About Us

Who is CHAIN? We are an interdisciplinary research team that focuses on the exercise of public authority in distributed networks. By combining expertise from law, philosophy/STS, and computer science, we are equipped to rethink and operationalize public values of the rule of law and legal compliance by design. Our aim is to safeguard the public values of transparency, accountability, trust and legitimacy, when implementing blockchain applications to address strategic policy objectives. Lastly, we provide a platform for interactions between academia, industry and governments to foster innovative developments. Our valorization panel includes top-notch academic experts to monitor scientific standards and share state-of-the-art knowledge.

NWO-MVI

The NWO-MVI project focuses on complexity due to hyper-connectivity of public and private actors when exercising public tasks using distributed ledger technologies, such as blockchain. In order to solve pressing societal issues, public actors increasingly exercise public authority through network governance together with private actors, resulting in complex public-private relationships. Additionally, the increasing interest of public actors in blockchain technologies to mediate public-private relationships, enlarges this complexity, bringing forth three fundamental problems. Firstly, public values of the rule of law such as foreseeability, transparency and reason-giving do not necessarily align with values in network governance such as efficiency and scalability, resulting in value conflicts. Secondly, due to unclear rules and value conflicts citizens might experience vulnerability and uncertainty, negatively impacting the trust relationship with their government. Thirdly, the increased use of private actors and distributed technologies to exercise public authority may cause uncertainty for citizens in terms of legal protection.

Therefore, the central research questions are:
1) which value conflicts arise when public authority is exercised through distributed technologies?
2) what are the rule of law conditions necessary to steer the role and responsibilities of public actors using distributed technologies?

This project takes an interdisciplinary design approach and analyses two case studies. Combining expertise from philosophy, law, and computer science, this project rethinks and operationalizes the rule of law values to achieve ‘transparency, trust and legitimacy by design’. The research results will empower partners and stakeholders to develop, implement, and use blockchain applications in a legally and socially acceptable way.

Our two case studies are: ‘The Red Button’, a collaboration between the Central Judiciary Account Collection Agency (CJIB) and the municipalities of The Hague and Eindhoven, and ‘The Energy Wallet‘, a collaboration between the municipality of Emmen and BlockchainLab Drenthe as part of the INTEREGG Project BLING.

Click here for more information about the NWO MVI program ‘Responsible Innovation Designing for Public Values in a Digital World’.

The Red Button

Our first case study ‘The Red Button‘ is focused on the use of blockchain by the government in de context of debt assistance. The blockchainpilot is based on self-sovereign identity to help people in debt signalling inability to pay in a timely fashion and giving them so called ‘debt rest’.

The Energy Wallet

‘The Energy Wallet‘ is a project set up by the municipality of Emmen that implements blockchain technology in the domain of government subsidies. The Energy Wallet is a blockchain-app that allows residents to earn tokens for answering questions about energy saving measures, which they can use to buy energy-saving measures at local retailers.