We are actively developing BoLT with the goal of deploying it. If you are interested in developing the ledger, the wallet, the pricing model, governance mechanisms, deployment plans, etc. please fill out the form and I will get back to you asap. if you are having trouble with the form, please contact seth@cmu.edu. Below are some of the sample projects we are working on. If you think BoLT is cool and can help our economy, but don't see something you want to work on, contact me anyway - there is lots more we are working on.
The goal of this project to develop a recommendation system which will suggest which bolts in a wallet should be used in a transaction. The idea is for a buyer to use their least desirable bolt that the seller will take. Since the value of bolts may differs for each party this is not just coming up with a single market price for the bolts, but coming up with a price from a particular user's perspective. The system should use the entries on the public ledger to determine the price of each bolt from the buyer's and the seller's perspective. As transactions are added to the ledger that information will be used to learn the proper price of a bolt.
Background in economics, monetary theory, machine learning, game theory, etc. would be useful, but not required.
Even with prices known there is an (automatic) negotiation that needs to take place between buyer and seller. The goal of this project is to design the proper mechanisms to facilitate the negotiation.
Background in mechanism design, economics, monetary theory, auctions, game theory, etc. would be useful, but not required.
BoLT requires a high throughput, low latency public ledger. The project is currently developing the ledger based on the HyperLedger fabric. We are about to being investigating other layer 1 ledgers in support of a more distributed system. We will also investigate extensions to the basic BoLT protocal, e.g., to support escrow, insurance, and risk reduction.
Background in blockchain and other ledger technology is a plus, but not required.
BoLT requires a wallet app which will allow a user to manage the bolts they have and communicate with other devices to trade and exchange bolts. There will be two versions of the wallet. One will function as a customer wallet. The other as a point of sale terminal for a merchant. This project will design the look and feel of the wallet as well as implement it as a webapp. It will also need to interact with the ledger.
Background in UI/UX, tools for design (e.g., figma), react, and other web development tech is a plus, but not required.
Background in blockchain, etherium, solidity, and other ledger technology is a plus, but not required.
Our goal is to deploy BoLT in a community in the very near future. How will we build initial trust in bolt? Teach users how to use it? Ensure that the users have smart phones/POS? What are the use cases we can describe to motivate initial deployment? These and other questions around governance as ancillary tools are essential. This project will explore these and other topics.
Background in community design, product development, banking a plus, but not required.