Blockchain and Tokenisation for Local Communities
Guido Boella, Claudio Schifanella, Cristina Viano · 2025
The main innovation introduced by blockchain is the possibility of creating cryptographic tokens (digital representations of a value or property right over an asset) and its ability to enable safe and transparent transactions of these tokens without relying on third parties as intermediaries. Moreover, smart contracts (software that operate over a blockchain, automatically executing the terms of an agreement when certain conditions are met) allow for programming the way in which tokens are transferred, thus automatising transactions. Hence, the potential of blockchains to disintermediate governance and business models. Recent years have seen the rise of experimentation with blockchains for social impact or blockchains for social good, i.e. blockchain-enabled activities that tackle urgent societal and environmental needs ( Galen et al., 2018 , 2019; Polvora et al., 2020; Voshmgir et al., 2019 ). The report “Blockchain and Sustainable Development” ( Fines Schlumberger, 2022 ) mentions 14 categories of blockchain applications # ranging from productive sectors to health, education and public administrative domains. Less experimentation is taking place in a domain that cross-cuts three of the above categories, namely Peer-to-Peer Cash; Government & Democracy; and Production and Consumption. This overarching domain is about the participation of citizens in the civic, democratic and economic life of their local community. Processes of co-production of public services by public administrations and citizens ( Brandsen and Honingh, 2018 ), as well as citizen self-organisation initiatives such as urban commons ( Bollier & Helfrich, 2019 ; Foster & Iaione, 2016 ) and local solidarity economies ( Miller, 2010 ; Vlachokyriakos et al., 2017 ), are crucial for fairer and just societies, and blockchains can support and enhance such existing participatory processes or enable new ones. Cities are organised in interconnected communities composed of citizens, economic activities and associations, each governed and managed with different rules and tools but in continuous interaction with the others. Tokenisation (the conversion of the right to an asset into a cryptographic token) 1 , smart contracts and tokenised economies (that leverage tokenization mechanisms for circulating values and incentives) can provide common and interoperable tools as a relevant layer to represent community rules and create new intercommunity services.