Blockchain and sovereignty: opportunities and limitations of operational autonomy

1 Introduction

Few digital technologies in recent memory have attracted as many claims about political transformation as blockchain. Since the publication of the Bitcoin white paper (Nakamoto, 2008), and particularly following its transformation into a general-purpose technology with the advent of Ethereum (Buterin, 2014), blockchain has been repeatedly presented as a tool for enhancing sovereignty. The meaning and subject of sovereignty, however, vary. Some have seen it as a means for individuals to exercise greater control over their digital identities, data, and assets (Allen, 2016). Others have analyzed blockchain as part of a broader shift toward networked forms of sovereignty, in which digitally coordinated communities can organize collective action, mutualize resources, and experiment with participatory governance across territorial boundaries without simply replicating the institutional form of the state (De Filippi and Schingler, 2023; De Filippi, 2024). More radical accounts have envisioned blockchain as the foundation for communities to become “network states” by eventually obtaining diplomatic recognition comparable to that historically enjoyed by nation-states (Srinivasan, 2022). Even today, the language of sovereignty continues to shape the blockchain ecosystem. As recently as 2026, the Ethereum Foundation enshrined “self-sovereignty” as a founding principle of its institutional mandate (Ethereum Foundation, 2026).

The prevalence of these claims raises a fundamental question: what is the relationship between blockchain and sovereignty? Three theoretical assumptions frame the answer developed here. The first concerns the level of analysis. The question can be approached endogenously by asking whether blockchain systems themselves, whether networks or decentralized applications, possess or instantiate sovereign properties. This paper takes an exogenous approach. It asks whether, and to what extent, actors who rely on blockchain can become more sovereign as a result. Therefore, blockchain is treated as an infrastructure that may expand or constrain the capacities of individuals, communities, firms, and states. The second assumption concerns what sovereignty means in this context. Rather than treating it as a legal-juridical status or a question of ultimate authority, the paper approaches it as effective capacity: the ability of an individual or social group to organize and sustain the conditions of collective life with meaningful independence from external control. This perspective draws on scholarship that examines sovereignty in terms of practical autonomy (Jackson, 1990; Pasquale, 2023; Manski and Manski, 2018; Bennke and Schneider, 2025). The third assumption distinguishes sovereignty from governance. Governance, as used here, refers to the organization and maintenance of the goods, services, and infrastructures on which collective life depends (Mann, 1984). Sovereignty, when approached as effective capacity, refers to the ability to exercise those functions continuously and with relative independence. The distinction matters because the question is not whether blockchain can be leveraged to perform governance functions per se, but whether it alters the degree of autonomy with which those functions can be exercised.

Existing scholarly work focused exclusively on the blockchain-sovereignty relationship tends to divide along two lines, each capturing something important while leaving key aspects unspecified. One strand takes sovereignty as a legal-juridical fact, with the state as the paradigmatic sovereign. Within it, some overstate blockchain’s significance, treating architectural decentralization as though it would straightforwardly undermine state power (De Caria, 2021; Ziolkowska, 2021), while others reduce blockchain to a technical substrate that will ultimately be absorbed into existing legal and territorial orders (Herian, 2020; Martinet, 2021). Empirical analysis of blockchain applications to public-sector governance similarly suggests that blockchain often augments existing state-backed administrative systems rather than transforming them (Bustamante et al., 2022). A second strand abstracts away from the state entirely, theorizing sovereignty as a more diffuse and plural phenomenon. Manski and Manski (2018) map a range of political futures in which blockchain redistributes sovereign capacities across individuals, communities, technologists, corporations, and states, while arguing that the same technological affordances can support competing projects of rule and authority. Bennke and Schneider (2025) go further, locating sovereignty not in particular actors but in protocols themselves, defined by their capacity to preserve governing logic against capture by any participant while remaining meaningfully entangled with external actors.

This paper contributes to this second strand by pursuing two questions that it leaves open. If operational autonomy, understood as the capacity to execute rules without continuous reliance on centralized intermediaries and with resistance to unilateral interruption, is blockchain’s most distinctive contribution to sovereign capacity, the first question asks what it is traded against: what other requirements for the exercise of governance are placed under pressure when operational autonomy becomes a design priority, and what material constraints emerge as a result? The second question concerns the choices actors make in response: how do designers and users resolve these tensions when building and adopting blockchain systems?

To address these questions, the paper develops a tripartite framework composed of the politics of technology, the politics of designers, and the politics of users. The first layer draws on science and technology studies (STS) (Winner, 1980) and material culture scholarship (Ingold, 2007) to examine how blockchain’s material properties generate tensions between operational autonomy and other governance requirements, particularly voice, accessibility, and legibility. The second layer also draws on STS, specifically the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015), to examine how designers interpret these tensions and embed particular resolutions within technical architectures. This analysis is conducted by comparing four onchain (blockchain-based) identification systems: Holonym, World ID, Proof of Humanity, and Idena. The third layer draws on neo-institutional theory and the concept of institutional logics (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999) to explain how actors evaluate and adopt blockchain systems. It identifies legalistic, commercial, communitarian, and insular logics as distinct ways of resolving the same underlying tradeoffs.

The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 sets out the qualitative, theory-guided comparative design and the criteria for case selection. Section 2 reframes sovereignty as effective capacity. Section 3 examines the politics of technology. Section 4 analyzes the politics of designers. Section 5 turns to the politics of users. Section 6 brings these levels together and argues that blockchain reconfigures sovereign capacity not in the abstract but through the specific interplay among technical affordances, design choices, and user priorities.

2 Materials and methods

This paper adopts a qualitative and interpretive research design combining conceptual analysis with a comparative examination of four onchain identification systems: Holonym, World ID, Proof of Humanity, and Idena. The argument was developed through an iterative engagement between theoretical literature and empirical cases. Scholarship on sovereignty, governance, science and technology studies, material culture, and institutional theory was used to develop a tripartite analytical framework addressing the politics of technology, designers, and users. The first dimension examines how the material properties of blockchain generate tensions between operational autonomy and other governance requirements. The second examines how these tensions are interpreted and embedded into technical architectures through different sociotechnical imaginaries, drawing on a comparative analysis of proof-of-personhood systems. The third develops a set of ideal-typical institutional logics through which different actors may evaluate and prioritize competing dimensions of sovereign capacity.

