Blockchain for the Arts and Humanities

As born-digital cultural materials proliferate, the arts and humanities require infrastructures that guarantee provenance, authenticity, and equitable access. This paper delivers a comprehensive, critical survey of blockchain's potential and limits across the sector. Moving beyond proof-of-concept enthusiasm, the paper queries whether blockchain provides demonstrable advantages over established, centralised solutions and identifies the social, economic, and technical barriers still hindering adoption. After contextualising blockchain's technical genealogy, applications in four domains are evaluated: preservation and provenance, scholarly publishing, proof-of-useful-work (PoUW), and NFTs and cultural value. Bringing these strands together, the study outlines pathways towards a decentralised humanities ecosystem that augments existing practice. Selective pilot projects, community-driven standards, and federated governance emerge as pragmatic steps to harness blockchain's strengths—immutability, transparency, and distributed trust—while mitigating environmental impact, cost, and exclusion. The paper thus frames blockchain as a contingent tool whose scholarly value depends on careful, collaborative design.