ES 95r Blockchain Edition

Harvard’s first class on blockchain, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and the distributed internet.

FALL 2017

SEPT 2017

crypto market cap:

$18B

DEC 2017

crypto market cap:

$565B 1

December 2017 ES 95r Harvard University Layout, design, and content synthesis Shuya Gong, Joel Kwartler Content Alan Bidart ‘18, Spencer Evans ‘18, Shuya Gong ‘17-’18, Austin King ‘18, Joel Kwartler ‘18, James Kim ‘19, Daniel Kang ‘18 & Tim Maounis ‘19, Scott Sussex ‘19, Arkam Javed ‘20, Humza Tahir ‘18, Junaid Zubair ‘18, Ibby Syed ‘19, Tom Orton ‘19, Tony Chen ‘18, Promit Ghosh ‘18, Kenny Okagaki ‘18, Ryan Smith ‘18, Yehong Zhu ‘18, Nisha Swarup ‘18 & Colton Gyulay ’15-’18, Paul Bottino

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Hi there.

This book is not a textbook-style overview of blockchain technology.

Rather, though it starts with a brief overview of the space, it focuses more on the results of Harvard’s inaugural Blockchain course, a special section of ES95r.

However, even if you’re a

Total neophyte.

Blockchain baby.

Ethereum embryo.

Bitcoin bloomer.

This book is still for you.

Inside, you’ll find overviews of the speakers, projects, and learnings of the course, as well as key takeaways for what Harvard should consider doing to get more involved in the Blockchain space.

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TABLE of CONTENTS 5

Why Blockchain

Who We Are

10

Speakers

Blockchain’s High Potential

The students in the class

Experts who spoke to the class

16

36

40

Projects

What teams built and learned

42

what’s next

Where to go from here

4

8

Blockchain In Universities

What other schools have done

44

conclusion

Parting words

Takeaways

What everyone learned

why blockchain?

In the Fall semester of 2017, 25 students met every Wednesday for Harvard’s ES95r: Blockchain Edition, in the basement of Quincy House. This is the story of why.

Some think Blockchain is just digital money.

Some think Blockchain will be as transformational as the internet. And some think Blockchain is overhyped. But as time passes, the skeptics keep getting quieter.

Blockchain technology is best known for its underlying role in enabling Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that went from less than $0.018 per coin in 2010 to above $18,000 per coin in 2017. A blockchain itself, however, is use-case agnostic: it’s a protocol that allows decentralized trust in tracking transactions, in a sort of open-ledger system where everyone is guaranteed to have an immutable, up-to-date copy of the chain of digital “blocks” detailing all of the network actions.

In the simplest terms, a blockchain is true to its namesake: it’s a list, or chain, of groups of data records, or blocks, that grows as more and more data is added to the system. It differs from a traditional database in two key ways: (1) once a block has been added to the chain, it cannot be changed, and (2) thanks to cryptographic advancements, a blockchain can be widely distributed on any network of computers. This means everyone can see copy that they know is up-todate and trust the information encoded, requiring no central party or single server host. More importantly, it also means that anyone can use the blockchain to interact.

Some think blockchain will be as transformational as the internet

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Blockchain is a technology that people say will change the world. But beyond currency, nobody is yet certain on what the biggest new uses will be. All anyone knows is that to discover them, smart, hardworking people will have to do a lot of experimenting, prototyping, and educated guessing. And that’s exactly what the students of ES95r’s Blockchain section do best.

Big questions to keep in mind: Where have blockchains been?

Where are they going?

Why are they important for Harvard?

Why now?

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blockchain (and associated cryptos) Though high potential, Blockchain technology, first created in 2008, is still relatively new to a tech world that took twenty years to warm up to the internet and another ten to finally use it to fundamentally change society. Nonetheless, Fortune 500 companies like NASDAQ [1] and Liberty Mutual [2], National Governments of countries like Sweden [3] and Russia [4], and unversities like MIT [5] and Berkeley [6] are already experimenting with Blockchain.

The promises of blockchain are important. They are not just financial; blockchain could provide the technology to finally solve many of the world’s biggest problems. Imagine a world with no voter fraud and no voter suppression, enabled by trustable digital identities that finally replace broken SSN-authentication dependence. Imagine a world where health records are secure yet transferring them between providers is seamless when care is needed, enabled by smart contracts and identity tokens. Imagine a world where green energy is finally all-servicing, enabled by microtransactions between distributed owners of solar panels, wind farms, and dams, outside of a utility’s monopoly. You might imagine these worlds, but others work to use blockchain to create them.

[1] http://www.nasdaq.com/article/how-stock-exchanges-are-experimenting-with-blockchain-technology-cm801802 [2] https://www.libertymutualgroup.com/about-liberty-mutual-site/news-site/Pages/Liberty-Mutual-and-Blockchain.aspx] [3] https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-blockchain/sweden-tests-blockchain-technology-for-land-registry-idUKKCN0Z22KV [4] https://www.coindesk.com/russias-government-test-blockchain-land-registry-system/ [5]http://blockchain.mit.edu/ [6]http://scet.berkeley.edu/blockchain-lab/

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&

WHO WE ARE WHO ELSE IS THERE at harvard?

The people in this class come from all different concentrations and backgrounds, and all had different reasons for being here. While the way we found out and navigated this space early on was varied, we all together with the same purpose: to learn more about this fast growing technology.

