From Crypto Trust to Digital Governance: Mapping Coordination Frictions in Global Policy Discourse

Blockchain is no longer only a crypto-finance experiment; it is a contested digital infrastructure shaping financial regulation, data governance, and digital sovereignty. Yet policy debates lack systematic evidence on how blockchain is framed as a governable object across regions and institutions—and where such framings create coordination frictions for cross-border regulation and standard-setting. This study maps global blockchain policy discourse using a dual-corpus, two-stage design that links broad metadata coverage with full-text inference. We classify documents into governance archetypes and quantify cross-group alignment using a low-dimensional semantic space derived from text, alongside a policy-risk index capturing evaluative stance. Three findings emerge. First, the discourse shifts from monetary framings toward regulatory consolidation and then toward coordination/standard-setting and public-infrastructure integration. Second, meanings cluster by region and issuer type despite shared anchors, indicating persistent interpretive divergence. Third, evaluative stance varies systematically across groups, revealing heterogeneous risk sensitivity. By separating governance logic from evaluative stance, the paper provides a scalable measurement framework and a diagnostic toolkit (e.g., coordination heatmaps and translation tables) to identify where regulatory alignment is most likely to break down.