BlockchainGov Paris Symposium September 2025

📅 BlockchainGov Symposium (Paris, 25–26 September 2025)
The BlockchainGov Symposium: Present & Future of Blockchain Governance marked the culmination of five years of research. Over two days at Panthéon-Assas University, our distinctive intellectual community of scholars, practitioners & experts came together to reflect on the state of decentralized governance and to map our way forward. The quality of discourse and collaboration in Paris really showed how exceptional this group of thinkers is that we’ve built together over the past five years. Thank you again to all who joined us.

The first day focused on Community Governance & Design, opening with a keynote by Judith Donath on trust, underlining it as a problematic, but permanent substrate for humanity.

9:30-11:00
Trust, Confidence, Legitimacy
Keynote: Judith Donath
Discussant: Malcolm Campbell Verdyun
Moderator: Primavera De Filippi

11:00-12:30
Blockchain Governance Design
Panel
Michael Zargham
Javier Arroyo
Paul Dylan-Ennis
Moderator: Sofía Cossar

Following this – Sofía Cossar moderated a panel on Blockchain Governance Design. Taking us through findings from the Blockchain Governance Cookbook & our Report on Blockchain Governance Dynamics. The panelists discussed the dynamics of polycentric governance, the exogenous & endogenous legitimacy and the multidimensionality of Blockchain Governance, how code, law, social norms, and market forces make it a “techno-social beast”

Slide from Sofia’s panel presentation.

13:30 – 14:30
Markets & Democracy
Fireside Chat
Eric Alston & Puja Ohlaver
Moderator: Sofía Cossar

The program continued with a fireside chat with Puja Ohlaver and Eric Alston, during which the audience engaged with them for the entire hour. Sofia sparked the conversation based on Puja’s latest paper “Community Currencies: The Price Of Attention And Cost Of Influence In A Networked Age”, contrasting it with Eric Alston’s two papers on Market Maturity and Regulatory Risk Propagation. While Puja’s paper can be seen as prescriptive, Eric’s can be seen as descriptive.

14:30- 15:30
Blockchain & Accountability
Keynote: Joshua Fairfield
Discussant: Primavera De Filippi

Joshua Fairfield delivered a keynote on “Smarter Contracts”, recalling the early legal debates around smart contracts – when lawyers often remarked that they were “neither smart, nor contracts.” This was followed by a jam with Primavera De Filippi, exploring accountability structures for AI and analogies that could guide future legal research.

16:00- 17:30
Progressive Decentralization & Exit 2 Community
Panel
Jacqueline Radebaugh
Nathan Schneider
Federico Ast
Moderator: Tara Merk

The final panel of Day 1 was E2C. Tara, who just finished her PhD on this topic, outlined the key challenges currently facing E2C projects:

1. Unclear and disputed purpose
2. Fragmented deliberation spaces
3. Incomplete governance design and lack of legitimate leadership

For a recap on this panel, read this thread on X, where Theo Beutel captures Nathan Schneider’s memorable tangent that “DAOs are bananas”.

That marks the end of day 1 of our conference. BlockchainGov hosted a reception where we stayed until we got kicked out. Onwards to day 2:

Day 2 focused on Institutions & Global Structures, and started with:

9:30-11:00
Rule of Code vs. Rule of Law
Keynote: Larry Catá Backer
Discussant: Marina Markezic
Moderator: Primavera De Filippi

The first session of the day was a keynote by Larry Catá Backer, questioning blockchain technology’s role in reinforcing cognitive cages. You can find a write-up of the talk here: https://www.backerinlaw.com/Site/podcasts/speeches-and-remarks/ .

Marina Markezic followed and spoke about the regulatory reality and evolution in Europe. Read more about her work here: https://eu.ci/

11:00-11:45
Interactive research seminar
In a fishbowl format, Xavier Lavayssiere, Theo Beutel, and Ellie Rennie helped facilitate an impromptu seminar exploring how academic research can be adapted to analyze decentralized and evolving socio-technical systems. Some of the topics touched on were:

• Risks and benefits of collaboration between blockchain researchers and practitioners?
• How can scholars maintain analytical distance while accessing insider knowledge?
• Can “participatory” research become advocacy? where should the line be drawn?
• What makes digital ethnography of blockchain communities distinct from other online ethnographies?

11:45-12:30
Alegality
Panel
Aaron Lane
Joachim Schwerin
Layer 0
Moderator: Jamilya Kamalova & Esen Esener

We then turned to the Alegality panel, led by two of BlockchainGov’s PhD researchers. The conversation moved between EU regulatory frameworks and protocol design, asking how governance can keep pace with innovations that constantly push the limits of legality.

Joachim Schwerin said: “If shutting down Bitcoin were possible, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

Primavera De Filippi & Morshed Mannan have written about alegality here.
And Esen Esener here.

13:30 – 14:30
Blockchain Governance and Power Dynamics
Panel
Pierre Noro
Laura Lotti
Ellie Rennie
Moderator: Tara Merk

The panel on Blockchain Governance Dynamics offered a collection of thought-provoking takes. Pierre Noro introduced the idea of “blockchain blasphemy,” Laura Lotti discussed crypto’s “three-body problem” and the normative vacuums created by censorship resistance, and Ellie Rennie presented the notion of “hyperaxis order” as a resilience ingredient that can enable institutions to expand meaningfully across space and time.

14:30- 15:30
Network Sovereignties
Panel
Clara Gromanches
Virginia Zangs
Judd Smith
Rithikha Rajamohan
Johan Michalove
Moderator: Sofía Cossar

Our final two panels treated the topic of Network Sovereignties & Network Nations. One of the main topics that BlockchainGov will focus our research on in the final year of our project. The first panel brought together a collection of reflections on territoriality from last year’s SOAM residents. They discussed how identity, coordination, and empowerment structures are being redesigned in relation to new definitions of territoriality. Examples stretched from physical spaces, digital platforms and imaginary realms. It is a well-curated collection of ideas and proposals, all of which will be published here in the coming weeks.

16:00-17:00
Network Nations
Panel
Liav Orgad
Andrea Leiter
Helena Rong
Moderator: Primavera De Filippi

Our grand Finale was the Network Nations panel hosted by Primavera De Filippi where Liav Orgad, Andrea Leiter & Helena Rong participated. We discussed the concept of Network Nations, a contrasting approach to Balaji’s “network state”.

However Network Nations differ in distinctive ways, a core distinction is that they don’t have a need for territorial claims, physical infrastructure and other needs that emerge from building territory based ecosystems. The Network Nations are aterritorial, allowing for sovereign communities to organize and self-govern as a nation building endeavor one abstraction layer above territorial jurisdictions. They have operational autonomy and in extention also enjoys functional sovereignty. BlockchainGov will develop this research further in the next year. In the meantime, read more about the framework here: https://networknations.network/

That concluded our Final BlockchainGov Symposium. Thank you to all who joined us in Paris. It was a true pleasure to test and try our favorite topics with you all, and we are looking forward to next year’s exploration.