This article defines protocol geopolitics as strategic contest over executable rules that determine transaction validity, identity recognition, settlement finality and cross-system compatibility. It asks when protocol architecture converts digital interdependence into asymmetric political capacity.
The article uses a structured theory-building comparison. It places blockchain governance in dialogue with protocol politics, standards-based power, infrastructural power and governance-fragmentation scholarship; compares public-chain, permissioned and hybrid regimes across five dependency channels and four operational layers and uses bounded illustrations from Ethereum, Ecuador and South Africa. The cases specify mechanisms rather than test causal effects.
Protocols become geopolitically consequential when they perform validity, finality or access-control functions. A protocol patchwork emerges where actors value continued exchange but confront legal heterogeneity, technical switching costs and selective connectivity. Interoperability brokers gain leverage by translating identities and assets, conditioning access and coordinating recovery, although that leverage weakens when gateways are open, substitutable and subject to multilateral recognition.
The article does not claim that technical infrastructures have only recently become political. Its contribution is to specify how executable protocol rules generate five distinct dependency channels and why partially interoperable regimes create a form of brokerage power not captured by territorial control alone.