The empirical materials consist of publicly available documents from the selected projects, including white papers, technical documentation, project websites, and public statements by founders and core contributors. These materials were analyzed interpretively, with attention to how projects define the problems they seek to solve, identify their intended users, articulate desirable futures, and translate these priorities into technical and governance arrangements. The four cases were selected through a most-similar systems logic: all are blockchain-based identification systems aimed at establishing proof of personhood, allowing variation to be examined in the ways they negotiate common tensions surrounding sovereign capacity. The imaginaries identified here for each case study are interpretive reconstructions derived from these materials rather than explicit self-descriptions; they represent the vision of collective life and technological order that each project’s design choices and documentation seems to enact, whether or not contributors would use that language themselves.

This approach has several limitations. First, the analysis relies on publicly available materials and therefore captures how projects represent themselves rather than the full range of internal disagreements, informal practices, or strategic considerations shaping their development. Second, blockchain projects evolve over time, and the priorities and imaginaries identified here may shift as communities, technologies, and governance structures change. Third, the analysis does not evaluate user adoption or measure whether particular configurations actually enhance sovereign capacity in practice. Its purpose is instead analytical: to develop a framework for understanding the different ways in which blockchain infrastructures can be designed and mobilized in pursuit of sovereign capacity.

3 Conceptual framework: sovereignty as effective capacity

Any attempt to assess how blockchain affects sovereignty must begin by clarifying what the word actually means, and why it is the right concept for the analysis in the first place. Sovereignty has historically been the language of public law, states, and international order, functioning as a synonym for the state’s legal authority over its citizens and territory. In law and international relations, it refers to a political entity’s juridical standing: the formal status of an independent, supreme authority within a defined territory. Although historians caution against treating it as a singular origin point (Teschke, 2003), the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 has come to symbolize the beginning of a political order structured around defined territorial borders, unified bureaucratic apparatuses, and formal equality among states (Biersteker, 2012; Troper, 2012). That model was eventually codified in legal doctrine. The Montevideo Convention provides its canonical formulation, defining statehood through four criteria: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Under Article 3, recognition by other states is a declarative rather than a constitutive act, thereby pushing sovereignty toward something resembling an objective legal condition. This understanding also accommodates arrangements in which states transfer or pool specific competences into new entities, such as the European Union, without relinquishing their standing as primary bearers of juridical authority.

From this perspective, blockchain has limited implications for sovereignty. Blockchain is a product of private software development and communities that possess no formal public authority. Blockchain systems do not create statehood, confer international legal personality, or substitute for recognition by other political entities. The juridical register does not, however, exhaust the meaning of sovereignty. A different tradition approaches sovereignty not as a question of formal status but as one of effective and ongoing capacity: the practical ability of actors to organize and sustain the conditions of collective life with meaningful independence from external control. ¹

The relationship between sovereignty and the state is, therefore, more contingent than the juridical perspective suggests. Legal recognition does not necessarily entail effective sovereign capacity, and sovereign capacity may exist beyond the state. Jackson (1990) analysis of quasi-states illustrates the first part of this claim. Examining postcolonial states in the 20th century, Jackson argues that the international system had increasingly separated juridical sovereignty from empirical statehood. Through international recognition, many newly independent states enjoyed the formal attributes of sovereign equality despite lacking the administrative institutions, economic resources, or coercive capabilities needed to govern their populations and territories effectively. They possessed what Jackson describes as juridical statehood, but often lacked the empirical capacities traditionally associated with sovereign authority. Legal recognition and effective governing capacity had, therefore, become analytically distinct.

Later on, Pasquale (2023) illustrated the inverse dynamic. The rise of large digital corporations such as Amazon, Google, and Meta showed that actors without sovereign legal status can nevertheless exercise forms of authority functionally analogous to aspects of state power. Through their control over digital infrastructures central to economic exchange, communication, and social interaction, these corporations establish rules, regulate participation, adjudicate disputes, and enforce standards governing the behavior of millions of users. They are not sovereign in the legal sense, but they possess substantial governing capacity and exercise it with considerable independence from traditional state institutions. Together, Jackson and Pasquale help make the point that sovereignty, as effective capacity, can be analytically separated from sovereignty, as juridical status.

Approaching sovereignty as effective capacity requires a further distinction between sovereignty and governance. Governance, as used here, is not equivalent to state government (Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992), nor a catch-all for collective action. Drawing on Mann (1984), governance is functionally the organization and maintenance of the goods, services, and infrastructure on which collective life depends. This includes, for example, economic coordination, social coordination, information and communication, and security and enforcement. Within these domains, governance operates by regulating entry and exit, establishing and modifying rules, and adjudicating disputes. Sovereignty, as understood in this paper, refers not simply to the performance of these functions, but to the capacity to perform them continuously and with meaningful independence from external actors. A state may retain formal authority over the issuance of identity credentials while depending on foreign cloud providers, external payment infrastructures, or privately operated platforms to store records, authenticate users, or deliver services. The same applies, in different configurations, to communities, firms, and individuals. Under this understanding of sovereignty, the relevant question is not simply whether actors other than the state can exercise governance functions, but whether they have the practical ability to do so with meaningful independence from arbitrary external influence.

