, Adam, you work for the last few years are worried that they personally
are telling lies about me again. Ive paid no one to put may not be able to handle larger blocks if transaction
BU in the Coinbase string. I await your retraction and volume ramps up. I dont have a whole lot of sympathy
apology.30 for that.33 In other words, if the bitcoin blockchain
was to scale and remain secure, then the community
Based on our findings, we believe the bitcoin community couldnt have it both ways. Some nodes would run full
needs a shared and inclusive vision for the future and a protocols and process more transactions into increasingly
mechanism not just for sorting the important signals from larger blocks, and others would run simplified payment
the noise of trolls on social media but also for mobilizing verification models and trust that 51% of full nodes get
to address them as an ecosystem. Were not saying that it right. Besides, the 2 billion people currently excluded
anyone should force anyone else to do anything. from centralized payment systems would more likely use
cryptocurrencies for smaller than average transactions.
Our concern is that, with every major disagreement
absent of a compelling vision beyond the libertarian In April 2017, two different camps of core devs emerged
dream, the network will continue forking into competing again to address block size by launching different updates
chains, each potentially less secure than the previous, to the Bitcoin Core protocol. The first was referred to as
putting the enormous value of the platform at risk. Indeed, segregated witness (SegWit), proposed by Blockstream
libertarianism may blind its adherents to their need from Co-Founder Pieter Wuille and favoured by many core
time to time for stewardship, and the attitude is one that devs. SegWit would free up block space by separating
precludes widespread adoption and investment. If the (segregating) the signature (witness) information from the
bitcoin network is to grow, several critical challenges need transaction data so the network could double the number
to be addressed. Here are the three most contentious. of transactions processed per second. This solution would
maintain the decentralization of power across the network.
The other, Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) advocated by investor
Governance challenge: How to scale without Roger Ver, would let miners vote on increasing the block
weakening the network size whenever needed, thus ceding them the power to
control the number of transactions in a block.34
For years now, whether to increase the one megabyte
block size has been a divisive subject with no resolution In May 2017, a group of bitcoin miners and start-up
in sight. According to Forde, the former director of DCI, If executives met and agreed on what they considered a
you look at the block-size debate, is it really a debate about win-win resolution to the block-size stalemate, essentially a
block size? In the media, its a debate about block size, proposal, Segwit2Mb combined soft/hard fork, posted
but I think what were seeing is that its also a debate on for peer review in March 2017 by RSK Labs developer
governance.31 Sergio Demian Lerner.35 Investment firm Digital Currency
Group claimed that, as of 25 May 2017, the signatories to
In August 2015, then-core developer Gavin Andresen this agreement represented 20.5 million bitcoin users, 58
advocated Bitcoin XT, a fork of the blockchain that companies in 22 countries, 83% of hashing power, and
allowed for eight-megabyte blocks. It was a controversial $5.1 billion in monthly onchain transaction volume.36 Yet
compromise that didnt take.32 The biggest pushback came none of the current Bitcoin Core developers have signed
from the mining pools in China. Serious bitcoin miners, like on. Samson Mow, Chief Strategy Officer of Blockstream, a
hard-core online gamers, need not only seriously powerful blockchain company that neither attended the meeting nor
computers to find a correct hash but also extremely signed the proposal, cast doubt on whether the proposal
high-speed bandwidth to broadcast it quickly across the had the majority of support needed to influence the
network. China is an exception to Nielsens Law of Internet bitcoin networks destiny. Matthew Corallo, Co-Founder of
Bandwidth: bandwidth doesnt increase by 50% each year. Blockstream and currently an engineer at ChainCode Labs,
If the block-size increase is too large, it would put low- expressed disappointment in peoples ignoring bitcoin

developer feedback. He said there were better technical Charles: I will do so when the time is right. It makes
solutions to the problem. Jeff Garzik, Founder of bitcoin sense to call out Core for bad culture in the same way
start-up Bloq, argued that the proposal was attracting new as calling out Uber.45
companies to fund technical efforts that would ultimately
improve the open-source code. He signed the agreement, Does it? tweeted Zooko Wilcox-OHearn, Founder
as did Erik Voorhees, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of z.cash. Companies have a structure specifically
of coin exchange ShapeShift. Voorhees told CoinDesk that, designed for accountability. If theres a problem, its
while he supported SegWit, he didnt care which solution the CEOs fault by definition.46 He added, In contrast
was chosen as long as a solution was chosen to end Bitcoin Core is a fuzzily-defined set and nobody says
the deadlock and increase the block size.37 Jamie Smith, the buck stops here.47 It was an excellent question:
Global Chief Communications Officer of Bitfury, conveyed Could we really compare the words and actions of a
Bitfurys utmost respect for the Bitcoin Core developers: few members of a large, open, decentralized and liable-
We are working to create an agreement and technical free network with the culture of a corporation like Uber
roadmap [for the proposal] that suits everyone and is best accountable for its operations in the world?
for the future of bitcoin. We are confident that the road
ahead is paved with promise and endless possibility.38 John Light, Co-Founder of Bitseed.org, chimed in, The
closest we have to that in Core is Lead Maintainer @
Such a fork would be similar to a stock split. orionwl [Wladimir J. van der Laan]. Maybe Core should
have Lead Community Maintainer(s) too :)48 We read
We see at least four possible outcomes: (1) miners rally that as another suggestion for leadership.
around BU; (2) SegWit, as the better technology, prevails;
(3) the chain forks and they fight it out in the market; or (4) There is not one bitcoin community, nor even one
the sides cooperate and reach a compromise that both bitcoin core community. Things have grown past that a
can support, the success of which plants the seed for long time ago, said van der Laan, the aforementioned
some governance mechanism. We support option four, but lead maintainer of the Bitcoin Core protocol and a
we think option two most likely. Pair of BitPay believes that, member of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative.49 He
if a substantial portion of the community feels it would be followed up with, Some rely on heavy moderation,
better served by a different set of consensus rules, then it some on self-regulation, and thats exactly how it should
will very likely create a fork with its preferred set of rules. be. I dont get this call for central control.50 In other
The fork would likely compete with and either overtake or words, to each his own, as long as its not centralized.
co-exist in perpetuity with the original chain, each finding
its own market. Such a fork would be very similar to a Then Charles made a critical distinction: Leadership
stock split, he said.39 and control are not the same thing.51
Without governance, invisible powers could Wilcox-OHearn suggested a representative body with
emerge some responsibilities: It would be *possible* to set up
a system in which Bitcoin Core has publicly verifiable
Our research revealed this recent exchange on Twitter. membership and spokespeople. But you dont want.
It is both illuminating and representative of the debate ?[sic]52
and bitcoins implicit need for stewardship.
Matthew Corallo, a developer at ChainCode, asked,
Ryan X. Charles, a software engineer formerly at But, really, do you *want* Core folks to be tied to a
BitGo, called out the Bitcoin Core developers for their hierarchy like BU [Bitcoin Unlimited], instead of speaking
antisocial culture. Yes, they are good security engineers. for themselves?53 So Bitcoin Unlimited was perceived
No, that doesnt make trolling OK.40 He was referring to as a hierarchy.
alleged trolling to promote the adoption of SegWit.41
Lets separate out whether it is possible to have such
Jameson Lopp, software engineer at BitGo, sought controls and whether it is desirable. I think people are
clarification: Seems like youre trying to blame shifting between the two, Wilcox-OHearn suggested.
the actions of a few on a larger group. Im a minor I assert that it is possible, and I argue that it might
contributor; are you saying Im responsible?42 be better in at least some ways.54 So some type of
stewardship could be positive for the platform.
Charles: Im sure many or most Core devs are genuine,
but a handful of toxic influential devs encourage me to Corallo disagreed on both counts: It is neither possible
look elsewhere for protocol leadership.43 There it was nor preferable. He explained, Not possible in part
the absence of leadership in the bitcoin community. because of the group contributing now wed all fork
and go create a competitor that had no strict hierarchy
Lopp: I agree, though I dont think calling out Core again and Not preferable as it results in a system with
makes much sense calling out individuals makes more little advantages over other systems.55
sense.44

In the gauntlet-throwing tone typical of these threads, the total coins created hit the pre-determined ceiling.59
Daniel Robert Plante raised another issue, and its a big So once all bitcoins have been minted, a fee structure
one: Then do it Matt. Fork. No permission. Its what could emerge if the core developers agree on one. The
Satoshi would do/did. But do you believe you have Bitcoin Unlimited upgrade would give miners power to
a grasp on the needs of the future?56 He nailed it. If set transaction fees now. Because each block has a fixed
someone didnt agree on a way forward as the future maximum size, there is a limit to how many transactions a
emerged, then he or she was more than welcome to miner can include. Therefore, miners will add transactions
fork and create a new chain. with the highest fees first, leaving those with low or zero
fees to fight for whatever space might be left over. If a
To us, this Twitter exchange reveals the lack of a transaction fee is high enough, a miner will likely include
shared view of what the community will require of its it in the next block; but if a fee is too low and the network
technology and a desire for leadership that can rise is busy, it might take two, three or more blocks before a
above the individual camps and seek common ground miner eventually records it in the blockchain.
and a unifying vision. Nature abhors a vacuum. In this
absence of explicit governance, we may be witnessing What do fees mean for people who cant afford fees
the emergence of what Primavera De Filippi called today? Wont levying fees lower the blockchains advantage
informal and invisible power dynamics.57 over traditional payment methods? According to venture
capitalist Pascal Bouvier, the fees reflect the marginal
cost of verifying a transaction. Without fees to incentivize
Governance challenge: How to maintain miners, as the block reward keeps halving, the hash rate
incentives for mass collaboration would likely drop. If hash rate drops, network security
declines.60
We found that miners do have an incentive to maintain That leads us to the 51% attack, where a huge mining pool
the bitcoin infrastructure because, if the network fails, or a cartel of large mining pools controls 51% of the hash
all the unconverted bitcoin theyd earned (or could earn) rate. With that much firepower, they would constitute a
through mining would be lost, worthless or at risk. Before majority vote of miners and could hijack block generation
we dig into incentives, lets be clear about the service that and thrust their version of the truth on the bitcoin network.
miners provide: it is not transaction validation. Every full They wouldnt necessarily get rich. Far from it. All they
node can validate transactions. Rather, miners preserve could do is to reverse their own transactions within a
the distribution of power the power to decide which previous block, rather like a credit-card chargeback. Lets
transactions to include in each block, the power to mint say the attackers bought some big-ticket item from the
coins, the power to vote on the truth. same merchant, waited until it shipped, then attacked
the network to get their money back. That wouldnt
Any design change to the original bitcoin protocol, whether mean tacking its own block to the end of the blockchain.
through an altcoin or an upgrade, must keep in mind That would mean going back and redoing the block that
appropriate economic incentives to sustain hardcore contained all their purchases as well as all subsequent
miner decentralization, so the network gets good value blocks, even as the network continues to generate new
from miners in exchange for the large sums of bitcoin. To blocks. When the cartels branch became longer, it would
Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd, that means that smaller become the new valid one. Satoshi bet on that being wildly
miners in geographically dispersed locations should be more costly than mining new coins.
able to compete nose to nose with larger miners that are
geographically centralized, that is, large mining pools in Trying to bootstrap or change a network protocol [such
Iceland or China.58 as IPv6] is just a monumental task, said Austin Hill, a
blockchain entrepreneur. You just dont want to be making
Is that possible? As the number of new bitcoins minted changes ad hoc or very fast on an ecosystem thats
halves every four years, what will happen when the reward managing anywhere from 3 to 10 billion dollars worth of
drops to zero? The mining cycle depends on the market peoples wealth and assets.61 At the end of the day, said
price of bitcoin. When the price drops, some bitcoin miners Andresen, That governance model is driven very much by
park their supply, but they continue to play the lottery what code the people actually want to run, what standards
until the price increases. Other miners cant afford to park people want to implement in the equipment they sell. He
and play; they just dry-dock their mining rigs or divert said that bitcoin, like the internet, will have a similar messy,
their processing power to another altchain that might be chaotic governance process that will eventually come down
more profitable. Still others join mining pools, pooling their to what codes the people choose to run.62 That worked
computing power with nodes with the hope of increasing well for the internet of information, which had decades to
their odds and at least getting some fraction of the evolve before commercial adoption, but it could prove risky
winnings rather than nothing at all. for assets on the internet of value, which companies have
already adopted and deployed in commercial ventures.
One answer is fees. Satoshi wrote, There will be
transaction fees, so [mining] nodes will have an incentive to
receive and include all the transactions they can. Nodes will
eventually be compensated by transaction fees alone when

Governance challenge: The energy consumed electricity to do that work. Thats how the proof-of-work
is unsustainable economics work out. It really is the price of bitcoin and
however much reward is in a block that drives how much
Our research findings are unequivocal; the proof-of-work hashing is done.67
method has been critical to building peoples trust in these
primordial days of the bitcoin blockchain. Years from The hash rate has been increasing considerably over
now, we will look back and appreciate the genius of its the last two years, rising from 1.5 exahashes per second
deployment, from minting and allocating new bitcoins to in mid-2016 to 4.2 exahashes in May 2017. Thats more
assigning identity and preventing double spending. Pretty processing power than the most powerful supercomputers
remarkable. And pretty unsustainable, according to critics on the planet.68 And the trend is towards using more
of cryptocurrencies that use proof of work to keep the energy, not less. If bitcoin really does become a global
network safe and pseudonymous. team network, I think we will need to slowly move away
from proof of work as the only way its secure, said former
Hashing, the process of running pending transactions core dev Andresen. In the very long run, maybe we will
through the secure hash algorithm 256 (SHA-256) to move away from proof of work as the way the network is
validate them and solve a block, burns a lot of electricity. secured, and well combine it with something else.69
Some people in the blockchain ecosystem are making
back-of-the-envelope calculations that become memes The cost for having no central authority is the cost of
in the community. Estimates liken the bitcoin networks that energy, said Eric Jennings, Chief Executive Officer of
energy consumption to the power used by nearly 700 Filament, an industrial wireless sensor network.70 Thats
average American homes at the low end of the spectrum one side of the argument. The energy is what it is, and its
and to the energy consumed by the island of Cyprus at the comparable to the cost incurred in securing fiat currency.
high end.63 Thats more than 4.409 billion kilowatt-hours,64 Think of the big vaults, the bunkerlike architecture with
a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint, and its by design. Its majestic Grecian facades, with heating, ventilation and
what secures the network and keeps nodes honest. air conditioning systems pushing air into bright lobbies,
competing branches on every corner, and ATMs in
In early 2015, The New Republic reported that the between.
combined processing power of the bitcoin network was
hundreds of times greater than the aggregate output of Now lets consider computer architecture itself. The Bitfury
the worlds top 500 supercomputers. Processing and Group has built a massively parallel bitcoin problem-solver
protecting the more than $3 billion worth of bitcoins in with application specific integrated circuits that are energy
circulation requires more than $100 million in electricity efficient and designed solely to mine bitcoins. Its Founder
each year, generating a volume of carbon emissions to and Chief Executive Officer, Valery Vavilov, argued that
match. The articles author, Nathan Schneider, wrote what machines and mining operations overall will continue to
has been on our minds ever since: All that computing become more energy efficient and environmentally friendly.
power, which could be curing cancer or exploring the Some of that depends on relocating to cold climates where
stars, is locked up in machines that do nothing but process energy is cheap and preferably renewable, such as hydro
bitcoin-type transactions.65 As citizens who care about our or geothermal, and where either Mother Nature handles
planet, we should all be concerned. the cooling or manufacturers figure out an efficient way to
capture the heat. Bitfury, for example, has two data centres
The more people adopt bitcoin, the more energy is one in Iceland and another in the country of Georgia
consumed. There are two issues, one around the electricity with plans for additional centres in North America, and it
used to run the machines and another around the energy acquired the Hong Kong-based start-up Allied Control,
used to cool them so they dont fail. Heres a rule of thumb: which specializes in immersion cooling technology.71 And
for every dollar a computer burns up in electricity, it needs so Bitfury is working to reduce the ecological impact of the
50 cents to cool down.66 The acute drought in California bitcoin infrastructure.
has raised serious concerns over using precious water to
cool data centres and bitcoin mining operations. Even if these initiatives limit minings carbon footprint, we
still have the rapid consumption and disposal of these
As the value of bitcoin increases, the competition for continually upgraded devices. Miners who want to make a
mining new bitcoin increases. As more computing power career of it must continually upgrade and specialize their
is directed at mining, the computational problem that systems. Most mining equipment has a useful life span of
miners need to solve becomes more difficult. One measure three to six months.72 Vendors such as MRI of Australia are
of the total processing power of the bitcoin network is applying new approaches to recycling, first disassembling
the hash rate. When we were writing our book in 2015, rather than shredding all these computing components,
Gavin Andresen told us, Lets say we have millions of and then managing resulting waste streams. Such creative
transactions per block, each paying an average of a dollar processes are enabling them to reclaim precious metals
transaction fee. Miners would be paid millions of dollars and reuse up to 98% of product by weight.73 Unfortunately,
per block, and they would spend a little less than that in hardware recycling is still not widely available to most
consumers of computing and communicating technology.

