Following the people and events that make up the research community at Duke

Students exploring the Innovation Co-Lab

Category: Business/Economics Page 1 of 7

How to be a Global Inventor

Sticky post

Gadgets, devices, doo-dads, oh my! The Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI)  recently hosted three of its members to lead a panel on creating medical devices for low- and middle-income countries. The event was called “Global Medical Device Innovation: Three Models for Creation and Commercialization.”

Each sought to decrease costs and increase scalability for medical procedures. In short, they are expert inventors who are doing good in the world. 

Two of the most prominent inventors of our era. Image courtesy of Disney.

We’ll go step-by-step in a moment, but to start you on your journey to being just like our panelists, here’s a short glossary:

Standard-of-care: a public health term for the way things are usually done.

IRB: institutional review board, a group of people, usually based in universities, that protect human subjects in research studies. 

Screening: when doctors look at signs your body might show to determine
whether you need to be tested for certain conditions. 

Supply-chain: the movement of materials your product goes through before, during, and after manufacturing. It is a general term for a group of different suppliers, factories, vendors, advertisers, researchers, and others that work separately. 

Regulatory pathways: supply-chain for government approvals and other paperwork you need to have before introducing your product to the public.

Step 1: Meet your Mentors

Walter Lee is Chief of Staff of the Department of Head and Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences, Co-Director of the Head and Neck Program, and an affiliate faculty member at the Duke Global Health Institute. He presented ENlyT (pronounced like en-light), a newfangled nasopharyngoscope – a camera that goes down your nose and down your throat to screen for cancer. He wants to expand with partners in Vietnam and Singapore. 

Marlee Kreiger helped found the Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies at Duke in 2007. Since then, she has led the Center in many interdisciplinary and international ventures. In fact, the Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies spans both the Pratt School of Engineering and the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. She presented on the Callascope, a pocket-sized colposcope – a camera device for cervical cancer screening. 

Julias Mugaga will soon be a visiting scholar at Duke – until then, he heads Design Cube at Makerere University in Uganda. He presented his KeyScope, a plug-and-play surgical camera with 0.3% of the cost of standard-of-care cameras. 

Kreiger’s presentation slides

Step 2: Name your Audience

DGHI has “global” in the name, so it is no surprise that these presenters serve communities around the world. Perhaps something that inventors like Dr. Doofenshmirtz often get wrong is that new innovation should come at the benefit of underserved communities, not at the cost of them. For Lee, that focus would be in his collaborations in Vietnam; for Mugaga it was his community in Uganda; and for Kreiger, it was the many studies conducted in Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Costa Rica, Honduras, and India.

Each of the presenters could agree that the main strategy is simple: find partners. Community members on the ground. Organizations that can benefit from your presence.

Another prominent–albeit villainous–inventor, Dr. Doofenshmirtz. Image courtesy of Disney.

Another notable aspect of your audience will be the certification you vie for. Depending on your location, you may need different permissions to distribute your product, or even begin on the journey to secure funding from certain sources.

In the United States, the most relevant regulatory pathway is FDA clearance, which is notably less restrictive than the CE mark distributed in the European Union. Both certifications are accepted in other countries, but many of the inventors on the panel opted to secure a CE mark to potentially appeal to a wider variety of governments around the world.

ISO is an international organization that is also necessary for certification, particularly if you are looking to test a medical product. No reason to be dragged down by the paperwork, though! When asked about securing Ugandan product certification, Mugaga declared, “This is one of the most exciting journeys I have taken.” His path to clearance was even more wrought with uncertainty – without steady sources of material in the Ugandan economy, it is harder to earn FDA or CE approval, two of the most widely-acknowledged certifications in the world. 

Mugaga’s presentation slides

Step 3: Test 

Now that you have permission, you can start changing lives. Many participants in our panelists’ studies were patients in community health clinics across the globe. Their partners in these clinics also had the opportunity to save tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment. While it seems like a no-brainer, there are ethical concerns that need to be addressed first. For that, you need to fill out…. You guessed it: more paperwork. IRB approval is usually granted by educational institutions (as you should recall from my handy glossary), and is crucial to secure before any testing with humans is started. In fact, the government (and most private investors) won’t even give you a second glance if you ask them for money without IRB approval. 

One big hurdle many of the panelists noted was a distrust of the technology and institution it came from – a foreign entity testing their products on you does not always invoke fear, but it certainly does not always promote trust. Kreiger noted that the work of their community health partners does the heavy lifting on that front; not only are they known community pillars, but they have authority to promote health technology through their existing relationships. If you run into trouble identifying partners in your inventorship journey–never fear. Lee has a message for you: “Ask around. At Duke, there’s always an expert around who’s willing to lend you their time.”

Step 4: Distribute

Now that you are an expert, your invention works, and you’re saving lives, you can attempt to cement your design as standard-of-care. This may look different depending on where in the world you want to distribute, but the next step is to contract a large-scale manufacturer. Your materials have been sourced by now (FDA says they better be) — so finding someone to put them together at an industrial scale should be easy! Your cost may fluctuate at this scale with the increased labor costs, but bulk production and distribution altogether should provide you, your institution, and your clients the best possible chance at changing the world. 

Lee did not receive NIH funding until his fourth attempt at applying. Kreiger did not settle on the first manufacturer contracted. Mugaga is still in the process of securing a CE mark. And yet, all of them are success stories. You can see the ENlyT saving lives in hospitals in Vietnam; you can track the reallocation of $18,000 in savings from purchasing a Calloscope; and if you’re lucky, you’ll catch Mulgaga on campus next year as a visiting scholar at Duke!

Post by Olivia Ares, Class of 2025

Blue is The New Color of Sustainable Investing

The green bond market’s remarkable success, currently valued at over US $500 billion[i], shows how bond finance is an effective way to raise substantial capital for climate-related investments. Following on this success, blue bonds are emerging as the newest trend in sustainability investing and they’re poised to make waves.

Introduced in 2008, green bonds commit to using the funds they raise exclusively for environmentally friendly projects, assets, or business activities[ii]. Since then, the green bond market has seen explosive growth and helped to shape investor attitudes toward sustainable investing.

The blue bond market — blue as in oceans — is where green bonds were 15 years ago[iii]. Blue bonds are a relatively new type of sustainability designed to finance the conservation and sustainable management of ocean and coastal resources[iv].

The Republic of Seychelles issued the first blue bond in 2018, with funds dedicated to expanding Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and improving fisheries governance[v]. To date, only 25 other blue bonds have been issued[vi]. Although in its infancy in comparison to green bonds, the blue bond market is poised to follow a similar trajectory as governments, companies, and investors begin to realize the importance of the blue economy and the relationship between climate change and our oceans[vii].

