The Crypto Research and Design Lab vision is to put people at the center of crypto.

Our mission is to use evidence-based thought leadership to accelerate the crypto industry toward its goal of creating a more equitable, inclusive society.

Founding Story

Driven by the urgency to bridge the gap between people's needs and the transformative potential of crypto, Tricia Wang and Sheila Warren joined forces in 2000 to co-found the Crypto Research and Design Lab (CRADL) to place people at the heart of the crypto ecosystem.

We welcomed Lauren Serota, as a founding partner in the latter half of 2021. With her extensive background in traditional finance, design, and emerging markets. Tricia and Lauren built a team of world-class researchers and designers who came from a diversity of disciplines.

Discover more about our founding story here.

Our Research Agenda

 

Research Questions

CRADL exists to conduct, analyze, and share critical research on the needs for crypto and the current uses of crypto. Our analysis examines how crypto complements existing systems, when it’s superior, and how the industry can improve. Through rigorous research, we uncover the human needs that crypto can address and craft actionable interventions, including interactive content and impactful event programming.

Our approach prioritizes humanity, community engagement, acknowledges the impact of trauma, and embraces principles of racial and class equity.

Crypto is a global phenomenon, prolifically evolving daily. Focus is key to ensuring the best use of this inflection point. We’re starting our research in 2022 in the US for two reasons:

  1. Little research has been done on the potential and current uses of crypto in the US.

  2. The decisions of US-based policymakers still have a significant, far-reaching impact.

How can crypto address seemingly intractable problems in the existing financial stack? Despite consensus on crypto’s potential to democratize financial access, there’s been little systematic research on how crypto-based financial services and products could benefit communities, particularly those that have been systematically excluded.

We’re investigating three topic areas:

1/ What are people’s actual needs and challenges?

We focus specifically on people’s current lived realities around finances, whether they use fiat currency or not. This baseline will provide the crypto industry with the information to articulate who it is serving (for example, breaking down that 1.7 billion), and design for actual human needs.

What do financial inclusion and exclusion look like for individuals and communities? What specific challenges do people face in existing financial systems? What does it mean to be excluded from the traditional financial system (and why does it matter)? What makes it hard to accumulate wealth?

2/ How is the crypto industry operating right now to address people’s needs?

What’s working? How is financial inclusion being framed? How is the industry building products and services? What makes a successful crypto UX heuristic? What role do crypto investors and founders play? How are crypto companies reflecting the diversity of the market within their companies?

3/ How do we close the gap between the crypto industry and people’s realities?

This topic is two-fold. First, we assess the diverse ways in which people are experimenting with crypto. What are the successful use cases? What makes a use case successful or unsuccessful? What new benefits are people seeing from crypto usage?

The second part analyzes the gap between what’s working in current crypto cases and peoples’ actual financial needs. This is all about defining impact and scaling use cases through design interventions, including content, events, and tools.

Our Approach

CRADL sits at the intersection of three functions — design, crypto, and social impact — that often operate in silos.

Our Impact

We measure our impact by our ability to make change in the following three ways: optimize existing products and policies, inform new products and policies, and inspire entirely new products and policies.

We investigate the power and promise of blockchain itself by creating evidence-based research of how the technology can be applied to create a more equitable, inclusive society.

Our Values

The core principles that drive our work and team

Humanity - We elevate the human voice as a constant in everything we do.

Visibility - We prioritize research on overlooked topics that require more discernment and visibility.

Equity - We foreground inclusivity in our analysis, with justice and fairness as our foundation.

Evidence-Based - We ensure our rigorous research and analysis are historically grounded, representative of the present moment, and future-forward.

Non-binary - We embrace the spectrum of culture and do not reduce the analysis of complex systems into binaries.

Meet the Team

Our network of 100+ advisors, research affiliates, and experts span across crypto, design, and social justice. 

Advisory Team

Within our network, we have individuals who actively operate protocols or invest in cutting-edge companies. Their invaluable input allows us to directly influence roadmaps and steer recommendations towards impactful implementation.

Additionally, we benefit from advisors who encourage us to explore new frontiers within the crypto landscape, expanding our analysis and pushing the boundaries of our research. This intentionally curated multi-disciplinary network spans across various industries, enabling the emergence of collaborative partnerships and versatile engagement.