Welcome to the Blockchain & Society Policy Research Lab, hosted by the Institute for Information Law, at the University of Amsterdam.

We study the societal impact of blockchain technologies from a law and policy perspective.

We are thinking about questions such as:

How are blockchain applications governed? What internal factors contribute to the success of a blockchain application?

How do different societal domains deal with blockchain technologies and their potential disruptive effect?

What are the most important regulatory issues around blockchain applications, and what are our policy alternatives?

With our methods we try to follow an interdisciplinary approach that integrates legal, social, political, economic, and technological discourses to describe a complex techno-social phenomenon. If we had to find a quote that best represents our approach, the one from Ferdinand Braudel would be the one:

“Whether one is writing about 1558 or the year of Our Lord 1958, if one wants to understand the world, one has to determine the hierarchy of forces, currents, and individual movements, and then put them together to form an overall constellation. Throughout, one must distinguish between long-term movements and momentary pressures, finding the immediate sources of the latter and the long-term thrust of the former.” – Braudel, Fernand, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), vol. 32, no. 2, 2009, pp. 171–203. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40647704.