The Ocean’s Big Role

The ocean covers 70% of the Earth’s surface, comprises 97% of all water on earth, and contains 99% of all living space on the planet[viii]. It plays a vital role in absorbing carbon dioxide and producing the oxygen we breathe, it is a significant component of the global economy, and a key element in fighting climate change. However, governments and organizations around the world continue to abuse the ocean rather than protect it. But with over three billion people reliant on a healthy ocean for their livelihoods, and more than 350 million ocean-related jobs, continued exploitation of our oceans will have catastrophic consequences[ix].

Commitments without Capital

The past few years have seen numerous commitments to restoring and protecting the long-term health our oceans. The United Nations declared 2021-2030 as “The Ocean Decade” and the 30×30 campaign pledges to protect at least 30% of the ocean by 2030[x]. Despite these commitments, the ocean remains chronically underfunded. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 “Life Under Water” receives the least amount of long-term funding of any of the SDGs. Recent reports suggest that $175 billion per year is needed to achieve SDG 14 by 2030; and yet, between 2015 and 2019, just below USD $10 billion was invested.[xi]

Source: https://icg.citi.com/icghome/what-we-think/citigps/insights/sustainable-ocean-economy

Not only does this gap prevent any meaningful progress, the cost of inaction is devastating. Failing to invest in our oceans could result in a total bill of USD $200 billion to $1 trillion a year by 2100 in loss of land, people relocation, and coastal protection[xii]. To put it simply, we cannot afford to underinvest in our oceans.

Mobilizing Capital Through Blue Bonds

Current ocean funding comes primarily through public and philanthropic sources, which are essential, however incredibly insufficient. Enabling the increased use of private finance is critical to achieving ocean conservation goals, and the use of blue bonds can play an essential role.

Bonds are a debt instrument that facilitates an interaction between a borrower and an investor. The investor provides capital to the borrower, and the borrower is required to pay back that capital within a certain period. In the case of blue bonds, the borrower is also required to use the capital to create positive impact on the marine environment. Such an arrangement enables the borrower to access significant amounts of capital upfront and provides the investor with a predictable income stream. This relationship is of particular use within the climate landscape. Green and blue bonds effectively unlock additional sources of capital for climate-related investments and enable private investors to participate in markets that would otherwise be considered too risky.

Source: https://enviroaccounting.com/green-bonds-and-pay-for-performance/

Successful Green Bonds as a Blueprint

To enable the rapid and responsible scaling of the blue bond market, we can leverage existing frameworks from green bonds as models. The green bond market has seen numerous innovative bond structures that support investment in traditionally underserved markets and align financial incentives with sustainability-focused outcomes. Three of these innovative bond issuances are outlined below and offer unique opportunities to apply similar structures to the blue bond market.

Blue is the New Green: A deep dive into three green bond structures and how they can turn blue

The Wildlife Conservation Bond

In 2022, The World Bank and Global Environment Facility issued a first-of-its-kind Wildlife Conservation Bond (WCB) which channels investment into conservation outcomes. This five-year $150 million bond contributes to protecting and increasing black rhino populations in two protected areas in South Africa[xiii]. The WCB is a great example of an innovative green bond that unlocked new financing streams for biodiversity protection and conservation initiatives.

Using the Wildlife Conservation Bond as a model, we can replicate this template across new geographies and species and transform how conservation is funded. Investors in the WCB do not receive coupon payments. Instead, the issuer makes conservation investment payments to help fund rhino conservation initiatives. In a similar manner, blue bonds can be created that enable coupon payments to be channeled to protect critical marine species.

Uruguay’s Sustainability-Linked Bond

In 2022, Uruguay issued a USD $1.5 billion sustainability-linked bond which includes a pricing feature designed to reward progress made on emissions-reduction targets. Coupon payments received by investors would decrease if the Uruguay government met pre-determined emissions targets, but if targets were missed there was a required increase in payment[xiv]. This arrangement aligned financial and environmental incentives and offered a signal to borrowers that more affordable finance is available in return for performing – or exceeding – sustainability strategies[xv].

Similar financing structures could be applied across a range of sustainability goals within the ocean landscape. Rather than reward progress on emissions reductions, blue bonds could be structured to offer favorable financing for biodiversity, establishing marine protected areas (MPA ) reducing plastic pollution, or fisheries management.

The Forests Bond

The Forests Bond was issued by the International Finance Corporation in 2016 to help unlock private finance for reducing deforestation. Investors in the USD $152 million Forests Bond could choose to receive coupons in the form of verified carbon credits, rather than cash payments[xvi]. This arrangement helped to boost demand for carbon credits and demonstrated investor interest in sustainability-focused investments.

The Forests Bond model can be repeated to support conservation of blue carbon ecosystems such as mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrasses. Blue carbon ecosystems sequester two to four times the amount of carbon of terrestrial forests, however, it is estimated that these ecosystems are being destroyed at four times the rate of tropical forests[xvii]. Designing a bond to act as a catalyst for the blue carbon market could offer the critical incentives needed to protect these essential environments.

Building the Blue Bond Wave

In all three of the above cases, investor demand for the green bond far exceeded initial expectations or the planned bond offering. This indicates that there is high investor interest for innovative bond models that provide both positive financial and climate returns. The main challenge is then providing investors with enough attractive opportunities to participate. With just 25 blue bonds issued to date, the blue bond market is nascent. Establishing a robust blue bond market requires transparency, standardization, and accountability. Clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) must be developed to demonstrate the tangible benefits of blue bond investments in terms of ocean conservation and sustainable resource management. Additionally, collaboration between governments, financial institutions, and environmental organizations is essential to create a supportive ecosystem that encourages blue bond issuance. Ultimately, the future of the blue bond market hinges on aligning financial incentives with environmental objectives, fostering innovation, and building a robust infrastructure that inspires trust and commitment from a diverse set of stakeholders[xviii].

Guest Post by Mackenzie Audino, 2024 Masters candidate in business administration and environmental management. This project was completed as part of the ClimateCap Fellowship, a program of the ClimateCap Initiative led by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and supported by the Hearst Foundations.


