papers
This paper by DCI Reserach Scientist Robleh Ali sets out a structure for a digital fiat currency system. The primary benefit of the cellular structure is that it lowers barriers to entry for payments by using trustless intermediation between cells in the system. The larger purpose of this structure is to create an open foundation for a decentralized financial system in which competition can thrive but which cannot be captured by private interests.
Auditing and financial oversight are critical to proving institutions are complying with regulation. This paper presents zkLedger, the first system to protect ledger participants’ privacy and provide fast, provably correct auditing.
Smart contracts are an often touted feature of cryptographic currency systems such as Bitcoin, but they have yet to see widespread financial use. In this paper, Tadge Dryja presents a solution he calls Discrete Log Contracts.
Christian Catalini is one of the world's leading academics on the business and economics of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Here are a few of his publications.
The Web has steadily evolved into an ecosystem of large, corporate-controlled mega-platforms which intermediate speech online. In this report we explore two important ways structurally decentralized systems could help address this.
There are tremendous potential applications for blockchain technology, an innovative distributed ledger database system, within the real estate industry. This paper explores the recording of property titles.
Catena enables applications to start their own "micro-blockchain" within a blockchain like Bitcoin. A paper by Alin Tomescu and Srini Devadas, MIT CSAIL
In this draft paper by graduate researchers Keith Duffy, Pasha Goudovitch, and Pavel Fedorov, the authors explore the potential for blockchain technology to improve digital identity in the United States.
In this paper, we propose MedRec: a novel, decentralized record management system to handle EHRs, using blockchain technology.
SpaceMint is a cryptocurrency that replaces energy-intensive computation underlying most of today’s cryptocurrencies by “proof of space.” Once set up, SpaceMint consumes very little energy, which will motivate regular users to participate in the mining process thereby truly decentralizing control over the currency.
In this paper, Devavrat Shah and Kang Zhang from the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems in the Department of MIT EECS present a model for predicting the price of Bitcoin and devise a simple strategy for trading Bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency Zcash grew out of an MIT paper "Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin," by Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza.
This paper by Christian Catalini and Joshua Gans explores how entrepreneurs can use initial coin offerings — whereby they issue crypto tokens and commit to accept only those tokens as payment for future use of a digital platform — to fund venture start-up costs.