It is precisely within this understanding of sovereignty as effective capacity that blockchain becomes analytically relevant. Bitcoin offers the clearest early illustration of this possibility. By implementing a monetary system capable of operating without a central bank, payment processor, or clearinghouse, Bitcoin demonstrated that certain governance functions, in this case the issuance and transfer of value, could be sustained through a technical infrastructure resistant to unilateral intervention by any state or firm (Nakamoto, 2008). No government or corporation could unilaterally alter its issuance schedule or reverse transactions according to its own discretion. For early proponents, this was not merely a technical achievement but a political one: it suggested that actors lacking control over territory or significant capital could nevertheless sustain forms of economic coordination with meaningful independence from the institutions on which such coordination had historically depended (Antonopoulos, 2017). The launch of Ethereum in 2015 extended this possibility beyond money (Buterin, 2014). Smart contracts transformed blockchain into a general-purpose technology, suggesting that virtually any rule-based arrangement could, in principle, be instantiated through self-executing code: from managing membership rules, to voting, allocating and managing common financial resources, and resolving disputes. It is this possibility that has led scholars to frame blockchain in the language of sovereignty (Manski and Manski, 2018; Bennke and Schneider, 2025; Srinivasan, 2022; De Filippi, 2024), and it is this possibility that the present paper seeks to examine more carefully.

Sovereignty as effective capacity is, therefore, practical, non-state-centric, and modular. It is practical because it concerns what actors can actually do rather than what authority they formally possess. It is non-state-centric because the actors capable of exercising it are not limited to states: a community managing shared resources through a blockchain system, or an individual holding assets in a self-custodied wallet beyond the reach of a hostile financial system, may exercise forms of sovereign capacity in the relevant sense. It is modular because sovereign capacity is not an all-or-nothing condition. An actor may exercise meaningful independence in one domain, such as the management of financial assets or digital identity, while remaining substantially dependent in others. The question pursued by this paper is, therefore, not whether blockchain makes its users sovereign in any absolute sense, but whether and under what conditions it expands the degree of independence with which governance functions can be performed in practice.

4 The politics of technology: autonomy, voice, accessibility, and legibility

To understand how blockchain affects the practical exercise of sovereignty, one key aspect to address is the politics of technology. Technologies are political because they do not merely serve pre-existing human purposes; they help configure the field within which purposes can be formed and pursued. Winner’s (1980) claim was that artifacts embody specific arrangements of power and authority. Some are politically significant because they are deliberately designed to produce particular social effects, others because their technical properties are strongly compatible with some forms of social organization and resistant to others. Ingold (2007) made a complementary point from material culture. Materials must be understood through their ongoing relations, affordances, and transformations in practice rather than as fixed properties of finished objects.

What makes blockchain particularly significant for questions of sovereignty is a property this paper terms “operational autonomy,” or what others have described as capture resistance (Bennke and Schneider, 2025): the capacity to execute predefined rules without continuous dependence on a central intermediary and with meaningful resistance to unilateral interruption. Operational autonomy rests on three closely connected features found in public and permissionless blockchains: a shared record that all participants recognize as authoritative and that cannot easily be altered once information has been added; a mechanism for determining which updates to that record are valid; and rules embedded in software that can automatically enforce those updates once they are approved. Like all material properties, operational autonomy sits in tension with others, making it hard to achieve simultaneously and at the same scale.

Scholarship has extensively examined the technological guarantees commonly attributed to public and permissionless distributed ledgers, including decentralization (Buterin, 2017; Bodó and Giannopoulou, 2019; Sai et al., 2021), self-execution (Seneviratne, 2024), immutability (Kim and Wang, 2018), and trustlessness (De Filippi et al., 2020), and has shown that these guarantees rarely appear in pure form (Mssassi and El Kalam, 2025; De Filippi et al., 2024; Kannengießer et al., 2020). The proliferation of consortium and private blockchains illustrates this clearly: in these architectures, operational autonomy is selectively configured, with identifiable authorities retaining the capacity to decide who participates, what rules govern the network, and how unforeseen situations are resolved (Tyma et al., 2022). This section builds on that literature by focusing on three properties that are in tension with operational autonomy and are especially pertinent to the exercise of sovereign capacity: voice, accessibility, and legibility. The argument is that stronger operational autonomy tends to place them under pressure. The relationship between these properties is summarized in Table 1.

TABLE 1. The politics of technology.

4.1 Operational autonomy

Blockchain is neither the first nor the only technology to exhibit relative operational autonomy. What makes it distinctive is the particular way it achieves this. Specifically, it combines general-purpose applicability with the production of a shared state, namely, a single, network-wide record of interactions that participants can independently verify and collectively recognize as authoritative. It is a history everyone agrees happened, not because they trust one another, nor because a central authority certifies it, but because the system’s architecture allows them to verify the same sequence of events for themselves.

Other decentralized technologies have failed to produce this. Email servers, for example, maintain independent records that need not align. Tor distributes routing information to preserve anonymity but leaves no persistent, collectively maintained account of activity. IPFS enables distributed access to identical content but provides no mechanism for converging on an authoritative version over time. In each case, information is distributed, but there is no basis for settling on a shared history. Blockchain systems allow geographically dispersed actors to collectively maintain and update a common institutional reality according to rules that are validated by the network and enforced automatically. It is this combination of general-purpose applicability and verifiable shared state that gives blockchain its distinctive significance for questions of sovereign capacity.

To understand why, it helps to consider what sovereign capacity has historically depended on. Two material foundations have dominated. The first is force. With the consolidation of the modern state between the 15th and 17th centuries, sovereign capacity became increasingly tied to control over the means of coercion. As Weber (1919) argued, the defining characteristic of the state is its monopoly on the legitimate use of force, sustained by armies, police organizations, bureaucratic administrations, and the fiscal apparatuses required to maintain them. Territory served as the central organizing medium: borders demarcated the space within which authority could be exercised, populations governed, and order enforced. The second is capital (Pasquale, 2023). With the expansion of industrial capitalism and, later, the emergence of large digital platforms, firms acquired the capacity to shape collective life by controlling the infrastructures through which economic exchange and information flows occur. Sovereign capacity migrated, in significant part, toward those who controlled the financial and digital architectures on which social coordination increasingly depended.

Blockchain introduces a third possibility: operationally autonomous code (De Filippi and Hassan, 2016). What distinguishes this foundation from its predecessors is that it does not require control over territory, coercive apparatus, or concentrated capital. Communities, associations, and transnational networks that lack force and substantial resources may nevertheless sustain certain governance functions through technical infrastructures that are comparatively resistant to external interference. The substrate of sovereign capacity, in other words, can be partially relocated from force and capital to code. This is not a claim that code displaces the other two foundations; states retain their monopolies on violence, and capital continues to shape what is buildable and sustainable. It is a claim that code opens a third pathway, one that expands the range of actors capable of exercising forms of autonomous collective organization beyond those who control territory or wealth.

