Blockchain systems afford new privacy capabilities. This threatens to create conflict, as different social groups involved in blockchain development often disagree on which capabilities specific systems should enact. This article adopts a boundary object perspective to make sense of disagreements between collaborating social worlds. We perform a case study of privacy attitudes among collaborating actors in Monero, a cryptocurrency community that emphasises privacy and decentralisation alongside a set of values sometimes described as anti-establishment, crypto-anarchist, and/or cypherpunk. The case study performs a series of interviews with users, developers, cryptographic researchers, corporate architects, and government regulators. Three novel and important findings emerge. The first is that none of the social worlds express a desire to monitor routine transactions, despite the obvious business and tax-collection value of such data. The second is that regulators are happy to postpone active involvement, based on the flawed assumption they can impose privacy-related regulation later, once risks have become clear. Such regulation may not be possible as protocols and rulesets currently being coded into the system may be impossible to amend in the future (unless they can obtain either developer or network consensus). The third is that regulators assume methods for overseeing extraordinary transaction are necessary to avoid widespread, near-effortless money laundering. Yet, each of the other social worlds is operating under the assumption that this trade-off has already been accepted. These findings demonstrate subtle power transitions and changes in privacy attitudes that have implications for research on blockchain, management, and boundary objects in general.

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Blockchain technologies have introduced a platform for a new wave of project management systems, providing managers with a range of characteristics, capabilities, and feature sets to aid their practice as they engage in increasingly complex processes and projects. This paper presents an explorative case-study in which open-ended interviews were conducted with practicing project managers. The interviews are analysed to understand currently deployed project management tools, technologies, and methods and to contextualise how blockchain-based systems may allow for improvements. Five constructs emerge: transparency, control, dynamic status updating, incentives, and trust. Feedback suggests blockchain-based alternatives could offer significantly better performance within each of these constructs, and thus should be explored as the technological backbone to the next generation of project management systems.

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