Josep Lluís Martí, professor of Philosophy of Law and researcher on the theory of democracy, specialising in deliberative democracy, participative democracy and digital democracy 

We are constantly being told that Blockchain is going to completely transform the financial and business sector in general over the course of the next ten years. The extent of the change, the experts tell us, might be comparable to the appearance of the Internet. Blockchain, together with Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data, forms part of the next wave of transformative technologies that are changing our societies from top to bottom, right down to the deepest foundations of our civilisation and ethical values.

Regardless of whether or not these predictions are accurate, it is clear that the world of politics and, more specifically, that of democracy will not be left out. Blockchain is arriving with the promise of a revolution in our forms of democratic organisation the likes of which has never been seen in history, of a truly equal distribution of power and the transformation of all of today’s institutions. Blockchain 3.0, as it is known, is the application of blockchain to collective organisation and governance. But what are we talking about exactly?

Blockchain, fundamentally, can do two things very well. Its main use is for certifying or authenticating information. It is, in this regard, a technology that offers security and trust. And it is easy to see how that is of great use, not only in the economic, financial and commercial sectors, but also in governance, where trust in processes is crucial. Blockchain, for example, can certify the identity of participants in a process of digital political participation, it can protect electronic voting, making it immune to attack and manipulation, and can certify public information as well as guarantee delegations of responsibility and power in complex forms of organisation.

The second thing that blockchain can derive from what we have mentioned above, but which is even more revolutionary, is that it allows for processes to be disintermediated. All our forms of social, economic and also political organisation have been based on the need for intermediaries. The key form of intermediation in politics has been political representation, and, to this end, more recently, politically parties. Blockchain allows for far more complex and sophisticated forms of power delegation and, more importantly still, distributed or decentralised structures of digital political participation, in what has come to be known as liquid democracy or horizontal democracy. It is not that representation is no longer needed, but that no one will have it exclusively. For example, instead of voting in elections held periodically for a list created by a party (in whom we place our trust) as a central mechanism of participation, we could vote for different people for different decision-making processes (a representative for social issues, one for economic issues, another for cultural issues…), or delegate our vote to a third party who we trust, if we do not feel sufficiently qualified to make the decision ourselves, or preserve our direct vote on a certain issue if we are sure we can exercise it responsibly.

The possibilities that open up to us are almost unlimited, and pose a great opportunity for experimentation, as well as a great responsibility for rigorously studying the possible effect of each of these democratic innovations. We are only at the beginning, but there are already more than twenty research groups around the world working on Blockchain’s application to governance and the transformation of democracy, such as the Center for Blockchain and Technologies, the Institute for Blockchain Studies, or the Blockchain Research Institute. Some startups have created apps for organisational governance in general, such as Boardroom (http://boardroom.to/), or for mobile voting like Votem (https://votem.com/). To the best of my knowledge, the groups making most progress are the Democracy Earth Foundation (https://www.democracy.earth/), and the research line of Primavera de Filippi, from CNRS and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/pdefilippi). We should be keeping a close eye on their research.