Margie Cheesman investigated a blockchain charity project for more than a year but found that the technology seemed to cause more problems than it solved.
Blockchain mostly fails to improve humanitarian projects and is a “conjuring” used to raise funds, digital anthropologist Margie Cheesman concluded in a research paper published on Aug. 13.
Cheesman observed the work of a blockchain humanitarian project from May 2018 to December 2019 and found that the use of blockchain provided little benefit to the project while adding some costs.
Her paper, “Conjuring a Blockchain Pilot: Ignorance and Innovation in Humanitarian Aid,” was published in the journal Geopolitics.
