BEYOND OWNERSHIP: REPRESENTING ATTRIBUTES, TRUST, AND RIGHTS IN DECENTRALIZED SYSTEMS

Date

2026-9-28

Author

Pekel, Umut

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Blockchain systems were originally designed to maintain balances, ownership records, token identifiers, and transactional state without relying on a single trusted intermediary. These abstractions remain central to decentralized systems, but they are not sufficient for many real-world applications in which the relevant state originates outside the ledger. Environmental attributes, behavioral trust, asset-level economic participation, and programmable rights are examples of externally derived state whose meaning depends on physical processes, human interactions, institutional validation, legal arrangements, or settlement rules. This dissertation investigates how such externally derived state can be represented in decentralized systems beyond ownership and value transfer. The central argument is that blockchain should not be treated as a universal replacement for existing databases. Rather, decentralized representation becomes meaningful when state has significance beyond a single organizational silo, must remain attached to a specific entity, and must be verified, updated, or used operationally by multiple actors. The dissertation develops this argument through four design artifacts. First, productbound environmental attributes are examined through a blockchain-based carbon footprint management framework, where carbon-related information is treated as an attribute of the product rather than as a detached tradable artifact. Second, participant. bound behavioral trust is examined through the Behavioral Trust for Identity Decentralization (BTID) framework, where trust is modeled as an accumulative state derived from interactions rather than as a static identity property. Third, asset-level economic participation is examined through a dual-layer tokenization architecture that separates legal asset anchoring from investor-facing participation in externally validated revenue streams. Fourth, asset-bound programmable rights are examined through a triple-layer architecture and the Programmable Rights Token (PRT), where beneficiary routing, encumbrance, transfer policy, settlement pointer, unit share, and asset anchoring are represented as rights-relevant state attached to a participation unit. Across these artifacts, the dissertation identifies a common representation pattern: external fact, validation, entity binding, decentralized representation, and operational use. The central argument posits that while existing token models excel at exchangeability— making claims transferable and divisible—they often fail at financeability: the ability to assign income, register and release pledges, preserve encumbrance state, and route settlement to designated beneficiaries without losing the connection to the underlying asset. To address this, the dissertation introduces the Programmable Rights Token (PRT) not merely as a new token standard, but as a rights-centric object schema (a base rights-container) that natively carries persistent, decomposable rights. Deployed within a triple-layer architecture, the PRT demonstrates that asset-level participation requires a strict separation between legal asset identity (as a disclosure anchor), programmable rights state, and deterministic settlement execution. The ledger does not produce carbon data, create trustworthy behavior, generate asset revenues, or establish legal rights by itself. Its role is to preserve and operate on selected externally validated state in a shared, auditable, portable, and programmable form. The dissertation contributes a selective framework for evaluating when decentralized systems are useful as representation infrastructures. It shows that ownership is a necessary but incomplete primitive, and that balances, token identifiers, and static credentials do not by themselves define the external meaning of represented state. Decentralized systems may need to represent attributes attached to products, trust attached to participants, participation attached to assets, and rights attached to participation units. By reframing blockchain design around representation fit rather than decentralization for its own sake, the dissertation provides a conceptual and architectural basis for future systems that coordinate externally meaningful state across organizational boundaries.

Subject Keywords

blockchain, decentralized systems, external state representation, representation beyond ownership, carbon footprint, behavioral trust, real-world asset tokenization, programmable rights token

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120996

Collections

Graduate School of Applied Mathematics, Thesis