A Digital Revolution Back to the Future: Blockchain Technology and Financial Governance

[...]we conclude by summarizing a more nuanced approach to the governance issues that evolving analysis of blockchains in finance should consider going forward. 1.Technology and Governance in "Sound" and "Wildcat" Finance Consideration of relationships between technology and governance typically stress the governance of technology. The mechanism through which central banks now shape economic governance is one which, as we shall see below, is theoretically fundamentally challenged by blockchain-based CCs. Since their emergence, central banks have played key roles as "the ultimate guarantors of the value of the circulating goods and titles" (Mallard et al. 2014). The potential for an explosion in the number of CCs is a first indication that blockchain-based wildcat banking signals a revolution to a post-modern future than a to return pre-modern financial governance That an emerging blockchain-based wildcat banking alternative centered around objects like CCs harks back to pre-modern monetary systems marked by competing private monies is a point frequently celebrated by proponents of the technology, who tend to enthusiastically invoke the ideas of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (eg., Kelly 2016; Koenig 2015; Swan 2015). Key actors in blockchain-based wildcat banking, most centrally CC-to-fiat money exchanges, have been targeted by a range of formal international and intergovernmental organizations ranging from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in anti-money laundering efforts (Campbell-Verduyn and Goguen 2018b).