Dr. Andrea Leiter:
- Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam
- Director of Amsterdam Center for International Law
- Senior Research Fellow at ZUG Institute for Blockchain Research
About this interview: This conversation with Dr. Andrea Leiter was recorded at Funkhaus Berlin on 19 June 2026 during the Web3 Summit. It was later broadcast on 6 July 2026 at 7:00 p.m. as part of Do You Speak Tech?, my radio show on Dublin community radio station Near FM.
What kind of “Truth” was Web3 trying to create?
PatrickDomanico: Your talk yesterday wasMore Truth: What Web3 Was Chasing and What Got Away. So, what kind of truth was Web3 originally promising? A technical truth, economic, institutional, or something more political?
Andrea Leiter: Yeah, I mean, I think that the point of the talk, indeed, was to say that there was a lot of attention on the technical implementation of the transaction as a truth machine. So, if the transaction is correct, if it represents what was to be transacted without the possibility of corruptibility through a central institution, then that would indeed be the basis upon which all sorts of other things could be built.
But it is the focus on the technical that I think gets in the way of looking at the social that makes up the transactions, the communities, the individuals, and, even more so, really what is being transacted.
And I think it’s something that, from a legal theory perspective, for someone who comes from a legal theory background, is relatively easy to see, because I would say that legal theory has spent almost four to five decades trying to show how the smoothness and the purity of the transaction that is supposedly based on consent of two individuals can be extremely problematic in a world of unequal bargaining power, of unequal access to services, and so on.
So, the idea of formal equality of consenting individuals in a transaction is a bit of an, yeah, ideal type of scenario that, once it lands in the world, causes a lot of problems, but can pretend not to cause these problems because the transaction is truthful.
Can Blockchain be a “Truth Machine” without social trust?
PatrickDomanico: I think the next question is something more in-depth. Let’s talk about blockchain, which is often described as a truth machine because records can be verified without trusting a central authority. But can technical verification ever replace social trust, journalism, institutions, or specifically law?
Andrea Leiter: I mean, I don’t think so at all. I mean, I also think that the idea that blockchain is a truth machine holds insofar as the transactional history becomes incorruptible. So, whatever has been written into the ledger can only be changed through very big efforts.
So, it is a truth machine in the sense that it is like an archive machine, a record-keeping machine that is based on a decentralized network. And so no single institution can retrospectively change the status of the ledger. And I think that’s its strongest feature.
But the question of how truths of the world come to be represented digitally, that’s a whole different problem. So, that has very little to do with the fact that the ledger cannot be changed. It has much more to do with the question: how do you bring offline information or non-digital information into the digital space?
And that always depends on the sources. Who is talking? On which kind of basis are they? In blockchain, we call that the “oracle problem.” And I think that has a very nice tone. It tells you everything you need to know.
Now, what does the oracle bring up? And there is a place of indeterminacy and unclearness where we again rely on the trustworthiness of sources like journalism, like institutions, and so on, in order to verify the data that goes onto the chain in the first place. So, that problem is not solved by blockchain.
Quantum Computing, Encryption and the limits of Blockchain
PatrickDomanico: I was thinking if you really believe that machines cannot be manipulated in any technical way, of course.
Andrea Leiter: I mean, I think that depends on the kind of machine and the kind of setup. I mean, I would say that one of the big questions is the power of quantum computing and what it will do to the encryption that is necessary for all the blockchains.
So, if… when… quantum computers will be powerful enough to decrypt very fast everything that has been secured through encryption in the blockchain, that will be a problem.
But that’s a technological, you know, build-up onto another kind of technological setting. So, I mean, I think there is no absolute yes or no answer. I think it depends on the system, and it depends on what you want to do with it.
So, I do think probably all technology has a glitch spot.
PatrickDomanico: Absolutely. And what can we do in that case when a quantum computer moves from a theoretical aspect to a practical or real use? So, is there anything that you have to change or be prepared for?
Because, for example, there is this trend at the moment but I don’t remember the term. This is the second time that I was talking with an interviewee, another professor from Trinity College Dublin, and I couldn’t remember the expression, but there are the so-called crackers who are downloading a lot of databases, even if they are unable to crack them. So, they are just collecting them in case, because one day, with the quantum they will and blah, blah, blah.
So, in this context, what do you see in a more generic and wider scenario?
Andrea Leiter: It’s a very good question. And I have to say that I lack the technological expertise to have a really informed understanding of where we are at. How much of this is speculation? How far away? I don’t know.