4.2 Voice

Sovereign capacity depends on more than the reliable autonomous execution of existing rules. It also depends on the ability to revise, challenge, and adapt those rules to changing circumstances. A community that cannot alter the arrangements under which it operates possesses only a limited capacity for self-government, however technically robust its infrastructure may be. Ostrom’s (1990) analysis of commons governance makes this point concretely. Collective-choice arrangements, the mechanisms through which participants can modify the rules they live under, are among the central conditions of institutional durability, and communities that lack them struggle to respond to new problems and changing environments. Drawing on Hirschman (1970), voice refers here to the capacity of those who depend on a technology to influence its rules, development, and future direction, shaping the infrastructure rather than merely operating within it.

Operational autonomy, in its purest sense, tends to limit users’ capacity to direct its development. Consider a community that adopts Bitcoin as its medium of exchange. The properties that make the network resistant to censorship and unilateral intervention also make it difficult for that community to alter the protocol according to its own priorities. Participants cannot independently modify the issuance schedule, reverse mistaken transactions, or adjust monetary policy in response to local conditions. Changes to the protocol emerge through the governance dynamics of the wider Bitcoin ecosystem, involving developers, miners, node operators, and other influential participants. Any individual community, therefore, remains dependent on decisions made beyond its own boundaries. Operational autonomy protects the technology from external control, but it can also reduce users’ capacity to govern the technology on which they effectively rely.

4.3 Accessibility

Sovereign capacity also depends on whether the infrastructures through which governance functions are performed can be routinely accessed and used by the people who rely on them. A system that works in principle but remains beyond the practical reach of large portions of its intended population cannot sustain collective organization, however autonomous or technically robust it may be. Infrastructure studies offer a useful frame here. Star and Ruhleder (1996) argue that infrastructures become effective when they recede into the background of everyday life, operating with sufficient reliability that users no longer need to direct their attention toward them. Sovereign capacity, in this register, depends not only on what a system can do but on whether it can become an ordinary part of practice rather than a continuous object of concern for those who depend on it.

Operational autonomy tends to hurt accessibility, ever since it depends on reducing reliance on intermediaries that can be regulated, pressured, or shut down. As custodians, hosted services, and managed interfaces are removed, users assume a larger share of the work and responsibility required to use a blockchain system. The Bitcoin example can help make this point clear. Participants who wish to preserve the network’s autonomy must manage private keys, understand the implications of transaction finality, and accept responsibility for mistakes that cannot easily be corrected. These requirements may be manageable for technically sophisticated users. For many others, they represent a substantial barrier to participation. Exchanges, custodial wallets, and payment processors reduce these burdens and make blockchain systems easier to use. At the same time, they recreate points of dependence through which external actors can influence or constrain participation. Operational autonomy may expand sovereign capacity by reducing reliance on centralized intermediaries, but achieving widespread accessibility often requires reintroducing precisely the forms of dependence it seeks to avoid.

4.4 Legibility

Sovereign capacity, in most practical circumstances, also depends on the ability to produce effects recognized beyond the infrastructure through which they are generated. Legibility refers here to the extent to which outputs produced within a blockchain system are recognized as meaningful and consequential beyond it. Its absence does not entirely negate sovereign capacity, but it substantially limits the range of governance functions that capacity can support in practice. A sufficiently insular community may sustain governance functions entirely within its own infrastructure without seeking external recognition, and as Section 5 discusses, some leveraging blockchain technology regard that independence as the point. But for most actors operating across societies composed of overlapping domains, the absence of external recognition is a practical constraint on what sovereign capacity can achieve. As Polanyi (1944) demonstrated, social and economic arrangements are always embedded within broader institutional relations; complete insulation may represent an ideal of autonomy but rarely provides the conditions necessary for sustaining complex collective life. Luhmann (1995) made a related point; namely, that although social systems reproduce themselves according to their own internal logic, they exist only in relation to an environment with which they maintain structural coupling. The ability to produce effects across domains is therefore a condition for sustaining influence beyond a system’s own boundaries.

Operational autonomy allows blockchain systems to generate and enforce outcomes according to their own internal rules without requiring continuous oversight from centralized authorities. However, the significance of those outcomes often depends on whether they produce consequences beyond the infrastructure itself. A transaction recorded on the Bitcoin network, for example, may be irreversibly recognized by the protocol as having occurred, but that fact alone does not compel a merchant to deliver goods, require a court to recognize it as fulfilling a contractual obligation, or satisfy a state’s tax requirements. For such effects to emerge, the transaction must be accepted and interpreted as meaningful within broader legal, economic, and social systems. The resulting tension is that the very capacity to make blockchain outputs consequential outside the infrastructure often requires relationships with institutions that remain beyond the actor’s control. The more an actor seeking greater sovereign capacity relies on courts, regulators, financial institutions, or other external authorities to recognize and translate blockchain-based actions into socially consequential effects, the more that actor’s autonomy remains conditioned by those external relationships.

5 The politics of designers: the case of onchain identification systems

The question of how blockchain affects the exercise of sovereignty lies not only in what the technology materially allows for, but also in the politics of designers; meaning how founders, developers, and designers translate particular visions of social order into the building of blockchain systems. This process is linked to the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, understood as collectively held visions of desirable futures that become embedded in technological projects (Jasanoff, 2015). Imaginaries matter because designers must decide which populations they seek to serve, which problems they regard as most pressing, and which tradeoffs between operational autonomy, voice, accessibility, and legibility are acceptable. 1n doing so, they privilege some possibilities while foreclosing others, shaping in practice the forms of sovereign capacity that applications built on blockchain can ultimately support.

