A new research network for Bitcoin and digital currency
tl;dr: We’re creating a new global research network to 1) study Bitcoin and stablecoin use, especially in the global south, 2) build technology capacity, and 3) understand how to better design applications and protocols to empower people to financially flourish. We’re starting with an MIT-UnB course open to anyone to teach. Get involved here.
Where will digital currencies like Bitcoin have the biggest impact?
We hear a lot of moving stories about how digital currencies like Bitcoin and stablecoins are helping people around the world. Activists have explained how their organizations have been debanked in their home countries, and how accepting donations in Bitcoin is the only way they can continue to operate. An Anti-Corruption Foundation employee said that without Bitcoin and privacy-preserving tools like CoinJoin, they couldn’t safely pay staff in Russia. We hear that stablecoin usage is rising dramatically in places like Nigeria, Argentina, Turkey and the Philippines, in part due to use cases like more cheaply sending remittances across borders, but also a desire to hold non-inflating currencies.
There are many stories like this, and digital currency advocates will say that this technology democratizes access to the financial system, and can transform finance for the unbanked. But it’s hard to tell if these stories are the exception or if something transformational is happening at scale. It’s also hard to tell how the opportunity is being balanced with the risks: There are also many stories of people suffering from cryptocurrency scams and fraud.
There are other important questions to answer, beyond merely getting a better understanding of what is happening: Instead of taking the technology as-is, can we better design it so it helps people financially flourish? By “financially flourish” we mean more than just being able to open a bank account or pass a KYC check. It’s the ability to safely earn, save, move, and grow value in ways that are meaningful in your context, and without being subject to arbitrary exclusion, seizure, or debilitating friction. In some places, that may involve a traditional bank or fintech; in others, it may mean having a secure, self-custodial Bitcoin wallet or a stablecoin account that can be used reliably. Our aim is to understand which tools truly enable people to thrive financially, and how to design them to work in the environments where they’re needed most.
For example:
How can we design wallets so that they are safer and easier to use?
Where do users run into issues using digital currency, and are there ways we can approach fixing them if we expand our view to the full stack, protocol to application?
What factors are most likely to dissuade use of a wallet or app: high latency, too many steps of interactivity, lack of trust, or high fees?
How might we encourage participation in decentralized networks around the world, including monitoring them for health and performance?
Equally important is to understand and address where these systems might increase harm:
What are the risks of rapid large-scale adoption of new currencies?
How might design choices help mitigate risks like scams, volatility, exclusion, or concentration of power?
What technical design choices can we make to “bake in” user sovereignty and prevent the potential for a platform or an authoritarian government to infringe on user rights?
We have mostly reliable institutions in the most developed countries, and that means sometimes not everyone there sees the need for self-custody. But that’s not true everywhere in the world. To understand the real-world importance of properties like privacy and self-custody, we need to go to the places where it really matters.
We realized two things recently:
Answering questions like these is vital to ensuring that digital currencies deliver on their promise
We cannot answer these questions alone in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Rapid adoption is happening in places like Lagos, Manila, and Buenos Aires. We need to collaborate with and empower the people who already intimately understand the problems with their financial systems because they live and work in them every day.
Introducing DCI Global
I’m excited to share that we’re starting a new research network, DCI Global. Inspired by similar networks that have come out of the Media Lab like the City Science Network and the Fab Lab Network, DCI Global will be a collaborative network of universities and non-profits that are working on digital currency education and research, with a focus on the questions outlined above -- to better understand how these technologies are being used, how to explain their risks, and how to improve them to solve real financial problems for real people.
We recognize that it takes time to create the relationships necessary to do effective global, collaborative research. So to start, we are offering free, open source course material. In 2018 we taught a course at MIT called Cryptocurrency Design and Engineering. The response surprised us -- over 800K views on OCW and YouTube -- and people still approach us about it at conferences. But the course is out of date.