[i] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X22002664#bib26

[ii] https://www.oecd.org/environment/cc/Green%20bonds%20PP%20%5Bf3%5D%20%5Blr%5D.pdf

[iii] https://unglobalcompact.org/take-action/ocean/communication/blue-bonds-accelerating-sustainable-ocean-business

[iv] https://www.undp.org/indonesia/blog/indonesia-launches-worlds-first-publicly-offered-sovereign-blue-bond-undps-support

[v] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/29/seychelles-launches-worlds-first-sovereign-blue-bond

[vi] https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/16/3/184

[vii] https://www.wellington.com/en-gb/intermediary/insights/blue-bonds-marine-ecosystem

[viii] https://oceanliteracy.unesco.org/our-blue-planet/

[ix] https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/uk/Documents/risk/ocean-financing.pdf

[x] https://marine-conservation.org/30×30/

[xi] https://www.weforum.org/whitepapers/sdg14-financing-landscape-scan-tracking-funds-to-realize-sustainable-outcomes-for-the-ocean/

[xii] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23168-y

[xiii] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/03/23/wildlife-conservation-bond-boosts-south-africa-s-efforts-to-protect-black-rhinos-and-support-local-communities

[xiv] https://www.reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/bank-floats-10-bln-brazilian-bond-plan-halt-amazon-deforestation-2022-12-19/

[xv] https://www.ifre.com/story/3661444/latin-america-bond-uruguays-us15bn-sustainability-linked-bond-wh65f7xrlp

[xvi] https://www.conservation.org/docs/default-source/peru/forests-bond_factsheet.pdf?Status=Master&sfvrsn=867eadb8_3

[xvii] https://siwi.org/latest/what-are-we-getting-wrong-about-blue-carbon/

[xviii] OpenAI. “The future of the blue bond market and what needs to happen to increase the amount of capital that is invested.” ChatGPT, 2023, [https://chat.openai.com/c/ba58a2d7-1129-465c-9fa5-f4815f08aa91]. Accessed [September 27, 2023]

My Face Belongs to The Hive (and Yours Does Too)

Imagine having an app that could identify almost anyone using only a photograph of their face. For example, you could take a photograph of a stranger in a dimly lit restaurant and know within seconds who they are.

This technology exists, and Kashmir Hill has reported on several companies that offer these services.

An investigative journalist with the New York Times, Hill visited Duke Law Sept. 27 to talk about her new book, Your Face Belongs To Us.

The book is about a company that developed powerful facial recognition technology based on images harnessed from our social media profiles. To learn more about Clearview AI, the unlikely duo who were behind it, and how they sold it to law enforcement, I highly recommend reading this book.

Hill demonstrated for me a facial recognition app that provides subscribers with up to 25 face searches a day. She offered to let me see how well it worked.

Screen shot of the search app with Hill’s quick photo of me.

She snapped a quick photo of my face in dim lighting. Within seconds (3.07 to be exact), several photos of my face appeared on her phone.

The first result (top left) is unsurprising. It’s the headshot I use for the articles I write on the Duke Research Blog. The second result (top right) is a photo of me at my alma mater in 2017, where I presented at a research conference. The school published an article about the event, and I remember the photographer coming around to take photos. I was able to easily figure out exactly where on the internet both results had been pulled from.

The third result (second row, left) unsettled me. I had never seen this photo before.

A photo of me sitting between friends. Their faces have been blurred out.

After a quick search of the watermark on the photo (which has been blurred for safety), I discovered that the photograph was from an event I attended several years ago. Apparently, the venue had used the image for marketing on their website. Using these facial recognition results, I was able to easily find out the exact location of the event, its date, and who I had gone with.

What is Facial Recognition Technology?

Researchers have been trying for decades to produce a technology that could accurately identify human faces. The invention of neural network artificial intelligence has made it possible for computer algorithms to do this with increasing accuracy and speed. However, this technology requires large sets of data, in this case, hundreds of thousands of examples of human faces, to work.

Just think about how many photos of you exist online. There are the photos that you have taken and shared or that your friends and family have taken of you. Then there are photos that you’re unaware that you’re in – perhaps you walked by as someone snapped a picture and accidentally ended up in the frame. I don’t consider myself a heavy user of social media, but I am sure there are thousands of pictures of my face out there. I’ve uploaded and classified hundreds of photos of myself across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even Venmo.

The developers behind Clearview AI recognized the potential in all these publicly accessible photographs and compiled them to create a massive training dataset for their facial recognition AI. They did this by scraping the social media profiles of hundreds of thousands of people. In fact, they got something like 2.1 million images of faces from Venmo and Tinder (a dating app) alone.

Why does this matter?

Clearly, there are major privacy concerns for this kind of technology. Clearview AI was marketed as being only available to law enforcement. In her book, Hill gives several examples of why this is problematic. People have been wrongfully accused, arrested, detained, and even jailed for the crime of looking (to this technology) like someone else.

We also know that AI has problems with bias. Facial recognition technology was first developed by mostly white, mostly male researchers, using photographs of mostly white, mostly male faces. The result of this has had a lasting effect. Marginalized communities targeted by policing are at increased risk, leading many to call for limits on the use of facial recognition by police.

It’s not just government agencies who have access to facial recognition. Other companies have developed off-the-shelf products that anyone can buy, like the app Hill demonstrated to me. This technology is now available to anyone willing to pay for a subscription. My own facial recognition results show how easy it is to find out a lot about a person (like their location, acquaintances, and more) using these apps. It’s easy to imagine how this could be dangerous.

There remain reasons to be optimistic about the future of privacy, however. Hill closed her talk by reminding everyone that with every technological breakthrough, there is opportunity for ethical advancement reflected by public policy. With facial recognition, policy makers have previously relied on private companies to make socially responsible decisions. As we face the results of a few radical actors using the technology maliciously, we can (and should) respond by developing legal restraints that safeguard our privacy.

On this front, Europe is leading by example. It’s likely that the actions of Clearview AI are already illegal in Europe, and they are expanding privacy rights with the European Commission’s (EC) proposed Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulation. These rules include requirements for technology developers to certify the quality of their processes, rather than algorithm performance, which would mitigate some of these harms. This regulation aims to take a technology-neutral approach and stratifies facial recognition technology by it’s potential for risk to people’s safety, livelihoods, and rights.

Post by Victoria Wilson, MA Bioethics and Science Policy, 2023

Helping People and Wildlife Coexist in Ways That Benefit Both, Using Math

Duke team wins top prize in mathematical modeling contest


Safari-goers watch a pride of lions in the Maasai Mara, a famous game reserve in Kenya. Credit: Ray in Manila, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Safari-goers watch a pride of lions in the Maasai Mara, a famous game reserve in Kenya. Credit: Ray in Manila, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Of all the math competitions for college students, the annual Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) is one of the biggest. And this year, Duke’s team took home a coveted top prize.

