Today, new technologies are emerging all at once—artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT), among others. These technologies are steadily reshaping both the economy and our everyday lives at remarkable speed. It is widely acknowledged that while they offer immense benefits, they cannot be left to operate without boundaries. Governments inevitably have to step in—not only to prevent negative impacts from spiraling out of control, but also to ensure that regulation does not stifle innovation and undermine the country’s future development.
Yet before enacting any law to regulate something, the state must first answer a fundamental question: What exactly is it trying to regulate? Although this may sound simple, in practice it is far from straightforward. We are not dealing with tangible objects like tables, chairs, or roads that everyone perceives in the same way. Instead, we are confronting technologies that are complex and ambiguous, interpreted differently by different groups. Definition thus becomes the “first button” of regulation—if the first button is fastened incorrectly, all the subsequent ones will be misaligned.
This very “first button” problem is what Stefan Seidel and his colleagues examine seriously in their 2025 article, Regulating Emerging Technologies: Prospective Sensemaking Through Abstraction and Elaboration, published in MIS Quarterly. They invite us to explore how people from diverse backgrounds—technologists, business actors, legal experts, and civil servants—can collectively make sense of emerging technologies and build shared understanding in order to craft regulatory frameworks that do not become obsolete too quickly.
The research team’s case study focuses on the regulation of blockchain technology in a small European country called Liechtenstein. At the outset, the discussion seemed centered on blockchain and cryptocurrency. Yet as interpretations were unpacked and debated over time, the “object of regulation” gradually expanded into legislation covering the broader token economy based on what was termed “trustworthy technology,” rather than being tied narrowly to a specific technological label.
Importantly, this process did not emerge from drafting laws behind closed doors by isolated parties. Instead, it evolved through gradual reinterpretation, dismantling, and reconstruction of technological definitions together, through two mechanisms the researchers call abstraction and elaboration.
The result was a legal framework not bound to a temporary technological trend, but one with the potential to “survive” alongside future technological evolution. Defining technology in a comprehensive and clear manner is therefore not a minor technical detail to be fixed later—it is the foundational step that determines how long a law can remain relevant.
Liechtenstein is a small country in Central Europe whose economy relies heavily on the financial sector. The government recognized that maintaining competitiveness would require opening space for new financial technologies within its economic system. When Seidel and his team conducted their research, the country did not even have a specific “blockchain law,” providing a valuable opportunity to observe how a piece of legislation is gradually assembled from scratch.
Blockchain itself holds significant potential to transform transactions, as it is a distributed database spread across multiple nodes, making retrospective alterations difficult and enhancing trust compared to traditional systems. Yet in practice, blockchain could not fully realize its potential because everything remained legally ambiguous. No one was certain what was legally permissible or impermissible on the blockchain. As a result, entrepreneurs hesitated to invest in innovative business models enabled by the technology, unsure whether future regulations would render them non-compliant.
This represents a classic case of “legal uncertainty” in an era where technology advances faster than regulatory paperwork. To address this challenge, Liechtenstein began designing blockchain-related legislation. In Seidel and colleagues’ study, this process unfolds in three main phases:
In 2016, the Ministry of General Government Affairs and Finance formed a small working group of six members, bringing together experts from technology, business, and law. The first challenge they encountered was that even terms we now consider familiar—such as token, private key, and public key—lacked shared meaning at the time. Each participant held a different mental image.
This phase, termed close-circle sensemaking, involved a small group working to establish common language and shared understanding. A critical shift occurred when the discussion expanded from the narrow question of how to regulate cryptocurrency to viewing the broader “cryptofinance system”—the entire financial ecosystem surrounding crypto assets, rather than focusing solely on individual coins.
Once a broader framework emerged, the government widened the discussion, inviting legal scholars and academics to participate. These expanded conversations led to a significant reframing of blockchain. Regulators gradually shifted from thinking in terms of a “cryptofinance system” to conceptualizing a “token economy based on trustworthy technology.”
