Cardano's Voltaire Governance: Complete Specification and Research Program

Blockchain Applications in Governance: A Comprehensive Study

This work offers a comprehensive framework of the policymaker and system architect and researcher aiming to operationalize blockchain in a public-sector setting by nexus-linking technical design with institutional governance requirements.

On Exercising Governance Power in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

This work explicates the trust and transparency trade-offs of the design choices in implementing a DAO and highlights how poor choices introduce critical vulnerabilities, using real-world examples as case studies.

Blockchain and sovereignty: opportunities and limitations of operational autonomy

Since its inception, blockchain has been presented as a technology capable of transforming the exercise of sovereignty by enabling individuals and collectivities to coordinate crucial aspects of their lives with reduced dependence on centralized intermediaries. Recent commitments to “self-sovereignty,” including the Ethereum Foundation’s 2026 mandate, suggest that this ambition remains central to the blockchain ecosystem. However, the relationship between blockchain and sovereignty has been insufficiently theorized. This paper argues that blockchain shapes sovereign capacity through the interaction of technical affordances, design choices, and user priorities. Drawing on science and technology studies, material culture, institutional theory, and political philosophy, it advances a three-part analysis. At the level of technology, the paper identifies operational autonomy as blockchain’s most distinctive contribution to sovereign capacity while showing that it exists in tension with three governance requirements: voice, accessibility, and legibility. At the level of designers, it examines how sociotechnical imaginaries shape the ways these material tensions are interpreted and negotiated, privileging some constituencies while excluding others. This argument is illustrated through a comparative analysis of four onchain identification systems: Holonym, World ID, Proof of Humanity, and Idena. At the level of users, the paper identifies four institutional logics - legalistic, commercial, communitarian, and insular - that shape how actors evaluate when blockchain should be adopted in pursuit of sovereign capacity. While operational autonomy remains significant, sovereignty, in this account, is an outcome continuously built, negotiated, and contested across all three levels.

Transforming insurance: A framework for decentralized models powered by insurtech

Decentralized AI Agents and Blockchain: Architectures, Coordination Mechanisms, and Governance Frameworks

Autonomous AI agents capable of holding digital assets, signing transactions, and executing smart contracts on public blockchain networks have moved from research prototypes to active deployment over the past two years. Despite this pace of adoption, no systematic treatment of their architecture, coordination protocols, and governance structures exists that spans the full design space. This survey addresses that gap through a systematic review of the literature from 2019 to 2026, covering 177 peer-reviewed publications and 14 system documentation sources, identified through a structured search of IEEE Xplore, the ACM Digital Library, Scopus, and arXiv. We classify deployed and proposed systems along four architectural dimensions: on-chain execution, off-chain agents with on-chain settlement, verifiable off-chain computation, and multi-agent on-chain interaction. Then, we examine the coordination mechanisms through which agents reach collective decisions, covering auction-based protocols, cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, token-incentive structures, and gossip-based peer-to-peer coordination. Governance is treated as a distinct dimension, analysed through a technical lens, covering on-chain parameter control, dispute resolution, and DAO structures, and an organizational one, covering accountability, incentive alignment, principal–agent dynamics, and regulatory compatibility). We survey applications across decentralized finance, supply chain, IoT, and agent marketplace domains, and identify six open research problems whose resolution is a prerequisite for broader deployment. The convergence of mechanism design and multi-agent reinforcement learning in asynchronous blockchain environments is identified as the direction of greatest near-term research value.

Blockchain-Enabled Central Bank Digital Currency: Technological Architecture, Privacy, and Institutional Design

This paper develops an analytical framework for the joint design of central bank digital currency (CBDC) and its underlying ledger architecture. We treat a digital monetary system as a tuple M = (S, R, C, I)—supply state, rule set, circulation parameters, and incentive structure—and read centralized, permissioned-distributed, and hybrid ledger designs as parameter settings on M. Two analytical propositions extend the framework. Proposition A locates a threshold above which a retail holding cap ceases to bind, building on the Brunnermeier–Niepelt neutrality condition. Proposition B characterizes the fixed point of the rule-update map under bounded policy shocks and reports its mean-square convergence rate. Each proposition is paired with a stylized numerical exercise; neither claims empirical validation. A comparative section then traces how the institutional environments of Singapore, the European Union, the United States, and China fix admissible regions in M before any architectural choice. What we contribute is a parametric vocabulary for techno-institutional comparison, not a new architecture; the principal limitation is the absence of pilot-data calibration, which we list as the highest-priority continuation.