“What a 13th-century clock teaches us about the next digital revolution: just as the mechanical clock, 700 years ago, made trusted time universal, blockchain will make trusted transaction records universal.”

More than seven centuries ago, the public mechanical clock quietly rewired the economy. By making one piece of information, the time of the day, precise, shared and trusted, it unlocked new ways to coordinate markets, labor and trade. Blockchain’s story is much the same but in digital form: instead of synchronizing hours and minutes, it synchronizes truth about ownership, transactions and agreements. History shows that when trust in critical information changes, the entire structure of the economy changes with it. 

For more on the economic impact of the mechanical clock, see this link.

The Forgotten Power of Trusted Time

Today, knowing the time is effortless, it’s in your pocket, on your write, in the corner of your laptop. That ubiquity hides its importance: trusted time underpins everything from the time value of money to global financial market coordination, logistics, manufacturing schedules and data analytics.

Before the mechanical clock, time was local and inconsistent. Communities relied on sundials, water clocks and church bells. Workdays lasted “from sunrise to sunset”, markets opened “in the morning” and coordination beyond the village was limited. Without a shared and trusted time, economies couldn’t coordinate efficiently or scale.

The Clock Revolution

In the late 13th century, public mechanical clocks began appearing in European cities, mounted on church or civic towers, they tolled the hours for all to hear. The first motivation wasn’t economic, it was prestige. A clock was a civic symbol, much like hosting the Olympics or building a landmark skyscraper today. 

But over time, trusted time transformed the economy in three waves:

• 14th-15th centuries: markets and town meetings set start and end times. Legal contracts referenced precise hours. 

• 16th century: Workshops and proto-factories standardised shifts, pay-by-the-hour emerged, production sequences tightened.
• 17th century: time discipline seeped into philosophy, religion and science. The protestant reformation reframed time as a scarce resource: scientists used the clock as a metaphor for the universe.

The results were measurable. Between 1500 and 1700, cities that adopted clocks before 1450 grew roughly 30 percentage points faster than late adopters. The adoption curve followed the classic S-shape of transformative technologies: slow start, rapid acceleration, then plateau.

There is a strong argument to believe that blockchain today sits in the equivalent of the 14th century for clocks, visible, intriguing, sometimes derided, but not yet embedded into every economic activity. The inflection point, when cultural and organisational adoption catch up to technical capability, has yet to come.

Blockcain: The Modern Parellel

“What the clock did for time, blockchain does for transactions: it creates a single, shared ledger of economic state”

Today, before blockchain, economically important records, ownership, transactions, contracts, live in silos: bank databases, government registries, private ledgers. They are accurate within their walls, but reconciling across them was slow, costly, and error-prone and required trust.

Blockchain, like the clock, creates a single, verifiable reference point, not for hours and minutes, but for the truth of economic events. Everyone, everywhere, can see the same data at the same time without trusting a single intermediary. This turns a digital state of truth into a public utility, just as the clock turned time into one.

What time coordination did for labour shifts, market hours, and shipping schedules, blockchain coordination could do for payments, asset transfers, and multi-party contracts, collapsing delays, disputes, and duplication into a single shared truth.

And, just like the clock, blockchain’s early use cases so far have been largely prestige-driven. Bitcoin was ideological, born from the 2008 crisis. NFTs, DAO governance, and other dApps often grab headlines without delivering obvious productivity gains. Yet history shows that such prestige-driven experiments, while seemingly superficial at first, often lay the very foundations on which the most transformative and enduring economic shifts are built.

From Horse-Speed to Light-Speed

Blockchain’s adoption curve will be far steeper than the clock’s. In the 14th century, news and know-how travelled at the speed of a horse; today, open-source code, security patches, and protocol upgrades propagate worldwide in seconds. Smartphones reached over 80% global penetration in less than 15 years, social media platforms hit a billion users in under a decade, and generative AI tools like ChatGPT crossed 100 million users in two months.

With instantaneous global communication, near-zero marginal cost of software replication, and interoperable digital infrastructure, blockchain’s march to ubiquity is unlikely to take centuries, it’s more likely to be a single-generation sprint.

Four Lessons from the Clock for Blockchain’s Future

So what can we learn from the economic and societal impact of the mechanical clock? Here are four key lessons:

• Culture Comes First

The clock only reshaped economies once society embraced time discipline. Blockchain must be woven into the economic fabric through processes, regulations, and habits before its full potential is realised.

• Complementary Innovation Unlocks Value

The clock’s benefits multiplied with shift work, scheduled markets, and industrial machinery. Blockchain needs (i) legal recognition for smart contracts, (ii) intuitive UX, (iii) off-chain data integration, and (iv) interoperability to unlock its full potential

• Early Movers Lock in Advantage

Early clock cities enjoyed centuries of compounding growth. Early blockchain adopters, whether nations, industries, or platforms,  could capture network effects that latecomers can’t match.

• Prestige Pilots Can Matter

Medieval towns didn’t foresee industrialisation when they installed a clock. Today’s experimental blockchain projects may seem frivolous, but they normalise the technology and create the cultural readiness for future adoption.

A Quick Thought Experiment

Picture yourself as a merchant in 1300. Your city’s new clock tower chimes every hour. It’s novel, but doesn’t seem transformative. Decades later, you’re coordinating shipments by the hour, your suppliers are synchronised with you across cities, your workers are on precise shifts, and market clearing is faster. Trade expands, costs fall, and new industries appear.

It’s plausible that blockchain goes on a similar path. Today, it’s niche and sometimes chaotic. But once it becomes invisible infrastructure, the digital equivalent of “knowing the time”, it could underpin vast new economic systems.

Final Chime

The mechanical clock gives us a shared “now” in the physical world, blockchain offers a shared “truth” in the digital one. Both are general purpose technologies whose real economic impact only appears once society adapts.

Seven hundred years ago, the chime of a bell synchronised the rhythms of trade, labour, and daily life. Today, the steady tick of new blocks could be doing the same, quietly setting the tempo for an economy we can’t yet fully imagine. 

The lesson is simple: those who hear the chimes early and act on them can shape the tempo for everyone else. The real question is: who will strike the first chime that sets the tempo for the centuries to come?