Blockchain Governance
Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549059/blockchain-governance/ ↗
De Filippi, a leading researcher on blockchain governance at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, addresses one of the most pressing questions in digital organisation: how do you govern systems without traditional hierarchies? The book examines how blockchain networks develop governance mechanisms — from Bitcoin's informal consensus to Ethereum's formal improvement processes — and what this teaches us about distributed decision-making more broadly.
For product direction, it offers frameworks for thinking about governance in any networked system where authority is distributed rather than centrally controlled.
The institutional analysis connects to broader questions about how technology reshapes the boundaries between markets, firms, and commons.
Essential reading for understanding how governance emerges in digital-native organisations.
Central argument
De Filippi, Reijers, and Mannan argue that blockchain networks are not governance-free systems but rather sites where governance is encoded into protocol rules, smart contracts, and community processes — a condition they term 'governance by infrastructure.' The central thesis is that as decision-making authority migrates into technical artifacts, traditional distinctions between rule-makers and rule-takers collapse, producing new forms of legitimacy and contestation. By comparing Bitcoin's emergent, off-chain consensus politics with Ethereum's more formalized improvement proposal processes, they show that distributed governance does not eliminate power asymmetries but redistributes and obscures them.
Critique
The framework risks overfitting to public, permissionless blockchains — Bitcoin and Ethereum — whose governance crises (hard forks, contentious upgrades, validator concentration) may not generalize to the enterprise or consortium contexts where most organizations actually deploy distributed ledger technology. A thoughtful reader might also challenge whether 'governance by infrastructure' is truly novel or simply a digital instantiation of older arguments about how standards bodies, technical committees, and platform APIs have always encoded political choices — in which case the blockchain framing adds rhetorical urgency more than analytical precision.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO overseeing platform products or multi-sided ecosystems, the book's core insight — that protocol decisions are governance decisions with downstream political consequences — reframes API design, permissioning models, and platform rule changes as acts of institutional design, not merely technical choices. The comparative analysis of Bitcoin versus Ethereum improvement processes also offers a direct template for evaluating when informal contributor consensus is sufficient versus when a product organization needs formalized RFC or RFC-equivalent mechanisms to manage distributed stakeholder authority over shared infrastructure.