The better bandit: decentralised infrastructure, crypto-States, and the rematerialisation of virtual worlds

This paper examines the role of hardware security as the basis for order in the decentralised metaverse. It does this by considering the infrastructural tools and governance practices at the heart of KONG Land, an example of a blockchain-based decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) and decentralised physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project. KONG Land manufactures open-source microchips to create verifiable hardware that anyone can use or integrate into their own application. KONG Land’s focus on the materiality of infrastructure led them to pursue a governance model as a digital-physical, politically decentralised polity. By foregrounding the physicality and affordances of decentralised efforts to manufacture microchips, this paper shows how rematerialising digital domains leads back to questions of statehood and its purpose and provides an explanation for emerging sovereignties. Building on Olson’s (1993. Dictatorship, democracy, and development. American Political Science Review , 87 (3), 567–576) theory of the stationary bandit, the paper positions projects like KONG Land as an attempt to create a ‘better bandit’ – one that sets out to provide its citizens with a superior level of security than that offered by either nation states or the corporate metaverse, with the intention of creating the conditions for Web3 production and expansion.