Ethereum The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) was founded
to gather requirements for deployment of Ethereum
In our research for Blockchain Revolution in 2015, when within enterprise blockchains and to establish technical
everyone was talking about the bitcoin phenomenon, specifications and standards to add these capabilities
we spent time learning about Ethereum and projects to Ethereum, via the Enterprise Improvement Process
in that ecosystem.74 It turned out to be time well spent. (EIP). With over 100 organizations participating, the EEA
Ethereum is emerging as one of the most important objectives are to understand industry requirements,
blockchain platforms today. Ethereum started as an open- leverage current standards and develop new open-source
source software platform for decentralized applications, standards alongside the Ethereum Foundations platform-
where stakeholders needed Ether the token to pay for level work, all to provide roadmaps for the deployment
computational steps and storage operations on the of enterprise and industry-wide applications on the
platform, said Joseph Lubin, Co-Founder of the Ethereum blockchain. EEA is an inclusive organization, with a rotating
Project. We earned revenue, $18 million, by selling a board comprised of giants like Microsoft (represented by
token. Before running the sale, we needed a legal structure senior blockchain executive Marley Gray) and start-ups
that would (a) protect those funds; and (b) be the legal like Nuco (represented by Chief Executive Officer Matthew
entity that could shepherd the platform potentially for a Spoke). EEA is implementing a multi-tiered governance
long time. We did discuss and commit to decentralized structure to meet the needs of large enterprises while
governance once we built sufficiently capable tools.75 maintaining open-source, rapid collaborative-development.
This includes leveraging current decentralized governance
The Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit consisting of 40 tools, as well as the potential to experiment with
or so developers and researchers, was part of the plan. blockchain-based governance tools such as Boardroom.
According to Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin, the Foundations
core tasks include (a) research on the next version of
Ethereum protocol and standards; (b) co-development and Governance challenge: How to address major
maintenance of the six different clients such as C++ and threats by consensus
Go; and (c) community outreach to both newcomers and
existing community members, publishing transcript of core Ethereums governance mechanisms faced a big test
developer calls, promoting developer events and keeping early on. In May 2016, a new breed of organization called
channels of communications open. the DAO, for decentralized autonomous organization,
crowdfunded a record-breaking $160 million from tens of
For example, if a company wanted to issue its own asset thousands of global investors. What distinguished the DAO
on top of Ethereum, it would write a piece of code that from all other start-ups was the absence of management.
basically implements a bank so that the company could The DAO was a blockchain application, a collection of
conduct transactions that decrease its own balance smart contracts that ran on the Ethereum blockchain. Its
and increase other peoples balances.76 There are an stakeholders human beings could review and vote on
infinite number of ways to do that, most of which are proposals for how the DAO allocated its funds.
not compatible with each other. Some blockchains like
Mastercoin and XC have a transaction type for issuing and The DAO allowed token holders to withdraw their Ether
transferring assets specific to their platforms. from the DAO through a split function. This function
allowed users to revert the process and get back the Ether
Ethereum is a general-purpose code platform. So its they sent to the DAO. In June 2016, a hacker exploited the
developers wanted the most common way to be some function by asking the DAO to return Ether multiple times
compatible standard. Someone from the Ethereum (a recursive call) before the DAO could update its own
community proposed such a token standard as a balance. The hacker succeeded in draining around $70
document on GitHub two years ago. The Foundation million of Ether from the DAO into a separate DAO where,
helped to standardize it and then put it to the community per the terms of the smart contract, it would have to sit
for rigorous review. The ERC-20 standard resulted from for 28 days before the hacker could send it to another
this collaborative effort. Its by and for Ethereum people, so account.
that other Ethereum people can better interact with each
other.77 That gave the Ethereum community several weeks to
decide what to do, if anything. Members began circulating
Another kind of standard enables the Ethereum ecosystem proposals. One proposed a soft fork designed to blackball
to interact with outside ecosystems and support outside any transaction from the DAO, but a few members
standards. For example, the Foundation is considering discovered a bug that would have opened the DAO up to a
integrating a set of optimized operations into the Ethereum denial-of-service attack.78
virtual machine so that it can more easily process RSA
cryptography, a fairly popular kind of cryptography used in Another proposed a hard fork in the codebase designed
other mainstream applications and named after Ron Rivest, to claw back all the Ether hacked from the DAO through
Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman who created the first the recursive call exploit and to implement a new contract
practical public-key system for communications. with only a withdraw function. DAO token holders could
request a refund of one Ether for every 100 DAO tokens.

Those who had paid more than one Ether for 100 tokens Ethereum is by no means alone in anticipating and
could request a refund of the difference. responding quickly to worst-case scenarios. Other core
Virtually everybody agrees that you shouldnt fix an developers and blockchain companies have moved quickly
application-layer problem with a protocol-level solution, to secure their networks. For example, in 2014, thieves
said Joe Lubin. Initially, most of the core Ethereum people stole 8 million VeriCoins, a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency,
did not want to have a fork, did not want to bail out from the MintPal exchange. Within days of the attack,
the promoters, developers and investors. They should VeriCoin developers released new code that forked the
have taken the serious losses as an appropriate teaching VeriCoin blockchain prior to the hack like Ethereum, they
signal.79 But it was an existential threat. If the hackers rolled back time and collaborated with exchanges to
goal was to destroy Ethereum, then the hacker could have make sure it was adopted.83
staged denial-of-service attacks for many years, messing
up the networks ability to process transactions efficiently. What they could do differs from what they have, as a
We would have been chasing this person in and out of group, committed to do in the interest of preserving the
different smart contracts, in a sort of a cat and mouse resource, and that is to engage the community in reaching
game, Lubin said.80 consensus on key issues. Thats stewardship.
Dont fix an app-layer problem with a Governance challenge: Managing the switch
protocol-level solution. to proof-of-stake
Lubin identified six different classes of stakeholders The first version of the Ethereum blockchain Frontier
developers, exchanges, miners, mining pools, token also uses proof of work. For Vitalik Buterin, the concern
holders and other community members who weighed about energy consumption is legitimate and worth
in, in the very vigorous debate over whether to fork. Those solving. Thats what other chains have done: explored
who argued for the hard fork sought to prevent the hacker alternative consensus algorithms for securing the network
from taking control of a very sizable portion of all the while retaining decentralization. The open-source nature
Ether in circulation. Those who argued against sought to of the bitcoin protocol makes it technically easy to do.
prevent what they considered censorship of the Ethereum Remember, the purpose of consensus algorithms is
blockchain. Some viewed the code as the law: the terms to distribute the authority to decide on the state of the
of the DAO contract, however flawed, should stand, and blockchain to a decentralized set of users. To the mind of
those who invested should suffer for the greater good of Buterin, there are only three securely decentralized sets
Ethereums reputation as an immutable chain. of users, and each set corresponds to a set of consensus
algorithms: owners of computing power, with standard
The six stakeholder groups voted overwhelmingly (89%) proof-of-work algorithms; stakeholders, with various
in favour of the hard fork. Users of the Ethereum platform proof-of-stake algorithms in wallet software; and members
then had to decide for themselves whether to use the of a social network, with a federated style consensus
forked version or continue on the non-forked version, now algorithm.84 Note that only one of those consensus
known as Ethereum Classic. The Foundation itself, which mechanisms includes the word power.
is a legally conservative, risk-averse entity, did not take a
position early on. Instead, it gathered information. After The developers of Ethereum expect to replace Frontier
the vote, it acknowledged Ethereum Classics right to with Caspar, a proof-of-stake mechanism. Proof-of-stake
exist. I dont think the verdict is in on whether it was good requires miners to invest in and hang on to some store
governance, but it was quite decentralized governance, of value (i.e. the native token of the blockchain such as
and I continue to applaud Vitalik for the studied approach Ether) in order to vote on the state of the chain. They are
he takes to decision-making and the care he takes in not no longer miners; they are validators. They neednt spend
issuing rash communications, said Lubin.81 He continued: energy to vote. If they break the rules, they may lose
their holdings. The plan is to phase in the proof-of-stake.
These systems are complex and subtle and According to CoinDesks Alyssa Hertig, Since [Casper]
theyre protecting important and valuable assets in has been pushed back several times, detractors see this
cryptography that we need a few hundred or so global hybrid as the latest evidence that proof-of-stake wont
experts to take a good look at them and try to beat the ever be fully implemented successfully on Ethereum.
**** out of them for three or five years, then well have Thoughtful discussions have sprung up on Reddit, such
some well-vetted frameworks that we can all share that as Fundamental problems with Casper and Vlad
handle certain foundational functions like escrowing Zamfir said its a reasonable possibility Casper wont be
money, enabling deposits and withdrawals, issuing implemented on Ethereum... is this cause for concern?85
new token allocations, etc. Layers of increasingly The latter referred to a couple of tweets by Vlad Zamfir
sophisticated functionality will have to be built and the who, according to Ethereums blog, has worked on proof-
deeper layers will need to be very well vetted so that of-stake blockchain architecture since September 2014.86
they dont need to change much because many will
build on them.82

Zamfir tweeted, I sold most of my ether at least [four] Tendermint
times... incl[uding] before this rally really started ($16) ...
lol :( But I absolutely will walk if I stop having sufficient Tendermint is what Co-Founder and Chief Technology
hope that the Ethereum community will adopt Casper- Officer Ethan Buchman called general purpose blockchain
style PoS and sharding. Which I think is a serious middleware, that is, software that operates between
blockchain protocols and blockchain applications, so that
possibility, given how much money we are giving
developers can create applications in their programming
Ethereum miners.87
language of choice for their environment of choice.92
Buterin tweeted to Zamfir, You think our large PoW According to Buchman, Tendermint met the highest
rewards make it more likely Casper will stall? That is so standards of security, meaning that it worked even if a
interesting; I completely disagree.88 third of the nodes in a network arbitrarily failed.93 Large
distributed peer-to-peer networks, where parties could
Zamfir replied, Interesting! I think the more money have wildly different types of machines under wildly
miners have the more incentive they have to participate different circumstances, need such a high level of fault
in governance. Where their incentive is to block.89 tolerance, including attacks on machines that turned them
into malicious nodes. He referred to this ability to tolerate
Others shared that view: Youre never going PoS. arbitrary failure as Byzantine fault tolerance, a theory put
Youll personally be forked before that happens, maybe into practice in distributed ledgers such as bitcoin and
literally by angry miners.90 Ethereum.
Tendermint has two components: its proof-of-stake

Of these alternatives to proof of work, veteran consensus mechanism ensures that every faultless
cryptographer Austin Hill cautioned against using other machine records the same transactions in the same order.
methods for securing consensus. Experimentation with Its application interface enables machines to process
your proof-of-work algorithm is dangerous, and its a transactions in any programming language. It emerged,
new area of computer science.91 It adds a dimension to as many alternatives to bitcoin did, as a proof-of-work
innovation: not only must developers worry about whether blockchain with a native token, the Atom, which users
their new features and functions will work in their own right, bonded in a security deposit (which they could lose if they
misbehaved) to participate in consensus. Tendermint has
but they must also check how the choice of consensus
developed into a general purpose blockchain consensus
algorithm keeps them secure and distributed to the most
engine that can host arbitrary application states. That
appropriate economic set.
means it can be used as a plug-and-play replacement for
the consensus engines of other blockchain software.94
Where 51% of attacks on proof-of-work models stem from
concentrated mining power, attacks on proof-of-stake In September 2016, Tendermint won an innovation
models come from concentrated coin control, and coin award and a 20,000 renminbi prize at the International
exchanges are typically the biggest stakeholders. In some Blockchain Week Demo Day in Shanghai, where it
jurisdictions, exchanges must be licensed and are under announced plans for a new Cosmos Network.95 Buchman
regulatory scrutiny. They also have reputation at stake, and described Cosmos as the Internet of Blockchains
so they have multiple incentives to protect the value of their designed to solve many of the outstanding problems
brand and the value of the coins held in account wallets. in the cryptocurrency community, including scalability,
However, with more coins in circulation, a greater diversity interoperability, security and flexibility.96 To fund its
of value and more strategic assets registered on PoW and development and launch, Cosmos, the entity building
PoS blockchains, an attacker might not care about any of out the Tendermint protocol, held an initial coin offering
these costs. of Atoms in April 2017 and raised $16.8 million in 28
minutes.97 Cosmos coalesced around what Buchman
Finally, there is the considerable task of bringing along a called a crisis of legitimacy of our institutions and a crisis
super-majority of Ethereum stakeholders to the proof-of- of value of our mediums of exchange, as a means of
stake model, since it may run atop the Ethereum platform developing currencies that supported community values
like a smart contract reminiscent of the DAO. Unlike bitcoin and keeping organizations transparent and accountable. Its
whose visionary Satoshi Nakamoto has receded from the website refers to Cosmos as a heterogeneous network of
debate and left others to interpret his vision, Ethereums proof-of-stake blockchains that can interoperate with one-
another.
creator, Buterin, is very present, very communicative and
working tirelessly on both the technical and the theoretical
There are lots of discussions about interoperability, said
aspects of the platform. He is enormously influential and
David Treat, Managing Director of Accentures Capital
inspiring, not just because of his brilliance but because of Markets Blockchain practice, but with limited progress to
his basic decency, his concern for human rights and the date as the primary platforms and codebase creators are
health of the planet. He may not be the ultimate arbitrator still focused on achieving their first production versions
as Linus Torvalds is over Linux, but Buterin certainly and building market share. Given current progress on the
stewards the Ethereum ecosystem. first wave of production systems, making progress on
interoperability is growing in urgency.98