The blockchain community at Harvard can hardly be called a community. While SEAS enrollment and the CS concentration size continues to rise, many SEAS students are completely unfamiliar with the technology. Some only know about Bitcoin, unaware of the powerful cryptographic ledger that enables it. Until mid-fall 2017, there was not even an unofficial student interest group.

Cue ES95r’s special blockchain section: a group of 25 Harvard students that split into teams of blockchain explorers, meeting for two hours every Wednesday to update each other on their technical or research progress and learn from each other about the space.

Though the stereotypical “Blockchain enthusiast� is a Silicon Valley-type techie, the students of ES95r drew a diverse set of Harvard students We were philosophers and computer scientists, applied mathematicians and mechanical engineers, economists and VES concentrators. We were varsity lacrosse players and entrepreneurs, writers and music producers, designers and stand-up comedians. And we were west coast cool and east coast cold, internationals and gap-year takers, from the quad, river, and off-campus alike. If anything, the numerous interests and backgrounds of the students should illustrate that slowly but surely, everyone, in every different sector, is starting to pay attention to Blockchain.

Though ES95r drew from diverse interests, it may not have drawn as heavily from a diverse ethnic and gender background. The ethnicities in the class were largely those traditionally represented in computer science, and the gender breakdown left room for improvement, with the class being roughly 86% male - 14% female. Hopefully, were Harvard to put more resources into the space, it would make it more public and more accessible to those not traditionally in blockchain circles, and lead to a more diverse set of perspectives working with blockchains.

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QUICK TAKE

What we did THIS SEMESTER: 25 students

Sophomores and seniors, engineers and philosophers, athletes and musicians

7 build projects

Smart Social Contracts and trading algorithms, education tools and package tracking

6 speakers

Engineers and entrepreneurs, real estate innovators and notarization disruptors

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Speakers: Over the course of the semester, a half-dozen Blockchain experts spoke or skyped with the class, addressing topics as broad as a framework for when Blockchains are useful to subject as specific as how a blockchain accounting prototype functions.

Homan Mohammadi

DAN ELITZER IDEO coLAB

Federico bond signatura

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engineering, consensys

9/27/17

Homan Mohammadi Homan Mohammadi is an MBA student at Harvard Business School who has a degree in Neurobiology from Harvard and worked as a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company.

INSIGHTS & LEARNINGS Broadly:

A discussion of how one might categorize cryptocurrency investments and a framework for analyzing investment opportunities

1.

Cryptocurrencies are a new form of investment that traditional investors are unclear on how to categorize: are they currencies? Securities? Property?

Some new category?

2.

Though active trading and exchanges exist, the metrics for valuation come from non-analogous markets like the stock market. How can one create new metrics to accurately value cryptocurrencies?

Property. securities. currencies.

WHAT DOES CRYPTO COUNT AS?

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10/4/17 DAN ELITZER |IDEO coLAB A graduate of MIT Sloan and co-founder of the MIT Bitcoin club and MIT Bitcoin projects. Dan is the Blockchain and Digital Identity lead at IDEO CoLab and startup advisor.

INSIGHTS & LEARNINGS Broadly:

A conceptual framework for thinking about when to use Blockchain technology to create the most value over using alternatives (databases, private networks, etc)

1.

Blockchain tech can provide new identification methods previously unavailable, through stronger forms of “Know Your Customer” validation

2.

Blockchain also enables distributed storage and computation, via the ability to transact tokens of value for computer resources in miniscule amounts

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3.

Blockchains are useful when multiple companies involved, but if just one party is necessary, databases are cheaper and equally useful

4.

The biggest mistake of the current blockchain industry is “slapping a token on everything,” even when it’s largely unnecessary

not everything needs a blockchain or token

10/4/17

Federico bond |signatura Federico Bond is CTO of Signatura, one of Latin America’s most influential blockchain notarization platforms.

INSIGHTS & LEARNINGS Broadly:

A detailed overview of the code development tools available for those building with the popular Ethereum blockchain

1.

Some of the most useful Ethereum tools include: Solidity, which is the actual scripting language the Ethereum blockchain uses; TestRPC, which simulates a wallet topology, or set of connected wallets, within a terminal; and Truffle, which lets one test smart contracts in those simulations.

2.

On the Ethereum blockchain, certain code operations, like data storage, are more expensive than others, like simple mathematical operations; as such, one should do only the minimum amount of work necessary to achieve the trust and transaction on the Ethereum blockchain, and offload what computationally-heavy work one can to a private server

3.

Unlike throwing up a quick website, testing blockchain prototypes requires setting up a test network, because every line of code that’s executed carries a “gas” or computation fee, in addition to possible transaction fees

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11/8/17

ENGINEERING TEAM |CONSENSYS ConsenSys is a venture production studio that build decentralized applications and tools for the Ethereum blockchain.

INSIGHTS & LEARNINGS Broadly:

The ethereum blockchain allows new methods for fulfilling old purposes, like land registries, accounting systems, and digital identity verification

1.

Because all transactions are on a blockchain, accounting software can trace all incoming and outgoing payments from a specific wallet address.

2.

The immutable, transactional nature of blockchain tokens can also replace the outdated and questionably useful title insurance industry, guaranteeing one owns the title to a property

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3.

Blockchain addresses can also be used as a platform to validate identity, allowing its users easier access to functions like voting

NEW METHODS FOR FULFILLING OLD PURPOSES.

VALUE: Over the course of the semester, a half-dozen Blockchain experts spoke with the class. Generally, they split their 1- or 2-hour discussion equally between a formal presentation and an open Q & A. As the blockchain space is now larger than any one person, or group of people, can stay up-to-date on, each speaker provided valuable insight into their specialty domains.

