Blockchain, DLT, Tokenization, and Digital Government Minitrack (Introduction)

Blockchain and, more widely, the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) have been successfully applied as promising techniques to achieve decentralized consensus, mainly in the business sphere. Their implementation bring promises of the improvement of security, efficiency, and speed in transactions and processes, which helps explain why so many government leaders are actively exploring its uses in government. Indeed, currently there is a lively debate for implementing blockchain and DLT into the public sector entities to conduct their operations (Government Office for Science, 2016) and research is focusing on topics like smart contracts, protection of intellectual property, identity management, electronic government as a service, land registry and so on (The Law Society, 2017).