We have been working with Professor Edil Medeiros at the University of Brasilia (UnB) to update the course and start this global experiment. We’ll be co-teaching it in the Fall 2025 at both MIT and UnB. We’ll have a common syllabus, programming assignments, and office hours between the students at MIT and UnB, and we’ll actively work to foster collaboration and a shared understanding of not only the technology, but also how to address problems in financial systems in different contexts. One reason I’m proud of our course is that it doesn’t just explain how these systems work, it gives the student an intuition for why they work the way they do, and a better sense of the design and tradeoff space so students can decide for themselves which tradeoffs make the most sense to them.
This is not just a one-time course. First, we’ll package up the material to share: It will all be open source and free to reuse, and we’ll even offer support if you want to teach it at your university. Second, we know that teaching a brand new course on complex technical topics can be hard, so we’re offering the opportunity for computer science faculty from any university to sit in on the course remotely if they are interested in teaching it in 2026 or beyond. We hope that through this course and material, we can achieve the following:
Help build greater capacity to work on this technology globally
Give universities confidence to add this to their curriculum, because they have an MIT-quality course to use as a template
Forge relationships to do joint research in the future
Eventually, we’d like to have specific joint research projects with researchers around the world and have students and researchers from these universities visit MIT, and vice versa. We hope that one day many universities might even start their own versions of the DCI.
Note that this network is not about “web3” or general “blockchain”. We are interested in what is getting real use by real people right now to solve their problems. There’s not a lot of great data out there about this, but as far as I can tell, that’s Bitcoin and stablecoins, so that’s where we are going to focus. We’re happy to broaden that to other projects if they can demonstrate real impact, but we’re not interested in pilots (often subsidized with tokens by foundations or companies) that are more about press releases than sustained organic usage.
We’re starting with a technical course designed for computer science undergraduate or graduate students because that’s what we know best, and it’s important to build technology capacity. But we also want to forge relationships with people from other disciplines who have been doing excellent work in financial inclusion and might not have been looking at digital currency just yet. In particular, we want to seek out people with expertise in financial inclusion who are willing to question assumptions. Financial inclusion is often equated with having a bank account—our work so far suggests that’s not always accurate, and we want to ask what’s truly needed for people to flourish, without assuming it’s traditional banking.
We also want to talk to you if you’re running an on-the-ground non-profit focused on Bitcoin or stablecoins and this mission speaks to you. So far we’ve been working with Lucas Ferreira at Vinteum to help kickstart the collaboration with UnB, and Pauloes Berhe at the Bitcoin Innovation Hub, as well as Makerere University in Uganda. Their contributions have been important to help practically work with local universities on the ground.
How to get involved
What can you do if you’re interested? Right now, we’re looking for the following:
MIT and UnB students: Register for the course this fall!
Computer science lecturers at universities globally who are interested in teaching Cryptocurrency Design and Engineering, especially if you want to sit in on our class. Find out more here.
(Note: We’d love to open up the course to everyone, but at this time we only have the capacity for faculty to audit the course live. The videos will be available to anyone on OCW as soon as we can get them edited and uploaded.)
Students and researchers of a related discipline who are interested in participating in the research network. Specifically, you should be interested in the research questions outlined above about how digital currency is being used globally and how to design this technology to empower people to financially flourish. If you’re interested in the course, please share this with computer science lecturers at your university who might be interested in teaching it.
On-the-ground non-profit orgs like Vinteum or the Bitcoin Innovation Hub who see alignment and want to explore how to work together to make this program a reality in their countries. This could mean anything from connecting with local universities and technical talent, to co-developing events, to bringing entirely new ideas we haven’t considered yet. We want to shape these collaborations together.
Anyone who thinks this is important and thinks they might be able to help or offer advice. For example, experts in financial inclusion and global collaboration who have seen it all and can help us avoid common pitfalls, or technologists working on inclusion from other perspectives like mesh networks, digital public infrastructure, or accessible hardware.
Last but not least, funders who can help us scale. We’re extremely grateful to Fulgur Ventures for a donation to kickstart this effort, but to realize our vision we’re going to need a lot more help. If your company or institution wants to build capacity in your country and can help fund this work, please get in touch!
Fill out this form if any of the above applies to you, and we’ll reach out. Or fill it out even if you just want to follow along, we’ll add you to our email list!