Finance 4.0: Design principles for a value-sensitive cryptoecnomic system to address sustainability
This work addresses sustainability issues in cryptoeconomic systems for designers and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing value-sensitive design methods.
The paper tackles the problem of designing cryptoeconomic systems to address sustainability challenges by proposing value-sensitive design principles that use multi-dimensional token incentives, and it validates these principles through user studies showing relevance, usability, and impact.
Cryptoeconomic systems derive their power but can not be controlled by the underlying software systems and the rules they enshrine. This adds a level of complexity to the software design process. At the same time, such systems, when designed with human values in mind, offer new approaches to tackle sustainability challenges, that are plagued by commons dilemmas and negative external effects caused by a one-dimensional monetary system. This paper proposes a design science research methodology with value-sensitive design methods to derive design principles for a value-sensitive socio-ecological cryptoeconomic system that incentivizes actions toward sustainability via multi-dimensional token incentives. These design principles are implemented in a software that is validated in user studies that demonstrate its relevance, usability and impact. Our findings provide new insights on designing cryptoeconomic systems. Moreover, the identified design principles for a value-sensitive socio-ecological financial system indicate opportunities for new research directions and business innovations.