Some speakers addressed the class on a broad level, hailing from the world of research and academia, offering conceptual and engineering frameworks for brainstorming blockchain-based concepts. Most useful in the first five weeks of the class, speakers taught sections about when to use blockchains versus when to depend on older technologies, test development tools, the broad industry categories to which blockchain is most useful, and the parallels--and differences--between blockchain-based transactions and transactions one traditionally envisions.

Specialized speakers, who came from venture studios or blockchain product companies, were also quite informative. Because everyone in the class developed base-level familiarity with the technology behind blockchains, these speakers could skip the usual “overview of a blockchain” section and devote more time to the details of their knowledge and work. Similarly, the questions they answered helped not only the askers, but the class as a whole, since the the parallels of applying a new technology to an old industry are well-established.

Rarely did a speaker not answer a question by referencing current work or prototypes that applied to multiple groups’ explorations.

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WHAT WE BUILT: Learning through oing blah blah.

BITS

Smart social contracts

frontier investments Ethereum tools for financial innovation

logistics network

API based smart contract packages

algo trading

Algorithmically trading cryptocurrencies

crypt ai

Cryptocurrency trading algorithm and ICO evaluation metrics

valuation gurus

Better cryptoasset valuation system

cryptoWB

Education platform for beginner crypto currency investors

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Bits | Smart Social Contracts Alan Bidart ‘18, Spencer Evans ‘18, Shuya Gong ‘17-’18, Austin King ‘18, and Joel Kwartler ‘18

Smart Social Contracts, to trigger contract executions based on input data from humans the two parties choose.

Process: We began our exploration with the intention of building a product or service not purely investment- or trading-related, to see if we could use the technology to create value that went beyond providing investors better returns. A such, we first took a wide survey of potential spaces, focusing on the system-level -- real estate, the legal system, healthcare, industrial equipment, and social.

Though we found inefficiencies in these systems, most could be solved by non-blockchain innovation, especially given the technical maturity of available blockchain tools. This led us to focus on giving others the power to use smart contracts more easily, via a sort of IFTTT interface, and seeing what they came up with, though we found difficulty in making onboarding users an easy process. Throughout, we also taught ourselves Solidity in order to build our technical prototypes.

Ultimately, we focused most on building our understanding of the technical space to allow for lower-level innovation in the future, as our exploration taught us that the biggest potential in the blockchain space still seems to be at the protocol level: creating oracles, optimized blockchains for specific use-cases, or integrations with other blockchains.

“the biggest potential in the blockchain space still seems to be at the protocol level” 17

Bits | Smart Social Contracts Alan Bidart ‘18, Spencer Evans ‘18, Shuya Gong ‘17-’18, Austin King ‘18, and Joel Kwartler ‘18 Smart Social Contracts, to trigger contract executions based on input data from humans the two parties choose.

Builds: Link to work: https://github.com/Joelkw/Bits We began with research and technical exploration into the space. Those of use who took a more technical path (or who chose to do both technical and research) taught themselves solidity, while others researched current opportunity spaces. After landing on the IFTTT for smart contracts concept, we completed user research with small business owners and venmo super-users, developed a working backend prototype for triggering smart contracts based on events, and created a UI.

Insights:

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Protocol Level Innovations, Not Products

The Oracle Problem Will Need a Creative Solution

This space is brand new. We are still attempting to figure out some of the most fundamental problems like how to increase confirmation of transaction times and increasing throughput of transactions. It is nonsensical to build applications upon a foundation that isn’t fully fleshed out. On top of this, unlike the interntet, most of the money in blockchain is reserved for the protocol level innovations. Union Square Ventures has a blog post where they talk about this in more detail.

The difficulty of getting real-world event data onto the blockchain is not that IoT devices or APIs don’t exist, but rather building an equally trustless, unhackable system to blockchain’s other operations. Some, like smartcontract. com, try to use a token-based system that rewards truth-telling, while we looked at using social circles, even between strangers, as the trust providers.

Regardless of the ultimate solution, it’s clear that the oracle problem will not be solved simply with better hardware sensors: software will need to be involved.

Insights, cont: Solidity (Ethereum’s Development Language) is Worth Learning and Using Solidity is the coding language for Ethereum.

For how new it is, there are actually a ton of resources online that will help you learn how to develop for the Ethereum blockchain. We particularly found Truffle and TestRPC most helpful when we were developing for various applications throughout the class. Regarding tutorials, we found going through all of the tutorials on the Ethereum were very helpful for basic skills. After that, we expanded to other tutorials that helped us learn to integrate Ethereum into different tools like Chrome through using the MetaMask Chrome plugin.

(And, Bonus) Harvard Is Falling Behind in the Blockchain Space Harvard is pretty behind on building a cryptocurrency community. Berkeley hosted a large conference this year with some of the current top innovators in the field and MIT has been involved in cryptocurrencies for years. Harvard is likely progressing forward as I have seen we are integrating blockchain into some of our classes (even if it is just one or two lectures). The Harvard Cryptocurrency Initiative is a promising endeavor that hopes to host a Harvard Blockchain conference this spring 2018. While most of the hype existing around cryptocurrencies is derived from the investing opportunities, we think it is very important that there exist outlets on campus for people to teach themselves more about the technological foundations upon which these currencies are built, and what their capabilities are.

