The ‘natural state’ of blockchains: an ethnography of validator governance
Ellie Rennie, Jason Potts, Joshua Tan · Information Communication & Society · 2025
Validators perform services on blockchain networks, from which they earn rents. Groups of validators, however, have power over blockchain networks, which requires politics to control. This paper reports on a multiyear ethnography of the Validator Commons as an attempt to build a political system for validator governance. This study of the politics of a natively digital economy offers a rare contemporary insight into a critical phase of economic development, previously only reconstructed from economic history, as the institutional transition from a Limited Access Order to an Open Access Order (North et al., 2009). We find indications that blockchains may transition to the latter through impersonal rules that constrain the power of elites in blockchain governance processes.