The turning point was recognizing that tokens are not merely representations of cryptocurrency or financial assets. Instead, they can function as “containers of rights”—whether rights to property, rights to access services, or rights to various forms of returns. This broader perspective allowed the law to move beyond regulating a specific financial technology and instead address a wider economic framework.
Once the overall vision stabilized, the initial draft law was no longer confined to a small circle. Liechtenstein opened the draft to broader stakeholder consultation, extending the sensemaking process beyond the initial group that had shaped the vision.
Ultimately, the country enacted its blockchain law in 2020, explicitly announcing itself as “the first country with a comprehensive regulation for the token economy,” stating:
“With the new law, Liechtenstein is the first country with a comprehensive regulation for the token economy. The law regulates civil law and also provides appropriate supervision of service providers in the token economy.”
In short, Liechtenstein began with the simple question of how to regulate blockchain, but concluded with legislation not tied to any single technological label. Instead, it focused on the broader token economy grounded in trustworthy technology—allowing the law to endure beyond specific technological shifts.
Sensemaking is a fundamental human process. We navigate daily life by interpreting what things around us mean—for ourselves and for others. Without this process, we would be unable to respond meaningfully to situations.
One of the earliest scholars to systematically explore this concept was Karl Weick in his 1979 book The Social Psychology of Organizing. Drawing inspiration from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Weick described organizations as continually enacting, selecting, and retaining meanings—much like living organisms adapting over time.
Building on Weick’s ideas, Stefan Seidel emphasizes that when states regulate emerging technologies, they must define them through collective sensemaking among diverse stakeholders. He identifies two core processes: abstraction and elaboration, which operate iteratively.
Abstraction involves distilling the essence of a concept, detaching it from specific forms to capture its underlying properties. Elaboration, by contrast, reintroduces detail to make abstract concepts concrete enough to support legal design.
For example, shifting from the term “safe wallets” to “custodians” represents abstraction. A safe wallet is a specific service, but viewed abstractly, it is simply one form of asset custody. The broader concept of custodians encompasses other services sharing the same core function—holding assets on behalf of others—allowing the law to remain adaptable.
Yet abstraction alone risks excessive vagueness. Elaboration must follow, clarifying the scope of duties, types of assets covered, security responsibilities, and legal conditions. These details transform abstract concepts into enforceable legal provisions.
A well-designed regulatory framework for emerging technologies is therefore neither narrowly locked into today’s technical forms nor so broad as to be meaningless. Rather, it emerges from careful interplay between abstraction and elaboration—enabling adaptability without sacrificing clarity.
The Liechtenstein case demonstrates that when regulating emerging technologies, the starting point should not simply be “How should we control this?” but rather “What exactly are we regulating?” The answer is not readily available; it must be constructed through dialogue, negotiation, and shared interpretation among diverse actors.
In Thailand, there is a tendency to import legislation from abroad, particularly in areas of digital technology and data governance, influenced by what is often called the Brussels Effect. European Union regulations such as the GDPR have shaped global standards, including Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA).
However, adopting the text of foreign laws without revisiting the underlying definitions and conceptual structures may produce regulations misaligned with Thailand’s social and economic context. Thai regulators therefore need spaces for deeper deliberation among state agencies, the private sector, and civil society to collectively reconstruct definitions and regulatory boundaries.
At the same time, invoking “Thai context” can become problematic if it justifies isolated, “Thailand-only” legal frameworks disconnected from international standards. The core characteristics of technologies like AI, blockchain, and digital platforms share similarities across jurisdictions; what differs are institutional arrangements and socio-economic contexts.
For Thai regulatory bodies, the objective should not be choosing between wholesale legal importation and uniquely domestic legislation. Rather, it should be designing definitions anchored both in the global essence of technology and in Thailand’s specific socio-economic realities. If done well, laws are less likely to become obsolete quickly, can mitigate risks effectively, and can simultaneously leave space for experimentation and innovation to flourish.
Note: Originally published in The 101 World on 25 February 2026.
