CREDIT: Cryptocurrency Effects in Digital Transformations

This research will consider the research issues emerging from crypto currencies eg Bitcoin and their associated underlying technology, the block chain.

The Bank of England in its recent report on Digital Currencies suggest that although there are many innovations that are either an innovation in the payment system (M-Pesa) or the currency (Bristol £), digital currencies represent an innovation in both payment and currency.

Digital currencies that are based on cryptographic protocols are termed crypto-currencies. These allow end-users to operate a financial system "without trust in third-parties" (Weber, 2014) through the use of a distributed public ledger. These systems are are technologically innovative and potentially extremely disruptive not only of money and payment systems, but also of centralised structures of control, recording and validation.

This research aims to investigate the phenomena of crypto-currencies grouped around 4 main themes, digital transformations, privacy, community and institutions; themes which are closely inter-related through the issue of "currency" and present wide ranging research opportunities.


The outcomes of the research will be
Policy documents for various stakeholders including central and local government, industry bodies such as techUK, research agencies etc.
A methodology for those companies engaged in incorporating crypto-currencies and blockchain technologies within their products and services. The methodology will be a step-step guide of the issues to be considered at each phase and will address both start-ups and incumbents.
A number of small pilot studies examining the potential impacts of crypto-currencies
A community of academic researchers and professionals able to develop the research area
Support for the DE theme in developing future calls in crypto currencies.
A compilation and dissemination of evidence of impact from the projects, identifying risks and opportunities for the UK.

Policy Making Impact
The research will provide evidence-based knowledge to inform policy making for the UK government, government agencies, industry groups such as TechUK and regional and local authorities. Crypto-currencies have the potential to make a considerable difference to both the activities of government bodies and policy-making. Through the work of Dr Mulligan at Future Cities Catapult we have excellent contacts with UK and European Government; Prof Brown (closely aligned to the project through Surrey's CODE research group) at Surrey has strong links to the Cabinet Office and the National Audit Office. Roger Maull has good links with Tech UK and meetings are already arranged to conduct further policy work.

Academic Impact
The research will provide new knowledge in the field of crypto-currencies and their economic and social impact; as such it is a typical Digital Economy multi-disciplinary project. We expect to make contributions to the fields of computer science, cryptography, economics, business and management. Within our wider community building activities we will also link with the broader social sciences: e.g. anthropologists have long researched into 'money' and debt. We will also incorporate the ideas emerging from our research into executive education, as well as post-graduate and undergraduate teaching.

In terms of research outputs we will focus attention on a small set of high quality publications. We have already begun discussion with an editor of a 4* Business journal as to the possibility of a Special Issue and Springer-Verlag have agreed a special issue for computer science related outputs. The leading edge of research in crypto currencies is in academic conferences. Therefore a key dissemination mechanism will be to present our research at leading conferences and academic seminars eg Computing, Information Systems and Management conferences. There is considerable interest in crypto-currencies amongst businesses and industry bodies and we have already had a number of invitations to present our research at these events.

Commercial Impact
Crypto-currencies have the potential to also transform fundamental aspects of industry and society. CREDIT will create impact on several levels across a broad spectrum of recipients in the UK. We will engage and create impact through interaction with industry both nationally and internationally (see Letters of Support). We will achieve this through running workshops and delivering presentations but also through building a process based workbook: a how-to guide. This will be particularly addressed at SMEs and start-ups. For incumbents we will also develop an audit tool around dominant design to analyse the key areas of resistance within the organization.

Community Impact
A driving force for CREDIT will be the creation of impact through delivering outputs from the UK academic community into globally relevant forums, for example W3C (Dr Mulligan has recently been invited to join this group to represent Cryptocurrencies and IoT), where CREDIT will be able to drive the results of CREDIT will act as an integrating entity to collaborate and co-ordinate these activities to ensure the research delivered will be received at the highest level.

A key part of CREDIT is to build upon the existing Digital Economy communities in economics and business models (NEMODE) and those around Cybersecurity/Cryptography/Crypto currencies (SSN+) to expand the connections between these networks and to integrate new members in order to link 'best-with-best' in this emerging field. Crypto currencies are inherently a multidisciplinary topic - requiring the integration of multiple research skills together. Every activity will therefore contain some aspect of inter-disciplinarity or multi-disciplinarity allowing members to exchange methods, best practice, knowledge, background and access to other relevant networks.