Studies of blockchain imaginaries have concentrated on foundational networks such as Bitcoin (Kow and Lustig, 2017; Swartz, 2018) and Ethereum (Brody and Couture, 2021; Dylan-Ennis et al., 2023), and on application domains such as decentralized finance (McCarthy, 2023) and NFTs (Dylan-Ennis, 2024). Identification has received comparatively little attention in this literature, despite its direct implication in the exercise of sovereign capacity. As understood here, identification is a governance function concerned with establishing socially recognized claims about subjects in ways that regulate access, rights, and obligations within collective life. Its significance is not limited to state bureaucracies or legal procedures. Identification underlies a wide range of routine social and commercial practices, from verifying age at a bar to confirming authorship of a message, and increasingly structures participation in digital environments where bodies and physical presence cannot be taken for granted.

Four onchain identification projects are examined: Holonym, World ID, Proof of Humanity, and Idena. All four projects converge on a common objective: providing proof of personhood. Proof of personhood concerns the regulation of membership in digital environments. It seeks to establish that each participant corresponds to a unique human being, rather than to a fictitious or non-human identity, and that no individual can hold multiple identities within the same system. This function has become increasingly consequential as socio-economic interactions move online. Without reliable mechanisms for distinguishing persons from duplicate or fake accounts, coordinated groups can artificially amplify their influence, automated agents can distort participation, and systems that rely on the principle of one person, one vote become difficult to sustain (Siddarth et al., 2020). Holding this governance function relatively constant across cases makes it possible to examine how different sociotechnical imaginaries lead designers to target different constituencies, approach blockchain’s operational autonomy from distinct angles, and ultimately produce divergent configurations of sovereign capacity for those relying on these systems. The analysis reconstructs these imaginaries from project documentation, white papers, public statements, and governance materials, examining how they become materialized through concrete design choices.

5.1 Holonym

Founded in 2022 by Shady El Damaty and Nanak Nihal Singh Khalsa, Holonym was presented as an onchain identification solution allowing users to prove both their uniqueness and selected personal attributes, such as age or jurisdictional residency, without disclosing the underlying information itself (Khalsa et al., 2022). To obtain these credentials, users connected a cryptocurrency wallet and submitted government-issued documents, such as passports or driver’s licenses, through third-party verification providers. Once validated, these credentials were transformed into a zero-knowledge proof, a cryptographic proof that allows a user to demonstrate that a statement is true without revealing the underlying information, and represented onchain through non-transferable tokens. Through this mechanism, users could demonstrate that they satisfied specific requirements while preserving a high degree of privacy (Human Tech by Holonym, 2023). The project saw early adoption in the real world through political organizations such as Lobby3, associated with Andrew Yang, which used the system to verify that political donations were from US residents, in compliance with federal campaign finance law (El Damaty, 2022). Holonym also expanded into blockchain-native communities through its collaboration with Gitcoin Passport, integrating privacy-preserving identity verification into one of the ecosystem’s most widely used Sybil-resistance tools (Khalsa, 2023). This relationship later culminated in Holonym’s acquisition of Gitcoin Passport and the rebranding of the project into human.tech, a broader identification ecosystem (Homonym Foundation, 2025).

The imaginary Holonym enacts appears to be one of institutionally portable identification, in which individuals can move across digital environments while retaining cryptographically verifiable credentials that remain legible to existing legal and administrative systems. The intended constituency is, therefore, not limited to blockchain-native communities but also extends to individuals and organizations that require recognizable forms of identity verification while seeking to reduce privacy risks and increase the accessibility of credentials across different contexts. This orientation shapes the project’s use of blockchain. Operational autonomy is not treated as an end in itself. Instead, blockchain is mobilized to make identity claims more portable, privacy-preserving, and interoperable. The result is an onchain identification application that achieves high levels of legibility beyond the blockchain ecosystem, but only by accepting a lesser degree of operational autonomy, since governments and official issuers of identity credentials remain the ultimate sources of authority. Holonym, therefore, illustrates a vision of sovereign capacity grounded less in independence from external interference than in the ability to navigate existing legal and regulatory contexts on more favorable terms.

5.2 World ID

World, originally launched as Worldcoin, was conceived in 2019 by Sam Altman, Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern and developed by Tools for Humanity. The project’s stated ambition was to create a global identity and financial network capable of verifying human presence online at scale (World, 2026). World ID functions as its identification layer. To obtain a credential, users visit a location hosting an Orb, a proprietary biometric device that scans the iris and generates a unique cryptographic representation of the user’s biometric data. This representation is stored in the World App, from which users can generate zero-knowledge proofs attesting to their uniqueness without revealing the underlying biometric information. Users in many jurisdictions also receive WLD tokens as an enrollment incentive. By 2025, the project claimed tens of millions of users and had integrated with a growing range of consumer applications and platforms (World, 2025). At the same time, it attracted significant regulatory scrutiny regarding biometric data collection, informed consent, and data protection (Sümer and Elbi, 2024).

The imaginary legible in World ID’s architecture is one of identification as a global digital infrastructure. The project envisions a future in which proving one’s humanity becomes a routine prerequisite for participation in online life, and identity verification must operate at a planetary scale. The intended constituency is thus exceptionally broad, encompassing mainstream internet users, platforms, applications, and digital services instead of a specific political or blockchain community. This orientation shapes the project’s design priorities. Blockchain serves as a coordination and verification layer, but the system accepts substantial organizational centralization to achieve accessibility. Tools for Humanity and the World Foundation continue to govern core aspects of device design, wallet operations, and key protocol services. The project is deliberately optimized for uptake: a simplified mobile interface, gas-free in-app transactions, an expanding ecosystem of mini-applications, and incentive structures designed to drive enrollment. The Orb itself is proprietary, physically deployed, and operated by contracted individuals. The central tradeoff is legible from this vantage point. World ID does not maximize insulation from centralized intermediaries; it relaxes that goal in order to maximize platform integration and scale. Blockchain remains indispensable for anchoring ID credentials, but it is subsumed within a broader product strategy oriented toward mass adoption.

