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Applying blockchain technology in multistakeholder cooperatives

Purpose: The main purpose of this thesis to explore the possible application of blockchain technology in solving issues and concerns of members and stakeholders in multi-stakeholder cooperatives, which prevent effective collaboration in governance.Design: This study is performed using an extensive literature study on blockchain technology, relevant business cases solving issues and concerns comparable to these in multi-stakeholder cooperatives and six semi-structured interviews with blockchain experts, using the business case of multi-stakeholder cooperative Gebiedscoöperatie Westerkwartier.Findings: Findings reveal blockchain-based solutions can contribute to solving existing issues and concerns in multi-stakeholder cooperatives, by implementing its main characteristics: creating transparency, immutability and distributed consensus. This results in increased trust, increased efficiency and accuracy in decision-making, decreased administrative costs due to self-executable smart contracts and enables product traceability in supply chains. However, information is retained in supply chains, preventing blockchain from reaching its full potential. In addition, smart contracts are not legally binding in all countries yet and blockchain, as most technologies, is subject to human or technical error.Value: Overall, this study contributes to understanding issues and concerns existing in multistakeholder cooperatives and the potential application and benefit of blockchain technology to solve existing issues preventing effective collaboration. Expert and participation: Jan Veuger

Making the blockchain civic

To what extent can the application of blockchain technologies be employed toward civic empowerment, organizing local civic and circular economies, reinstating trust in civic institutions, or, perhaps, creating entirely new types of institutions?

Plotting on the blockchain. On the possibility of care among widespread logics of extraction

Blockchains draw everything they touch into a market logic. Is resistance possible?Activist and artistic engagements with blockchain technology point to (at least) threedifferent sets of tactics that aim to subvert this affordance of the technology. The firstis part of an accellerationist logic: riding the waves of capital until capitalism finallycrashes, funding alternative values with whatever profit was accrued while it lasted.The second are part of prefigurative politics: building alternative blockchain systems,often in the form of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, that perform adifferent kind of politics and social organization, for example cooperativism or self-organized art funding. Then, there are those that explore how blockchain’s logics canbe subverted to make space for different ways of relating in non-financial and more-than-human ways. In this short essay I would like to focus on this third tactic, and toexplore what it might mean, I've been inspired by Patricia de Vries’ take on “plot workas an artistic praxis” (2022) that builds on decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter describedas “the plot system” that represented small, imperfect corners of relative self-deter-mination within the larger context of colonial plantations (Wynter 1971, 96). De Vriesasks how artistic work, implicated as it is in institutional and capitalist logics, can per-form plot work to create space for relating outside of those logics. But before I adressthis question, it is important to understand what Wynter understands as the logic ofthe plantation.

The City as a License.

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain have in recent years been presented as a new general-purpose technology that could underlie many aspects of social and economic life, including civics and urban governance. In an urban context, over the past few years, a number of actors have started to explore the application of distributed ledgers in amongst others smart city services as well as in blockchain for good and urban commons-projects. DLTs could become the administrative backbones of such projects, as the technology can be set-up as an administration, management and allocation tool for urban resources. With the addition of smart contracts, DLTs can further automate the processing of data and execution of decisions in urban resource management through algorithmic governance. This means that the technological set-up and design of such DLT based systems could have large implications for the ways urban resources are governed. Positive contributions are expected to be made toward (local) democracy, transparent governance, decentralization, and citizen empowerment. We argue that to fully scrutinize the implications for urban governance, a critical analysis of distributed ledger technologies is necessary. In this contribution, we explore the lens of “the city as a license” for such a critical analysis. Through this lens, the city is framed as a “rights-management-system,” operated through DLT technology. Building upon Lefebvrian a right to the city-discourses, such an approach allows to ask important questions about the implications of DLTs for the democratic governance of cities in an open, inclusive urban culture. Through a technological exploration combined with a speculative approach, and guided by our interest in the rights management and agency that blockchains have been claimed to provide to their users, we trace six important issues: quantification; blockchain as a normative apparatus; the complicated relationship between transparency and accountability; the centralizing forces that act on blockchains; the degrees to which algorithmic rules can embed democratic law-making and enforcing; and finally, the limits of blockchain's trustlessness.

Blockchains otherwise

Using Blockchains for Agent-based Auctions

From the article: "To extend the lifetime of products, an agent is connected to the product. This agent has several roles. It depends on the phase of the lifecycle what these roles will be. One of the roles in the usage or recycling phase is to negotiate for buying spare parts in case a part of the product is broken. The same agent can also decide to offer spare parts to other agents to reuse working parts of a broken product. To accomplish this idea, a marketplace for agents has to be set up, where the auctions can take place. To support this concept, blockchain technology has been used. Blockchains are a new type of technology, known from bitcoins, but there are other cases where blockchains can be used. Blockchain is known for its decentralisation, transparency and for making trustful transactions. In this paper the working of different types of blockchains will be briefly explained and determined if they can be useful for online auctions by agents. A prototype of the marketplace using blockchains has been built."