Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T06:45:03.377Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The market, the regulator, and the government: Making a blockchain ecosystem in the Netherlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Inês Faria
Inês Faria*
Affiliation:
University of Lisbon, Portugal
*
Corresponding author: Inês Faria, CSG/SOCIUS-ISEG, University of Lisbon, Rua Miguel Lupi 20, 1249-078 Lisbon, Portugal. Email: [email protected].
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This article presents a socio-anthropological analysis of the formation of a business ecosystem around blockchain technology in the Netherlands, within the broader context of the European Union and the digital single market. I argue that while reproducing widespread global models of business group and network formation, the relations created by these networks also reveal particularities of local business and governance cultures. Such particularities emerge from the pragmatics of collaboration and competitive market relationships, as well as legal heterogeneity and plans for legal harmonisation in digital innovation and governance in Europe. They also emerge from the challenges and transformations that current experimentation cultures for digital innovation bring to the interactions between market players, regulators, and government. These challenges and transformations materialise in increasingly informal connections and strategies for experimental legitimisation, which occur in parallel to more formal and traditional forms of regulatory and governmental interaction. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and in online terrains, including observation periods and 32 interviews with entrepreneurial project teams, as well as with individuals involved in financial incumbents’ innovation labs.

Keywords

Blockchaindigital identificationbusiness networksregulationEuropean UnionNetherlands
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , 2021 , pp. 40 - 56
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2021 The Author(s)

