Blockchain Ethics Has a Blind Spot: Massive Review Reveals What the Hype Ignores

Blockchain technology has been sold for more than a decade as a trust machine: a distributed ledger that records transactions across a network of nodes in a cryptographically secured, append-only way, resistant to unilateral control, and therefore capable of restoring confidence in environments where institutional credibility is contested. But a new systematic review of the scholarly literature suggests that the ethical conversation surrounding this technology has been running on a remarkably narrow track. Researchers Mosa Motea and Pius Oba of the Wits Business School at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg conducted a PRISMA-guided systematic literature review, screening 1,051 records from Scopus, Web of Science, and IEEE Xplore and ultimately analyzing 91 peer-reviewed studies published between January 2014 and April 2025. Their findings, published in SN Social Sciences, reveal a field that talks a great deal about privacy, security, transparency, and decentralization, while largely ignoring fairness, inclusivity, communal accountability, and environmental justice.

The technical architecture of blockchain is what makes these ethical questions so consequential. A distributed ledger is, at its core, a database replicated across many computers, where new entries can only be appended, never erased, and where consensus mechanisms such as Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake determine which version of the ledger is authoritative. Immutability, the property that records cannot be altered once written, is often celebrated as an ethical advantage: it resists tampering and single points of failure. Yet the review shows that this same immutability collides directly with data protection regimes such as the General Data Protection Regulation, which grants individuals a right to erasure. Scholars have examined the tension between permanent records and data minimization, consent, and accountability in decentralized systems, often framing ethics through a compliance-oriented lens rather than a broader inquiry into user autonomy or power asymmetry.

The review’s methodology is worth understanding, because it is what gives the findings their weight. The researchers followed the PRISMA 2020 framework, which provides structured guidance for reporting systematic reviews in a transparent and reproducible manner. After removing duplicates, 727 unique records remained and were subjected to title and abstract screening. This stage retained 411 articles for full-text assessment, and a detailed review of those articles, applying predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, excluded 320 studies in total. The largest single reason for exclusion was that 207 articles addressed blockchain from a purely technical or economic perspective without substantive ethical analysis. The final dataset of 91 peer-reviewed articles formed the empirical foundation for a qualitative synthesis and thematic analysis that distinguished between ethical values, design or governance principles, and concrete mechanisms and instruments.

What emerged from this analysis is a picture of ethical discourse that is heavily concentrated on a narrow cluster of technical and regulatory concerns. Privacy, security, transparency, and decentralization dominate across application domains. Security and trust were similarly prominent themes in the early literature, which positioned cryptographic assurance and distributed consensus as ethical advantages over centralized systems. Subsequent studies, however, have highlighted new vulnerabilities introduced by smart contracts, governance attacks, and the concentration of power among miners or validators, complicating simplistic narratives of trustlessness. Transparency and auditability are frequently cited as ethical benefits, particularly in supply chain management and public-sector recordkeeping, yet critical scholarship notes that transparency is often unevenly distributed, privileging technically sophisticated actors while offering limited intelligibility or recourse to affected communities. Transparency alone, the review concludes, does not guarantee accountability or democratic oversight.

The temporal distribution of publications tells its own story. Scholarly attention to blockchain ethics was limited prior to 2018, reflecting the technology’s early association with narrowly defined financial and cryptographic applications. From 2018 to 2019 onwards, the volume of ethics-focused publications increased steadily, coinciding with the expansion of blockchain into socially sensitive domains such as healthcare, digital identity, and public-sector governance. The period between 2020 and 2024 marks a pronounced growth in ethical scholarship, a surge associated not only with broader technological diffusion but also with global socio-political developments that heightened concerns around digital trust, surveillance, and data governance. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified debates around the ethical implications of digital infrastructures used for contact tracing, identity verification, and service delivery, prompting renewed scrutiny of blockchain-based solutions and their societal consequences.

Geographically, the review exposes a striking imbalance. Approximately 80 percent of the reviewed studies originate from the Global North, led primarily by the United States at 22 percent and the United Kingdom at 21 percent, with additional representation from Western European countries such as the Netherlands at 13 percent and Germany at 11 percent. Contributions from Global South regions, including Africa, parts of Asia, and the Middle East, remain comparatively limited. This uneven representation matters because dominant ethical concerns in the literature are shaped largely by developed-world research contexts, where issues related to privacy, surveillance, and data governance feature prominently. The authors argue that ethical frameworks developed within dominant Western liberal traditions are often transferred into new settings without sufficient adaptation to local histories, relational norms, or governance realities. In postcolonial and culturally diverse environments, uncritical transfer of universalized ethical assumptions risks reproducing exclusion, misalignment, or governance failure.