5.3 Proof of Humanity

Proof of Humanity was launched in March 2021 as a joint initiative between Kleros, a cooperative specializing in decentralized dispute resolution, and the Democracy Earth Foundation, an organization dedicated to democratic innovation and digital governance. Proof of Humanity was conceived not merely as an identification system but as a foundational public infrastructure for one-person-one-vote governance, universal basic income distribution, and other applications requiring or benefiting from a persistent registry of unique human beings, such as airdrops (James, 2021). Unlike other onchain identification systems that relied on state-issued credentials or biometric devices, Proof of Humanity proposed to establish personhood through social verification. Registration required applicants to submit a profile containing their name, photograph, a short video declaration, and a blockchain address. Existing participants vouched for applicants by stacking their own reputation on the legitimacy of the submission. Any participant could challenge an application suspected of being fraudulent or duplicated, with disputes resolved by the Kleros Court, where randomly selected jurors evaluated the evidence and rendered binding decisions. Successfully registered participants were offered tokens distributed in a universal basic income fashion as an economic incentive. Following its launch, responsibilities for the governance of the registry increasingly shifted toward a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) structure, in which participants collectively debated and voted on questions concerning the registry’s operation and development (Cossar et al., 2024).

The imaginary Proof of Humanity’s early documentation projected was identification as a collective governance arrangement (James, 2021; Ragosa, 2021). Throughout 2022, however, it became more clear that the two founding organizations had brought substantially different visions to the project. Kleros members and allies were primarily oriented toward building a technically robust infrastructure capable of integrating with a wide range of decentralized applications, and treated governance as instrumental to that goal. Democracy Earth Foundation members and allies regarded participatory governance and UBI distribution as central to the project’s purpose (Cossar et al., 2024). The intended constituency was therefore not mainstream users seeking frictionless identification, but rather communities interested in democratic governance, collective self-rule, and one-person-one-vote coordination. This orientation shaped the project’s architecture in significant ways. Operational autonomy was heavily balanced against voice, with arrangements that enabled participants to collectively govern the conditions under which personhood was recognized. The result was an identification system that maximized participant influence over both membership decisions and the evolution of the registry itself, but only by accepting greater coordination costs, ongoing dependence on community engagement, and the possibility of internal conflict. These tensions ultimately proved irreconcilable between the two founding organizations (Lesaege, 2022), culminating in a DAO vote to fork the project in 2022 (Andrei et al., 2022), illustrates the dynamic.

5.4 Idena

Idena is an open-source proof-of-personhood blockchain launched in 2019 and maintained by a largely anonymous community of contributors, with no publicly identifiable corporate sponsor, foundation, or governing organization. Unlike the other examples examined here, Idena is not primarily designed to provide identification services. Instead, proof of personhood functions as the foundation of the blockchain network itself, where a validated identity grants access to mining rewards and other core network functions. Whereas Bitcoin distributes influence through computational power and proof-of-stake systems distribute it through capital ownership, Idena distributes participation according to verified human uniqueness, organizing the network around the principle of one human, one account. Entry is invitation-only: new participants must receive an invitation code from a validated member who has an economic stake in their success (Idena, 2026a). Verification occurs through synchronized global ceremonies held at regular intervals, during which all participants must simultaneously complete cognitive puzzles known as “flips”, each presenting a set of images that form a coherent story in one sequence and a nonsensical one in another. Because validation occurs simultaneously across the entire network, managing multiple accounts is practically impossible. A validated participant receives a cryptoidentity, equal voting power, and mining rights for that epoch, and becomes eligible over time to issue invitations to new members. Missing or failing a ceremony carries penalties, including loss of status and, for newer participants, burning of staked coins.

The imaginary legible in Idena’s design and documentation is one of personhood as a basis for protocol governance, whereby verified human uniqueness serves as the principal mechanism for organizing participation, allocating rewards, and distributing influence throughout the network. The intended constituency is not mainstream users seeking legally recognizable credentials, nor communities interested in collectively governing identity as a social institution, but participants interested in cryptocurrencies who regard human uniqueness as a preferable basis for coordination than either computational power or capital ownership. This orientation shapes the architecture in important ways. Governance exists, but its scope is considerably narrower than in Proof of Humanity, and different in kind. In Proof of Humanity, almost nothing was in principle off the table: participants brought up and voted on issues including registration rules, arbitration mechanisms, and ultimately the continued existence of the registry in its original form. In Idena, the core logic of the network - verified human uniqueness as the basis for participation, equal mining rights, simultaneous global validation ceremonies - functions as a set of founding commitments that governance does not revisit. Community deliberation operates more like a maintenance mechanism, concerned with keeping the protocol faithful to principles already embedded in its architecture (Idena, 2026b). These choices produce a comparatively more autonomous, though not fully autonomous, blockchain infrastructure, at the cost of greater accessibility, broad adoption, and external recognition.

6 The politics of users: legalistic, commercial, communitarian, and insular

A remaining aspect to understand blockchain’s effect on sovereign capacity is the politics of the users. If the politics of technology concerns what blockchain makes possible and the politics of designers concerns how those possibilities get built into systems, the politics of users concerns who actually reaches for those systems and why. The actors who might leverage blockchain to enhance their sovereign capacity are heterogeneous: states seeking to reduce reliance on foreign platforms, cloud providers, or payment infrastructures; firms coordinating transactions or records without depending entirely on dominant intermediaries; communities organizing membership, resources, or mutual aid across borders; and individuals operating under conditions of institutional exclusion, surveillance, or administrative unreliability. What links them is a shared practical problem in which each seeks to sustain some aspect of collective or individual life under conditions in which existing intermediaries are unavailable, untrusted, costly, or vulnerable to capture. Blockchain becomes relevant insofar as it offers a way to reorganize such functions with greater operational autonomy. But actors do not evaluate this possibility uniformly. Their assessments are shaped by the institutional logic through which they define legitimate authority, acceptable risk, and successful action.

