Opyn-ing the next chapter :D

Find our new, coming work at twitter.com/opyn_.

We started Mechanism Labs because we were passionate about pushing the blockchain space forward and contributing to making this technology useful to people.

We began ML at a time when the biggest challenges to widespread blockchain adoption were questions of scalability. We intended ML to be a new type of research lab that would reflect the ethos of the cryptocurrency space by being open source and collective.

However, though the community had come together to work on problems of scalability for blockchain technology, there were considerably fewer ways that people were putting to use this technology. We realized that we were passionate about how cryptocurrency would impact people in their day to day lives.

So, with the help of a generous grant from MakerDAO, we decided to travel to India to try to determine the pain points people had with their finances and how cryptocurrency technology could potentially help. We are going to begin publishing our takeaways from our field study in India. You can check out the first blog post here.

More specifically, we encountered a number of challenges. Whereas India had previously shown a keen interest in the cryptocurrency space, a difficult regulatory environment had barred most people from interaction with the space. Through its monopoly on the financial system, the Indian central bank had unilaterally prohibited Indian banks from working with exchanges and other crypto companies, without the passage of any bills through parliament. Without access to the centralized financial system, the Indian cryptocurrency industry has been hampered; read more in our report.

Since the beginning, we had been working on cryptoeconomics. With an increasing desire to work on problems for end users, we have decided to explore decentralized finance, which we see as applied cryptoeconomics. We realized that the seeds of a fairer, more inclusive, and more open digitally native financial system are being planted in crypto.

So, while we are still passionate about cryptocurrency-related research, we are focusing less on Mechanism Labs as a research lab, in order to play a part in the building out the financial system of the future.

And that’s what we’ll be working towards @opyn.

The Mechanism Labs github will still be up, and we will leave it open to PR. We hope that one day, academic papers will be written the same way that open source code is.

— Zubin, Aparna, Alexis