Validators: The transition from a Limited Access to Open Access Order

This pre-print paper argues that validators, who perform services from which they earn rents, hold power over blockchain networks that requires politics to control. It identifies an institutional transition from a Limited Access Order to an Open Access Order, as described by North et al. (2009), achieved through impersonal rules that constrain elite power. The authors, named in the post as @profjasonpotts and @joshuaztan, support this with an ethnography of the Validator Commons.