References

Accenture (2013) The Future of Identity in Banking. Available at: <https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/DotCom/Documents/Global/PDF/Dualpub_9/Accenture-Future-Identity-Banking.pdf>. Accessed 26 October 2018..+Accessed+26+October+2018.>Google Scholar
Arner, D., Barberis, J. and Buckley, R. (2017) Fintech, regtech and the reconceptualization of financial regulation. Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business, 37(3): 371–413.Google Scholar
Black, J. (2002). Regulatory conversations. Journal of Law and Society, 29(1): 163–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caliskan, K. (2020) Data money: The socio-technical infrastructure of cryptocurrency blockchains. Economy and Society, 49(4): 540–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callon, M. (1990) Techno-economic networks and irreversibility. Sociological Review, 38(51): 132–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carruthers, B. and Stinchcombe, A. (1999) The social structure of liquidity: Flexibility, markets and states. Theory and Society, 28(3): 353–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, S., Di Filippi, P. and Potts, J. (2016) Economics of blockchain. Proceedings of public choice conference, 2016. Fort Lauderdale, United States. Available at: <https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01382002>. Accessed 10 October 2019.CrossRef.+Accessed+10+October+2019.>Google Scholar
Dewey, J. (ed.) (2019) Global Legal Insights: Blockchain and Cryptocurrency. UK: Global Legal Group.Google Scholar
DNB [Dutch Central Bank] (2018) Dutch Central Bank (DNB) Bulletin: DNB experiments with blockchain technology. Available at: <https://www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/DNBulletin2018/dnb376502.jsp#>. Accessed 17 July 2020..+Accessed+17+July+2020.>Google Scholar
DuPont, Q. and Maurer, B. (2015) Ledgers and law in the blockchain. King's Review Magazine. Available at: <http://kingsreview.co.uk/articles/ledgers-and-law-in-the-blockchain/>..' href=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=DuPont,+Q.+and+Maurer,+B.+(2015)+Ledgers+and+law+in+the+blockchain.+King's+Review+Magazine.+Available+at:+.>Google Scholar
Eckert, S. and Bõrzel, T.A. (2012) Experimentalist governance: An introduction. Regulation and Governance, 6(3): 371–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faria, I. (2019) Trust, reputation and ambiguous freedoms: Financial institutions and subversive libertarians navigating blockchain, markets, and regulation. Journal of Cultural Economy, 12(2): 119–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faustino, S. (2019) How metaphors matter: An ethnography of blockchain-based re-descriptions of the world. Journal of Cultural Economy, 12(6): 478–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
EBF [European Banking Federation] (2016) Innovate, Collaborate, Deploy. European Banking Federation Vision for Banking in the Digital Single Market. Available at: <https://www.ebf.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/EBF-vision-for-banking-in-the-Digital-Single-Market-October-2016.pdf>. Accessed 10 October 2019..+Accessed+10+October+2019.>Google Scholar
ECB [European Central Bank] (2018) Virtual or virtueless? The evolution of money in the digital age. Lecture by Yves Mersch, member of the executive board of the ECB, Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, London, 8 February. Available at: <https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2018/html/ecb.sp180208.en.html>. Accessed 17 July 2019..+Accessed+17+July+2019.>Google Scholar
eIDAS (2014) Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 of the European Parliament and European Commission, of the 23 July 2014. On electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market and repealing Directive 1999/93/EC. Available at: <https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/system/files/ged/eidas_regulation.pdf>. Accessed 11 January 2020..+Accessed+11+January+2020.>Google Scholar
Engelen, E., Ertürk, I., Froud, J., Leaver, A. and Williams, K. (2010) Reconceptualizing financial innovation: Frame, conjuncture and bricolage. Economy and Society, 39(1): 33–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engelen, E. (2015) Don't mind the ‘funding gap’: What Dutch post crisis storytelling tells us about elite politics in financialized capitalism. Environment and Planning A, 47(8): 1606–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ertürk, I. and Solari, S. (2007) Banks as continuous reinvention. New Political Economy, 12(3): 369–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ertürk, I. (2015) Financialization, bank business models and the limit of post-crisis bank regulation. Journal of Banking Regulation, 17(1-2): 60–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
EU [European Union] (2015) A digital single market strategy for Europe - COM (2015) 192 final. Available at: <https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/digital-single-market-strategy-europe-com2015-192-final>. Accessed 11 January 2019..+Accessed+11+January+2019.>Google Scholar
EU [European Union] (2016a) Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and European Commission, of 27 April 2016. On the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing, Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation/GDPR). Available at: <http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679andfrom=EN>. Accessed 11 September 2020..+Accessed+11+September+2020.>Google Scholar
Fernandez, R. and Wigger, A. (2016) Lehman Brothers in the Dutch offshore financial centre: The role of shadow banking in increasing leverage and facilitating debt. Economy and Society, 45(3-4): 407–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kochenov, D. and Gstrein, O. (2019). Digital identity and distributed ledger technology: Paving the way to a neo-feudal brave new world? University of Groningen, Faculty of Law Research Paper 31/2019. Available at: <https://ssrn.com/abstract=3433498>. Accessed 23 April 2020..+Accessed+23+April+2020.>Google Scholar
Kogut, B., Walker, G. and Dong-Jae, K. (1995) Cooperation and entry induction as an extension of business rivalry. Research Policy, 24(1): 77–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kogut, B. (2012) Business groups and financial markets as emergent phenomena. In: Knorr-Cetina, K. and Preda, A. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 126–45.Google Scholar
Langley, P. and Leyshon, A. (2017) Platform capitalism: The intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation. Finance and Society, 3(1): 11–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lopes, D. (2018) Under pressure: Financial supervision in the post-2008 European Union. In: Carrier, J. (ed.) Economy, Crime and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 93–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, G. (1995) Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maurer, B., Nelms, T. and Swartz, L. (2013) ‘When perhaps the real problem is money itself!’: The practical materiality of Bitcoin. Social Semiotics, 23(2): 261–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayer, S. (2011) Embedded politics, growing informalization? How NATO and the EU transform provision of external security. Contemporary Security Policy, 32(2): 308–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, W. and Morris, L. (1999). Fourth Generation R&D: Managing Knowledge, Technology and Innovation. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Moore, J. (1993) Predators and prey: A new ecology of competition. Harvard Business Review, 71(3): 75–86.Google Scholar
Morgan, B. and Yeung, K. (2007) An Introduction to Law and Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nakamoto, S. (2008) Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Available at: <www.cryptovest.co.uk>. Accessed 17 October 2019..+Accessed+17+October+2019.>Google Scholar
NVB [Dutch Banking Association] and PwC [Pricewaterhouse Coopers] (2017) How Bankers Can Become Innovation Leaders Again. Available at: <https://www.nvb.nl/…/001608_pwc-how-bankers-can-become-innovation-leaders-again-2017.pdf>. Accessed 26 October 2019..+Accessed+26+October+2019.>Google Scholar
O'Dwyer, R. (2015). Money talks: The enclosure of mobile payments. In: Lovink, G., Tkacz, N. and de Vries, P. (eds.) MoneyLab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 230–44.Google Scholar
Powell, W. (1990) Neither market, nor hierarchy: Network forms of organization. Research on Organizational Behaviour, 12: 295–336.Google Scholar
Probst, L., Frideres, L., Cambier, B., Martinez-Diaz, C. and Luxembourg, PwC. (2016) Report on blockchain: Blockchain applications and services. Business innovation observatory. contract n° 190/PP/ENT/CIP/12/C/N03C01. Available at: <https://ec.europa.eu/…/innovation/business-innovation-observatory/trend-reports_en>. Accessed 10 October 2019..+Accessed+10+October+2019.>Google Scholar
PwC [Pricewaterhouse Coopers] (2016) Know your customer quick reference guide. Available at: <https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/financial-services/publications/assets/pwc-anti-money-laundering-2016.pdf>. Accessed 26 October 2019..+Accessed+26+October+2019.>Google Scholar
Riles, A. (2014) Managing regulatory arbitrage: A conflict of laws approach. Cornell International Law Journal, 47(1): 47–119.Google Scholar
Stone, R.W. (2011) Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swartz, L. (2017) Blockchain dreams: Imagining techno-economic alternatives after Bitcoin. In: Castells, M. et al. (eds.) Another Economy is Possible: Culture and Economy in a Time of Crisis. Cambridge: Polity, 82–105.Google Scholar
Swartz, L. (2018) What was Bitcoin, what will it be? The techno-economic imaginaries of a new money technology. Cultural Studies, 32(4): 623–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thiemann, M. and Lepoutre, J. (2017) Stitched on the edge: Rule evasion, embedded regulators and the evolution of markets. American Journal of Sociology, 122(6): 1775–1821.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Todeva, E. (2006) Business Networks: Strategy and Structure. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsang, C. (2019) From industry sandbox to supervisory control box: Rethinking the role of the regulators in the era of fintech. University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology and Policy, 355–404.Google Scholar
Walker, G., Kogut, B. and Shan, W. (1997) Social capital, structural holes and the formation of an industry network. Organization Science, 8(2): 109–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiss, M. (2020). Varieties of privatization: Informal networks, trust and state control of the commanding heights. Journal of International Political Economy, https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1726791.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zetzsche, D., Buckley, R., Barberis, J. and Arner, D. (2017) Regulating a revolution: From regulatory sandboxes to smart regulation. Fordham Journal of Corporate and Financial Law, 23(1): 34–103.Google Scholar
Zwilling, A. (2017) Electronic Digital Identity Management Systems in the European Union. MA thesis in Information Sciences, Radboud University. Available at: <https://www.ru.nl/publish/pages/769526/z_armin_zwilling.pdf>. Accessed 15 August 2019..+Accessed+15+August+2019.>Google Scholar