Going Foward: To continue this project, we would want to do further user research, beyond discussions and UI walkthroughs with local businesses and students. We envision a larger-scale simulation game we hold for ~20 people that puts our assumptions about social trust, and the number of trusted versus untrusted parties one needs in a trustable interaction, through extreme stress.

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frontier investments | ethereum tools Daniel Kang ‘18 & Tim Maounis ‘19

Building Ethereum tools to allow financial innovation.

Process: We began by pinpointing the characteristic advantages of the blockchain and the corresponding weaknesses of the current investment processes in emerging and frontier markets. We determined that investors fail to (or rarely) invest in these areas given the lack of data they have about the regions as well as the lack of security in capital transactions. The blockchain, we decided, provided a good mechanism for secure transactions and was a viable source of legitimate data.

Given that we had no prior expertise on smart-contract implementation as well as design best practices, the majority of the first half of the semester consisted of finding the right resources to teach ourselves how the language operated, and how the different elements of decentralized applications operated with each other. In parallel, we had to align our product strategy with current limitations and potential roadblocks to perceptions and technical difficulties involving the blockchain technology. Cryptocurrency adoption was another issue we had to design our application around so that the volatile and unpredictable nature of the currency would not be a deterrent for institutions and businesses to adopt our technology.

“[blockchain] provided a good mechanism for secure transactions and was a viable source of legitimate data” 20

Builds: Throughout the rest of the semester, we began to implement different aspects of our platform, including a working currency minting and destroying smart contract (Solidity), a user interface framework (JavaScript, Web3), part of a digital signature encryption mechanism (JavaScript), as well as a piece of a financial-institution registration platform (JavaScript).

Insights: Identification of resources is paramount Throughout this entire process, a lot of our time was used looking for the right resources that would teach us best design and implementation practices.

Going Foward: We have learned a lot and hope to continue our progress in this endeavor, but would have liked some support in our technical intelligence. We, however, understand that this is a nascent field, and are excited for what Harvard will offer in the future.

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logistics network| api based smart contracts James Kim, ‘19

Logistics Network could provide API-based smart contracts for tracking packages.

Process: Smart contracts, despite their elegance, are quite limited by the fact that the blockchain has to be deterministic, such that the result of a computation must be completely verifiable onchain. This means that smart contracts usually can’t have bearing on the outside world without an “oracle.” I thought that a great way to expand smart contract usage would be to allow an real physical items to be traded using smart contracts.

Utilizing existing APIs for logistics networks (FedEx, Uber) and oracles to link them up to contracts in the Ethereum blockchain. Through the process, I was able to set up a rudimentary oracle on oraclize, although the actual functionality of it was limited due to costs.

Builds: I implemented a connection between live, third-party APIs and the ethereum blockchain.

Since it was difficult to set up complex API queries on the blockchain using Solidity, I instead opted to set up an outside server that took a simple request and a code and sent a corresponding request to FedEx, then had oraclize send a request to this server I set up.

“Smart contracts, despite their elegance, are quite limited by the fact that the blockchain has to be deterministic” 22

Insights: Developer security concerns In the process, I learned a lot of Solidity, and the specific security concerns that developers must consider. One of the biggest challenges I faced was trying to figure out bugs in my contract code, especially since there is not much literature online about setting up oracles in a consistent way.

Going Foward: To continue this project, we would want to do further user research, beyond discussions and UI The next step would be to create a convenient web-app to be able to create smart contract code without learning solidity. This will allow the everyday user to create logistics contracts, which will certainly increase the number of people using smart contracts.

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ALGO trading| cryptocurrency trading Tom Orton ‘19

Algorithmically trading cryptocurrencies.

Process: We looked at different approaches to algo-trading cryptocurrencies. The first stage was to get data: we coded and ran a data-logging server on the EC2 cloud which logged the minutely order book data across 17 different crypto exchanges. Next, we started an initial survey of differences between exchanges. Key findings included significantly different transaction fees (ranging from -0.1% to 1%), trading in different real currencies (USD, ZAR, CNY), differences in volatility and trading volume, and significant differences in the valuation of BTC based on exchange rates (for example, some exchanges traded BTC 10% higher than other exchanges – arbitrage trading this away is challenging, because capital needs to be moved between different real currencies, and deposited into a different bank account, for each trade).

“arbitrage trading this away is challenging, because capital needs to be moved between different real currencies, and deposited into a different bank account, for each trade” 24

Builds: We began a preliminary analysis of naive trading techniques: using nearest neighbors and linear regression to create estimators for future price changes, and trading accordingly.

We found that transaction fees can make a significant difference to the level of profitability of high frequency trading algorithms.

Next we created a live paper trader to test these algorithms in real time – we found that the real time trading performance (vs performance on historical data) was much lower: this was because of small assumptions made when running the algo trader on historical data (for example, not taking into account that the bid price does not equal the ask price on the exchange).

After this, we started to look at more sophisticated time series models, including VAR models and the use of recurrent neural networks. While these models would give positive return, these tests were done during the time the BTC was increasing rapidly, so it was difficult to evaluate the success of these trading algorithms relative to a realistic baseline.

Insights: Exchange Prices’ Interconnectedness We also took a slight digression to look at how interconnected different exchange prices were. We did this by building a few statistical models and fitting them to the orderbook data we collected from our datalogger. In general, we found strong qualitative relationships that Biter and Bithumb strongly influence the prices on other cryptocurrency exchanges in the short term (2 minute intervals). We also saw evidence that on Biter and Bithumb, the price movement, rather than the full orderbook, was most influential in impacting price movements on other exchanges in the short term.

