Do blockchainers 2.0 know what trust is?

There is a peculiar conception of trust underpinning the experimentation of blockchain startup applications beyond the financial sector, which blends the libertarian views of blockchain inventors with the neoliberal culture of competition and meritocracy typical of the startup world. Do blockchainers 2.0 know what trust is?

Blockchain technology enables the undertaking of transactions that do not need intermediaries as a guarantee for the trust since transactions are validated by all participants in the ecosystem. This is why Blockchain is often described as a “trustless infrastructure”. Around this conception of “trustless infrastructure”, Silvia Semenzin and Alessandro Gandini identified a need to investigate the relationship between blockchain as a technology and “the social” broadly intended around it. For the researchers, blockchain culturally prompts a plurality of views, social standpoints, and interpretations that must be taken into account. In other words, they propose the investigation of the cultural conceptions of trust underpinning the ecosystems of blockchain beyond finance, that is, the Blockchain 2.0 scene.

Methodology of the study

A peculiar conception of trust that blends the libertarian views of blockchain inventors with the culture of competition and meritocracy that is typical of neoliberal entrepreneurial cultures.

Opposing worldviews in the blockchain ecosystem

What conceptions of trust do Blockchain 2.0 startuppers have? What trust-building processes is the implementation of blockchain envisaged generating in contexts beyond finance?

Semenzin and Gandini consider that Blockchain is a “narrative technology” whose meanings contribute to configuring social reality. Blockchain 2.0 variation constitutes an aspiration for “changing the world,” building on the assumption that existing socioeconomic arrangements are no longer sustainable and new ones must be created.

In this context, the Blockchain 2.0 scene constitutes a peculiar conception of trust that blends the libertarian views of blockchain inventors with the culture of competition and meritocracy that is typical of neoliberal entrepreneurial cultures. Many of the actors around Blockchain culture refer to the innovative and impactful potential of blockchain in society. Enthused by a broadly libertarian ethos, they see blockchain as a “revolution” and a tool that will radically alter societal processes, displaying a fair degree of technosolutionism, which understands technology as the neutral go-to solution to societal problems.

Some studies around Blockchain cultures concur, describing the blockchain scene as a highly heterogeneous social context inhabited by a plurality of stakeholders with sometimes opposing worldviews; these include libertarian, anarchist, and “commonist” but also more “institutionalist” positions. While a majority of stakeholders come from the domain of finance and entrepreneurship, a small but tightly connected set of actors interested in socioeconomic models as alternatives to traditional forms of capital accumulation have also been attracted to Blockchain. For example, as blockchain is foreseen to enable alternative licensing and distribution models of artworks and other intellectual property, thus paving the way for a fairer distribution of revenue deriving from collaborative projects, many artists are attracted to the Blockchain ecosystem as a means to rebuild the economic fabric of domains that experienced significant economic shrinking in the digital era. For all these reasons, Semenzin and Gandini state that blockchain technology reflects an ‘interpretative flexibility’ that frequently pairs up with an idealization of the potential of this technology, revealing the lack of a homogeneous interpretation of its social significance.

What is trust for blockchain entrepreneurs

Many of Blockchain 2.0 initiatives are built on the assumption that blockchain represents a revolutionary technology because it facilitates “trustless” exchanges. For the authors, the tone is generally very optimistic about a future where blockchain would “disrupt” the status quo. In most cases, keynotes and participants concur that blockchain “will change everything forever” because “every sector in the world is being disrupted by blockchain”, and the “trustless” nature of the blockchain technology is regularly mentioned as a key component of its disruptive potential.

As Semenzin and Gandini note, the underlying principle that keeps these conversations together is that distributed ledger technology allows us to eliminate central and intermediate authorities, “automating” the trust-building process and thus empowering individuals by giving them more freedom of action, but how this actually occurs in a given social context is, on the contrary, much more vaguely articulated. In some cases, the automation of the trust-building process that the blockchain technology is deemed to enact is described as a kind of “magic” that takes place the moment the technology is put to work, so the burden of building trust among participants is eliminated and replaced by a technology-enhanced process of validation. In this sense, it may be said that “trustless” actually means a system where trust is envisaged to be “automated.”

Semenzin and Gandini argue that Blockchain 2.0 entrepreneurs emerge as unable to comprehend the extent to which the implementation of blockchain in a societal context cannot do away with considerations about in what kind of “social” the technology intervenes. In general terms, Blockchain 2.0 entrepreneurs find it difficult to effectively conceive how this technology embeds in existing social relations and power structures, in other words, Blockchain 2.0 entrepreneurs ultimately fail to recognize the eminently social nature of the trust-building process.

For the researchers, the vision of blockchain as a tool to promote technologically enabled trust and the vision of a “trustless” society cannot be detached from the questions of what trust is for those promoting this view, and how these understandings are encoded in the applications their promoters seek to popularize. In fact, the practical implementation of “trustless” social exchanges clashes with a variety of social and cultural constraints, as the mediation operated by the blockchain technology embeds within existing power structures and social relations in a given context.

Cosmovision of Blockchain 2.0 entrepreneurs

Researching about what is trust for 2.0 Blockchain entrepreneurs gave rich insights into their understanding of the world.

The vision of a meritocratic trustless social system operating through the blockchain cannot do away with money altogether, in fact blockchain is described as a functioning, meritocratic tool that ensures the automation of trust. Often described as “tokenomics” a key feature of blockchain “social” applications is the translation of real-life assets into digital assets, or “tokens,” that can be purchased through the distributed ledger.

For the authors Blockchain 2.0 entrepreneurs display an understanding of social relations that, on the one hand, reproduces and exacerbates the libertarian, hyperindividualized vision of society that inspired its creators’ vision of the world. In fact, Blockchain 2.0 culture promotes competition and meritocracy as forms of social reproduction, where these views are further emboldened by the arrival of a new technology that is seen to fit these goals.