Journal Home
Login
Register
Open Access Journal
Submit a Paper
Propose a Special lssue
Open Access
ARTICLE
Regulatory Convergence of Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Legal Infrastructure: Institutional Clarity, Technological Governance, and the Future of Digital Trust
Issue Vol. 2 No. 02 (2025): VOLUME 02 ISSUE 02 --- Section Articles
pdf
Abstract
The accelerating convergence of blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, and digitally mediated legal infrastructures has introduced profound challenges and opportunities for contemporary governance, institutional design, and regulatory theory. While blockchain systems promise decentralization, immutability, and trust minimization, their rapid diffusion across financial markets, healthcare, supply chains, and legal services has exposed significant regulatory ambiguities and systemic risks. Artificial intelligence, simultaneously transforming professional judgment, legal reasoning, and data-intensive decision-making, further complicates the institutional landscape by introducing algorithmic opacity, automation bias, and new forms of socio-technical power. This article develops an extensive, theoretically grounded, and empirically informed analysis of how emerging regulatory initiatives—particularly legislative efforts aimed at clarifying the legal status of blockchain tokens and crypto-exchange infrastructures—reshape the governance of digital trust in complex socio-technical systems.
Drawing strictly upon the provided body of interdisciplinary literature, this research situates contemporary blockchain regulation within a longer historical trajectory of legal adaptation to disruptive technologies. It integrates scholarship on distributed ledger architectures, smart contracts, artificial intelligence in law, big data governance, and trust theory to argue that regulatory clarity is not merely a compliance mechanism but a constitutive force that stabilizes technological meaning, allocates responsibility, and enables institutional legitimacy. Particular attention is given to legislative efforts reported in 2020 that sought to clarify the legal classification of blockchain tokens and the operational boundaries of crypto exchanges, positioning these initiatives as pivotal inflection points in the maturation of blockchain governance frameworks.
Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative doctrinal–conceptual approach, combining interpretive legal analysis with comparative technological governance theory. Rather than empirical experimentation, the research synthesizes regulatory texts, scholarly debates, and sectoral use cases to generate analytically rich findings about the evolving relationship between law, code, and institutional authority. The results demonstrate that regulatory clarity mitigates fragmentation across jurisdictions, reduces uncertainty in innovation ecosystems, and enables the responsible integration of AI-driven systems within blockchain-enabled infrastructures.
The discussion extends these findings by engaging deeply with competing scholarly perspectives on decentralization, trust-free systems, algorithmic governance, and legal automation. It critically evaluates claims that blockchain can eliminate the need for legal institutions, demonstrating instead that law remains central in structuring accountability, resolving disputes, and governing socio-technical complexity. The article concludes by articulating a future research agenda focused on hybrid regulatory models, adaptive governance mechanisms, and the ethical co-design of legal and technological systems capable of sustaining digital trust at scale.
Keywords
References
1. Mills, D., Wang, K., Malone, B., Ravi, A., Marquardt, J., Chen, C., & Baird, M. (2016). Distributed ledger technology in payments, clearing, and settlement. Journal of Financial Market Infrastructures, 5(2), 215–238.
2. Gatteschi, V., Lamberti, F., Demartini, C., Pranteda, C., & Santamaría, V. (2018). Blockchain and smart contracts for insurance: Is the technology mature enough? Future Internet, 10(2), 20.
3. Banerjee, A. (2019). Blockchain with IoT: Applications and use cases for a new paradigm of supply chain driving efficiency and cost. Advances in Computers, 115, 259–292.
4. Katz, M. D. (2013). Quantitative legal prediction—or how I learned to stop worrying and start preparing for the data-driven future of the legal services industry. Emory Law Journal, 62, 909–966.
5. Two New Bills in Congress Offer Clarity for Blockchain Tokens and Crypto Exchanges. (2020). In The News. Congressional Blockchain Caucus.
6. Hawlitschek, F., Notheisen, B., & Teubner, T. (2018). The limits of trust-free systems: A literature review on blockchain technology and trust in the sharing economy. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 29, 50–63.
7. Zhang, P., White, J., Schmidt, D. C., Lenz, G., & Rosenbloom, S. T. (2018). FHIRChain: Applying blockchain to securely and scalably share clinical data. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, 16, 267–278.
8. Livni, E. (2017). Your next lawyer could be a machine. World Economic Forum.
9. Karafiloski, E., & Mishev, A. (2017). Blockchain solutions for big data challenges: A literature review. In IEEE EUROCON 2017 (pp. 763–768).
10. Özyılmaz, K. R., & Yurdakul, A. (2021). Managing blockchain immutability in the GDPR era. Nature Electronics, 1–9.
11. Mills, M. (2016). Artificial intelligence in law: The state of play. Thomson Reuters.
12. Zhang, A., Lin, X., & Sohal, A. S. (2020). Blockchain-based smart contracts: Applications, challenges, and future trends. Computer, 53(10), 50–57.
13. Ramachandran, A., & Kantarcioglu, M. (2018). Using blockchain and smart contracts for secure data provenance management. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.10000.
14. Lin, I. C., & Liao, T. C. (2017). A survey of blockchain security issues and challenges. International Journal of Network Security, 19(5), 653–659.
15. Yang, C., Huang, Q., Li, Z., Liu, K., & Hu, F. (2017). Big data and cloud computing: Innovation opportunities and challenges. International Journal of Digital Earth, 10(1), 13–53.
16. Beck, S. (2014). The future of law. The American Lawyer, 1–6.
17. Spangler, S. (2014). Disruptive innovation in the legal services market. American Bar Association Annual Meeting.