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Insights, cont: Importance of Careful Assumptions when Building Trading Algorithms A key learning experience from this is how important it is to get small details in the trading model for high frequency trading correct – otherwise the performance forecasts can be highly inaccurate. For example, assuming the historical price was the “price” affected our results when real-time trading, because we did not have the historical information of the orderbook’s bid and ask prices.

Going Foward: We want to continue testing and refining our algorithm, especially during a period when bitcoin is not increasing rapidly. Otherwise, it’s difficult to separate the effectiveness of our algorithm against the overall increase of the market, and it often also makes the most sense to just hold rather than actively trade currency during those price surges.

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CRYPT AI |Algorithms and research based metrics Scott Sussex ‘19, Arkam Javed ‘20, Humza Tahir ‘18, Junaid Zubair ‘18, Ibby Syed ‘19

An application based cryptocurrency trading algorithm and research-based set of metrics for evaluating ICOs. Process: Our group completed a two-fold project: one was application-based and the other was research based.

Builds: Link to work: https://github.com/jzubair/es95 Application based: We designed an algorithm for trading based on a Deep Recurrent Q-Network (DQN). The algorithm is designed to predict the expected levels of relative future profit (reward) from owning USD vs ETH/BTC at a given timepoint. DQNs have been used in other domains, such as playing Atari video games at beyond human levels. We have implemented a DQN framework that can take in an arbitrary neural network as a predictor and train it to perform predictions about expected reward, given arbitrary transaction fees on the exchange.

We have tested the approach using a network on toy examples to demonstrate that the approach is viable, and have since moved on to testing on hourly Bitcoin price data. So far it appears to perform reasonably, but we are continuing to test on larger amounts of data. We’ve currently been testing on periods where Bitcoin does very well, so it is difficult to fairly evaluate our model.

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Crypt AI |Algorithms and research based metrics Scott Sussex ‘19, Arkam Javed ‘20, Humza Tahir ‘18, Junaid Zubair ‘18, Ibby Syed ‘19 An application based cryptocurrency trading algorithm and research-based set of metrics for evaluating ICOs.

Builds, cont: Research based: We developed a venture-capital type valuation system to determine what metrics make for a valuable ICO. Over the course of the term, we analyzed pricing data from top-performing ICOS and categorized them into both categorical and quantitative variables, looking at what positively correlated pricing for successful ICOs. Among the largest categorical predictors was at least one person in the group that had a significant amount of blockchain experience.

Interestingly enough, the names of many of these people were not public facing and instead sat behind pseudonyms (such as the guy behind Augur). Surprisingly, having a white-paper was not an important valuation metric since almost all the ICOs we analyzed had whitepapers. We found that the more technically complex ideas generally tended to do well, but this association was weak.

In the “Analysis” excel document, the second “Highest growth ICOs”, includes a risk analysis of how risky each investment is. The program took into account the presence of a whitepaper, how long it had been since the ICO date, average growth percentages and had adjusted for the rise in the crypto market as a whole, basically trying to see how the coins did when they only had to go up against themselves.

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Insights: China’s Ban on ICOs affecting outcomes We also found that the Chinese government’s ban on ICOs had an overall negative effect on the overall amount of funding that ICOs received. For ICOs that were released before the ban, there was an overall uptick in month-by-month investment. Basically, if a project decided to ICO before the China ban date, they’d see an average of 2% more capital growth every month, but after the ban there was overall less investment in ICOs. There could be other confounding variables, but on a baseline this suggests that China is more bullish on ICOs compared to the rest of the world. The raw data for this that we based analysis on is included in the crypto_prices csv file, if interested.

Solidity (Ethereum’s Development Language) is Worth Learning and Using In regards to qualitative data, we found that successful ICOs (up until this point) have had three relevant price spikes on average - the first happens right at the point of release, which is where the first valuation happens. There is no average time-period for the second and third price spikes, they can be anywhere between months to an entire year. However, we found that some of these price spikes are correlated to dates with significant shifts in the cryptocurrency market (such as the dates when BTC jumps 24% in one day) and thus gave us inferential errors when looking at the fluctuations of market capitalization for a given ICO and the price.

Going Foward: Our current neural network predictor is an LSTM that uses historical price data as the input features. Since we have our general DQN architecture built, we next plan to expand on this predictor to take in more features that might be helpful in predicting expected reward. Our current predictor performs best on hourly data, so we are also interested in modifying this predictor to better handle the volatility of 10 minutely price data.

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valuation gurus | cryptoasset valuation Nisha Swarup ‘18 & Colton Gyulay ’15-’18

Creating a better cryptoasset valuation system.

Process: Our group began this semester with some exposure to blockchain and cryptocurrency but little formal technical training in the space. Initially, we sought to focus on smart contracts and applications; in this vein, we set out to learn smart contract programming with Solidity on the Ethereum blockchain. We quickly realized that we would be more interested in studying the space at a higher level and developing a better understanding of the crypto landscape in terms of coin valuations and typologies. This motivation was in part spurred by the guest speaker and current HBS student Homan Mohammadi, who has spent the last few years studying the space more in depth.

After a few meetings, we began working closer with Homan on a few key areas: 1) establishing a more fundamental approach to cryptoasset valuations, and 2) developing a typology for the different kinds of coins being made available. There is immense opportunity in applying traditional economic and financial thinking to the cryptoasset space, and the dearth of research in this nascent field makes the opportunity relatively accessible.

