Blockchain research has developed rapidly over the past decade, evolving from a focus on digital assets and core protocol design toward broader questions of coordination, governance, and automation. While much of the academic literature remains centered on consensus, scalability, and decentralized finance, growing attention is being paid to how blockchain-based systems can support verifiable rules, programmable organizational processes, and new forms of interaction among institutions, markets, and autonomous software agents. At the same time, persistent challenges such as administrative inefficiency, limited institutional transparency, insecure smart contract deployment, and the absence of robust identity and delegation mechanisms for AI agents continue to constrain real-world adoption.
This Research Topic explores blockchain not only as a technical infrastructure, but as a programmable coordination layer for organizational, economic, and institutional systems. It aims to bring together interdisciplinary research on how smart contract platforms and related cryptographic tools can be used to reduce operational friction, enable new economic and governance models, improve protocol security, and support accountable forms of AI-driven automation. Particular interest is placed on work that bridges theory and implementation, including formal models, empirical studies, system designs, and real-world pilots that remain compatible with existing legal, financial, and institutional environments.
The Topic also seeks to encourage more rigorous scholarship on the emerging relationship between blockchain systems and agentic AI. Rather than treating autonomous agents as a speculative future application, this collection invites research on the concrete technical foundations required for secure and auditable machine participation in decentralized environments, including cryptographic identity, credential delegation, negotiation protocols, verification frameworks, and mitigation of host-level trust assumptions. Across all areas, contributions should clarify how programmable trust can be operationalized in practice and what measurable benefits, constraints, or trade-offs arise in real deployment settings.
We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
– blockchain-based systems for programmable operations in small and medium-sized enterprises, including automation of workflows, payments, accounting, access control, and inventory processes
– economic and organizational models enabled by decentralized trust infrastructures, with attention to coordination, commitment, incentive design, and value allocation
– programmable institutional design and verifiable governance, including the specification of fixed and adjustable rules, discretionary mechanisms, and commitment devices for firms, DAOs, collectives, and public-sector contexts
– AI-assisted methods for smart contract auditing, protocol analysis, vulnerability detection, gas optimization, and continuous monitoring
– formal and applied research on negotiation protocols, automated mechanism design, and smart contract generation for autonomous or semi-autonomous software agents
– cryptographic and protocol foundations for agentic systems, including identity, authentication, delegation, auditability, and reduction of blind trust in hosting environments
– cross-cutting studies on zero-knowledge systems, verifiable credentials, stablecoins, legal-technical interoperability, real-world integration pilots, and empirical evaluation of measurable outcomes
This Research Topic invites original research articles, reviews, methods papers, case studies, and perspective pieces that advance the study of blockchain-enabled coordination across organizational, institutional, and agentic settings.
Article types and fees
This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:
- Community Case Study
- Data Report
- Editorial
- FAIR² Data
- FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
- Hypothesis and Theory
- Methods
- Mini Review
- Opinion
Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.
Keywords: blockchain, smart contracts, programmable governance, decentralized coordination, institutional design, protocol security, AI agents, cryptographic verification, automated mechanism design, decentralized trust
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