I mean, I do think the few things that can be said are that, indeed, I think the quantum space is also a space similar to how the blockchain space was, where there is a lot of potential, where you can basically not say a straight sentence about the technology without using the word “potential,” and it all falls apart because nothing is here yet.
So, it’s all a bit of an expectation of a future to come. And it will have, for sure, a significant impact. I mean, particularly on the question of encryption/decryption. On the other hand, people are working on quantum encryption at the same time. So, I mean, I think people are trying to prepare for that by using the same technology for securing better.
I think the question of this availability of data everywhere is really a bit of… I think we don’t know yet what will happen. But I do think the fact that we have been, in the past decade, almost feverishly, obsessively sharing things about ourselves with the world could become problematic, depending on the political inclinations of governments.
We are seeing a rise of authoritarianism, so ever more authoritarian tendencies in different governments around the world. And the idea that these governments can put their hands not just on social media, which is already where I think people are a bit careless and maybe too much craving for some resonance and love from the world through exposing themselves…
I think now, with the advent of LLMs and really the level of intimacy that people go to with their chatbots, I mean, I think you can really develop a whole cosmology of someone, not just psychological, but really like you can paint the whole world of someone’s life through having access to the data sets that are now really carelessly, again, fed into the big tech companies.
I do think that the question of how to protect privacy, how to do better… I mean, I think we might be a bit of a lost cause for this. Um, but I’m thinking of my children, for example, and I think with them, I would be much more careful about everything that I would put out and put up about them.
Because the bright side of it is like, oh yeah, you get thumbs up and you get hearts, and you get good at knowing what kinds of things. But the dark side of it is, of course, whoever sits on this data, if we don’t have a democratic, safe state with a rule-of-law system, then, maybe, this will cause us a lot of trouble.
Did financialisation change the original promise of Web3?
PatrickDomanico: You have worked on how blockchain can change the way we understand value and governance. When Web3 became heavily financialized, did it lose the chance to create new forms of value beyond markets and speculation?
Andrea Leiter: I think there are two things to say to that. It’s a very interesting question, and it’s a good provocation.
I mean, I think the first point is that I don’t think it loses its ability to do value from below that is not as speculative and as, I would say, blown up or lifted as financial speculative value.
So, I think that — and I think this is also continuing — there is still a plethora of small-scale projects that are relying on blockchain technology for non-financialised value-from-below work.
There are, yeah, different projects that you can see: Grassroots Economics, the Crypto Commons, Bread Co-op, I mean, people are really like, to name just a few, including also the organization I co-led and co-founded Sovereign Nature Initiative, where we also tried to do something very different. And the speculative element didn’t play a big role.
But I think that, in general, as a, like, I would almost say psychological trait of the space, the idea of a unicorn, which means you have to be speculative in some way or another if you have a 10x return on investment, or more than that, is deeply ingrained.
I mean, the first people who had invested in the different protocols, they did see their investments one hundredfold. So, it happened. And so that sense that it happened and that it was possible, I think, cannot be underestimated in what animates the space, what animates people.
You know, if you have a first-mover advantage, maybe, who knows, maybe you will get very rich out of that. And then I think this is part and parcel of the crypto mentality.
And I think that here, then, the question becomes: can you use that? And can you use the fact that this really indeed happened and becomes real to funnel these flows into the projects that are not speculative, that are regenerative, that are reproductive, that sustain life on Earth?
And I mean, I think Yanis Varoufakis said it yesterday very beautifully on stage. You know, he said, yeah, I mean, you need to become a class traitor. I mean, this is a great fantasy. You know, you become rich and then you redistribute.
So, I think in that sense, it plays a big role.
And then finally, maybe just to say, yes, I think finance is the name of the game in crypto at the moment. I think there are large-scale institutional players that have nothing to do with anything that was a subcultural vibe of Web3 in the get-go, that had zero interest in developing a better future or anything like that.
They just have a very clear task, which is to make as much profit as possible through technological innovation. And I think this mix of blockchain technology and financial innovation is a match made in heaven.
The perfect use case for blockchain is finance, is bot arbitrage, bot finance. I mean, let me say this better… algorithmic trading is a much better word. So, I think this is really what blockchain technology does best: enable algorithmic trading.
Can Blockchain help Journalism verify what is real online?