Developed within neo-institutional theory, institutional logics are “socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality” (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999, p. 804). They supply actors, regardless of the type, with practical understandings of which goals are worth pursuing, which forms of authority are legitimate, and which kinds of action are appropriate. Four ideal-typical logics are identified: legalistic, commercial, communitarian, and insular. In practice, these logics are analytically distinct but empirically intertwined: actors frequently draw on more than one at the same time. What distinguishes them is not the exclusion of alternative considerations, but which source of legitimacy takes priority when tensions between competing dimensions of sovereign capacity must be resolved. Their relationships are summarized in Table 2.

TABLE 2. The politics of users.

6.1 Legalistic

The legalistic logic is oriented toward securing compliance within a bounded legal and administrative order. What makes the use of a technology legitimate, from this perspective, is legality: action that is legally authorized, procedurally regular, and institutionally enforceable. Weber (1978) identified this as the distinctively modern basis of authority, grounded in a belief in the validity of enacted rules and the right of those elevated under such rules to issue commands, rather than in personal charisma or inherited tradition. Actors operating under a legalistic logic therefore evaluate blockchain primarily through the lens of legibility. Their concern is not solely whether governance functions can be performed autonomously, but whether their outputs can generate recognized effects beyond the blockchain infrastructure itself. Blockchain may improve record integrity, auditability, and administrative efficiency, but high degrees of operational autonomy sit uneasily with the requirements of interpretation, revocation, and legally accountable enforcement. Actors guided by this logic tend to accept limitations on operational autonomy when doing so increases legal recognition, regulatory compatibility, and institutional enforceability. Sovereign capacity, from this perspective, depends less on insulation from existing institutions than on the ability to operate effectively within them. Among the identification systems examined here, Holonym most closely aligns with users operating under this logic: its architecture accepts constraints on operational autonomy precisely to produce outputs that courts, regulators, and administrative bodies can recognize and act upon.

6.2 Commercial

The commercial logic is oriented toward the problem of coordinating exchange under conditions of uncertainty, transaction costs, and competition. From this perspective, what makes the use of a technology legitimate is demonstrated utility: whether it creates value, reduces coordination costs, and enables participants to achieve desired outcomes. Suchman (1995) describes this orientation as pragmatic legitimacy, whereby actors evaluate institutions according to whether they serve their interests and solve practical problems. Actors operating under a commercial logic, therefore, evaluate blockchain in terms of its capacity to facilitate coordination and expand participation, which means that accessibility tends to take precedence over maximal operational autonomy. Self-custody, irreversible transactions, and the absence of intermediaries may strengthen resistance to external interference, but they can also discourage participation and limit adoption. Commercial actors, therefore, frequently accept the reintroduction of intermediaries when doing so reduces barriers to use. These choices create new dependencies and weaken operational autonomy to some degree, but from the standpoint of commercial logic, sovereign capacity depends on whether governance functions can be exercised effectively and at scale. A system that few people can use offers little practical advantage regardless of its technical independence. An actor operating under this logic would be most drawn to World ID’s model, where blockchain anchors identity credentials but accessibility and scale take precedence over maximal independence from intermediaries.

6.3 Communitarian

The communitarian logic is oriented toward the problem of collective self-government under conditions of shared interdependence. What makes the use of a technology legitimate, from this perspective, is participation: whether those subject to a system have meaningful opportunities to shape, contest, and revise the rules that govern them. This idea of legitimacy finds its ground in democratic theory, such as Dahl (1989) argument that those affected by collective decisions should have a genuine voice in making them. Pateman (1970) advanced a stronger claim that participation is not merely instrumental to legitimate outcomes but constitutive of them. Actors operating under a communitarian logic therefore approach blockchain through the lens of voice. Operational autonomy may reduce dependence on external authorities, but a system that is too insulated or too rigid can equally constrain a community’s capacity to shape the infrastructures through which it governs itself. Actors guided by this logic tend to favor mechanisms that preserve participants’ influence on the technology’s development, including deliberative forums, voting procedures, elected representatives, and other revisable governance arrangements. These mechanisms can create opportunities for internal conflict or capture, but actors operating under a communitarian logic generally regard such risks as preferable to dependence on infrastructures that those relying on them cannot meaningfully direct. Sovereign capacity, in this view, depends on the continuing ability of a community to govern both itself and the infrastructures through which it acts. An actor operating under this logic would find the most to learn from Proof of Humanity, where governance of the identification infrastructure was originally itself the product, even at the cost of coordination friction and the possibility of irreconcilable internal conflict.

6.4 Insular

The insular logic is oriented toward the problem of arbitrary power and the risk of capture by concentrated actors. What makes the use of a technology legitimate, from this perspective, is protection: whether it minimizes exposure to discretionary interference and preserves participants’ ability to act independently of external control. The broader intellectual roots of this logic can be found in anarchist critiques of centralized authority. For thinkers such as Bakunin (1990), political freedom requires the reduction of relations of domination that allow individuals or institutions to impose their will upon others. Crypto-anarchist and cypherpunk traditions reformulated this aspiration through digital infrastructures, treating cryptography as a mechanism for enabling coordination beyond the coercive control of states and other centralized intermediaries such as banks (May, 1988; Davidson and Rees-Mogg, 1997).

Actors operating under an insular logic place operational autonomy above competing dimensions of sovereign capacity. Their primary concern is not legal recognition, broad adoption, or collective revision, but the ability to sustain governance functions with minimal exposure to external interference. They therefore tend to favor protocol immutability, distributed validation, self-custody, limited reliance on intermediaries, and the possibility of an exit through forking when disagreement becomes irreconcilable. These choices increase resistance to capture but also make systems more difficult to modify, more demanding to use, and less likely to generate effects recognized beyond the infrastructure itself. An actor operating under this logic would be most aligned with Idena’s architecture, where the protocol’s core commitments are relatively insulated from revision and resistance to capture is treated as the condition on which everything else depends.

7 A tripartite question

The question guiding this paper was what the relationship between blockchain and sovereign capacity is. The arguments presented above suggest that the answer is tripartite. First, there is the politics of technology. Blockchain introduces operational autonomy, but this autonomy is neither pure nor self-sufficient. The same features that allow rules to be executed with reduced dependence on centralized intermediaries also place pressure on equally meaningful requirements for self-sovereignty, including voice, accessibility, and legibility. Blockchain can make governance functions more resistant to unilateral interruption, but it can also make them harder to revise, harder to use, and harder to translate into effects recognized beyond the infrastructure itself. Operational autonomy is, therefore, not synonymous with sovereign capacity. It is one dimension of it, whose political significance depends on how it is combined with other governance requirements.

