Over the last years, crypto-assets have gained significant interest from private investors, academia, and industry. While the user population and their motivations, perceptions, and behaviors have been studied, non-adopters and factors influencing their decision have been left unexplored.
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Crypto-assets are unique in tying financial wealth to the secrecy of private keys. Prior empirical work has attempted to study end-user security from both technical and organizational perspectives. However, the link between individual’s risk perceptions and security behavior was often obscured by the heterogeneity of the subjects in small samples. In a collaboration with the researchers from University of Innsbruck, Artemij Voskobojnikov, a PhD candidate in my research group, has conducted a survey of 395 crypto-asset users to discover three distinct types of such users.
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Over the past years, the cryptocurrency domain has grown substantially. The corresponding user base has also changed significantly and is no longer only made up of cypherpunks and computer experts as was the case in the early days of Bitcoin. Managing these cryptocurrencies, however, has been found to be challenging for the users and it remains largely unknown what features of current wallets contribute to the poor UX, why, and to what extent. Artemij Voskobojnikov, PhD candidate in my research group, has led a collaboration with Freie Universität Berlin researchers that investigated this exact question.
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Cryptocurrency markets have grown substantially in recent years, and have attracted new users and investors, pushing the overall number of owners into the millions. At the same time, the number of distinct cryptocurrencies has exploded to over 5,000. In this burgeoning and chaotic “cryptojungle,” new and unexplored incentives and risks drive the behavior of users and non-users of cryptocurrencies. While previous research has focused almost exclusively on Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies and utility tokens have been ignored. Led by my PhD student Artemij Voskobojnikov, an interview study of cryptocurrency users and non-users focused on their perceptions and management of cryptocurrency risks as well as their reasons for or against involvement with cryptocurrencies.
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