PatrickDomanico: Talking again about AI and Web3, I think from a journalistic point of view, of course, because I really love any kind of aspect of journalism, even a technical one, like data journalism or the adoption of AI and ethical aspects.
For example, one of the problems sometimes is about copyright. I was thinking that maybe blockchain can be useful in journalism because, for example, let’s imagine this interview with you. I’m going to write an article, and then we have a specific record.
So, do you think, in this context about AI and all the things, good and bad, that it is bringing, can blockchain help verify what is real online, or will it add another layer of complexity?
Andrea Leiter: I mean, I do think that is a good question. And, to my mind, at least, I don’t come from that space. I have never worked in this area. So, it’s really only…
PatrickDomanico: Not from a technical point of view…
Andrea Leiter: Yeah. The way that I think about it, I do think that brings us back also to your first question. What is it about blockchain and verification of data?
I mean, in a sense, the moment you have a trusted source of data, if your problem is not whether the data is trustworthy because you don’t trust the source, that blockchain can do.
But if you have a trusted source, then I do really think that, in this time of fake news, false truths, and the almost impossibility of verifying where an image comes from, blockchain could be a technical implementation of that in that sense.
And I think there have been companies trying to work on that, and I think you can go at it in different ways. You can either say that now, after our interview, for example, you upload this file and you sign it with your private key. So, it is attached to this account, which is your journalistic account. And this will be knowable.
So, no one can pretend that it came from anywhere else. So, if you know that this is the source it came from, then that can be an important layer, at least to know, you know, is it really The New York Times that published that? Is it really, or is this a fake video?
So, I think on that level, it will add a layer of complexity for sure. It will have to add a layer of complexity, but I think it could be a really important and useful application.
Why is Web3 still so difficult for ordinary users?
PatrickDomanico: And what about the policy instead? What are the main bottlenecks in terms of policies, law, and the adoption of those technologies? What are the main bottlenecks, in your perception and in your research studies?
And so, if you had to describe this to your children that you were mentioning, or to my lovely ten-year-old niece, how could you say why it is very hard to adopt this kind of technology at the moment?
Andrea Leiter: So, what’s the main… I mean, I think that, for blockchain specifically, one of the problems is that the decentralization of finance, the decentralization of money, the way that the technology at the moment operates, asks a lot of people.
I mean, I don’t know how much experience you have with this, but I have been doing this for ten years and operated with the most complicated interfaces. Every time you send a Web3, every time you send a blockchain transaction out, you almost have a heart attack because you send it into the ether.
And then you can say, hey, I’m going to call the blockchain if something went wrong.
So, I mean, the level of responsibility that you have to carry as a user is enormous. We have banks also, not just because they have the capacity to privately print money and all of the political economy, macroeconomic reasons. I mean, that is one part of the picture, but it’s also for usability.
It’s also for being able to indeed make a transaction on a large scale and not have to carry the whole responsibility of understanding the stack, of understanding who’s behind it. So, all of that trust that is meant to be outsourced through the transaction, in a sense, becomes a problem of the end user left alone, having to scroll through Reddit fora and all sorts of places to see, hey, is this company legit? Can I actually do this token wrapper? Oh, I did this and this. And now my funds are somewhere, and I don’t know how to get them back.
And I mean, there’s a whole life of how you handle this technology properly, because it is disintermediated, because it is on the individual to do it. And I think there is just a bit of a false idea of what humans are willing to do.
I think they’re just not. People are just not interested enough to be the custodians of their own money if they have a trusted intermediary. Even if they pay a fee for it, they’ll be like, yeah, let’s do that. That’s nice. Then I can call you, and I can say, I had a problem, and you will fix it for me.
So, I think this is something where blockchain has a fantasy of this idea of self-sovereignty, which is really also a funny double-down word on something. So, it’s really me, me, me, me, me. Self-sovereign adds something to it. And that just doesn’t hold up with how people like to live their lives. It’s too complicated.
What did Web3 lose and what can still be recovered?
PatrickDomanico: For ordinary citizens the promise of Web3 was often empowerment: more ownership, more transparency. So what’s the most important thing that got away and is still recoverable?
Andrea Leiter: I mean, I think the most important thing that got away is that the people who built this technology, which was really a technology built bottom-up, it’s not a big corporate. This is one of the very particular things about Web3.
It was not launched and invented by a big corporation. It was launched and invented by a bunch of people who came to be ever more so. It’s a community, it’s a subculture, it’s a movement. And this is what built and developed this technology and made it so powerful.