Hyperledger Governance challenge: The need for industry
standards as soon as possible
Hyperledger is an open-source collaborative effort
launched to advance blockchain technologies across In our research, the development of industry standards
such industries as banking, IoT, manufacturing and supply emerged as a big issue. Behlendorf sees two major
chains. The effort, hosted by the Linux Foundation, is
challenges. In any one marketplace or ecosystem, we
focusing on distributed ledgers and smart contracts
want everyone using the same code, the same chain and
separate from cryptocurrencies, for scenarios where
the same kinds of transactions to get the efficiency, he
participants in a network want to share a record-keeping
system and to automate additional transactions on top of said. That means engaging industry associations specific
that shared ledger. to each industry and educating them on the trade-offs
between (a) sharing enough data in the chain to reassure
Its Chief Executive Officer, Brian Behlendorf, sees everybody of the integrity of, for example, the provenance
distributed ledger technology as an operating system for tracking process; and (2) providing enough confidentiality
decentralized market places and digital communities, to participants that competitors cannot figure out each
foundational in the same way that the Linux operating others businesses or deduce terms of agreement with
system is foundational in the cloud, the same way that other members of the market or ecosystem.
internet protocols are foundational.99 Developers could
build a cryptocurrency or a system for tracking other digital Designing these systems to be both confidential and
assets on top of it. auditable is a very big challenge not just a technology
challenge, but a business challenge. How much data will
According to Behlendorf, We dont believe in one companies share to make the whole effort meaningful?
big chain to rule them all; we believe in adapting the Behlendorf did not know. We might have some proof of
governance models that exist today and facilitating them concepts, we might have people playing on the perimeter,
using this technology.100 between one or two partners in an ecosystem, but we
really want to get the whole of the industry to adopt
As a project of the Linux Foundation, Hyperledgers a common standard and give an industry the time to
charter borrows from the Linux governance framework. convert, he said.103
Its mission is clear, to create an enterprise grade, open-
source distributed ledger framework and codebase
Jesse McWaters of the World Economic Forum agreed on
and an open-source, technical community, and to
the magnitude of this challenge. He used the creation of a
promote participation of leading members of the
know-your-customer (KYC) utility for financial institutions as
ecosystem and host the infrastructure for [the project],
establishing a neutral home for community infrastructure, an example:
meetings, events and collaborative discussions and
providing structure around the business and technical There is an enormous appetite in the financial services
governance.101 The charter provides for a governing board, community for a KYC utility, and blockchain is one way that
its composition, conduct and responsibilities. Like the such a utility could be operationalized. However, before
Internet Engineering Task Force, it provides for a technical this can happen, institutions need to agree on standards
steering committee and a process for reaching consensus, and practices for the exchange of KYC data. Reaching
and voting if necessary, on changes to the codebase. that agreement among enough institutions to start building
It also provides for a marketing committee and an end a network effect is the hard part and blockchain doesnt
user technical advisory board for industry outreach and actually do anything to fix that problem for us.104
education. Finally, it sets forth codes of conduct, including
transparency so as to preclude the formation of trusts. Industries also differ in their need for speed. For the bitcoin
blockchain network, the process of clearing and settling
Its membership already exceeds 130 different transactions takes about 10 minutes, which is far faster
organizations, from IBM and Intel to J.P. Morgan and Wells end to end than most payment mechanisms today. But
Fargo. Casey Kuhlman, Chief Executive Officer of Monax clearing transactions at the point of sale instantaneously
Industries, explained why his start-up joined Hyperledger: is not the issue; the real problem is that 10 minutes is
[T]o get our software into production in enterprises, we simply too long for the IoT where devices need to interact
need not only to prove the technology itself, but also to continuously. Former core developer Gavin Andresen said
develop the mechanisms to build and deliver that software solving for a trillion connected objects is a different design
collaboratively. Kuhlman observed quite astutely, The old
space from bitcoin, a space where low latency is more
one-to-one approach dominated by account managers
critical and fraud is less of an issue or where parties could
walking the halls of incumbent enterprises pitching
establish an acceptable level of trust without the bitcoin
the IT companys new thing may still work for a lot of
technology, but it isnt likely to work for blockchains and network.
smart contracts.102 It was an astute observation: to cross
that chasm obscurity between the fanatic early adopters
and the more pragmatic early majority of adopters, we
need to collaborate. Collaboration is the glue that will make
this technology stick.

Ten minutes is also too long for financial transactions I think its okay at this point to have a number of different
where timing matters to get an asset at a particular consensus systems out there competing. But you dont
price, and where latency exposes traders to time-based want protocols competing for very long, because then
arbitrage weaknesses such as market timing attacks.105 you cant build anything, said Joichi Ito. I have a feeling,
The immediate solution for entrepreneurs has been to though, that we may be still a few years out before we
fork the bitcoin codebase, that is, to modify the source settle on what we think the wireline layer is going to be.
code by tweaking a few parameters, and to launch a new If you look at the layers of the internet now, it wasnt
blockchain with an altcoin in place of bitcoin as incentive predetermined exactly how the layers were going to be cut,
to participate. Litecoin is a popular altcoin with a block right? IBMs Token Ring was sort of layer two and layer
time of 2.5 minutes, and Ripple and Ethereum are entirely three together. It wasnt obvious where the layers would be
re-engineered blockchain platforms that have latency of cut. Similarly, with blockchain technology, Where does
seconds, not minutes. So does each industry need its own the accounting live? What should the accounting do?107
blockchain?
According to Behlendorf, This stuff is ready to leave the
lab as the web was in 1993 or 1994. Lets just make sure
Governance challenge: Premature anointment we dont encumber it with too much legacy and too much
of any protocol as an industry standard commitment.108
Our research surfaced the downside of arriving quickly at

industry standards. The space is still so young that the Governance challenge: The lack of robust
desire for standards, while well-placed, runs the risk of infrastructure
hardening projects that have really just come out of the
lab, said Behlendorf, which he sees as the second big To paraphrase science fiction author William Gibson, the
challenge: preventing widespread adoption of an inferior future is here; its infrastructure is just unevenly distributed.
technology. People were in such a rush to take credit- For example, had Greek citizens known about bitcoin
card orders over the internet that they would use anything during their countrys economic crash in 2015, they still
we came up with. The result was the suboptimal internet wouldve been hard-pressed to locate a bitcoin exchange
security paradigm still in use. Behlendorf still feels bad or a bitcoin ATM anywhere in Athens. They wouldnt have
about the cookie header, intended as short-term memory been able to transfer their drachmas into bitcoins to hedge
for storing items in a virtual shopping cart but deployed against the plummeting fiat currency. Computer scientist
as a tracking device that has turned the web into a giant Nick Szabo and information security expert Andreas
surveillance machine. People have all but written off the Antonopoulos both argued that robust infrastructure
possibility of anonymity on the internet. matters and cant be bootstrapped during catastrophes.
Greeces blockchain infrastructure was lacking at the time
Anybody running systems in this space needs to anticipate of the crisis, and there was insufficient bitcoin liquidity for an
a period of five or 10 years of fairly rapid progress in the entire population to move its troubled fiat currency into it.
underlying technologies, Behlendorf said. Right now
we should be in a let a thousand flowers bloom mode, The blockchain also falls short on security controls for
and let these technologies find their footing. The ones such a massive bump in usage. It lacks the transactional
that fail will become obvious. The ones that succeed capacity to onboard millions and millions of people.
will have a choice, either to remain independent or to Such an immature technology would be susceptible to
merge with somebody else. Sorting the winners from capacity problems, system failures, unanticipated bugs
the losers requires more than white papers, essays and and, perhaps most damaging, the huge disappointment of
academic research, he said. It requires people going out technically unsophisticated users, none of which it needs
and exercising the different stacks, seeing what theyre at the moment.
good for, fixing bugs and adding features. That means
deployment, real production experience.
Heres where knowledge, advocacy and stewardship of

standards processes are critical: We need to avoid making
serious architectural decisions that first become legacy
and then become hindrances. That means conducting
experiments and then throwing away the failures as quickly
as we can. And its harder to throw away failures once
theyve become industry standards, Behlendorf said.106

Governance Challenge: The lack of 2. Stewardship of applications
constructive discourse
Traditionally, centralized organizations were responsible for
The current challenges do not really reside in any the coordination and governance of online applications,
specific technical component, said Roszak of Bloq and said Primavera De Filippi. Today, with blockchain
the Chamber of Digital Commerce. The issues reside in technologies, we are witnessing the emergence of global
the human factor of communication and finding a way of networks or organizations, which operate in a distributed
building consensus during the early days of this $6.5 billion manner without any centralized middleman to mediate
railway. The debates, fights and passions involved are in the rollout of new tools that sound great. 114 Our research
many ways a feature and not a bug of the network.109 bears this out. To understand what we mean by blockchain
applications, consider this analogy: email is to the internet
Debate is a feature, not a bug. what cryptocurrencies are to the blockchain the first
application and just as postal mail (now snail mail) was
If I were to criticize the blockchain technical community, to email, digital currency is an application with a physical
its not very respectful, said Pindar Wong. Theres a lot world antecedent fiat coins and bills (soon to be slow
of bravado, a lot of posturing, as you would expect, and it dough or anonymoney) that helps all stakeholders to
doesnt even involve tech. He mentioned the practice of wrap their heads around it. But compelling analogies can
shouting down people in public. When we asked whether lead to faulty thinking, induce a false sense of security or
that happened frequently, he said, Go online; ALL CAPS, limit the imagination altogether, as the page metaphor
all of the time. So we did and found many a heated thread for web screens did by anchoring minds to a print medium
related to bitcoin block size. So nasty have the exchanges (e.g. landing page, page views, retail catalogue) and
become that Andreas Antonopoulos, technologist, serial then using the web primarily as a publishing platform
entrepreneur and author of Mastering Bitcoin, recently and somewhat belatedly as a town hall, a crowdfunding
tweeted, I wish people wouldnt put me in mentions when event, a collaborative workshop, a multiplayer arena or a
bashing @rogerkver. I am never ok with personal attacks worldwide genomic laboratory. Of the asset classes on
or abuse. Stop it.110 A person with the Twitter handle @ blockchain platforms (see Table 2), the rising popularity of
veryevilone replied, Roger has been happy to attack other the initial coin offering (ICO) is a case in point.
people and insult their intelligence. He is not interesting and
he doesent [sic] deserve respect111 to which Antonopoulos
responded, Lack of respect is a measure of the speaker,
not a reflection of the subject. I will block accordingly.112 He
wanted no part in hostilities and would block those who did.
The rough-and-tumble should not exclude people who

want to contribute, said Wong. Thats an important point.
The nature of the discourse may put off otherwise really
talented developers. Some might say, Stay out of the
kitchen if you cant stand the heat. Others might say that
its a hostile tactic for defending ones position. When it
comes to solving big and important problems, hostility is
a failed strategy. Deep thinkers like Antonopoulos opt out.
Wong added, At the very risk of being facetious, I would
say we all need training in active listening. ... Were hearing
what were expecting to hear, not necessarily what the
person is meaning to say. Meeting people in person helps
to understand what they mean online. If anything, one of
the big rewards as a volunteer in scaling is to see people
meet each other and come out with, Youre an asshole,
Im an asshole, but we can now be assholes together.
Maybe we agree on something now. Thats humanity at
work, and I think thats wonderful.113

Table 2: Top 10 Digital Assets, as of 17 June 2017
Rank Name Platform US$ Market Cap US$ Price Circulating Supply
1 Golem Ethereum 493,919,905 0.595621 829,252,000.00
2 Augur Ethereum 336,539,500 30.59 11,000,000.00
3 Gnosis Ethereum 270,024,758 244.46 1,104,590.00
4 Basic Attention Ethereum 220,787,000 0.220787 1,000,000,000.00
5 MaidSafeCoin Omni 219,171,586 0.484301 452,552,412.00
6 Iconomi Ethereum 209,038,380 2.4 87,000,000.00
7 Ardor Nxt 199,448,251 0.199648 998,999,495.00
8 DigixDAO Ethereum 185,485,200 92.74 2,000,000.00
9 Veritaseum Ethereum 143,919,531 74.58 1,929,609.00
10 SingularDTV Ethereum 129,022,800 0.215038 600,000,000.00
Source: CryptoAsset Market Capitalizations, https://coinmarketcap.com/assets, accessed 17 June 2017
As blockchain applications have evolved from potential to of the coin. ICOs can be very equity-like, where tokens
actual use cases, we can see that particular use cases will represent a fractional ownership in the underlying value of
raise specific governance questions best answered at the an organization, subject to profit or loss, and presumably
level of each use case (e.g. payments, smart contracts, at a later date entitlement to shares of profits.
securities clearance, insurance, etc.). There will not be
a single blockchain but many, some of which may serve However, often ICOs are not offering equity-like value at
specific industries or geographies. At the highest level, we all. Augur did one of the first ICOs granting token owners
need to focus on interoperability. Commercial blockchain the right to participate in its prediction markets. Others still
applications are taking off, and governance will be critical are offering something more akin to access, for developers
to their success. For example, Ripples global payments to build applications and for users to run them. Bilaji
steering group, a blockchain bankers network with defined Srinivasan, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, likened them
rules and governance, has been a major step forward in to a paid API key. He said, When you buy an API key
terms of adoption and industry acceptance.115 from Amazon Web Services for dollars, you can redeem
that API key for time on Amazons cloud. The purchase of
a token like Ether is similar, in that you can redeem ETH
Governance challenge: Oversight of for compute time on the decentralized Ethereum computer
applications whose off-chain equivalents are network. This redemption value gives tokens inherent
regulated utility.117
The ICO is an application whereby organizations of any size While the definitions are still evolving, the value is clear,
can raise money peer-to-peer by offering tokens or coins which is why the New York-based venture capital firm
in a new venture, project or network. In 2016, blockchain Union Square Ventures (USV) broadened its investment
organizations raised nearly $200 million through ICOs. strategy so that it could buy ICOs directly. Menlo Park-
These arent just new cryptocurrencies masquerading as based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz joined
companies. They represent digital rights management USV in investing in Polychain Capital, a hedge fund that
platforms (SingularDTV), distributed venture funds (the buys only tokens.
DAO) and even new platforms for investing in ICOs
(ICONOMI). The euphoria around them is palpable. The Blythe Masters, consummate Wall-Street-insider-turned-
token launch (some are calling certain forms of these ICOs), blockchain-pioneer, expressed her concern: Newcomers
the first killer app for crowdfunding, is a powerful tool to are simply able to do things that regulated institutions are
enable the ecosystem to build itself out, with the issuance not able to do, but one needs to think very carefully about
of protocol tokens, said Lubin of Ethereum. 116 why those regulations exist, and what purpose they serve,
before one can conclude that exposing consumers to
They have been likened to the initial public offering (IPO), unregulated financial activities is a good thing.118
the process through which a privately held firm raises
capital through public markets by issuing stock that Lubin of Ethereum does not even call them financial
investors can buy. Heres where the analogy breaks down: instruments: There are no investors. There are
IPOs are highly regulated affairs, involving a number of stakeholders who bought a software product called Ether
intermediaries, such as investment bankers, exchange that enables business and software developers to build
operators, auditors, lawyers and crowdfunding platforms on and use the decentralized application platform.119
(such as Kick-starter and Indiegogo), whereas ICOs are
not. IPOs are issuances of securities, mostly equities. With
ICOs, the classification really depends on the purpose