Undergraduates Erik Novak, ’24, Nicolas Salazar, ’23, and Enzo Moraes Mescall, ’24, represented the Blue Devils at this year’s contest, a grueling 4-day event where teams of undergraduates use their mathematical modeling skills to solve a real-world problem. The results are finally in, and the Duke team was chosen as one of the top 22 outstanding winners out of more than 11,200 teams worldwide.

Their task: to analyze some of the challenges facing a nature reserve in Kenya known as the Maasai Mara. This region is named for the local Maasai people, a tribe of semi-nomadic people who make a living by herding cattle. It’s also teeming with wildlife. Each year, more than a million wildebeests, zebras and gazelles travel in a loop from neighboring Tanzania into Kenya’s Maasai Mara Reserve and back, following the seasonal rains in search of fresh grass to eat.

Some 300,000 safari-goers also flock to the area to witness the massive migration, making it a major player in Kenya’s billion-dollar tourism industry. But protecting and managing the land for the benefit of both wildlife and people is a delicate balancing act.

The reserve relies on tourism revenue to protect the animals that live there. If tourism slumps — due to political unrest in Kenya, or the COVID-19 pandemic — desperate communities living around the park resort to poaching to get by, threatening the very wildlife that tourism depends on.

Poachers aren’t the only problem: wild animals such as lions, leopards and elephants sometimes venture into human settlements in search of food. Conservationists must strike a balance between protecting these animals and managing the dangers they pose by raiding crops or killing valuable domestic livestock.

Tourism is a mixed blessing, too. While safari-goers bring money into the region, they can also disturb the animals and pollute the Mara River, and off-road drivers can erode the soil with their jeeps.

The mission facing the Duke team was to identify ways to mitigate such conflicts between wildlife and people.

From left: Teammates Erik Novak, ’24, Nicolas Salazar, ’23, and Enzo Moraes Mescall ’24 finished in the top 0.1% in the 2023 Mathematical Contest in Modeling.

This year’s contest ran over a single weekend in February. Camped out on the third floor of Perkins library, the team of three worked 12 hours a day, fueled by a steady supply of Red Bull and poke bowls. During that time, they built a model, came up with budget and policy recommendations, and wrote a 25-page report for the Kenyan Tourism and Wildlife Committee, all in less than 96 hours.

They built a mathematical model consisting of a system of six ordinary differential equations. According to the model’s predictions, they said, it should theoretically be possible to increase the reserve’s animal populations by about 25%, reduce environmental degradation by 20%, nearly eliminate retaliatory lion killings, and cut poaching rates in half — all while increasing the average yearly flow of tourists by 7.5%.

Participating in a smaller-but-similar contest last fall, the Triangle Competition in Mathematical Modeling, helped them prepare. “It’s kind of like a practice for the MCM,” Salazar said.

Veronica Ciocanel

“They did not win that contest, but they took everything they learned and look what they did with it. I’m very proud,” said assistant professor of mathematics and biology Veronica Ciocanel, who coached the team and co-organized the Triangle competition.

In addition to finishing in the top 0.1% of competitors, the Duke team got three additional awards for their performance; the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) award, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) prize, and an International COMAP Scholarship Award of $10,000.

The problems in these contests tend to be much more open-ended than typical coursework. “We didn’t know what the solution was supposed to be or what tools to use,” Novak said.

Modeling, computation and coding skills are certainly important, Ciocanel said. “But really what matters more is practice, teamwork, and communicating their results in a written report. Students who have a solid course background don’t need to do anything else to prepare, they just need to be creative about using what they know from the courses they already took.”

“Use what you have and work well together,” Ciocanel said. “That I think is the most important thing.”

Robin Smith
By Robin Smith

Is The World In Crisis?

According to a recent NPR/Ipsos poll, nearly 70% of Americans believe that U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” Two out of every three respondents also agree that U.S. democracy is “more at risk” now than it was a year ago. 

These fears are not unfounded. For the past three years, the United Nations Human Development Report has issued increasingly grave warnings for the state of the world. The warnings focus specifically on the Anthropocene, rising inequality, and growing polarization, conveying themes of both uncertainty and hope.

Pictured above: The 2022 Human Development Report.

On March 22nd, the director of the United Nations Human Development Report Office, Dr. Pedro Conceição, discussed his perspective at Duke University. The fireside chat was hosted by the Duke Center for International Development and the South-North Scholars, and was moderated by Dr. Anirudh Krishna.

“People should be able to live their lives at their full potential,” Dr. Conceição began. “When you look at the world and see how people are living their lives compared to how they should be living their lives, you get the need for human development.”

First introduced in 1990, the Human Development Report focuses on improving the quality of human life, rather than just the economy in which human beings live. The report emphasizes three pillars: people, opportunity, and choice. “Living life to your full potential is essentially about human freedom,” Dr. Conceição said. It is these freedoms that are at risk as the conditions in the Human Development Report worsen.

Credit: 2021/22 United Nations Human Development Report.

“We need to dig more deeply into why we aren’t taking action,” Conceição maintains. He explains that current efforts to spark change are too factual. Governments and corporations are focused too heavily on raising awareness and should pivot to trying to take tangible steps.

Political division is also a major source of stagnation, as those who lie on either side of the spectrum tend to be more insecure in their views of the future. Because of these obstacles, it requires a “more complex and unusual way of trying to understand these problems.”

The report has citizens from around the world concerned about potential declines in the quality of well-being. But Dr. Conceição asserts that the reports are meant to communicate hope.

“It’s precisely because we are having this level of uncertainty that this becomes even more relevant,” he said. In fact, it is this uncertainty that the report will build off of for future publications. The literature will dig deeper into novel areas of uncertainty, to figure out the best way forward.

An analysis of the current global uncertainties. Credit: 2021/22 United Nations Human Development Report.

Dr. Conceição urges students to invest in the United Nations and its initiatives, as it is crucial in creating a better outlook on the future. As Abraham Lincoln once expressed, “The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it.”

Want to get involved with the United Nations? Click here!

Written by: Skylar Hughes, Class of 2025

Why There Has Never Been Infrastructure ‘Justice for All’

Since coming to Duke nine years ago, I gained the realization that all rural communities are virtually the same… the infrastructure neglect is still the same.”

Catherine Coleman Flowers

Catherine Coleman Flowers is no stranger to action. Since the start of her career, she’s accomplished everything from working as the Vice Chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council to founding the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. An internationally recognized advocate for public health, Flowers has worked tirelessly to improve water and sanitation conditions across rural America.