By application domain, the reviewed articles cluster around healthcare at 25 percent, public governance at 17 percent, financial services at 15 percent, and digital identity initiatives at 7 percent. Each domain frames ethics differently. In financial services, ethical discussion is dominated by security, fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and market integrity. In healthcare, concerns centre on privacy, consent, and data protection, reflecting the sensitivity of personal health information. Supply chain applications emphasize transparency, traceability, and accountability, particularly in relation to provenance verification. Public-sector applications broaden to include legitimacy, accountability, and citizen trust, but these studies remain fewer in number and vary considerably in analytical depth. Across domains, ethical insights are rarely transferred or adapted from one context to another, a siloed treatment that limits cumulative learning and contributes to inconsistent ethical standards across blockchain deployments.

The methodological findings are perhaps the most sobering. The majority of the 91 studies rely primarily on conceptual, normative, or theoretical analysis, drawing on ethical principles, legal reasoning, or philosophical argumentation to assess potential risks and benefits, often without reference to empirical observations of deployed systems. Empirical studies addressing ethical issues in blockchain applications are comparatively limited, and where empirical work is present, it most commonly takes the form of technical case studies, architectural analyses, or simulations focused on system performance, security, or efficiency. Studies employing qualitative methods such as interviews, ethnographic observation, or participatory design approaches remain rare. Quantitative empirical investigations of ethical outcomes, including user impact, governance effectiveness, or distributive effects, are also scarce. As a result, there is limited evidence assessing whether blockchain systems achieve stated ethical objectives in practice, and ethical discourse often remains anticipatory or speculative rather than evaluative of real-world implementations.

Formal ethical and design frameworks fare little better. Value Sensitive Design, which emphasizes the systematic incorporation of human values into technological design, has been applied sporadically to blockchain systems, often in exploratory or illustrative ways rather than as a comprehensive design methodology. Responsible Innovation, which emphasizes anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness as guiding dimensions for ethical innovation, is rarely applied systematically, and when it is mentioned, it tends to remain at a normative or policy-discursive level. In a substantial portion of the literature, ethical evaluation is conducted without reference to any formal framework at all, relying instead on ad hoc principles, regulatory benchmarks, or domain-specific norms. Where design-oriented approaches are employed, ethical considerations are often embedded indirectly through architectural choices such as permissioned versus permissionless ledgers, access control mechanisms, or privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques, but these decisions are rarely linked explicitly to underlying ethical values or subjected to systematic evaluation.

In response to these patterns, the authors propose a values-driven ethical framework with a layered structure that distinguishes between ethical values, design and governance principles, and mechanisms and institutional arrangements. The framework identifies privacy, security, transparency, and decentralization alongside underrepresented values such as fairness, inclusivity, participatory governance, communal accountability, and environmental responsibility. It does not treat these values as static or universally weighted, instead recognizing that ethical priorities may vary depending on application context, institutional setting, and stakeholder composition. Design principles such as proportionality, explainability, accountability, participation, adaptability, and sustainability function as intermediaries between abstract values and concrete mechanisms. Crucially, the framework treats code-based mechanisms and institutional processes as complementary rather than substitutive: while blockchain architectures can encode certain constraints and affordances, ethical governance requires ongoing institutional engagement, deliberation, and adaptation. The authors recommend embedding ethical impact assessments, participatory oversight, accountability and redress mechanisms, and context-sensitive implementation requirements into blockchain policy, procurement, and deployment processes. The framework is not empirically validated in this study, and the authors are explicit that it should be interpreted as a conceptual and integrative contribution, a scaffold for ethical deliberation and governance planning rather than a prescriptive or one-size-fits-all solution. But as blockchain systems continue to be deployed in domains with significant societal implications, from digital identity to healthcare records to smart-city infrastructure, the review makes clear that ethical governance will remain a critical challenge, and that the field’s persistent principle-practice gap, where ethical commitments are articulated but seldom translated into design requirements, governance mechanisms, or accountability structures, demands more than rhetoric to close.

Subject of Research: Computer Ethics

Article Title: A systematic literature review of ethical concerns in blockchain technology: towards a values-driven framework

Article References: Motea, M., & Oba, P. (2026). A systematic literature review of ethical concerns in blockchain technology: towards a values-driven framework. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 362. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01642-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01642-y

Keywords: blockchain, ethics, systematic literature review, value sensitive design, responsible innovation, digital governance, privacy, sustainability, systematic, literature, review, ethical