Stress-testing and debugging are left to the issuers, not He estimated that there are only between 1,000 and 2,000
to independent bodies with expertise in software auditing. developers who understand how to build blockchain
There is potential for these new instruments to blow up in applications, whether on Ethereum, Hyperledger or
less-than-savvy investors faces and give ICOs a bad name other platforms. He would like that number to increase
before they have a chance to do any good in the economy. substantially: We are ready for the crowd to show up. A
subset of those will build the infrastructure, those second-
Patrick Murck, Special Counsel at Cooley and a fellow tier developers, the ones who come in and jump into the
with Harvard Universitys Berkman Center, said that some black box, so to speak, and make it work better, faster,
of these tokens are securities and are already regulated more feature-full. The space also needs people with
under existing rules. Some are not and should not be production experience, and thats a function of time. The
regulated. Law enforcement didnt need new rules to catch demand begs for creative education programmes, perhaps
criminals on the bitcoin blockchain. The US Securities and enabling young talented coders to earn their degree or
Exchange Commission (SEC) didnt need a new process other relevant professional certifications through their
for reviewing Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss application contributions to blockchain projects.
to start a bitcoin exchange traded fund. The SEC posted
the application, invited public commentary and issued Governance challenge: The lack of user-
its decision: No. It ruled that bitcoin markets were largely friendly interfaces
unregulated, and so such a fund would be unduly risky.
Our research indicated that theres much work to be done
Should issuers of ICOs or funds pegged to in basic user interface and experience. Many of these
cryptocurrencies let the buyer beware? Should regulators apps are inaccessible to the average person. Theres not
come in and write the rules? Or should key stakeholders enough wallet support, and many interfaces are user-
come together and provide community guidelines and unfriendly, requiring a high tolerance for alphanumeric
oversight? code and geekspeak. Most bitcoin addresses are simply
strings of between 26 and 35 characters beginning with a
one or a three, quite tedious to type. As Tyler Winklevoss
Governance challenge: The lack of skilled said, When you go to Google.com, you dont type an
developers IP address into your web browser. You type in a human-
readable name, something that you can remember, thats
At the application layer, said Perianne Boring, Founder mapped to its IP address. The same should be the case
and President of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, with bitcoin addresses. Actual bitcoin addresses shouldnt
business and technical skills to bring these projects to be exposed to the average user. Little things like that make
market are important.120 Our findings were unambiguous a difference.123
on the need for skilled workers. The space needs talent,
and talented people from anywhere in the world can
contribute. Despite flair-ups on social media, many of the
exchanges (on GitHub, for instance) among developers are
educational, and those like Matthew Corallo of Chaincode
Labs are known for encouraging new developers.121
Brian Behlendorf at Hyperledger would like to see many

more developers who are familiar enough with the
technology and the concepts that they can move among
different technologies.122 For example, if you know how to
build mobile apps, you actually have a range of different
technologies to do that. If you work at a place like Uber,
you might know how to build an iPhone app and an
Android app and bounce between them and make them
look consistent. So being multilingual is not a unique
challenge, but understanding what works in a mobile
setting is the hard part.

3. Stewardship of the ecosystem as a Were going to see more human messiness, but more
whole human messiness doesnt mean the technology is bad.127
Because they lack a central point of control, these But will people actually take the counterparty to court?
networks, applications and organizations require new De Filippi estimates that, in the analogue world, 80%
distributed governance systems to coordinate on of contract breaches arent enforced because theyre
matters such as interoperability, privacy and security, in too costly to pursue in court, too expensive to go into
a collaborative manner, Primavera De Filippi said. We proceedings. Why should those numbers improve in
need to figure out new decentralized governance systems a blockchain world? When the code indicates that the
that can be easily deployed on top of these decentralized contract has been fully executed rather than breached,
infrastructures.124 except one party is dissatisfied with the outcome, will the
dissatisfied party actually pursue a lawsuit? Will the courts
Decentralized governance systems for decentralized recognize the case? Will the small business owner back
infrastructure away from the corporate legal team of Dewey, Cheatham
and Howe or with his modest resources even be able
The ecosystem needs a proper regulatory framework that to identify his anonymous counterparty, so that he could
understands and accommodates blockchain technologies, file a lawsuit in the first place?
De Filippi said.125 Such a framework would mitigate some
of the strong legal uncertainty surrounding these emergent The courts are going to get it wrong. Theyve already
technologies, thereby helping start-ups and larger started to get it wrong, applying intellectual property rules
companies alike to move beyond the proof-of-concept to anything that is intangible. They think that physicality is
stage. Proper legal and regulatory frameworks also favour the dividing line between virtual property and intellectual
long-term, more sustainable and more technically sound property, and its not, said Fairfield. Theres no intellectual
business models over short-term high-risk ones. property element, theres no part of a bitcoin that is
intellectual property, theres no creative spark for copyright,
theres no patentable idea, theres no patent, theres no
Governance challenge: The lack of a proper trademark.128 So their challenge is formidable. They must
legal structure for stewardship oversee the unforeseeable. On the one hand, they must
avoid stifling innovation by overreacting to worst cases
De Filippi and Cardozo Law School Professor Aaron human trafficking, illicit drug trade, gunrunning, child
Wright, co-authors on a forthcoming Harvard University pornography, terrorism, tax evasion and counterfeiting, for
Press book on the blockchain, questioned whether the instance. On the other hand, they must not twist new but
current legal framework could handle the questions raised unproven applications such as blockchain-based platforms
by smart property deployed globally at scale. Smart for identity management to restrict civil liberties. There
contracts both define and manage ownership rights. Their must be a stable approach to regulation, legislation and the
code makes no assumptions about the assignment of international negotiation of treaties to minimize regulatory
rights, and code cant arbitrarily seize, divest or transfer uncertainty, so that investors will continue to support the
these rights. For example, if during the process of land technologys global development.
registration, government officials assigned the ownership
of a parcel of land to someone who wasnt the legal owner Fairfield focused more on process: The common law isnt
of that parcel, that person would have absolute sovereignty affecting technology law; the common law is technology
over the parcel, and the legal owner couldnt simply reverse law. The common law is the process of adapting human
the assignment. systems to technological change the real fight is how do
we take old rules meant for old technology and adapt them
Right now there is a lack of legal recourse in a world of rapidly and competently, so they are recognizable when
irrevocable transactions and unavoidable smart contracts. we start using them but iterated so theyre state of the art
According to De Filippi and Wright, People are, indeed, when the technology really hits.129
free to decide the particular set of rules to which they
want to abide, but after the choice has been made The common law is technology law.
can no longer deviate from these rules, to the extent
that smart contracts are automatically enforced by the Last but not least, and this should be no surprise, identity
underlying code of the technology, regardless of the will matters big-time or at least how we construct it on the
of the parties.126 This very high degree of certainty blockchain matters. If we combine a precisely coded
mathematical certainty as to the outcome of a transaction version of personhood with a precisely coded version
or a smart contract is unprecedented in society. It of society, we get the stuff of science fiction novels and
delivers greater efficiencies and effectively eliminates non- Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. De Filippi and Wright
performance risk because we have no choice of breach, conjured images of self-enforcing contracts, walled
no choice of damages. But thats also a downside. It allows gardens or trusted systems, owned and managed by a
no room for human beings. To Josh Fairfield of Washington sophisticated network of decentralized organizations that
and Lee University School of Law, that means more dictate what people can or cannot do, without any kind of
messiness, not less. Were going to see more fights. You constitutional safeguards or constraints. In other words, a
didnt actually renovate my house, I want my money back. machine-driven totalitarian regime.

Governance challenge: Premature legislation Whatever the particular policy issue is, if you dont
or regulation will stifle the blockchain understand the technology and you dont understand the
revolution implications, youre setting yourself up for failure, said
Brito. If you dont understand it, you can introduce law
In 2013, Benjamin Lawsky, former Superintendent of and policy thats going to harm the development of the
Financial Services for the State of New York, reviewed New technology.135 Pindar Wong recalled a phrase from his
Yorks existing statutes governing money transmissions internet governance days: Dont regulate what you cant
and found them woefully inadequate for virtual currency.130 control, because youre just going to get embarrassed.136
The department initially wanted to regulate this technology Given the interdependence of economies around the world,
by enforcing rules written around the time of the Civil War. we have a sense of urgency around global coordination of
Those laws couldnt possibly address any kind of digital any policy-setting.
technology like the internet, let alone bitcoin traded on
a blockchain. The more I learned, the more interested I
got in how powerful this technology is, and I saw all the Governance challenge: Business development
various applications and platforms that were going to be outpaces scientific research
built over time, he said. If he could get regulation right, to
make sure the bad stuff we didnt want to see happening Unlike the internet, which had a long incubation period with
in the ecosystem was avoided, and at the same time not much experimentation in non-profit mode before venture
have regulation be too overbearing, then we had a real capitalists started to invest heavily in dotcom start-ups,
chance of helping a very powerful technology make serious blockchain technology is already supporting business
improvements to our system.131 applications. A lot of money has flowed to blockchain
entrepreneurs with high expectations for business results.
Lawsky concluded, Maybe we need a new type of Were investing as if its 1999, but the standards are 1989,
regulatory framework to deal with something that is just said Joichi Ito of MIT Media Lab. Theres so much we dont
qualitatively different?132 His proposal, the BitLicense, know about this resource.
was the first serious attempt to provide a regulatory lens
onto this industry. A controversial piece of law, it revealed For starters, how will it affect human behaviour? We mean
how even well-intentioned regulations can produce behavioural change in a deeper sense than Netiquette.
unintended consequences. When the BitLicense went into Today, many people count on their bank or credit-card
effect, there was a mass exodus of companies, such as company, even talking with a real person, when they make
Bitfinex, GoCoin and Kraken from New York; they cited an accounting error, forget their passwords, or lose their
the prohibitive cost of the license as a main cause. The wallets or chequebooks. Most people with bank accounts
few that stayed were well-capitalized and more mature in developed economies arent in the habit of backing up
businesses. their money on a flash drive or a second device, securing
their passwords so they neednt rely on a service providers
There needs to be a balanced approach applied [so] as to password reset function, or keeping these backups in
not impair investment flows, job creation and innovation, separate locations so that, if they lose their computer and
Roszak told the Committee on Energy and Commerce of all other possessions in a house fire, they dont lose their
the US House of Representatives. There are currently over money. Without this discipline, they might as well stuff their
1,000 start-ups betting their lives on blockchain-enabled mattress with cash. On the blockchain, such distributed
technologies. Applying light touch regulation similar to applications (dapps) will reside with each user and run on
the [United Kingdom], Singapore and Canada with a wait the users machine regardless of the service provider rather
and see attitude (much like the early internet) will create than on the web and in the cloud. Yet, 230,000 users of
jobs for Americans and help keep innovation in the United Microsoft Windows 7 in 150 countries had not developed
States.133 the essential habit of keeping their computer software up
to date and were attacked by the WannaCry ransomware
Jurisdiction already matters when it comes to using bitcoin. with an estimated total damage of $4 billion.137
Some governments have banned it or banned state banks
from exchanging it, as some countries have done. Jerry In developing economies, those who still rely on barter may
Brito of the cryptocurrency policy think tank Coin Center be able to make a behavioural leap of sorts, leapfrogging
said, In a typically Chinese way, its not illegal, but it could not only a whole generation of technology but also a
be at any moment and everybody knows it.134 China century of banking habits and attestation practices that
has allowed a serious professional mining community might otherwise become liabilities in a blockchain world. In
to flourish and those mining pools have become quite other words, their lack of access to traditional financial or
influential in debates over upgrades to the bitcoin protocol. other centralized resources may put them at a behavioural
What happens to blockchain security if China suddenly advantage on the blockchain. With greater freedom
bans mining, too? Other jurisdictions have moved to define better privacy, stronger security and autonomy from
bitcoin narrowly, as the US Internal Revenue Service third-party cost structures and system failures comes
has done. The IRS has labelled bitcoin as an asset for greater responsibility. For those consumers who dont trust
calculating taxes on the appreciation of value. themselves to keep safe backups of their private keys,
third-party storage providers could provide backup service.