Pictured above: Catherine Coleman Flowers
Credit: Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

On February 9th, Duke University students got to hear from Flowers in a powerful seminar sponsored by Trinity College. A Practitioner in Residence at the Nicholas School of the Environment, Flowers discussed her incredible activism journey.

“I became an activist very, very young,” she said. Her family heritage nurtured her love for the environment early on, as well as her home state of Alabama. In high school, she began to read about the sanitation crisis happening in rural Alabama, Lowndes County in particular.

“I learned that poor people (there) were being targeted for arrest because they couldn’t afford sanitation systems,” Flowers said. The poverty rate in this historically Black county is double the national average, and sewage treatment is not provided for many residents. For those who can afford sanitation systems, they are often far from adequate, such as poorly maintained septic tanks. Issues like exposure to tropical parasites and improper installations are rampant throughout the county.

A man in Lowndes County assessing his septic tank. Credit: The Associated Press

“It builds upon the structural inequalities that make sure these areas remain poor,” Flowers said. Across the US, millions of rural areas face the same complications. From places like ‘Cancer Alley’ in New Orleans to the city of Mount Vernon in New York, sanitation systems are failing miserably.

“We saw families that couldn’t live in their houses half the time because of the sewage that was running into their home,” Flowers explained. Unsurprisingly, almost all of the areas facing these issues are home to minority communities. “The narrative used to be, ‘they don’t know how to maintain it,’ but that isn’t true. The technology isn’t working at all.

In November of 2021, Flowers filed the first-ever civil rights complaint against sanitation in Lowndes County. Thanks to her, as well as other prominent community activists, the issue garnered nationwide attention. In less than a year, the county received a $2.1 million grant from the USDA to begin solving the sewage crisis. Similar funding efforts have also been seen in Mount Vernon. “That is an example of what a solution can look like,” Flowers said.

“That’s the kind of power that you have as a Duke student,” Flowers said in closing. With almost one million dollars available for student funding annually and access to one of the greatest networks in the world, Duke students are in a remarkable position to make a change, she said. In North Carolina, counties like Duplin and Halifax are in need of outside help. “Growing up in the computer age, you can bring those skills needed to assist those applying for funds.”

Duke’s Environmental Justice Network

So, what can you do? Above all, Flowers emphasizes the importance of leading from behind. ” Don’t go in the community and try to lead from the front… People from the community need to be involved from the design to the implementation.”

As students, our assistance is needed in the form of support. From assisting with grant applications, to utilizing our network access to spread the word, there are so many ways to get involved. True equity is found not when we speak for the community, but rather when we strengthen the community’s ability to speak for itself.

Click here to get in contact with Ms.Catherine Coleman Flowers, and click here for more information about work you can do in the local community!

Post By Skylar Hughes, Class of 2025

“Brains are Weird… and the World is Difficult”

Institute for Consumer Money Management, and Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hindsight.

Intending to do the right thing doesn’t always lead to actually doing it, a tendency formally known as the “intention-behavior gap.” We can intend to go to bed early and still go to bed late. We can want to exercise and still choose not to. We can recognize the importance of saving extra money and still choose to spend it instead. So why is it so hard to change our behavior? Because, says Jonathan Corbin, Ph.D., “brains are weird” and “the world is difficult.”

Corbin is a senior behavioral researcher at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University. The Center for Advanced Hindsight recently partnered with NOVA Labs, Thought Cafè, and the Institute for Consumer Money Management to create the NOVA Financial Lab, a group of financial literacy games targeted at adolescents and emerging adults. In each game, players practice managing money while taking care of a pet. You may never have to sneak a cat into a concert or prepare a retirement plan for a dog in real life, but you will need to understand concepts like budgeting, interest, and debt. “What we hope people start to do,” Corbin says, “is really think about, ‘What decisions should I make now to make better decisions later?’”

Essentially, “Money spent now is money that can’t be spent later.” As intuitive as that might seem, “The way we think about money is relative, and it’s not linear.” When you’re already spending thousands of dollars on a car, for instance, an extra five hundred dollars for a feature you may or may not need “feels like a very small amount of money,” but in a different situation, its value can seem higher. How many times, Corbin points out, could you go out to eat with five hundred dollars?

The three games combine financial literacy with behavioral science to explore why people make the decisions they do and how they can start to make better ones.
Source: https://advanced-hindsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/CAH-NOVA.pdf

There are three games: Shopportunity Cost, Budget Busters, and Exponential Potential. (“One of the people from PBS helped us come up with these cute names,” Corbin says.) They each involve different skills, but they all focus on “financial literacy from a behavioral science perspective.” Players have to contend with both external obstacles and common behavioral biases to make financial decisions for a pet. “I always choose the dog,” Corbin adds, “but I understand other people might choose the cat.” (I chose the cat.)

The first game, Shopportunity Cost, focuses on short-term financial planning. It involves dressing a pet up like a person in order to sneak them into a concert for the night. “You have to make decisions that optimize the pet’s happiness while also being able to make it to the concert and back home,” but you have a limited amount of money to spend. If you spend too much money too soon, you’ll run out, but if you’re too frugal, your pet won’t enjoy the evening. As goofy as the concert scenario is, it introduces players to an important concept known as opportunity cost, which refers to the potential benefits we miss out on when we choose one alternative over another. Say you’re debating between a $50 outfit and a $30 one. The opportunity cost of choosing the more expensive outfit is $20, but shoppers don’t always consider that. “Opportunity cost neglect is the simple idea that when we’re faced with financial decisions, we tend not to consider alternative uses for that money.” Reframing the $30 outfit as “a $30 dress that I’m okay with plus 20 extra dollars” that could be spent elsewhere might lead you to choose the cheaper outfit. Or it might not. “Sometimes you want the $50 outfit, and that’s perfectly fine… but a lot of the time that might not be the right decision.” Like many things, taking opportunity cost into account is a balancing act. “We shouldn’t obsess over every possible opportunity that there is,” Corbin cautions, but “consider[ing] opportunity costs can lead to better financial decisions.”

Budget Busters, meanwhile, involves medium-term planning. Players have to manage checking, credit, and savings accounts while caring for their pet over a six-month period. Along with purchasing essential and non-essential items to attend to their pet’s basic needs and happiness, players have to contend with unforeseen circumstances like medical emergencies. The game introduces people to the 50-30-20 rule, a budgeting concept that involves devoting 50% of income to essentials, 30% to non-essentials, and 20% to savings. Budget Busters also explores the principle of mental accounting, the idea that aside from formal budgets, we have “categories in our head” that change our perception of money. “Let’s say you get birthday money from your relative. That money tends to be a different kind of spending money to you than money you get from your paycheck,” Corbin explains, because “money feels different in different contexts.” 