Some open questions in the space include: In what ways is crypto a diverse asset class?

Can we create a framework to evaluate different currencies by asking “what gives it value” and “why will it appreciate”?

Some of the needs in the market: Exchanges aren’t safe Regulation of custodianship makes it difficult for institutional investors Better cold storage, e.g. myetherwallet or jax Coming up with better metrics 30

Builds: Link to work: https://www.cointheory.io/ We focused on building a better metric, by evaluating a metric called NVT (Network Value to Transactions Ratio) that is analogous to the PE ratio for a stock. The PE ratio represents a ratio of price to “health” of a given financial instrument, where health for stocks is calculated as the company’s earnings. For a cryptoasset like bitcoin, “health” can be thought of as network transaction volume. If people are using Bitcoin for more of their transactions, this justifies a higher price.

The fundamental value of a cryptoasset like Bitcoin can be thought of as either a medium of exchange or a store of value.

Some of the ways in which we considered refining the NVT metric were as follows: Using circulated supply vs total supply of coins Changing how we represented transactions (to avoid overcounting in cases where the transaction was represented as going to two addresses)

Insights: A Research and Academic Opportunity There is almost no interaction or dialogue between students and faculty on this technology.

We see considerable opportunity for Harvard academics to weigh in on some of the valuation techniques and economic implications of the technology. As discussed, the emerging nature of this field of research provides an opportunity for newcomers to quickly get up to speed and to bring along interdisciplinary insights that can positively affect the space.

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Valuation gurus |Cryptoasset valuation Nisha Swarup ‘18 & Colton Gyulay ’15-’18 Creating a better cryptoasset valuation system.

Insights, cont: A Need for Innovation in Defining a Cryptoasset Type There is currently no clear consensus on exactly how cryptoassets differ from other kinds of assets. Over the course of the semester, we read many different kinds of blogs and books on cryptoasset valuation, and found lots of diversity in how the crypto community is thinking about these problems. Since it is such a nascent space, there is opportunity for students to be part of shaping the theory of valuation, even through data collection or analysis. There is solid research establishing cryptocurrencies as a separate asset class from existing classes, but within this specific asset class there are also distinctions to be made.

A Need for Innovation in Defining a Cryptoasset Type Cryptocurrencies are the most similar to existing currencies/commodities and can act as either a store of value or medium of exchange. Though many subdistinctions can be made within this group, such currencies might include Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, or Monero.

Cryptoutilities comprise tokens and other applications which provide a service and for which valuations are based off the value of the future network. Such utilities might include Augur, Gnosis, Siacoin, or Golem.

Finally, cryptosecurities are a class of coins that essentially provide liquidity and transparency to an existing asset or asset class. Such securities might be venture capital or real estate investment funds, where value is driven by underlying assets. These behave like traditional securities, albeit with non-traditional fundraising mechanisms.

Financial Parallels do Exist

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Traditional finance theory has relevance to the world of cryptoassets. We were able to leverage research in stock valuation (like the idea of the PE ratio) and portfolio rebalancing (the idea of dynamic resizing) when completing our project. One main metric we examined in this regard was NVT. A high NVT indicates that a cryptoasset’s on-chain transaction volume is valued more highly. This generally means that the network is experiencing rapid growth and its future returns are valued more highly by the market, or that there is a potential bubble in price if this increased valuation is unsupported. Our project partially tried to better separate these situations through better analysis of transaction activity and fundamental drivers. NVT is calculated by the network value (total market capitalization) divided by the transaction volume (in dollars) on the blockchain. The transaction volume is only an estimate derived from activity seen on blockchains.

cryptowb| education platform Tony Chen ‘18, Promit Ghosh ‘18, Kenny Okagaki ‘18, Ryan Smith ‘18, Yehong Zhu ‘18

An education platform for beginner cryptocurrency investors.

Process: We started by identifying our group’s goal – we were all interested in investing and wanted to learn more about how to best invest our funds and where we can find more information about investing. We began by mapping out the most popular cryptoasset investments and analyzing their growth, value proposition, application, and tentative futures to see if there were any patterns amongst the cryptoassets that had grown to be the most popular.

As we moved deeper into the cryptoasset analysis, we decided to form an investment group to map out how well our newly-gotten information and instincts would fare in the cryptoasset investment market. However, upon midterm check-ins, we realized that this approach didn’t leave much lasting impact - we’d be the only ones to benefit from this type of approach.

We decided to pivot to addressing a key point that had consistently come up during our research - it’s very difficult to cement the fundamentals of blockchain and set up an investing flow, so we decided to build an education platform that helped with exactly that.

“it’s very difficult to cement the fundamentals of blockchain and set up an investing flow”

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cryptwb | education platform Tony Chen ‘18, Promit Ghosh ‘18, Kenny Okagaki ‘18, Ryan Smith ‘18, Yehong Zhu ‘18 An education platform for beginner cryptocurrency investors.

Builds: Link to work: http://www.cryptocurrencyexchangefund.com/ We built a website, written for the complete novice, about how to invest in cryptocurrency, with the goal of making it a more accessible investing space.

Insights: Good investing practices are Lacking Given the recent hype around this market, hopeful investors may dive in and throw money at market in hopes of making a positive return. However, this is a terrible (and sometimes financially-ruining) investment strategy, and as a result making sure people who visit our site are strongly encouraged to follow good investment practices. Without these practices, it doesn’t matter how good or bad a cryptocurrency is - an investor is going to end up with a net loss.

