This article argues that blockchain represents a form of ‘platform imperialism’ that extends both the cultural and economic power of Silicon Valley and American geopolitical interests. [...] The US State Department has played a crucial role in coalescing these networks through initiatives such as Civil Society 2.0 which cast Silicon Valley platforms and a culture of techno-solutionism as universal. What is distinct about blockchain platform imperialism are its claims to algorithmic governance and powers of cartography. As part of ‘Data’s Empire’, blockchain undermines the developing world state’s ability to control its own resources, while mapping new ‘territory as an object of power’. Blockchain complements techno-colonial processes of data extraction and computational capitalism by using code to lock in proprietary relations. Opening new terrains of data and expanding network technologies does not depend upon imperial coercion but an assemblage of development agencies, foreign governments and platforms all ‘celebrat[ing] the transformative nature of ICTs’. Within these contours, there are rival cyber-powers and platforms as well as indeterminacies of connectivity which diffuse the exercise of imperial power. However the ‘spiritual hegemony of American-based entrepreneurship’ pervades these networks. The US has relied on the soaring rhetoric of freedom, democracy and empowerment through connectivity in shaping global communication systems. American hegemony in ICT4D can be explained in political-economic terms as the support of domestic capital and platforms, the leadership of governing bodies such as ICANN and the US State Department’s long-standing interest in tech-centric soft power initiatives. This continuity of soft power and cultural imperialism spans the ‘free flow of information doctrine’ during the Cold War to the ‘freedom to connect agenda’ in the era of network computing. As articulated by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, connectivity is the ‘great leveller’ creating ‘a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all’ [...] The emergence of blockchain in the development sector foregrounds its role as a technology and discourse, at the fulcrum of American soft power initiatives, Silicon Valley solutionism and the promises of big data. This is a discourse that inculcates solutionism and a Silicon Valley performative style in the development sector, while materially expanding the purview of computational capitalism. [...] Far from the promises of decentralized and transparent data empowering all participants, data production in Pacific blockchain projects redounds to imperial hierarchies. Continua su https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951720985249 Giacomo