There are parallels in Budget Busters. Sometimes players receive unexpected windfalls like gifts or prizes. (My cat won $40 for being “Best in Show” at the local pet pageant.) Players get to decide whether to use the extra money on a “fun” item for their pet or put it into savings. Corbin says “gift money” is a classic example of a misleading mental account. “We tend to overspend… because it feels like it’s not even our money in a way.” In reality, though, money has “fungibility,” meaning it’s “exchangeable… across any account.” In other words, “money is money,” regardless of where it comes from.  A $10 bill, for instance, can be exchanged for two fives without changing its value. (Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, lack this property. “You can’t exchange the picture of a cat you bought from the internet for Chipotle.”) Like Shopportunity Cost, Budget Busters focuses on both traditional financial concepts and common behavioral tendencies that affect decision-making. “None of these things are necessarily bad,” Corbin emphasizes, “but they’re things that one should be aware of… when that natural proclivity may be swaying them in the wrong way.”

Budget Busters, which focuses on monthly budgeting, also encourages players to look closely at discounts when shopping. “Sometimes the discount that looks really good from a  percentage-off perspective isn’t actually the better discount” in terms of overall budgeting and total amount of money saved, Corbin warns.

The last game, Exponential Potential, explores concepts like compound interest, debt, and investment. The premise of the game involves traveling back in time to balance debts and investments. The goal is to make your pet a millionaire. By showing players how investment decisions can affect future net worth, the game seeks to increase understanding of processes involving exponential growth. Exponential Potential introduces the concept of exponential growth bias. According to Corbin,  “We tend to underestimate things that grow exponentially.” He cites the coronavirus pandemic as an example: “Even the people who were making the graphs of Covid’s growth… it’s really hard for them to figure out how to show that to people.” Log-transformed graphs are one option, but they can be deceptive by making the slope look flatter. Similarly, when dealing with exponential growth in the financial world, “People are going to underestimate how badly they’re going to get burned” by debt, but they may also underestimate how much they’ll benefit by saving for retirement.

With compound interest, for instance, “The interest gets applied both to principle and to interest from the last time, and that’s where exponential growth happens.” In the game, players have the opportunity to adjust how much money to put toward paying off debts, investing, and saving for retirement each month. Then they travel decades into the future to see how their decisions have affected their pet’s net worth.  “We’re hoping that that kind of feedback allows you to think through… what you might have done wrong and try to correct,” Corbin says. Once again, though, raw numbers aren’t the only factor at play. “We just want people to understand what the optimal way to do this is, and if there’s a better way for them to do that psychologically, that’s fine.” Debt account aversion, for example, refers to the fact that people want to have fewer debt accounts, meaning they are often eager to pay off accounts in full when they can. Some financial advisers suggest that “because they think it’ll get the ball rolling and you’ll be more likely to pay off the next one.” According to Corbin, there isn’t a lot of evidence for that, and sometimes paying everything off at the outset isn’t ideal. For instance, “It is optimal to start thinking about retirement as soon as you can… but if you’re delaying putting money into retirement because you’re so concerned with your student loan debt,” that can be problematic. Still, Corbin understands the appeal of closing debt accounts. “I am risk-averse, which means if I have a debt I’m probably going to put more money toward that debt that I necessarily should given what the interest rates are and what I could potentially make by investing that money instead.” Financially speaking, “There’s a decent likelihood that I should just pay the minimum on my mortgage… [but] I’ve decided I’m willing to trade off those future gains for the peace of mind that if something goes wrong… I’ll be ahead on my mortgage payment.” Even in Exponential Potential, the right choices aren’t always clear-cut. Corbin describes it as a “sandbox approach” where players are given more opportunity to play around. “This is the trickiest game because there’s no perfect answer for anything,” he says. “Everything has risk.”

Another bias that can affect our financial decisions is known as present bias, the tendency to discount the future in favor of the present. Corbin offers the everyday example of staying up too late. “Nighttime Me wants to stay up and read…. Morning Me is going to be really ticked off at Nighttime Me when they’re exhausted and don’t want to get up.” Research suggests that people can have a harder time identifying with their future selves. That can easily affect our financial decisions, too. “I’m going to let future me worry about that. That guy. Whoever that is.” However, “If you can get people to identify more with that person,” they can sometimes make better decisions. Ultimately, “The game isn’t trying to force people to become investment robots.” We are biased for the present because we live in it, and that’s normal. The purpose of the game is simply “to nudge people… to worry just a little more about the future.”

“Money is basically for safety, security, and happiness,” Corbin says. The ultimate objective is to balance needs, wants, and savings to achieve those three goals both in the present and the future.

By Sophie Cox
By Sophie Cox

Duke First-Year Founds Cryptocurrency Security Startup, Harpie

“Crypto is scaling so quickly but security systems are still the same as they were in 2013.” Those are the words of Daniel Chong, a recent Duke student whose new startup aims to change that.

One of the largest challenges within cryptocurrency is security. The most impactful application of cryptocurrency thus far is decentralized finance (DeFi). DeFi eliminates intermediaries by allowing people and businesses to conduct financial transactions through blockchain technology as opposed to working through banks or other corporations. However, as a result, people are personally responsible for securing their assets. 

Graphic from the Harpie.io Website

When engaging with cryptocurrency people generally use a trading platform and a wallet. Cryptocurrency trading platforms like Coinbase, Binance, and Crypto.com allow people to buy and sell cryptocurrencies using USD or other cryptocurrencies. However, in order to use crypto, one must transfer some of it into a wallet.

As with conventional currency, crypto wallets are not required in order to use cryptocurrency but they allow individuals to store their tokens in one place, easily retrieve them and send it to other individuals or organizations (i.e. buying non-fungible tokens).  Some of the most popular wallets include Coinbase wallet, Metamask, and Electrum. 

Screenshot of a Metamask Wallet

These wallets are not only password-protected but provide each user with a seed phrase or a series of words generated by one’s cryptocurrency wallet. This phrase, like a password, provides access to the crypto associated with that wallet.

An example seed phrase

The catch is, if an individual gets locked out of their wallet and cannot remember or does not have access to their seed phrase, all of their money will be lost. This is a major problem in the space and people have lost millions of dollars to lost seed phrases and inaccessible wallets. In fact, 20% of all existing Bitcoin tokens have been misplaced. 

