Global governance of blockchains

This chapter draws out wider lessons for future research in categorising the rapid evolution of global blockchain governance across three phases. Each of these periods is characterised by varying (in)formality and con- or di-verging relations between the Global North and South. First, an initial informalism phase is shown to involve cross-national coordination amongst unequally dispersed non-state actors experimenting with rules in growing applications of the technology across both the global North and South. Second, a bifurcation phase from about 2015 sees increasingly formal governance of blockchain applications emerging at northern-dominated international institutions in the North, while informal experimentation with financial technology (FinTech) widens across the Global South. Third, an uneven formalism phase, from the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak till the present, has yielded growing formal blockchain governance in the Global South in manners not entirely in line with standards promulgated in the Global North.