Accessibility to investing is a problem.

There’s a lot of work behind the setup to invest in the first place. You have to know what you want to invest in, as different exchanges have different topologies. There are fees and costs on all platforms - knowing when to transfer and where to purchase/sell cryptoassets is currently an art of its own. Additionally, concepts such as public and private keys, and the greater concept of setting up a wallet, as well as how to truly protect sensitive information (saving your private key in OneNote isn’t secure…) are generally new concepts to people who have no interaction with blockchain outside of their interest in investing. Addressing these needs is an important part of our investment platform.

Different exchanges have different strengths.

Understanding exchange topology is an extremely important part of being a smart investor.

Each exchange has its strengths, weaknesses, fees, and limitations, and knowing where to do business, when to transfer business, and how and where to make a sale all require an understanding of the major exchanges and their properties. This is an especially difficult area to tackle because these options and limitations change both based on the location from which an investor is operating and the regulations in that area regarding cryptoassets.

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Insights, cont: Different cryptoassets should not be evaluated equally Our group performed analyses of a large number of assets, which we tackled according to their investment popularity, as a part of our efforts to create an investment strategy before we pivoted towards an education platform. We quickly realized the vast majority of these “investments” weren’t meant to be currency in any way, shape or form. They were made for communication, computation, or otherwise resource-exchange-based phenomena when people were attempting to spectate on them like guessing which currency will gain popularity. While there is meaning in value - after all, if any one of these networks are utilized for their purpose, the tokens will increase in value as demand for them increases - the way the assets are prospected and understood aren’t always correct. Understanding the purpose of an asset and how to value it is an important part of entering the cryptoasset investment market.

There’s no central point for a newcomer to learn more about investing in cryptoassets.

That’s why we decided to build an education platform to go through the square one basics of investing and cryptoassets. While it would be impossible for one news source to contain information on every cryptoasset and its developments, having a central point for newcomers to understand investing, cryptoassets, and how to get involved is a valuable contribution towards future investors we wouldn’t have made had we simply made an investment group to track our own returns throughout the semester.

Going Foward: We’d like to see more acknowledgement of the potential of blockchain (and its evolutions like Iota’s Tangle) for future technology. While blockchain is not an universal solution to every existing technology problem out there, it is very useful in democratizing and decentralizing many existing industries, and thus inherently disruptive to any industry that it can be applied to. Additionally, having courses, or even just professor support for further research into this technology, would go a long ways towards having lectures, discussions, and potentially even courses on the topic of blockchain and cryptoassets would go a long ways towards educating the student body on one of the most revolutionary technologies of our time. Blockchain will definitely play a big role in the future of the digital age. We missed the mark with the boom of the internet - let’s not repeat mistakes.

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COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS:

What are other intsitutions up to?

stanford:

conference, lab, and courses offered

mit:

princeton:

intro to crypto, partner with Coursera, wrote a textbook

Media Lab initiative, annual conference

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Berkley:

annual conference, student run courses

harvard graduate schools: have student run clubs

stanford:

conference, lab, and courses offered

Courses: CS251 - Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies, est 2016 https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs251/ Covers all aspects of cryptos including consensus, applications, mining, legality, economics, privacy Course textbook: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction by Narayanan, Bonneau, Felten, Miller and Goldfeder CS251P - Bitcoin Engineering est 2016 bitcoin.stanford.edu Lab course, building Bitcoin-enabled applications Focused on monetary/transaction side, not building decentralized applications on blockchain Per-use Bitcoin micropayment apps

people: Dan Boneh co-director of Stanford Computer Security Lab Professor of cryptography, also teaches online class on Coursera

events: Scaling Bitcoin est. 2017 https://stanford2017.scalingbitcoin.org/ Blockchain Protocol Analysis and Security Engineering https://cyber.stanford.edu/bpase18

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princeton:

intro to crypto, parner with Coursera, wrote a textbook

Courses: Intro to Cryptocurrency ( in partneship with Coursera) https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency Published textbook: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies 2017, Princeton Computer Science Professors http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/

Berkley:

annual conference, student run courses

Courses: Blockchain Fundamental, 2017 https://decal.berkeley.edu/courses/4095 Blockchain for Developers, 2017 https://decal.berkeley.edu/courses/4094

people: Blockchain At Berkeley Student Organization https://blockchain.berkeley.edu/ Est 2016, hosts events, teach cryptocurrency courses, consults, and provides research and development in the blockchain space, including analysis of whitepapers and workshops

events: Berkley Bitcoin Expo

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Crypto Economics Security Conference est 2017 https://cesc.io/

mit:

Media Lab initiative, annual conference

people: MIT Media Lab: Digital Currency Initiative http://dci.mit.edu/ founded April 2015: research, open-source contributions, prototyping MIT Bitcoin Club http://bitcoin.mit.edu/about/ provides collaboration forum for students and hosts the MIT bitcoin expo

events: MIT Bitcoin Expo http://mitbitcoinexpo.org/ annual conference bringing academics and industry leaders together, est. 2013

resources: http://blockchain.mit.edu/ Aggregation of MIT research papers and talks published about the blockchain

harvard gsd student group

A GSD student created the “Harvard Blockchain Group,” an unrecognized graduate student organization that consists mostly of a facebook group, at https://www.facebook.com/harvardblockchain/, to “increase the understanding and application of this technology within the Graduate School of Design and Harvard University, and engage with open-source cryptocurrency communities.”

harvard business school student group

Similarly, students at Harvard Business School have created their own Blockchain, Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Club, to “to promote cryptocurrencies and other applications of blockchain at HBS by: facilitating education; encouraging collaboration and innovation within Harvard and with stakeholders in the wider space; and exploring new applications of blockchain across industries.”