Furthermore, in the past, it was already hard enough to secure one’s crypto wallets but now people have several wallets, each with their own unique seed phrase and passcodes making it all the more difficult. In the Fall of 2020, Daniel Chong, a Duke first-year at the time, identified this wallet security problem. 

“Crypto is scaling so quickly but security systems are still the same as they were in 2013.”

Daniel Chong

Having grown up in Las Vegas, Chong was used to fast-paced environments and unique challenges. During high school, Chong started coding as a hobby. 

“I just wanted to build something,” he explained

The first project he built was a website for a research paper he had in his high school psychology class. In 2018 Chong was introduced to solidity, a programming language that’s main purpose is to develop smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain. If you are unfamiliar with blockchain, please refer to my previous article here

Chong matriculated to Duke during a period of transition, the Fall of 2020. As a result of being sent home due to COVID-19 in the Spring and having to shift to online meetings, many on-campus clubs were struggling. Early on Chong met Manmit Singh, a Junior at the time and the President of the Duke Blockchain Lab.

Even though Chong was only a first-year, he had experience coding in solidity and ended up aiding Singh in revamping Duke Blockchain Lab so students could continue engaging with and learning about blockchain despite the pandemic. Additionally, he ran a virtual course on web3 and solidity development for other club members. 

Despite the fact that Chong was attending classes, involved in clubs, and working part-time, he began talking to his brother Noah who was a senior at Georgia Tech about once again, building something. 

After working on building a security solution for crypto wallets for about a year, Chong and his brother received venture capital funding for their startup Harpie: a simple crypto protection plan that scales with you. 

Chong explained that venture capitalists are very excited about crypto right now, especially back in November of 2021 when crypto was in a bull market and bitcoin was at a market high of 60,000. 

Harpie is a web app that allows users to connect all of their wallets to individualized protection plans. This means that if you have a Harpie protection plan and someone hacks your wallet or you get locked out, you can go to the Harpie web app and transfer your funds from the unusable wallet to a new one.

Additionally, users are able to choose the degree of security their Harpie account has. Users can regain access to their fund via email, phone, or (personal recommendation) 2-factor authentication. Ultimately, for $8.99/month you can protect as many wallets, with any sum of funds, as you want.

Why Harpie is a better backup Solution

After working for just over a year, Harpie launched on February 14th, 2022. The next weekend Chong and his brother headed to ETHDenver, the largest Ethereum conference, to promote Harpie and compete in the Hackathon. For those who are unfamiliar, hackathons are competitive, sprint-like events where computer programmers and others are involved in software development work to build something over a condensed period of time. 

Over 10,000 people participated in the ETHDenver hackathon in person and over 30,000 participated virtually for over $1 million in bounties and prizes, as well as up to $2 million in investment capital.

While the teams had 36 hours to build a project, Chong and his brother managed to build there’s in 4-5 hours. They did this by quickly creating a front-runner bot/flash bot to help people avoid getting hacked by detecting and halting transactions to unauthorized addresses.

The brothers not only successfully built the bot but also placed top 10 in the overall hackathon and had the opportunity to present their project.

While presenting, Chong also received questions from Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. He explained this as a very “nerve-wracking experience” and added that Buterin asked very technical questions such as what the miners’ extractable value would be.

Chong and his brother (left) onstage with Vitalik Buterin (right) presenting at ETHDenver

In the future, Chong would be open to entering more hackathons but right now is more interested in growing his startup. Currently, Chong is taking time off from school to focus on Harpie and to, ultimately, revolutionize security systems as they relate to online assets.

“Rest easy knowing your crypto is safe.”

Daniel Chong

On the Intersection of Innovation and Immigration

International students comprise an essential part of the fabric of US colleges.

Their contributions to ongoing campus dialogues, research initiatives, and cross-cultural exchange have improved not only the caliber, but also the relevance of American universities on a global scale. Yet, through a combination of legal challenges and the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment of international students in the United States declined by 15% from 2020 to 2021.

Logo for The Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law School, founded in 2013.

This figure was a key motivating factor behind one of the panels at The Evolving Role of Universities in the American Innovation System conference, hosted by The Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law School on March 3 and 4. The panel, titled “Immigration Policy and the Availability and Cultivation of Talent to Support U.S. Universities’ Missions,” explored the importance of effective immigration policy in fostering a culture of innovation in the United States. Featuring four thought leaders on the intersection of immigration policy and international students, the panel was moderated by Stuart Benjamin, JD, from Duke Law School. 

Esther Brimmer, DPhil, Executive Director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators

Panelist Esther Brimmer, DPhil. stressed the importance of generating a coordinated national strategy for attracting international students, with the goal of creating an attractive environment for scientific leadership. Scientific fields are the focus because, while international students make up only 5% of total enrollment at US universities, over half of them are employed in STEM fields. Furthermore, in the 2016-2017 Academic Year, 54% of master’s degrees and 44% of doctorate degrees in STEM fields were issued to international students, two figures that have been on the rise in the past decades.

Data from 2019 IIE Open Doors Report. Chart created by World Education Services.

Recent legislation from the Biden-Harris Administration capitalized on the rising relevance of international STEM students by expanding  opportunities for study and bolstering legal protection, a move backed strongly by Brimmer and other immigration policy scholars.

Richard Freeman, PhD, Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University

Richard Freeman, PhD, followed up Brummer’s points by analyzing the impact of international students on a recent scientific breakthrough: the development of COVID-19 vaccines. Working off of a thesis that the US university serves as a critical global hub for science, technology, and innovation, Freeman focused his analysis on the C-suites, inventors, and clinical trial authors as it pertained to major pharmaceutical firms Moderna, Novavax, Pfizer/BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca/Oxford. Freeman found that US university education was a uniting factor in the backgrounds of most of the leaders and innovators within the vaccine development processes, irrespective of whether they were born in the United States. To propagate the vast US innovation system, Freeman alluded, it was imperative that policymakers develop the necessary frameworks to maintain a pool of international talent.

Caroline Wagner, PhD, Associate Professor at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University 

Caroline Wagner, PhD, proceeded to expound upon the critical policy frameworks necessary for enhancing international collaboration at US research universities. She discussed how liberal democracies such as the United States ought to shift their policies in terms of focus, funding, and approach towards research in order to keep pace with a more diffuse and fast-growing international STEM ecosystem. Therefore, research at the university level needed to be better aligned with US national interests on an economic and political level, claimed Wagner. Working off of this claim, the focus of Wagner’s current collaborative project with the Berkeley Research Group Institute is to develop and advise a more deliberate science and technology policy that would balance innovation with the needs of global security.