There is also a societal dimension that we dont yet Governance challenge: Powerful incumbents
understand. Money is still a social construct representing will usurp domains
what a society values. It is endogenous to that society, it
manifests because of human relationships, and it adapts A question that kept coming up was, Whats to prevent
to evolving human needs. You cant take the social out the behemoths of the old, closed paradigm huge
of money, said Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times. corporations or powerful nation-states from appropriating
A lot of these protocols attempt to do that by creating an applications or the networks they run on for their own
absolutist and very objectified system. It just doesnt reflect narrow interests? For example, a repressive state could
the world as it is. She pointed to the euro system as an aim all its state processing assets and all its mining pools at
example of how one size one set of protocols doesnt the bitcoin blockchain to stage a 51% attack or at minimum
fit all countries.138 She echoed what Antonopoulos said destabilize the process. Or a wealthy despot decides
about the very human need for societies to forgive and that immutable posts on the blockchain are eroding his
forget in order to move on. Theres a very long tradition power. This despot could seize all the mining power
in finance of obliterating records, because we as a society within reach and purchase the rest from countries that still
believe that its wrong to persecute or discriminate against tolerate his bad behaviour, to put him over the 50% hash
individuals for something they did 10 or 15 years ago. We rate threshold. He could then decide which transactions
have this whole debt jubilee-esque mentality because we to include in blocks and which to reject. With controlling
think people should be given another chance. Creating interest, he could also decide whether to fork the code and
a system that never forgets is slightly sociopathic, she introduce a few prohibitions, maybe blacklisting addresses
said.139 Is that where were heading? Is that what we want? associated with gambling or free speech. So do honest
nodes adopt this centrally controlled fork or do they fork
over to a new code? Andrew Vegetabile, Director of the
Governance challenge: Lack of diversity of Litecoin Association and Senior Systems Engineer at
viewpoints Avionics Test and Analysis Corporation, said there would
be no escape from such a scenario because the despot
As many have observed, the blockchain movement is controlled 51% of the network. And he neednt represent
overpopulated with men. In technology compared to other a government; he could be one of the worlds wealthiest
sectors of the workforce, people of colour are under- people or an executive of a highly profitable company with
represented by 16-18%, and women hold only 25% of all substantial purchasing power.145
computing jobs.140 Everyone in Silicon Valley complains of
the gender bias, and perhaps in the blockchain ecosystem
Incumbents have taken notice of ICOs. Companies like
even more so, said Pindar Wong. Thats unhealthy.
Were not getting enough diverse views. Going back to Goldman Sachs, NASDAQ Inc. and Intercontinental
cybernetics first principles, Ashbys Law of Requisite Exchange, the American holding company that owns the
Variety,141 we need a variety of viewpoints, be it male, NYSE, which dominate the IPO and listing business, have
female, gay straight, old, young, whatever you want to been among the largest investors in blockchain ventures.
perceive it to be. When problem-solving has deadlocked, At some point, they could attempt to defend their territory,
a key question to ask is, Do we have enough variety in the either gobbling up the most successful new ventures
room or online? The goal is to maintain requisite variety or lobbying to make sure existing regulations for well-
to avoid thinking errors, said Wong. You avoid thinking established firms apply to small start-ups, and suing any
errors by having a wide variety of views that get equal start-up that survives the regulatory inquisition. This litigate-
treatment.142 No discrimination. not-innovate strategy may buy them time to sort out a
strategy. Or it may simply drain the incumbent of whatever
There are certainly high-profile women who have founded
and are managing companies in the space: Blythe real value it contains.
Masters, Chief Executive Officer of Digital Asset Holdings;
Cindy McAdam, President of Xapo; Melanie Shapiro, Chief Think of those twin tyrants legacy systems and active
Executive Officer of Case Wallet; Joyce Kim, Executive inertia. Academics have well documented the effects
Director of Stellar Development Foundation; Elizabeth of lock-in and switching costs and have identified
Rossiello, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of BitPesa; the challenges of postmerger systems integration.
and Pamela Morgan, Chief Executive Officer of Third Key Organizations with huge technology investments in their
Solutions. Many of them have suggested the industry installed base may be more likely to throw more money
is very welcoming to all voices, male and female alike. at their old system, sharpening their knives for the pistol
Venture capital in blockchain is also gaining in diversity. fight rather than conducting strategic experiments on the
Arianna Simpson, former Head of Business Development
blockchain. If money and power do try to capture the
at BitGo, is now an investor in the sector. Jalak Jobanputra
is an investor whose venture capital (VC) fund focuses network, the miners would stop them by going to the real
on decentralized technology. But how diverse is the version of bitcoin and initiating a fork, according to Keonne
developer community? In our research, we came across Rodriguez, Senior Manager, Digital and User Interface/
comments like this that resonated: More women in the User Experience Lead at Synechron.146
#blockchain ecosystem would mean better collaboration,
more sensible governance.143 Studies have shown this
to be true.144 We need to attract more women and more
minorities to the ecosystem, with such groups as Women
in Blockchain advocating their achievements.

Governance challenge: Dictators learning
curve, quantum computing and utter failure The Players in the
Scenarios emerged in our research that didnt fit cleanly Blockchain Ecosystem
into any bucket, and so we have put them here, loosely
under the category of unknowns and unintended
consequences. AI expert Steve Omohundro threw this
phrase at us: the dictators learning curve, or how cave Although blockchain technology emerged from the open-
dwellers end up with space-age technology. Think about all source community, it quickly attracted many stakeholders,
the AI labs out there staffed by the worlds smartest PhDs with different backgrounds, interests and motives. Each
with access to the worlds most powerful computers. PhDs has a role to play. There are early signs that many of the
might fork the bitcoin code or write a smart contract that core stakeholders see the need for leadership and are
controls a drones delivery of package, where bitcoin is stepping up. Anyone or organization that is working to
held in escrow until that exact moment when the package promote the acceptance and use of blockchain-based
arrives. Lets say these PhDs post that software as open- technologies is a steward of the ecosystem, said Perianne
source code to the internet, because thats what they do Boring of the Chamber of Digital Commerce.149 Here are
to move their ideas forward; they share ideas. So now the players and their perspectives on governance:
ISIS doesnt need an AI lab, it doesnt need a software
development team. It just needs to substitute a grenade Blockchain innovators
for the package. Thats the dictators learning curve, and
its not steep. But dont blame the code or the culture of Vanguards in the industry, from Erik Voorhees, Chief
sharing. Its not necessarily what we do with the code; its Executive Officer and Founder of ShapeShift, to Roger Ver,
what we dont realize were doing with it the unintended an investor also known as Bitcoin Jesus, believe any form
consequences of a friction-free world. of formal governance, regulation or oversight is not only
foolish, but antithetical to the principles of bitcoin. However,
Looming in the distance is quantum computing, the as the industry has expanded, many entrepreneurs are
cryptographers Y2K problem. It combines quantum seeing a healthy dialogue with governments, and a focus
mechanics and theoretical computation to solve problems on governance more broadly, as a good thing. Companies
such as cryptographic algorithms vastly faster like Coinbase, Circle and Gemini have joined trade
than todays computers. Said Omohundro, Quantum organizations, and some even maintain close relations
computers, in theory, can factor very large numbers with emerging governance institutions, such as the Digital
very rapidly and efficiently, and most of the public key Currency Initiative at MIT.
cryptography systems are based on tasks like that. And
so if they turn out to be real, then the whole cryptography Venture capitalists
infrastructure of the world is going to have to change
dramatically.147 What started as a clique of cryptoinsiders snowballed into
technologys most influential VCs, such as Andreessen
Pindar Wong spun a worst-case scenario. It could Horowitz. Then financial services titans joined the mix:
break, he said. The whole experiment with blockchain Barclays, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, NYSE, UBS and Visa
technologies could fail. In his view, that would be a good among others have made direct investments in start-ups or
thing, because we only learn once we make mistakes. If we supported incubators that nurture new ventures. Pension
make mistakes early enough, then the cost is much less funds are entering the fray. OMERS Ventures, the billion-
than if we let them fester. Bitcoin is not even a decade old, dollar venture arm of one of Canadas largest public-sector
its market capitalization is a rounding error on a rounding pensions, made its first investment in 2015. Jim Orlando,
error in the global financial system, he said. Its materially who runs that group, is looking for the next killer app that
irrelevant. We havent moved all of e-commerce onto any does for blockchain what the web browser did for the
blockchain platform. Internet.150 Investment has exploded. According to data
in PricewaterhouseCoopers DeNovo platform, funding
So what might we learn? One reason why this technology in blockchain companies increased 79% year-over-
works is that it has socially engineered the game year in 2016 to US$450 million.151 Tim Draper of Draper
mechanics based on one assumption, that there are more Fisher Jurvetson told us that, if anything, Financiers are
good people than bad people, Wong said. If that turns underestimating the potential of blockchain.152 Digital
out to be wrong, that there are actually more bad than Currency Group, a venture firm founded by Barry Silbert,
good people, then we will have learned something.148 has appointed academics and other nontraditional advisers
As satirist James Branch Cabell observed, The optimist to its board to accelerate the development of a better
proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The financial system through both investment and advocacy.
pessimist fears this is true.

Banks and financial services Non-governmental organizations
Before 2015, few major financial institutions had The year 2015 proved transformative for the burgeoning
announced investments in the sector. In its Global FinTech constellation of NGOs and civil society organizations
Report 2017, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that 77% focused specifically on this technology. Groups include
of survey respondents in financial services expected to Jerry Britos Coin Center and Perianne Borings Chamber
adopt blockchain as part of an in production system or of Digital Commerce. These groups are gaining traction in
process by 2020.153 Today, Bank of Montreal, BNY Mellon, the community. Brito said, Governance comes into play
CIBC, Commerzbank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, when there are serious decisions that need to be made
ING, Macquarie, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho and you need a process or institution for that to happen.160
Bank, Nordea, RBC, Socit Gnrale, State Street, TD
Bank, UniCredit, Wells Fargo and dozens of others are Governments, regulators and law enforcement
investing in the technology and wading into the leadership
discussion. Many of the worlds biggest banks have signed The internet of value will deal with money, stocks, bonds
up to the R3 CEV consortium. Stakeholders must remain and other financial assets, deeds, votes, identities and
cautious of any powerful incumbents looking to control this other assets that governments tend to originate, register
technology, just as they had to tread cautiously in the early or otherwise oversee to preserve the public interest.
days of the internet. When it comes to transactions involving these assets
the foundation of our economies they would be right to
Coders and developers express both curiosity and concern for the common good.
Blockchain developers lack formal oversight bodies such For example, central banks are each taking different
as ICANN, the IETF or W3C to anticipate development steps to understand this technology. Benjamin Lawsky,
needs and guide their resolution and the bitcoin former Superintendent of Financial Services for the State
community prefers it that way. Members do have a few of New York, said strong regulations are the first step
norms, such as participating in online forums, posting towards industry growth.161 Carolyn Wilkins, Senior Deputy-
protocol improvement proposals publicly for peer review, Governor of the Bank of Canada, believes central banks
discussing and addressing other members concerns, everywhere should seriously study the implications of
advocating for particular solutions, testing proposed code moving entire national currency systems to digital money.
and jumping in to debug code that is, not just suggesting The Bank of Englands top economist, Andrew Haldane,
but implementing a fix. Bypassing peer review is a real has proposed a national digital currency for the United
no-no, while trolling to improve ideas is OK.154 When we Kingdom.162 The Deputy Chief of the Bank of Russia, Olga
spoke with Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen in 2015, Skorobogatova, said that it was time to develop national
he was at the centre of the block-size debate. He told us, cryptocurrencies, and the Peoples Republic of China has
Id prefer to stay in the engine room, keeping the bitcoin been experimenting with Ethereum to develop a digital
engine going rather than spending every waking moment yuan.163
advocating for bitcoins future.155 At the time, he viewed the
internet governance network as a useful starting point. I However, governments around the world are uncoordinated
always look for role models. The role model is the IETF.156 in their approach to blockchain some favouring laissez-
Its kind of chaotic and messy, he said, but it works faire policy, others diving in with new rules and regulations,
and its reliable. However, in the absence of clear and such as the BitLicense in New York. Some regimes
transparent leadership, Andresen either found himself or are openly hostile, increasingly a fringe response. Even
put himself too much in the spotlight. It was a Catch 22 of those stakeholders who resist government intervention
sorts that cost him his developer privileges.157 acknowledge the merit of regulator participation in
governance debates. Adam Draper, a prolific VC in
Academics and scholars the industry, reluctantly acknowledged, Government
endorsement creates institutional endorsement, which has
Academic institutions are funding labs and centres to value.164
study this technology and collaborate with colleagues
outside their silo. Joichi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Users
Lab, saw an opportunity for academia to step up: MIT
and the academic layer can be a place where we can do All of humanity and every company and institution will use
assessments, do research and be able to talk about things this technology as foundational. People have a legitimate
like scalability without any bias or special interests.158 right to care about identity, security, privacy, human rights
Notable universities such as Stanford, Princeton, Duke and in general, fair adjudication and the long-term viability
New York also teach courses on blockchain, bitcoin and of this resource. Yet there is no shared taxonomy or
cryptocurrencies.159 categorization of the space: Does blockchain refer to the
bitcoin blockchain or the technology in general? Is it big
B Blockchain or little b blockchain? Is it a currency,
commodity or technology? Is it all of these things or none
of them?

The Global Solution they get that information by promising to keep the secret.
The more secrets they hold, the greater the information
Networks (GSN) asymmetry and the greater their advantages, but those
advantages have harmful systemic implications in both civic
Framework Applied to and commercial spheres.168
Blockchain Pindar Wong, former Trustee of the Internet Society, was

quite reflective: I spent most of my adult life trying to build
an internet, and it turned out that internet actually shouldnt
be trusted. It is, in fact, a trustless internet. I grabbed this
blockchain technology with two hands and have run with
it as fast as I can because, in some sense, it is a second
Weve outlined the major issues and a few successes in bite of the cherry. Its penance. Its the ability to right a
addressing them. They are significant. To date, many are wrong, which I didnt know that we were making with the
still unsolved, with only pockets of collective movement internet.169
to resolve them. We cannot underscore it enough: for this
technology to reach its next stage and fulfil its long-term So we cannot leave governance of such complex global
promise, we still need coordination, organization and innovations solely either to governments or to the private
leadership. Human beings must step up and lead. sector: political and commercial interests have proven
insufficient to ensure that this new resource serves society.
Questions persist over how much leadership will come Rather, and more than ever, we need multistakeholders to
from the internet governance community, and rightly so. collaborate as equals and provide global leadership. We
Initially, many organizations involved in internet governance need all three pillars of modern civilization the private
viewed digital currencies and blockchain technologies as sector, the public sector and civil society to participate
outside their purview, but that is changing. Vint Cerf, who in stewarding this new global resource. According to The
co-created the internet itself and led the creation of the Economist, Multistakeholderism may be, like democracy,
Internet Society and the Internet Engineering Task Force, the worst form of governance except for all the other
suggested that a good starting point for blockchain would ones.170 We believe that non-state, multistakeholder
be to create a birds of a feather interest group within the networks (which we call global solution networks or
IETF.165 The W3C has made web payments a priority, and GSNs) are the most effective means we have to steward
blockchain is central to that discussion.166 Additionally, the global resources (see Figure 2).
IGF has hosted sessions about blockchain and bitcoin,
where participants have explored new decentralized Figure 2: Seven Types of Global Solution Networks
governance frameworks enabled by this technology.167
Heres the thing. Many of our concerns about the

first generation of the internet have come true. Large
corporations and authoritarian regimes have captured
much of the technology and are using it in their vast
private empires to extract most of the value. They have
closed off opportunity and privatized much of our digital
experience. We use proprietary stores or government-
owned channels to acquire new apps for our phones,
tablets and watches. Search engines and marketing (or
propaganda) departments alike interrupt our content with
advertising and state messaging. Big organizations that
promote and prosper from consumer data are notoriously
secretive about their activities, plans and information
assets. To be sure, some of these behemoths have opened
up voluntarily, but many others have merely reacted to the Source: Global Solution Networks, gsnetworks.org
sunlight of whistle-blowers and investigative journalism.
Such disclosures are dwarfed by efforts to hide operations
and conceal information. Simply put, these stakeholders
havent been good stewards of the public trust, and
existing internet governance networks havent been
effective in representing all interests equally.
Case in point: the banking industry. Banks are traditionally

secret keepers, according to Kaminska of the Financial
Times. She explained that banks make good judgments
about whom to lend to and how to process payments
when they have good access to private information, and