And I think that a lot of the expertise, the knowledge, the deep understanding still sits with that community. So, I think this is what should be protected through investment into the community, rather than trying to sell products to the big investors and forget about the people who are at the bottom of holding this.
So, I think if it’s meant to be in the service of a social collective, of a better future, it needs to work in the community that develops it. It needs to be able to care for that community and then move outward from there.
But I think if you let the base die, then I think we are really in trouble. I don’t think we are there yet. I do think this is salvageable. So, I think that’s the core.
Why Privacy may be Web3’s most immediate use case
PatrickDomanico: Okay. So thank you very much. Last question for our audience. So what’s one thing that listeners should do after hearing this interview with you today?
Andrea Leiter: Yeah, I would shout out to my colleagues about a project, which I think is a fabulous project, a privacy project in Web3. It’s called Nym, N-Y-M, and they are working hard on privacy, Web3 based privacy.
And I do think that privacy is one of the big questions that is so immediate in people’s lives, and that is such a big problem. So, I would say go and find the Nym VPN and try it out, because it will give you a level of privacy that you probably don’t have at the moment.
And that is not very complicated. And it’s a very hands-on thing you can do.
From Get-Rich-Quick schemes to Crypto Crime
PatrickDomanico: I was lying: the last question … last, very last. Is there any question that I didn’t ask that you would have loved to answer?
Andrea Leiter: No, I can’t think of anything right now. I think we covered a number of things.
I’m thinking now a little bit that I’m speaking from my perspective. And my perspective is an inner Web3 community perspective. So, I’m trying to think a little bit about what is something that someone who has nothing to do with all of this should know or should be aware of?
And I mean, I do think that one of the things that people should be aware of is that this fantasy of getting rich quick with blockchain, with cryptocurrencies, I think has really passed.
I think that the things that we have seen in the past years, the memecoins of the president, you know, Trump’s token ($TRUMP) by the Argentine president Milei’s Libra token ($Libra). I mean, these were really like scams of the worst kind.
Editor's note: The description “scams of the worst kind” is Leiter's characterisation. $TRUMP was launched in January 2025; filings submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission state that Trump-affiliated entities initially retained 80% of its token supply and describe investment in $TRUMP as highly speculative and carrying a risk of total loss. These facts do not themselves establish that $TRUMP was fraudulent or a scam.
Argentine President Javier Milei promoted $LIBRA on social media in February 2025 before deleting the post and denying involvement with the cryptocurrency. His government stated that he had not participated in its development. Following the token's rapid rise and collapse, complaints were filed and a federal investigation was opened into the launch and Milei's involvement.And I think that the Web3 space is still filled with that. And I think that the distance in the knowledge of the user and the sophistication of the scam is getting ever bigger.
So, I think it’s a dangerous place to dabble in all by oneself.
PatrickDomanico: That’s very interesting. I have, like, a very, very, very last question.
But do you think that during, like, the race of the golden age in crypto, in the past few years, where that was what you were talking about … the idea of becoming rich very fast with crypto, speculation etc… Do you have the feeling that even some criminal organizations took advantage of it, let’s call it money laundering, just converting crypto into real money or vice versa?
Do you have this feeling? This is not a provocation.
Andrea Leiter: It’s just absolutely. And it’s not just a feeling. It’s the absolute reality. I mean, the first crypto endeavor is the Silk Road, or Alphabay, where darknet things, full-on darknet, full-on… I mean, you can differentiate between different crimes: drugs, human trafficking might be worse than drugs, whatever.
I mean, you take your own choices of what are the bad crimes and what are not-so-bad crimes, and so on. But I mean, this is a big part of crypto, the darknet.
And indeed, I mean, it remains so. And I mean, I think that if you look at many of the hacks, I mean, the North Korean hacker group [Lazarus] is well known, well renowned for hacking.
I mean, this is part and parcel of the Web3 universe. I think it would be really … yeah, it is part and parcel of the web of the Web3 universe.
PatrickDomanico: Thank you very much, even for the extra bonus questions and answers. So, where can we find you online?
Andrea Leiter: You can find me online on my profile page at the University of Amsterdam. If you put that in, you’ll find my email, and I’m on LinkedIn.
PatrickDomanico: Thank you very much for joining us today and for your time.
Andrea Leiter: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
PatrickDomanico: Thanks.