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course insights Blockchain Resources are Growing Rapidly The number of resources that explain or allow development on blockchains has exploded, and with them, the number of people interested in or working in the blockchain space. It is no longer unreasonable to have multiple annual conferences about blockchain technologies, academic offerings, or research divisions in the space.

Other Universities Are Taking Notice Though not always the earliest adopters of technologies not invented in university, the nation’s (second) best schools are offering undergraduate courses and blockchain conferences, and publishing blockchain research.

While taking ES95r, students would travel to MIT or Berkeley for conferences and meetups.

learning blockchain means knowing both what to build with and what can be built 40

Test All Analogs While blockchain is new, analogous concepts do exist; the trick is separating “what is” from “what seems to be.” When applying investment strategies, brainstorming product markets, or building a new protocol, one can look to past successes, but one must be careful to test and prove that such past innovations are actually applicable.

High-Level Low-Level Innovation Current blockchain technology provides an opportunity for many low-level innovations -- faster transfer protocols, data integrations, identity systems -- but to build them, one needs high-level innovation -- conceptual models, evaluative metrics, and new ways of thinking about networks. We found this to be the case especially in non-investment opportunities: one must understand how a social or transport network functions from above, but also work to create the technology that allows that function.

Need for Both Conceptual and Technical Education In most computer science topics, students need only learn the technology, as they enter with an innate understanding of the concept: one may learn JavaScript, but already be innately familiar with the web; one can learn about cryptography, but already understand why one needs password-secured information; one can even learn the basic algorithms, but intuitively why searching information efficiently matters. Blockchain is at least as important as these other topics, yet because it is slightly removed--it depends on cryptography, it depends on algorithms, and it depends on the internet networks--one must learn both to build with and what can be built.

effectively applying blockchain technology not only means understanding how to build, but why.

Decentralized Information Requires Communities Blockchains are based on principles of decentralization, which contributes a large part of the technology’s potential power, but it also means that information about specific blockchains, protocols, or products can be difficult to find. We found that clubs, academic courses, and conferences were the best means by which to learn the most, as someone else almost always had useful thoughts to contribute when problems or questions arose.

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WHAT’s next?

This semester was the first of what could be and surfaced a lot of needs. Here, we propose a few courses of action for fostering blockchain education at Harvard.

Far reaching stretch goals are denoted with an *

CLasses: AM/CS offering

Split into two classes to address the different interest levels and approaches to understanding blockchain.

Tech focused: One for technical people (a CS130-style): 130-CS courses deal with “Economics and Computation” and are problem-set based, involving technical work

Application focused: One for more generalized (a CS100style): 100-style classes are often meant for those interested in technology, but who do not necessarily know how to code

Research-focused class or curriculum

similar to the DCI at MIT Media Lab, this would be geared towards those not interested in developing startups but interested in academic documentation and diving into the technology

Other:

seminar based on reading whitepapers, similar to CS 191

Great example:

Stanford CS251 https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs251/

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people: Faculty Faculty-led forums around blockchain discussions / debates, dedicated faculty positions, professorships Example: Debate between James Waldo and other crypto experts - Select a research topic for the week, structure either side of it, talk about findings in debate format

Non-faculty

Doctoral positions, staff advisors, experts in residence

initiatives: Student led

University led

Community for blockchain ideas

Fellowships

Harvard Blockchain Consulting Group

TECH Fellow

Annual conference

Harvard wallets with gifted cryptoassets, similar to how MIT studentsrecieved $100 in bitcoin their freshman year

Investment fund similar to Black Diamond fund and the Harvard Financial Analysts Fund which actively invests in coins as assets / within a portfolio Wintersession Incubator Wintersession program or incubator to learn about blockchain or give support for those who don’t want to take a class for it

Endowment investing Research lab for practicing professor HILT grant for developing a CS course Innovation funding this may look like a blockchain category for the President’s Innovation Challenge, or a fund for blockchain initiatives

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conclusion

Why is this important, why is it important now, and why is it important for Harvard?

Source: google trends, “Blockchain”, December 2017

At worst, blockchain will replace many of today’s financial systems and remain the technology behind hundreds of billions of dollars of digital transactions. At worst, Blockchain will transform society with an impact comparable to the internet revolution.In either case, it’s a technology that should not and cannot be ignored.

The students of ES95r’s inaugural Blockchain section created many things: new investment strategies and metrics, attempts at solving the hard oracle problem, and frameworks for thinking about the products of this new technology. We learned about cryptography, digital identity verification, network flows, and distributed systems, from the internet, guest speakers, and each other.

Although Paul Bottino’s guidance may be legendary, we otherwise had limited support: no undergraduate blockchain community, no course curriculum, and no dedicate educational resources. ES95r:Blockchain was a classic example of Harvard students 44

being Harvard students, determined to not let lack of established resources stop us from learning what we wanted to learn. The excitement from other industry and academic institutions, combined with the hard-working brainpower always present on Harvard’s campus, makes one believe that Harvard has massive untapped ability to advance blockchain technology and solve problems from identity to healthcare to law to energy.

One can only imagine just how innovative Harvard could be in the blockchain space, if it simply tried.

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