Overall, the expression If there is a will, there is a way When it comes to governance, we cannot expect a
applies. The smartest technologists on the planet are small group of engineers to figure out a perfect protocol
working on creative solutions to some of these challenges. for economic transactions and social interactions. This is
Further, as computers become inexorably smarter, they not an engineering problem, said Primavera De Filippi.
will undoubtedly provide their own solutions. Investor It is a social and political problem. She recommended
Roger Ver said, Say the smartest human has an IQ close involving all relevant stakeholders across diverse
to 200. Imagine artificial intelligences with an IQ of 250, or disciplines in a neutral forum.174 Thats what ColliderX
say 500, or 5,000 or 5 million. There will be solutions, if provides: an independent R&D hub for deep technical
we humans want them.171 In this section, we look at how research, which will be peer-reviewed and open access. To
diverse stakeholders can come together and forge new maintain impartiality, its crowdfunding its operations and
understandings and new action plans. administering the funds to researchers via grants. Iliana
Oris Valiente, Founder of ColliderX, said, The ColliderX
initiative has been received with great enthusiasm from
Standards networks: Dont deify differences; the blockchain tech community, academics and industry
codify common ground partners alike. All stakeholders are rallying behind ... a new
model to fund and promote core technical research to
Most urgent is the need for standards at both the platform move the blockchain industry forward.175
and application levels. Gavin Andresen was among
the original core developers who believed leadership Yale Law School Professor Elizabeth Stark, another
was required to move the agenda forward on common emerging star in governance, took up the mantle
standards. Maybe you can design light socket set waves of convener-in-chief for the industry. Like another
by committee, but you cant design software standards prominent woman Dawn Song, MacArthur Fellow
that way, he said. Pointing to the early days of the web, and Computer Science Professor at Berkeley, and an
Andresen said, The internet model shows that you can expert in cybersecurity Stark came from a distinctly
have technologies where consensus does arise, even academic background but has other ambitions. To solve
though theres no one clear leader, but You can either the blockchains scalability issue, she organized Scaling
have a process, or a person, or a process that ends in a Bitcoin, convening developers, industry players, thought
person. You definitely need one or the other.172 Consensus leaders, government officials and other stakeholders
mechanisms alone cant support standards development. in Montreal, and collaborated on the Bitcoin Lightning
Network.
Were missing a Jon Postel, said Joichi Ito of one of
those [US Department of Defense]-funded guys who were In financial services, both R3 CEV and Hyperledger are
slightly hippy but thought this government work was kind tackling critical standards issues. Invariably, there will have
of cool, an attitude Ito would not use to characterize either to be standards networks on a variety of things, from the
the Bitcoin Core developers who can be hard to talk to blockchain protocol that forms the basis of the financial
or the Chinese miners who can be very aggressive. In services industry of the future, to common standards for
contrast, Postel was a tireless steward who, for decades privacy and payments in the IoT.
until his death, shepherded the Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority and served as the Request-for-Comments Editor, While these groups attack the problem from different
managing and maintaining the internets documents of angles and with different agendas, each shares a common
record. goal to make this technology ready for prime time by
building infrastructure, developing standards and making it
When youre dealing with a technology that is so leading scalable.
edge, groundbreaking, and relies on cryptography, you
need to think slightly differently. Im trying to think slightly
differently and break away from what I called binary
thinking. Binary thinking is black and white, are you
secure or insecure, and I dont think those lead to very
fruitful debates, said Pindar Wong. When youre dealing
with a technology as sophisticated as bitcoin, which is
the only blockchain we currently know that works, that
is unhackable, youre dealing with nuance, with very
sophisticated discussions in a highly technical domain that
you dont need everyone to participate in. Everyone has the
opportunity to participate, but you dont need everyone to
participate.173 Who should participate? Within the bitcoin
ecosystem, there is a very exceptionally smart and gifted
group, the brightest people in the room, Wong said.

Networked institutions: Welcome stakeholders governance body of the consortium will provide what Small
everywhere referred to as curation, meaning human interaction and
arbitration as needed. The network will not reach its full
Members of the blockchain ecosystem need opportunities potential if certain members can gain unfair through their
to collide, so to speak, with other stakeholders so that status or visibility.180
they can hear each others concerns and positions. When
asked what we need most, Perianne Boring said, A public The World Economic Forum predicted that within a
dialogue on the importance of encryption. With many high- decade, we could store 10% of global gross domestic
profile terrorist attacks, like Manchester [England], there product on blockchains.181 As an organization, the World
is a renewed call throughout the world to ban encryption. Economic Forum has championed and advanced big
This is a grave mistake. Cybersecurity attacks, like identity issues, such as income inequality, climate change and
theft and ransomware, continue to be a multibillion-dollar even remittances. Other networked institutions, from the
drain on the economy. Decentralized, blockchain-based smallest groups to the biggest foundations in the world,
security systems could address cybersecurity issues head such as the Clinton Foundation and the Bill & Melinda
on. The blockchain industry is not participating in the Gates Foundation, would be wise to champion this
global encryption debates, and they should be, she said.176 technology to advance such major issues as financial
inclusion and healthcare delivery. Networked institutions
Joseph Lubin called for decentralized inclusiveness: often have a role to play in influencing government policy-
We set out at the start of Ethereum to be as inclusive making, making them a critical link and strategic partner in
as possible, so any person or company that might overcoming a number of major showstoppers.
want to be exposed to the technology should be able
to use it. There were certainly some crypto-anarchists
in the space broadly who were disgusted that banks Advocacy networks: Respect members
might be spoken to or that we, any of us, would interests and constraints
educate or collaborate with a bank, let alone a central
bank. But if this technology is to have profound impact There is strength in numbers when it comes to advocating
on the planet, then it needs to be, or it should be, for the ecosystem. Each stakeholder cannot focus narrowly
everywhere and widely distributed in terms of different on its concerns and hope to achieve results. Advocacy
use cases.177 networks arise with the disillusionment with traditional
political and civic institutions, making them a logical fit for
The World Economic Forum has been a vocal proponent the blockchain community, which is trying to upend how
of blockchain technology. The blockchain was front and those traditional institutions solve problems. However,
centre at the Annual Meeting in Davos in January 2016. in these early days, advocacy networks must work with
Jesse McWaters, Financial Innovation Lead at the World government as a partner.
Economic Forum, believes blockchain technology is a
general-purpose technology, like the internet, which we can To advocate for the blockchain ecosystem, Perianne Boring
use to make markets radically more efficient and improve founded the Chamber of Digital Commerce (CDC), a trade-
access to financial services. He tells non-technologists in based association in Washington DC. Within a year, CDC
the finance sector, Dont worry about blockchain. Dont attracted a high-profile board (e.g. Blythe Masters, James
worry about block size or any of that to start. What you Newsome, George Gilder). The movement needed boots
should really care about is the future-state architecture on the ground in Washington to open a dialogue with
of your industry. Focus on the characteristics you believe government, she said. With her background in journalism,
that future-state infrastructure needs to have and that will Boring focused on messaging, positioning and polish.
necessarily have a governance component to it.178 Her organization is open to anyone who is committed to
growing this community, she said, and is now a leading
A great example of this mindset is Moog Inc., a $2.5 billion voice in policy, advocacy and knowledge in the burgeoning
provider of precision motion control equipment and a blockchain governance ecosystem.182
leading supplier in additive manufacturing (3D printing). It
is using governance to attract the right platform partners. Some stakeholders have very different cultures
The company envisions a blockchain-enabled digital from others. You can get to a point where you
supply chain where it can exchange intellectual property have transparency in certain things. You dont need
on a point-of-use/time-of-need basis as both a producer transparency in everything. You wouldnt want to run a
and consumer. Users must have absolute control of the bank consortium necessarily that way, at least, in the
value created by their IP, said George Small, Principal legacy world, said Joseph Lubin of Ethereum. We found
Engineer of Moog.179 We are focusing on governance first out with all the different banks in the alliance that they have
as a means to building a consortium of industry equals some very rigorous constraints, that its not natural for
who have earned their communitys trust and would like to them to operate with us freewheeling blockchain start-ups
help create such an IP exchange. Stewardship must be and that we need to respect their constraints.183
transparent, fair and stable, he said. We will not be able
to build upon a moving target or one that fails to support
absolute trust across ecosystem members. Collaborators
such as Hyperledger are providing the infrastructure. The

Non-profits focused on human rights and economic These watchdogs have an important advocacy role as
empowerment can especially benefit from advocacy well. In the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks, some
networks. For example, BitPesa, the universal payment and European lawmakers, regulators and law enforcement
trading platform, operates mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa. blamed bitcoin as the source of terrorism financing.
It belongs to multistakeholder groups like the US state The Blockchain Alliance called for patience: Lets not
departments task force on Africa, where it sits alongside regulate out of fear, they said. 188 Other than the self-
IBM, Microsoft and other tech firms that have greater policing role of community members who convene,
influence over African governments and can lobby on collaborate and debate on forums and on Reddit, few other
BitPesas behalf.184 watchdog networks have stepped up. Partnerships with
law enforcement are a helpful start, but the blockchain
Advocacy networks are closely tied to policy networks, and ecosystem needs fully independent organizations, perhaps
Coin Center and CDC are taking the lead in this area. We traditional watchdogs such as Amnesty International
could also include here the Coalition of Automated Legal and Human Rights Watch, to sound the alarm when
Applications (COALA), MITs Digital Currency Initiative, corrupt and unscrupulous governments find ways to use
and others. Advocacy is critical to scaling blockchain blockchain as surveillance tool.
technology. In the absence of strong advocates who speak
up for stakeholders and stand up for stakeholder rights, What about central banks as watchdogs? They have
governments and other powerful institutions could try to considerable regulatory power in their respective countries,
stifle, twist or usurp this powerful open network to their but they do not operate in silos. They coordinate and
exclusive advantage. collaborate with other central banks and with global
institutions like the Financial Stability Board, the Bank
for International Settlements, the International Monetary
Watchdog networks: Do no harm Fund, the World Bank, and others. We need stronger
global coordination to address blockchain issues. Today,
Blockchain is still in its Wild West phase. People central bankers are asking important questions. Carolyn
are experimenting because they can, some making Wilkins, Senior Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Canada
extraordinary claims, and not all participants are equally and a central banking veteran, told us, Its easy to say
versed in the technology. The ecosystem needs the that regulation should be proportionate to the problem, but
equivalent of an Electronic Freedom Forum to watch what what is the problem? And what are the innovations that we
organizations are doing in the space. want?189 These are great questions that we could address
more effectively in an inclusive environment.
Governance comes into play where there are serious
decisions that need to be made, and you need a process
for that to happen, said Jerry Brito, one of the most Policy networks: Participate in debate and
prominent legal voices in the space first at the Mercatus coordinate regulation
Center at George Mason University and now as Director
of Coin Center, a not-for-profit advocacy group.185 He Rather than simply regulating, governments can improve
recommended starting with the Hippocratic Oath: first, do the behaviour of industries by making them more
no harm. The current bottom-up approach that bitcoins transparent and boosting civic engagement not as
core developers are using is showing a little bit of its rough a substitute for better regulation but as a complement
edges right now with the block-size debate. Its going to to the existing systems. We believe effective regulation
be very difficult to get any consensus, Brito said, but he and, by extension, effective governance come from a
doesnt think any organization could or should impose multistakeholder approach where transparency and public
order on it. We want to help develop that forum and foster participation are valued more highly and weigh more
a self-regulatory organization if it comes to that.186 By self- heavily in decision-making.
regulatory organization, he means self-regulation by the
companies in the industry, specifically of their consumer Open-mindedness is a virtue. Elizabeth Rossiello, Founder
protection and privacy practices and not of core protocol and Chief Executive Officer of BitPesa, described how
development, which he thinks is best left to an admittedly her organization does its on-the-round due diligence and
messy open-source process outside the scope of Coin makes sure that its operations comply with existing laws.
Centers policy mission.187 Where appropriate laws dont yet exist, BitPesa has a hand
in writing them. It does a comparative check, works with
The Blockchain Alliance is a partnership between law companies in other regions, and understands what theyve
enforcement, NGOs, trade organizations and the private been doing with their governments. For example, in India,
sector, and is the first true advocacy network to form in companies are also writing their regulation for this type of
the space. Coin Center and the CDC, with support from payments network, and so BitPesa is collaborating and
Bitfury, Bitfinex, BitGo, Bitnet, Bitstamp, Blockchain, sharing knowledge.190
Circle, Coinbase and others have partnered with US law
enforcement agencies, such as the Department of Justice,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service and
the Department of Homeland Security.

Primavera De Filippi of the Berkman Center at Harvard Knowledge networks: Know what you dont
has emerged as one of academias clearest and most know
eloquent voices on governance. She said that we cannot
establish a proper policy and regulatory framework for The scale of the transformation under way in a new global
blockchain technologies at a local or national level. She modus vivendi is barely understood. Education is key,
recommended international cooperation, multistakeholder said a vice-chairman in the corporate banking sector.
dialogue and a forum for lawyers and engineers to That transformation requires collaboration between the
talk more with each other and understand each others public and private sectors, which was not needed and
language better.191 was not possible over the past two decades before
the emergence of the new technologies. He expected
De Filippi formed the COALA with her colleagues, lawyer- members of the ecosystem to learn through mistakes,
turned-entrepreneur Constance Choi of Seven Advisory, some of them affecting civil liberty and personal privacy.
and Adroit Lawyers Amor Sexton, the leading digital Enlightened organs of the public and private sectors
currency lawyer in Australia. They have led a series of will increasingly work together on anticipating, avoiding,
blockchain workshops at Harvard, MIT and Stanford, mitigating or correcting these mistakes.195
as well as in London, Hong Kong SAR and Sydney.
Through COALA, a participant in the Internet Governance There are hundreds of pilots under way. For example,
Forum, they liaise with key stakeholders, regulators and Bitfurys Blockchain Trust Accelerator, in partnership with
policy-makers to help them understand the impact that the New America Foundation and the National Democratic
blockchain technology might have on existing legal and Institute, is creating responsible, innovative and cutting-
political institutions. De Filippi said, We invite them to edge pilot projects to advance knowledge for the global
contribute to the elaboration of policies, regulations and good.196 Brian Behlendorf of Hyperledger hopes that
standards for this emergent ecosystem.192 communities will share what theyve learned from both
their successes and failures, what works, what doesnt,
Today, a nascent policy network is emerging. Coin Center, and what needs to be fixed in terms of architecture and
a not-for-profit policy group in Washington DC, focuses product. Knowledge networks support this iterative
on five core verticals: innovation, consumer protection, learning and sharing and developing evidence-based
privacy, licensing and anti-money laundering/know your policies. They give advocates relevant information for
customer. The CDC, a trade organization, focuses on lobbying efforts and serve as a repository of data, which
promoting the acceptance and use of digital currencies.193 standards networks, such as the International Organization
When the Chamber opened its doors in 2014, the public for Standardization, can use to develop specifications for
policy community was sceptical, even fearful, of bitcoin decentralized ledger technologies (DLTs), FinTech and
and blockchain. A US Senator was calling for a ban blockchain technologies.
on bitcoin. We attributed this sentiment to a general
misunderstanding and miscommunication from highly For example, COALA is doing foundational research to
publicized events including Silk Road and Mt. Gox, said ensure that blockchain-based applications can operate
CDC Founder, Perianne Boring. Since then, the Chamber in the current regulatory framework and interact with
has made huge strides in educating the community. In existing institutions governed by the rule of law. It has
the past 12 months, we have held over 100 briefings for launched initiatives such as COALA-ID, a blockchain-based
policy-makers at the state, federal and international level. framework for credentials management and access control
Today, we have many bitcoin and blockchain champions in collaboration with MIT; Elethron, a blockchain-based
through the worlds policy community; we even have a system for renewable energy trading in collaboration with
Congressional Blockchain Caucus.194 Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Hewlett-Packard;
and COALA LEX, an interface between smart contracts
The United Kingdom has its own Digital Currency and legal contracts to bridge the gap between traditional
Association, as does Australia and Canada, who speak legal frameworks and blockchain technologies. The
for industry. Promoting and uniting many strong voices in Coalition intends to elaborate upon meta-languages for
the policy arena will ensure that blockchain has a better hybrid techno-legal agreements and develop an open-
chance of fulfilling its potential. source library of standardized and certified smart contract
modules. It has representation at technical standards-
setting bodies such as W3C and IETF, and has partnered
with such academic institutions as Harvard, Stanford,
Cambridge and Oxford universities, University of California
at Berkeley, University College London, National Center of
Scientific Research, and Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology, all to drive scientific and fact-based
research for the blockchain ecosystem.197