Dany Bahar, PhD, Associate Professor of Practice of International and Public Affairs at Brown University

Dany Bahar, PhD, rounded out the panel with a discussion of the intersection between migration and innovation, with a specific focus on inventions. Through his research, Bahar identified a class of individuals whom he dubbed Global Mobile Inventors, scholars and inventors who patent multiple novel technologies in a multitude of different countries. As these individuals migrate across borders, they utilize their technical expertise to positively contribute to the economies of each country within which they reside. Upon mapping patent data against migration reform trends, Bahar found that negative migration reforms often stop innovative inventors from moving, leading to a loss of innovation and a lowering of economic output.

Chart visualizing the movements of Global Mobile Inventors between twenty nations from 2015 to 2019. Chart and data obtained from Dany Bahar.

Bahar asserted, in no uncertain terms, that America needs migrants now more than ever before. This powerful statement was met with nods of approval from each panelist, an empowering example of consensus-building from leaders working within a decidedly imperfect university system. However, it was the panelists’ common recognition of institutional shortcomings that laid the groundwork for an especially fruitful discussion, one that will likely play out on the national and international political stage for years to come.

Post by Vibhav Nandagiri, Class of 2025

Decentralized Finance and the Power of Smart Contracts

When people use apps or services like Netflix, Instagram, Amazon, etc. they sign, or rather virtually accept, digital user agreements. Digital agreements have been around since the 1990s. These agreements are written and enforced by the institutions that create these services and products. However, in certain conditions, these systems fail and these digital or service-level agreements can be breached, causing people to feel robbed. 

A recent example of this is the Robinhood scandal that occurred in mid-2021. Essentially, people came together and all wanted to buy the same stock. However, Robinhood ended up restricting buying, citing issues with volatile stock and regulatory agreements. As a result, they ended up paying $70 million dollars in fines for system outages and misleading customers. And individual customers were left feeling robbed. This was partially the result of centralization and Robinhood having full control over the platform as well as enforcing the digital agreement.

Zak Ayesh Presenting on Chainlink
and Decentralized Smart Contracts

Zak Ayesh, a developer advocate at Chainlink recently came to Duke to talk about decentralized Smart Contracts that could solve many of the problems with current centralized digital agreements and traditional paper contracts as well. 

What makes smart contracts unique is that they programmatically implement a series of if-then rules without the need for a third-party human interaction. While currently these are primarily being used on blockchains, they were actually created by computer scientist Nick Szabo in 1994. Most smart contracts now run on blockchains because it allows them to remain decentralized and transparent. If unfamiliar with blockchain refer to my previous article here. 

Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement being directly written into computer code.

Zak Ayesh

There are several benefits to decentralized contracts. The first is transparency. Because every action on a blockchain is recorded and publicly available, the enforcement of smart contracts is unavoidably built-in. Next is trust minimization and guaranteed execution. With smart contracts, there is reduced counterparty risk — that’s the probability one party involved in a transaction or agreement might default on its contractual obligation because neither party has control of the agreement’s execution or enforcement. Lastly, they are more efficient due to automation. Operating on blockchains allows for cheaper and more frictionless transactions than traditional alternatives. For instance, the complexities of cross-border remittances involving multiple jurisdictions and sets of legal compliances can be simplified through coded automation in smart contracts.

Dr. Campbell Harvey, a J. Paul Sticht Professor of International Business at Fuqua, has done considerable research on smart contracts as well, culminating in the publication of a book, DeFi and the Future of Finance which was released in the fall of 2021.

In the book, Dr. Harvey explores the role smart contracts play in decentralized finance and how Ethereum and other smart contract platforms give rise to the ability for decentralized application or dApp. Additionally, smart contracts can only exist as long as the chain or platform they live on exists. However, because these platforms are decentralized, they remove the need for a third party to mediate the agreement. Harvey quickly realized how beneficial this could be in finance, specifically decentralized finance or DeFi where third-party companies, like banks, mediate agreements at a high price.  

“Because it costs no more at an organization level to provide services to a customer with $100 or $100 million in assets, DeFi proponents believe that all meaningful financial infrastructure will be replaced by smart contracts which can provide more value to a larger group of users,” Harvey explains in the book

Beyond improving efficiency, this also creates greater accessibility to financial services. Smart contracts provide a foundation for DeFi by eliminating the middleman through publicly traceable coded agreements. However, the transition will not be completely seamless and Harvey also investigates the risks associated with smart contracts and advancements that need to be made for them to be fully scalable.

Ultimately, there is a smart contract connectivity problem. Essentially, smart contracts are unable to connect with external systems, data feeds, application programming interfaces (APIs), existing payment systems, or any other off-chain resource on their own. This is something called the Oracle Problem which Chainlink is looking to solve.

Harvey explains that when a smart contract is facilitating an exchange between two tokens, it determines the price by comparing exchange rates with another similar contract on the same chain. The other smart contract is therefore acting as a price oracle, meaning it is providing external price information. However, there are many opportunities to exploit this such as purchasing large amounts on one oracle exchange in order to alter the price and then go on to purchase even more on a different exchange in the opposite direction. This allows for capitalization on price movement by manipulating the information the oracle communicates to other smart contracts or exchanges. 

That being said, smart contracts are being used heavily, and Pratt senior Manmit Singh has been developing them since his freshman year along with some of his peers in the Duke Blockchain Lab. One of his most exciting projects involved developing smart contracts for cryptocurrency-based energy trading on the Ethereum Virtual Machine allowing for a more seamless way to develop energy units.

One example of how this could be used outside of the crypto world is insurance. Currently, when people get into a car accident it takes months or even a year to evaluate the accident and release compensation. In the future, there could be sensors placed on cars connected to smart contracts that immediately evaluate the damage and payout.

Decentralization allows us to avoid using intermediaries and simply connect people to people or people to information as opposed to first connecting people to institutions that can then connect them to something else. This also allows for fault tolerance: if one blockchain goes down, the entire system does not go down with it. Additionally, because there is no central source controlling the system, it is very difficult to gain control of thus protecting against attack resistance and collusion resistance. While risks like the oracle problem need to be further explored, the world and importance of DeFi, as well as smart contracts, is only growing.

And as Ayesh put it, “This is the future.”

Post by Anna Gotskind, Class of 2022

Page 1 of 7

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén