Designing Blockchain for Scale: It’s Not Your UX

Description:

Blockchain technology enables new ways for individuals to engage in trustless and permissionless transactions, with network models that rely on aligned incentives and assume malicious actors. The emerging field of cryptoeconomics combines game theory, mechanism design, economics, and computer science to explore how to architect these blockchain-based protocols.

But user adoption of blockchain still lags. While many blame poor UX, we believe the incentive systems and network architecture themselves should be better designed for human participation. In this talk, we briefly review the blockchain space and cryptoeconomic models, identify barriers to mass adoption, and teach simple design thinking principles that can be applied to cryptoeconomic models to overcome these barriers.