There should be a forum to present proposals or ideas, Delivery networks: Keep incentives for mass
Tyler Winklevoss of Winklevoss Capital said.198 Both formal collaboration in mind
and informal knowledge networks provide such forums.
Through collaborative research, experimentation and Just as you cant have fire without fuel, oxygen and
deliberation, they create and disseminate new knowledge heat, you cant have effective globalization without
to other GSNs, stakeholder groups and the broader interoperability in goods, data and money, said Chris
public. For example, MITs Digital Currency Initiative is Larsen, Executive Chairman of Ripples board of directors
uniting and exciting academics and universities globally. and former Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of
Informal gatherings like the San Francisco developer Ripple. The internet of value is about creating a world
meetup and the New York developer meetup are also where money can be sent as easily as information. Using
making knowledge a priority. Blockchainworkshops.org simple, open protocols like Interledger Protocol, we
has convened stakeholders to share key lessons. Reddit, can connect all the places where value lives ledgers,
the online community, is also a medium for debate in the blockchains and payment networks. They all have to work
space, and GitHub is a repository of conversations about together to make this a reality.203
code and the code itself. The Blockchain Research Institute
is commissioning research on how the blockchain will How do we ensure that the incentives are adequate for
transform core verticals in the economy and core functions interoperability and distributed mass collaboration, making
in organizations. Its publishing programme will feature the technology ready for prime time? We need an ICANN
white papers, case studies and conferences. moment for blockchain, where organizations will form to
deliver essential functions. However, whereas ICANN and
COALA also provides an open, neutral and collaborative many other GSN types in the internet governance network
forum for discussions around the core issues of legal and are distinctly American, blockchain leaders should push to
technical interoperability. We gather together a global make these organizations international. Joichi Ito said, I do
community of blockchain experts, including lawyers, think theres already a big push to make governance non-
academics, institutional leaders, policy-makers, computer American and international from the beginning because
scientists and entrepreneurs, De Filippi of COALA said.199 thats one thing we learned from ICANN, that its hard to
get out from under America once you get started as part of
Joichi Ito of the MIT Media Lab underscored the need for America.204 COALA is a global organization that performs
basic research that was solution neutral. I intentionally a few key roles: It disseminates knowledge, influences
divested all of my shares in bitcoin-related companies, like policy and advocates for blockchain technology, and
Guardtime and Blockchain, because I felt that I had to be supports the development and deployment of blockchain-
able to speak without having a conflict [of interest]. Some based applications, all critical to overcoming major
people think that was a little bit overboard. At least for our potential showstoppers.205
core team, we decided that that was important. When we
talk to some of the more careful people like the central Dont roll your own crypto.
banks, were not trying to sell them anything.200
The much greater focus on smart-contract auditing is
Ito has worked to build some capacity and some funding incredibly important. Theres a maxim in the cryptography
that was relatively neutral. He envisaged communities of space: Dont roll your own crypto. So, you really want to
academic expertise around whichever standards develop, use extremely well-vetted software packages, said Joseph
a community at each layer platform, application, industry Lubin.206 The ecosystem could use far more independent
that could facilitate standards conversations as they cryptographic auditors to provide this vital function. Its
came along. The lab is also trying to help its 90 member more than quality assurance.
companies to understand how they might participate in
this open standards process.201 He reiterated the neutrality
of solutions; the lab would have no skin in the game. Its
important to have people who can have non-financially
motivated, non-conflicted points of views on both the
technology and the standards, he said.202

Summary: What Needs 3. Advocacy networks: To forestall regulatory, legislative,
judicial or executive action that might stifle further
to Be Done innovation, blockchain needs stronger advocacy. The

policy and advocacy work of the Chamber of Digital
Commerce is exemplary, but the ecosystem needs
more. We encourage organizations in every country
While our goal was to create a language and structure to join the CDC and participate in its work. Networked
to think about the stewardship of blockchain and not to institutions with global influence could convene heads
make specific recommendations to particular stakeholders, of state and chief executive officers so that they might
some sensible next steps did emerge. The time for global discuss their common interests in developing this new
action is now. We believe people, institutions and industries global resource. In collaboration with these leaders, for
throughout the world need blockchain technology and we example, the ecosystem needs a roadmap and action
must do all we can to make it available. Here is a set of plan for future government officers, representatives and
actions that will move this technology forward. Our hope judges at the municipal, state, national and regional
is that these will prompt discussion and provide positive levels, designed to help them monitor blockchain
steps that could be taken. initiatives, assess potential harms and unintended
consequences, engage the blockchain community in
1. Networked institutions: To attract the necessary discussions, and coordinate with their peers in other
level of stakeholder participation, we recommend jurisdictions prior to issuing legislation or regulation of
that respected global networked institution (e.g. the the technology.
World Economic Forum, the Internet Society, the
Internet Governance Forum, etc.) convene, through an 4. Policy and watchdog networks: Much must be
online platform and a series of meetings, a discussion done to address the need for better monitoring of
of the governance issues outlined in this report. blockchain problems and challenges. Consider initial
The goals would be to (a) include key players in the coin offerings. The first jurisdiction to come up with
room; (b) provide participants with the taxonomies a workable policy for ICOs will attract a flood of ICO
and frameworks developed in this report so that activity and economic development for that state.
everyone has a shared understanding of governance Also consider the environmental impact of blockchain
challenges and solutions; and (c) forge some informal technology. Under the joint auspices of the World
actions to improve governance, primarily at the overall Economic Forum Climate Project and Energy Initiative,
ecosystem level, but possibly at the two other levels of we recommend forming a multistakeholder network
governance. to look not exclusively at the energy consumed by
mining but also at the energy expended in current
2. Standards networks: To break the deadlock of bitcoin production lines and service delivery methods where
platform development, we recommend the creation of industries intend to deploy blockchain technology.
the Bitcoin Engineering Task Force (BETF) as a loosely The goal would be to explore methods for capturing
self-organized, grass-roots technical group comprised the heat produced by mining, harnessing the unused
of the nine stakeholder groups. It would not be a computing power of appliances, and for reducing
formal body with a board of directors or any hierarchy. energy consumption across whole systems. We would
It could operate as a working group of the IETF, W3C like policy-makers to collaborate more deeply and
or other appropriate organization. Its mission would more rapidly.
be the adoption of standards and the engineering
and sustainability of blockchain technology, and it 5. Delivery networks: The Hyperledger Project,
would develop, test and implement new protocols the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and the Trusted
and standards, according to the broad consensus of IoT Alliance are three important organizations
its membership prior to implementation. Instead of providing feedback on protocols and doing work
formal membership, attendance at BETF meetings at the applications level. Every company, not just
and participation in any BETF online forum would be technology companies but users of these applications,
open to all volunteers. Participants would contribute should join these open initiatives, depending on
as individuals, not as representatives of companies or the platform(s) they have chosen. To build out the
organizations. The community could learn much from necessary infrastructure, we recommend greater
the consensus mechanisms and decision-making outreach to industry associations both at the corporate
processes of the IETF and other standards bodies, and professional levels, including outreach to the
such as the W3C. professional services firms that support them, with
the goal of identifying projects as bold and forward-
looking as the Belt and Road Initiative, where they
might incorporate blockchain technology to facilitate
collaboration, consensus-building, the transparency
of reporting and other aspects to increase the
efficiency, effectiveness and accountability of project
management.

6. Knowledge networks (education): To address the All stakeholders in the ecosystem all three levels
urgent need for diverse talent and expertise in the must understand these governance challenges and
ecosystem, every university should be organizing opportunities. Today most players are focused on
blockchain courses in their computer science building their own companies, organizations or platforms
programmes and strategic courses in their business and are paying little attention or devoting little effort
programmes, and there should be a massive open to the challenges of building a healthy ecosystem. No
online course (MOOC) or series of courses available organization can succeed in an ecosystem that is failing
for credit and certification. We recommend forming or stalled. Every organization should assign resources,
an industry-academic collaborative under an however small, to participate in ecosystem governance.
organization such as Coursera or edX to encourage
the development of advanced programming skills in This second era of the internet promises to create new
the blockchain space around the world, potentially opportunities for a more prosperous world. Prosperity
modelled after, led by or including such organizations is about ones standard of living. To achieve it, people
as Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, Stanford must have the means, tools, and prospects for creating
Engineering Everywhere, Udacity and other non-profit material wealth and thriving economically. For us it includes
open education platforms. Such a collaborative would more security of the person, safety, health, education,
also support the development of course shells and environmental sustainability, chances to shape and control
teaching materials across areas of the academy: not ones destiny and to participate in an economy and society.
just computer science, mathematics and engineering This is the promise of the blockchain, the promise of a
but finance, accounting, operations and logistics, future where there is prosperity for everyone. But we must
marketing, law, economics, sociology and medicine. act now.
Above all, it would be inclusive, perhaps with additional
outreach to girls, women and their teachers in regions
of need.
7. Knowledge networks (applied research): Blockchain

may be the least known and least understood
technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. AI,
for example, has become a mainstream topic even
though it may ultimately have less impact on our
economy. To address the need for better strategic
knowledge about blockchain transformations, we need
better use-case research and awareness-building
programmes. The Blockchain Research Institute has
launched a programme of 40 projects to explore
blockchain transformation of industries, government,
competitiveness and management challenges.
8. Knowledge networks (scientific research): To

accelerate research so that knowledge catches up
with investment, we recommend funding fundamental
research projects, such as those under way at the
MIT Media Lab. All member countries should be
conducting, categorizing and analysing experiments
with blockchain technology organizations, networks
and individuals around the world so that no country
or region comes to dominate the technology or its
expertise. The goal of such research would be to
identify key gaps in scientific knowledge and expertise,
create a set of principles for ecosystem players to
help them self-organize and address these gaps, and
create a comprehensive network of networks to help
coalesce the scientific community.

About the Authors Appendix: Global
Solution Networks
The opinions expressed in this report are those of the Knowledge networks
authors.
Bitcoin Wiki
Don Tapscott is the Chief Executive Officer of the Tapscott Accessible globally through Wikipedia and updated
Group, a think tank exploring the Digital Economy, and through decentralized academic peer review, its entries
author of 16 books about the Digital Age. He is Adjunct span blockchain protocol specifications, cryptocurrency,
Professor at the Rotman School of Management at the data mining and links to blockchain company directories.
University of Toronto, Chancellor of Trent University and
Senior Adviser to the World Economic Forum. In 2013, Bitcoin & Blockchain Leadership Forum (Bank of England)
he founded the Global Solution Networks Program, a $5 Founded by the Digital & Social Media Leadership Forum,
million investigation into multistakeholder networks. this group operates under the very popular membership-
model, where participants collaborate on blockchain
Alex Tapscott is the Chief Executive Officer of Northwest research projects and showcase proof of concepts for
Passage Ventures, an advisory firm building early-stage advanced applications of decentralized ledger technologies
companies in the blockchain space. He is a founding (DLTs). http://bblf.info
member of the International Monetary Funds High Level
Advisory Group on FinTech, a founding member of the Blockchain Association of New Zealand (BANZ)
World Economic Forum Global Future Council on the Membership of BANZ, a non-profit blockchain research
Future of Blockchain and a member of the Elections association in New Zealand, includes law firms, developers,
Canada Advisory Committee. academics and companies that pool resources to build
blockchain applications for specific industries, such as
Together they began investigating blockchain in 2013. agriculture and supply chain management.
They are authors of the 2016 bestselling book Blockchain
Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Blockchain Canada
Changing Money, Business, and the World. In 2016, Founded by Ethan Wilding and Alan Wunsche to aggregate
they convened the first meeting of The Muskoka Group, information about blockchain technology, this Toronto-
a collaboration to promote blockchain stewardship. In based non-profit organization maintains a blockchain
2017, they launched the Blockchain Research Institute, repository that helps policy-makers pass legislation that will
a knowledge network conducting 40 projects on the enable cryptocurrency adoption.
strategic implications, opportunities and challenges of this http://blockchaincanada.org/
technology.
Blockchain Collaborative Consortium (BCCC)
Comments, suggested changes and additions to this Founded by Yoichiro Pina Hirano, this Japanese
report are welcome at info@tapscott.com. organization facilitates information exchanges about
decentralized ledger technologies among stakeholders
in the financial industry, ultimately to create blockchain-
neutral solutions for industries and to integrate Japans
knowledge with the rest of the world.
http://bccc.global/
Blockchain Education Network (BEN)

BEN began as a Facebook messenger group of bitcoin
student leaders from MIT, Stanford, Delaware, Michigan
and Penn State and has expanded into a 1,000-member
community with initiatives to boost morale, encourage
participation and share blockchain know-how.
https://blockchainedu.org/swarm/
Blockchain Research Institute (BRI)

This non-profit organization identifies subject matter
experts to research and develop reports and case studies
on blockchain topics of critical interest to leaders of
business, government and NGOs.
https://www.blockchainresearchinstitute.org

