Hello and welcome to our presentation on our recent paper
"Blockchain and Cryptocurrency in Human Computer Interaction a Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda".
We are happy to present this here at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference 2022.
Here on the right, you can see a QR code and the
link to our paper if you want to download it and read along.
This project was done by a group of researchers from different universities the CDTM,
the Center for Digital Technology and Management in Munich which is a joint institution of the TUM
(Technical University of Munich) and the LMU (Ludwig Maximilian Universität)
and the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich as well as Lancaster University.
So what was our motivation behind conducting this literature review?
Over the past decade, cryptocurrencies and blockchains
as a field have developed tremendously. We've seen the emergence of Ethereum,
smart contracts, and their iteration in new blockchains like Cosmos, Polkadot, or Solana.
Yet it is still widely agreed that the technology lags behind with regard to usability.
So our motivation here was to consolidate the knowledge that the HCI community had brought
forward and to understand how this field developed:
What are current themes and issues and what are potentially interesting future
research avenues that our field can contribute to?
We approached this with a classic literature review design we used the PRISMA framework
and started out with the keyword search across ACM, IEEE, and Springer Link.
We included all articles up to the point of our keyword search which was July 2021.
This resulted in around 1400 articles (already including those added through
forward search of the final results). Through stepwise screening – first title
and abstract and then going more deeply into the full text – we ended up with 99 relevant articles.
We coded the identified papers in several iterations along different categories:
bibliometrics, contributions, used methods, which cryptocurrencies and blockchains they looked at,
and whether they framed the research question with regards to cryptocurrencies or blockchains.
Now these are not all of them, but based on these different categories we
identified six salient themes: (1) trust in trustless systems, (2) cryptocurrencies,
their motivation risks and perceptions, (3) cryptocurrency wallets, (4) blockchains
and engaging users with it, (5) specific application use cases for blockchains, (6) and
support tools for blockchains. Now already by the naming, you can see
that there is a chasm between cryptocurrencies, a focus on them, and a focus on blockchains.
We tried to capture this in a figure. Here you can see the different themes in different
lanes and all the papers assigned to them. In green you see the cryptocurrency papers
– those that approach their research looking at the cryptocurrencies – versus
the papers in red that have a blockchain focus. Looking at this it becomes evident that these
different foci blockchain vs cryptocurrency actually address different issues.
Now, for example, let's look at "Cryptocurrency: Motivation, Risks and Perception".
This is very much about understanding cryptocurrency users
not so much about blockchain users, though. Compared to that "Specific application use
cases" – building with blockchain, prototyping with blockchain – almost always look at
it from a blockchain perspective. Now, what can we learn from that?
I think to dive in there in-depth you have to read the paper.
Instead, I want to take the time to focus on the discussion. Taking a step back,
what can we learn from the state of HCI research on cryptocurrency and blockchain?
If we look into practice we can see that blockchain ecosystems
have brought forward many innovations over the past years.
We have moved from Bitcoin to smart contract blockchains,
like Ethereum, to the second iteration of them with Solana, Cosmos, Terra, or Polygon.
Many projects reaching maturity that improve over the original usability issues the design
of Ethereum and Bitcoin brings with them, namely slow and expensive transactions.
Interaction with blockchains and smart contracts has been gaining maturity.
There are interfaces now, web3 if you want so, that move interacting with blockchains
increasingly to the browser and make it more accessible to users.
DeFi or NFTs have emerged as recent phenomena, attracting new groups of users
that are more interested in the use case than the technology behind it.
Looking at HCI research we find that we lag behind the developments in practice.
Most extant literature focuses on Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Ee didn't find any papers really taking these new
interactive blockchains and doing research on them.
Web3 and its connected phenomena like NFTs and DeFi are still underresearched.
This also has to do with the fact that our literature reviews stopped in July 2021,
before NFTs exploded in the summer. This is not to say they weren't there before.
Overall little prototyping has been done with regards to decentralized applications
or cryptocurrency wallets, as the entry gate to blockchain ecosystems.
So what does this mean for future research? There's still plenty to improve on
where the HCI community and interaction designers can contribute to.
First, we need to get a better understanding of who blockchain users really are.
Because right now we treat them as one. But first, empirical research has shown
that actually they are different groups and arguably this continues
as "True Bitcoiner" s are not the same group of users with the same motivation as the
current group of users joining because of NFTs. So we need to differentiate a bit more and we need
to better understand those sub-communities The same goes for decentralized
autonomous organizations (DAOs). They bring a totally different
form of working toward goals, in the digital but also in the physical space, with them.
It's interesting to explore the tension between trust
and pseudonymity and how these tensions are managed by increasingly large groups.
Finally, diversity and inclusion have been long-standing topics in our community
and yet we do not understand why the majority of cryptocurrency and blockchain
users – the overwhelming maturity – as a report by studies are male.
A second point where the interaction design community can make a real difference is to
generate and create new and better concepts for wallets.
Empirical research so far has brought forward design implications but never tested them.
And arguably we can only test them if we build. We need to differentiate here between hardware
wallets mobile wallets and browser wallets. And future research should do so because at
the moment we know a little bit about mobile wallets but very little about the other two.
And finally, there is the opportunity to build interfaces that help users transition
from custodial wallets – such as let's say Coinbase – that manage the keys for users,
to non-custodial wallets that require more responsibility and effort on the user's side but
could also offer more flexibility. Not all users might want that.
But still helping them transition is important because once you make a mistake and you lose your
keys, then truly, your money is gone. And that's high risk at stake.
Finally we also need to move beyond Bitcoin as a community.
It is the largest cryptocurrency but arguably there's a much bigger design space: To engage
with smart contract application blockchains. And this is also where we can now with
new blockchains like Solana or Cosmos or Polygon build truly interactive blockchain applications.
This also means that we need to engage with contemporary phenomena like NFTs or DeFi that
arguably have brought in an increasingly high number of users, eclipsing those
of past users that joined just because of cryptocurrency on their own.
So understanding prototyping and exploring the design space
about NFTs could be hugely interesting. This connects also back to the last point:
Understanding identity on the ledger. One part of this is self-sovereign identity.
Logging in with your wallet address instead of an email address and password.
And reputation behind that stored on the blockchain.
But an additional opportunity is to chart the design space for expression
of digital identity: What could it look like? Well, right now people are already using NFTs
as profile pictures or expressing themselves purely through their online personas.
How could this develop in the future and what could it be used for?
Well, this is up for the interaction design community to explore...
Thank you for listening to this talk! I hope
you find our paper interesting. You can download it here.