Second, there is the politics of designers. Designers do not simply apply blockchain to pre-existing problems; they interpret what the problem is, who the relevant constituency is, and which tradeoffs are acceptable. These dimensions do not always align neatly or coherently. In some cases, technical arrangements closely support the future designers seek to create, as with Holonym’s use of government-issued credentials to build a privacy-preserving identification system that remains legible within existing legal and administrative frameworks. In others, the very mechanisms introduced to realize a particular vision can later constrain it. Proof of Humanity, for instance, sought to establish a democratically governed identification infrastructure, yet the participatory architecture that expanded collective governance also generated conflict and governance frictions that complicated broader adoption, an objective that at least some of its founding organizations, particularly Kleros, regarded as important. The cases also reveal substantial variation in the constituencies imagined by designers. Some projects are oriented toward relatively narrow groups, such as Idena’s participants who view human uniqueness as a prerequisite for coordinating the blockchain network itself. Others, such as World ID, aspire to serve heterogeneous populations globally, beyond the blockchain ecosystem itself. Design, therefore, is the process through which a vision of a desirable future mediated by technology encounters material constraints, acquires particular users, and becomes more accessible to some actors than to others.

Third, there is the politics of users. Actors who adopt blockchain systems, from individuals to communities, do not encounter operational autonomy in the abstract. They approach it through legalistic, commercial, communitarian, or insular logics that shape what they regard as legitimate, useful, and worth sacrificing. Even when actors pursue multiple objectives at once, tensions among autonomy, voice, accessibility, and legibility tend to be resolved through a dominant logic. A legalistic actor will limit autonomy to secure legibility; a commercial actor will reintroduce intermediaries to increase accessibility; a communitarian actor will accept conflict to preserve collective governance; and an insular actor will sacrifice recognition or ease of use to reduce exposure to capture. General claims or hopes that blockchain can straightforwardly support greater sovereignty miss the interaction among these three levels.

These three dimensions show why blockchain’s relationship to sovereign capacity is contingent and cannot be evaluated at the level of technology alone. Operational autonomy creates new possibilities for performing governance functions with reduced dependence on centralized intermediaries, but those possibilities remain incomplete until they are stabilized through design and taken up by users. Designers give operational autonomy a concrete form by deciding whether a blockchain system should prioritize resistance to capture, collective revision, ease of use, or external recognition. Users interested in leveraging blockchain to perform governance functions then determine the practical significance of those choices by approaching systems through legalistic, commercial, communitarian, or insular logics. Sovereign capacity, therefore, is configured through the interaction among technological affordances, design choices, and user priorities, and its extent depends on how those dimensions reinforce or undercut one another in practice. A highly autonomous system may do little for sovereignty if it cannot be accessed, governed, or made consequential beyond itself. A less autonomous system may still expand sovereign capacity if it enables actors to perform a valued governance function more independently than they otherwise could. The central question is, therefore, which dimensions of sovereign capacity blockchain strengthens, which ones it weakens, for whom, and under what conditions.

8 Conclusion

This paper has asked what the relationship is between blockchain and sovereignty when sovereignty is understood not as legal status or ultimate authority, but as effective and ongoing capacity. The answer is that this relationship is conditional and contingent. It depends on how operational autonomy, blockchain’s most distinctive contribution to the performance of governance functions, interacts with the design choices of builders and the priorities of users. Operational autonomy matters because it enables rules, records, and transactions to persist without continuous dependence on centralized intermediaries and to withstand unilateral interruption more effectively. But it does not amount to sovereignty by itself. It is always mediated by the politics of technology, which places autonomy in tension with voice, accessibility, and legibility; by the politics of designers, who embed particular sociotechnical imaginaries into technical architectures; and by the politics of users, who adopt blockchain systems through institutional logics that determine which tradeoffs are acceptable. The comparison of Holonym, World ID, Proof of Humanity, and Idena shows that the same broad governance function can produce markedly different configurations of sovereign capacity depending on how these three dimensions interact. Blockchain makes sovereign capacity increasingly infrastructural, partial, and contingent on the alignment between technical affordances, design choices, and the practical priorities of those who rely on them.

Several implications follow for future research. Studies of blockchain and sovereignty should move beyond general claims and examine the specific configurations through which autonomy, control, accessibility, and legibility are combined in practice. More attention should be paid to the actors who adopt blockchain systems, not only to the designers who build them, since sovereign capacity ultimately depends on whether particular users can mobilize a system for their own purposes. Future work should also examine how these configurations evolve over time: the cases analyzed here already show that blockchain projects can pivot, fork, centralize, or seek external recognition in ways that alter the form of sovereign capacity they make available. Finally, the framework should be extended beyond public and permissionless blockchains as well as beyond identification to other domains where blockchain is presented as politically transformative.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Andrej Zwitter, University of Groningen, Netherlands

Reviewed by: Firat Cengiz, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Prabhu Sivabalan, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Footnotes

A second tradition in political philosophy understands sovereignty as ultimate authority over collective life. Schmitt (1922) famous formulation that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” captures this concern with the existence of a final authority capable of determining when ordinary rules no longer apply. This understanding has been influential in blockchain scholarship, particularly in debates over the “rule of code” and whether automated execution can displace human discretion (De Filippi and Hassan, 2016). However, studies of blockchain governance have shown that questions of final authority do not disappear but rather relocate. Moments of crisis, ambiguity, or unforeseen circumstances frequently require coordination and decision-making among developers, miners, validators, and other influential actors (De Filippi et al., 2024). While this debate remains important, it addresses a different question from the one pursued here. The present analysis is less concerned with whether blockchain eliminates the need for ultimate authority than with whether it enables actors to perform governance functions with greater practical independence from external control.