Web3 and the State: Indian state's redescription of blockchain

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how the Indian government redefines blockchain technology from a tool of transparency to one of trust, emphasizing its recentralizing effects and the state's role as intermediary in non-financial applications.

Contribution

It reveals the discursive shift in Indian policy documents that reframe blockchain as a means for the state to re-establish control and redefine decentralization.

Findings

Blockchain is being redescribed from transparency to trust.

The Indian state positions itself as an intermediary despite decentralization claims.

Recentralizing effects of blockchain are emphasized in policy discourse.

Abstract

The article closely reads a discussion paper by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog and a strategy paper by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) advocating non-financial use cases of blockchain in India. By noting the discursive shift from transparency to trust to adjustably transparent enacted in these two documents, and consequently the Indian state's redescription of blockchain, the paper foregrounds how blockchain systems are being designated as "decentral" but have recentralizing effects where the state reinvents and re-establishes itself as an intermediary. The paper illustrates how discursive shifts concerning trust, transparency, (de)centralization and (dis)intermediation are crucial sites for investigating redescriptions of emerging sociotechnical systems.