DC Blockchain Center Muskoka Group
This resource for technology providers and governments Founded by blockchain practitioners, advocates, theorists
educates entrepreneurs and policy-makers on the potential and policy experts in 2016, this group supports the
benefits of blockchain and provides a platform for the global solution networks framework and multistakeholder
public and private sectors to collaborate on blockchain use approach to stewardship of blockchain technologies as a
cases. global resource used for achieving prosperity worldwide.
http://digitalchamber.org/initiatives/dc-blockchain-center/
P2P Foundation (P2P wiki)
Dubai Future Foundation Known for hosting Satoshi Nakamotos first paper on the
Run by the Global Blockchain Council, a public-private bitcoin protocol, the P2P Foundation hosts wiki sites on
initiative, this group is exploring blockchain-based various use cases for decentralized, commons-based
solutions to replace outdated bureaucratic and business societies, where peers review insights via such wiki portals
frameworks. Pilot projects include health records, diamond as P2PF Blog, P2PF Wiki and P2PF Lab.
trading, title transfers, business registration, wills and https://p2pfoundation.net/
shipping.
Post-Trade Distributed Ledger (PTDL) Group
Financial Blockchain Shenzhen Consortium Launched by 40 financial institutions and prominent market
This consortium provides access to relevant blockchain infrastructure stakeholders, this group identifies best
information and collective project testing in the financial practices for leveraging decentralized ledger technologies
sector. Its efforts have resulted in a prototype blockchain and strategies for overcoming barriers to widespread
platform for securities trading and related new services in adoption.
credit, digital asset registry and invoice management. http://www.ptdlgroup.org/presentations-and-documents.html
GitHub Reddit
This open-source, online software development tool This online platform describes itself as the front page of
serves as a repository for code and a platform for code the internet where conversations begin, with communities
development, peer review and problem-solving. Unlike forming around cryptocurrencies (Dogecoin, Litecoin),
client-server systems, every Git directory resides on every blockchain platforms (bitcoin, Ethereum) and ecosystem
computer as a full record and complete history of every issues (block size, consensus mechanisms).
change to the code. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc
Global Solution Networks (GSN) Trust in Digital Life (TDL) Blockchain Working Group
Founded by Don Tapscott, GSN seeks to (a) identify, A membership association founded by the Intel
analyse and summarize the potential components of a Corporation, TDL consists of industry leaders and
global governance network; (b) place the requisite tools academic institutions that exchange research on customer,
in the hands of global problem-solvers; and (c) facilitate market and technology insights into improving DLT to
connections among multistakeholder networks. expedite a trusted single European digital market.
https://gsnetworks.org https://trustindigitallife.eu/
Input Output Cryptocurrency Collaborative Research Chair UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies
(Tokyo) Launched by University College London (UCL), the centre
Established by former Ethereum Co-Founder Charles generates multidisciplinary, multistakeholder research
Hoskins with the Tokyo Institute of Technology, this across such topics as cryptography, law, smart contracts,
research chair differs from traditional academiccorporate automation and the sociological impact of decentralized
research partnerships in that its R&D is open-source and decision-making systems. http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/
patent-free so industry participants can share research
findings. WhiteChapel Think Tank (WTT)
Founded by Jeremy Wilson of Barclays and John Edge
MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) of Red Rose in London, this group produces reports that
This global hub supports deep research in such areas bring decentralized ledger technology use cases to life and
as healthcare and medical records, global rights shares information among industries, government and non-
management, decentralized publishing, user-controlled governmental organizations. http://www.wthinktank.org/
credit identities, central bank and digital currency adoption,
and securitized financing for solar microgrids.

Operational and delivery networks Policy networks
Blockchain Alliance Australian Digital Currency Commerce Association

Co-founded by Coin Center and the Chamber of Digital (ADCCA)
Commerce, this group seeks to protect public safety on the ADCCA promotes industry best practices and consistent
blockchain, detect and combat blockchain-related criminal regulatory frameworks to shape the policy-making process
activity and promote a long-term vision for regulatory and advocate for appropriate blockchain regulatory
efforts that do not stifle decentralized ledger technology framework for FinTech businesses in Australia.
innovation. http://adcca.org.au/mission-statement/
Decentralized Arbitration and Mediation Network (DAMN) Coin Center

Launched by Key Solutions, DAMN is developing The center makes sure policy-makers understand the
decentralized dispute resolution frameworks and an opt- advantages of cryptocurrencies before issuing regulation.
in decentralized justice system designed and used by With the Uniform Law Commission (US), it drafted the
the blockchain community for commercial transactions. Model Regulation of Virtual Currency Business Act. It has
https://forum.daohub.org/t/decentralized-arbitration-and- created a state digital currency regulation tracker.
mediation-network/3062 https://coincenter.org
Ethereum Digital Assets Tax Policy Coalition

The Ethereum virtual machine is a decentralized platform Formed by the Chamber of Digital Commerce and Steptoe
for uploading and running programmes, conducting and Johnson, this Washington DC-based coalition
transactions, executing smart contracts and automating develops effective US tax policies for the growing virtual
traditional processes like settlement, accounting and currency markets, policies that work for both industry and
supply-chain tracking. government.
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) Global Blockchain Forum (GBF)

This consortium of Fortune 500 companies, This initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce
cryptographers, academics and veteran Ethereum promotes industry best practices and consistent regulatory
developers delivers protocols and standards for frameworks across jurisdictions to shape blockchain
decentralized applications, interoperable across industries regulation and coordinate advocacy around the world.
on the Ethereum blockchain.
Smart Contracts Alliance (Chamber Working Group)
Hyperledger Project (HLP) This initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce
Launched by the Linux Foundation, this project is creating promotes acceptance and use of smart contract
open-source protocols and standards for blockchain technologies by (a) developing policy related to smart
interoperability across industries, platforms that developers contracts; (b) identifying best practices and advancing
can use to build applications for global business interoperability; and (c) engaging public policy-makers and
transactions. regulators.
Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC)

Co-founded by AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel, this
non-profit group seeks to identify requirements for open
interoperability standards and common architectures
across industries to connect physical and digital assets
and capabilities on the industrial IoT.
http://www.iiconsortium.org
R3CEV LLC (R3)

This consortium of banks and financial services firms is
designing an open-source distributed ledger to record,
manage and synchronize financial agreements securely,
transparently and efficiently among financial institutions
only.
Trusted IoT Alliance

Cisco Systems, Bosch, Foxconn Technology Group,
Gemalto and several other companies have set up a
consortium to develop a shared blockchain protocol for IoT
and to secure and improve IoT applications.207
https://github.com/Trusted-IoT-Alliance

Advocacy networks Standards networks
Bitcoin Foundation Coalition for Automated Legal Applications (COALA)

Formed to standardize, protect and promote the COALA assembles domain experts, global institutions
development of the Bitcoin Core protocol, this non-profit, and leading academic research institutions to develop
member-driven organization offers a range of resources: blockchain standards and applications enabling innovative
best practice guides, educational resources, meeting legal and policy frameworks.
minutes, speakers bureau, workshops and conferences.
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/ ColliderX
ColliderX is an open-source, crowdsourced and
Blockchain Association of Canada (BAC) crowdfunded R&D hub for blockchain and adjacent
BAC supports employment growth and career technologies. It brings together academic researchers
opportunities in blockchain technologies. Its members and open-source developers to compile and answer
speak at issue-based conferences in Canada and challenging technical questions from industry participants.
participate in discussions with the Canadian government Its approach will produce independent, impartial and
on critical policy issues. https://blockchainassociation.ca/ peer-reviewed foundational research freely available to the
ecosystem.
Blockchain Trust Accelerator (New America and Bretton
Woods II) CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium (C4)
Co-founded by New America, the Bitfury Group and the Co-founded by Andreas Antonopoulos and Vitalik Buterin,
National Democratic Institute, this initiative created a new this non-profit organization certifies professionals who
business model for strategic capital ownership. Its model intend to offer cryptocurrency-related services. Those who
addresses the root causes of volatility. have demonstrated proficiency receive Certified Bitcoin
Professional designations. https://cryptoconsortium.org
Chamber of Digital Commerce (CDC)
CDC advocates for appropriate rather than oppressive CryptoCurrency Security Standard (CCSS)
regulation of cryptocurrencies and blockchain Funded by C4, CCSS is an open standard that helps
technologies. It represents diverse views in the blockchain secure information systems that use cryptocurrencies. It
space, acts as a reliable source of information for has evolved into 32 controls for anyone building a new
lawmakers and offers a suite of services in government system on the blockchain. The standards cover the entire
affairs. http://digitalchamber.org life cycle of the crypto private key usage in blockchain
applications.
Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC)
Founded by Bitfury, GBBC brings together the worlds Digital Assets Accounting Consortium (DAAC)
leading businesses and business leaders to highlight the This working group of the Chamber of Digital Commerce
latest innovations and advances in blockchain technology, advocates for updated Generally Accepted Accounting
advocates for its global adoption and provides a forum for Principles, practices and reporting standards for digital
education, collaboration and dialogue. assets in collaboration with the Association of Independent
Public Accountants and Financial Accounting Standards
State Working Group Board.
This initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce
advocates for digital currencies and decentralized ledger Institute for Innovation and Data Driven Design (ID3)
technologies to US state and local governments and Affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, this non-profit
suggests appropriate state and local legal and regulatory organization develops and field-tests legal and software
requirements. http://digitalchamber.org/initiatives/state- trust frameworks for data-driven services, infrastructures
working-group/ and enterprises.
Wall Street Blockchain Alliance (WSBA) International Securities Association for Institutional Trade
This non-profit trade association speaks with such Communication (ISITC) (Blockchain Working Group)
blockchain stakeholders as market participants, policy- ISITC represents financial institutions and technology
makers and technology innovators, and produces reports providers striving to improve the financial industry in
of its findings. It also hosts Wall Street Education Day to Europe. Its blockchain working group is creating a list of
educate the public and advance mainstream adoption. benchmarks to help standardize blockchain tools.
https://isitc-europe.com/isitc-europe-blockchain-working-group/
International Standards Organization (ISO)

This independent international NGO brings together
experts from 164 national standards bodies to develop
market-relevant international standards and support
innovation.

Acknowledgements
ISO/TC 307 (ISO Initiative) (Blockchain Standards
Committee)
ISO established three new technical committees (TCs) for
developing international standards for decentralized ledger
technologies: one for blockchain and electronic distributed
ledger technologies, one for chain of custody and one for
organizational governance. The authors acknowledge the generous support of the
World Economic Forum and the Blockchain Research
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (Blockchain Institute. In addition, the authors extend their heartfelt
Community Group) thanks to the people who generously shared their time
W3C hosts several decentralized community groups to and insights. In alphabetical order: Jeremy Allaire, Marc
develop standards, guidelines, software applications and Andreessen, Gavin Andresen, Andreas Antonopoulos,
protocols. Its blockchain community group is working on, Brian Behlendorf, Perianne Boring, Jerry Brito, Paul Brody,
for example, message format standards and guidelines for Richard Brown, Ethan Buchman, Vitalik Buterin, Bruce
blockchain storage. Cahan, Nicolas Cary, Vint Cerf, Ben Chan, Constance
https://www.w3.org/community/blockchain/ Choi, Timothy Cook Draper, Michael Cooper, Matthew
Corallo, Primavera De Filippi, Adam Draper, Joshua
Fairfield, Brian Forde, Vinay Gupta, Mike Hearn, Austin
Networked institutions Hill, Joichi Ito, Eric Jennings, Izabella Kaminska, Andrew
Keys, Joyce Kim, Chris Larsen, Benjamin Lawsky, Marcus
World Economic Forum Leef, Charlie Lee, Joseph Lubin, Adam Ludwin, Dino
The World Economic Forum is an independent international Mark Angaritis, Blythe Masters, Cindy McAdam, Jesse
organization committed to improving the state of the world McWaters, Carlos Moreira, Patrick Murck, Anoop Nannra,
by engaging all four pillars of society business, political, Steve Omohundro, Jim Orlando, Lawrence Orsini, Jose
academic and other civic leaders to shape global, Pagliery, Stephen Pair, Eric Piscini, Keonne Rodriguez,
regional and industry agendas. https://www.weforum.org Elizabeth Rossiello, Matthew Roszak, Richard Samans,
Kirsten Sandberg, Marco Santori, Barry Silbert, George
Small, Jamie Elizabeth Smith, Thomas Spaas, Balaji
Srinivasan, Elizabeth Stark, Jutta Steiner, Lynne St. Amour,
Nick Szabo, Bob Tapscott, Peter Todd, David B. Treat,
Jason Tyra, Iliana Oris Valiente, Valery Vavilov, Andrew
Vegetabile, Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees, Joseph Weinberg,
Zooko Wilcox-OHearn, Carolyn Wilkins, Cameron
Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, Jeremy Wilson, Pindar Wong
and Aaron Wright.

Notice Endnotes
We have obtained the information in this report from 1 The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a concept
sources we believe to be reliable and accurate. However, developed by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic
we have not independently verified information from third- Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/
party sources. We make no representation or warranty, the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-
express or implied, as to its accuracy or completeness. how-to-respond/
In addition, the statements in this report may provide 2 Global Solution Networks Program. A programme
current expectations of future events based on certain conducted by The Tapscott Group for the Rotman
assumptions and include any statement that does not School of Management, 2014-2016. http://gsnetworks.
directly relate to a historical fact or a current fact. These org/, accessed 20 June 2017.
3 Global Solution Networks. http://gsnetworks.org/,
statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties
accessed 20 June 2017.
and other factors that are not exhaustive. The individuals
4 Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic
and companies contributing to this report operate in a
Cash System. www.bitcoin.org, 1 November 2008.
constantly changing environment and new risks emerge www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, accessed 20 June 2017.
continually. We caution readers not to place undue reliance 5 Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic
on these statements. The individuals or companies Cash System. www.bitcoin.org, 1 November 2008.
contributing to this report undertake no obligation to revise www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, accessed 20 June 2017.
or update publicly any statements, whether as a result of 6 Interview with Paul Brody, 7 July 2015. Updated via
new information, future events or otherwise; they shall in no email from Brody, 16 June 2017.
event be liable for any loss or damage arising in connection 7 David D. Clark. A Cloudy Crystal Ball, presentation,
with the use of the information in this report. IETF, 16 July 1992. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/
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2017 All rights reserved. Internet Governance Network Part I Global Solution
All rights reserved. No one may reproduce, store in a Networks Program, Martin Prosperity Institute,
retrieval system or transmit any part of this publication University of Toronto, 2014.
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photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of accessed 17 May 2017.
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White Paper

Realizing the Potential

Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott

2017 All rights reserved.

REF 240617 00034436

Geneva and San Francisco, June 2017

Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 3

However, this extraordinary technology may be stalled, sidetracked, captured or otherwise

4 Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 5

Resource: The Internet

In this report, our goal is not to provide specific proposals,

Since the end of World War II, state-based institutions have

But while necessary, these industrial-scale solutions were

Governance means stewardship, not government or

In our 2013-2015 research, we set out to do the definitive

6 Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

2. Knowledge networks 7. Networked institutions

Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 7

Where the internet democratized information, the

8 Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

Table 1: Top 10 Cryptocurrencies, as of 17 June 2017

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Tendermint has two components: its proof-of-stake

Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 17

18 Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

Our research surfaced the downside of arriving quickly at

Heres where knowledge, advocacy and stewardship of

Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 19

The rough-and-tumble should not exclude people who

20 Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 21

Brian Behlendorf at Hyperledger would like to see many

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Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 23

24 Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 25

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Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 27

Framework Applied to and commercial spheres.168

Blockchain Pindar Wong, former Trustee of the Internet Society, was

Heres the thing. Many of our concerns about the

Case in point: the banking industry. Banks are traditionally

28 Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 29

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Realizing the Potential of Blockchain 31

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to Be Done innovation, blockchain needs stronger advocacy. The

34 Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

7. Knowledge networks (applied research): Blockchain

8. Knowledge networks (scientific research): To