KK Jain

KK Jain

KK Jain

KK Jain

KK Jain

KK Jain

KK Jain

KK Jain

KK Jain

KK Jain

Here at nCent Labs, we believe markets are a more efficient way to organize work at scale than firms. (For an introduction to how incentive markets can be formulated on a blockchain, see our recent post entitled The Success of Incentive-Centered Markets.) There are three meta-categories of incentive programs...

KK Jain

Space exploration plays a special role in our hearts and minds. Humanity is set upon a great timeline of exploration, and space primordially calls to us next. Our first steps on the moon, for example, symbolize the cumulative technological achievement of humanity. Ever since then, children dream of jettisoning...

KK Jain

How do you find the best person for a job in the fastest way possible? The answer to this question is something of a holy grail for startups. A recent study has shown, for example, that companies with effective recruitment strategies double the profit margins of their competition. The flip side of this is many people...

KK Jain

Decentralized incentive markets can solve complex problems at scale, but to realize this potential we must optimize two equally important domains: (1) the technology side, by building the best protocol and tools for developers, users and others to create and participate in an incentive market; (2) the psychology side, by understanding how to effectively...

KK Jain

What’s one of the biggest challenges facing nonprofits, social activists, and political campaigns? The answer is simple: finding donations. Since charitable work addresses some of the most important social, political, and ecological crises facing our society, we need to ensure that they can effectively raise the funds they need. But as things stand, the most common...

KK Jain

How have auctions changed over the past 50 years? Aside from going online in the form of household names like eBay and Christie’s, the basic mechanics of today’s auctions have stayed more or less the same — a seller puts an item on offer and potential buyers place their bids. Whoever places the highest bid at the end...

KK Jain

If you’re like most people under 40, you know someone who found their current love interest through a dating application like Tinder, OKCupid, or Hinge. Just a few years ago, though, this was the exception instead of the rule. How popular has online dating become? And how can we expect...

KK Jain

As a society, we spend a lot of time looking for things. Individuals search for apartments to rent, cars to buy, and romantic partners to date. Businesses search for customers, employees, and suppliers. Although we tend to approach these searches as if they are unique, we at nCent believe that they appear distinct on the surface but are often subject to similar dynamics on a meta level. Our goal...

KK Jain

nCent has announced a $10 million seed round backed by an illustrious group of investors including Naval Ravikant, SV Angel, Sequoia, Winklevoss Capital, Zhen Fund, Floodgate, and MetaStable among others. At Hack.Summit() on July 10, 2017, we launched nCent labs out of stealth mode in a fireside chat with tech visionary, mega-investor and founder of Future Ventures, Steve Jurvetson! Of course Steve happened...

KK Jain

We at nCent believe that designing the right incentive system is crucial for optimal system operation, and that this statement applies to domains far and wide. Today we’ll focus on a system that countless commentators have called a “broken system” — namely American politics. Saying that the U.S. is divided across political lines is by now a cliché. The inauguration of each new president...

KK Jain

If you ask 10 different crypto-enthusiast to define Bitcoin Maximalism — you will get 12 different answers. What is clear however is that Bitcoin was the first decentralized cryptocurrency — and one that has been proven to be surprisingly resilient, at Internet scale, for almost a decade after its founding. While we may not agree with everything that every Bitcoin Maximalist has ever said, here are 10 of our favorites. 1. From Murad Mahmudov...

KK Jain

Decentralized networks like blockchains have the potential to solve complex problems by incentivizing individuals to contribute their specialized knowledge and skills to achieve a common goal. For example, the challenge of quickly finding the right employee can be solved by incentivizing individuals to disseminate the job description to the most appropriate people in their circle of professional acquaintances. As more and more people learn of the job description through these network...

KK Jain

One of the most important decisions we’ve made at nCent Labs is to create our own base layer protocol, rather than build on an existing “Turing Complete” chain like Ethereum, EOS, or NEO. The fact that Ethereum was released only three years ago — considered alongside of recent developments in sidechains, sharding, and alternative consensus mechanisms — made it significantly more challenging for us to trust the long-term predictability...

KK Jain

The field of incentive design is both broad and interdisciplinary, touching Economics, Sociology, Computer Science and even Biology. However, applications of incentive design to blockchain is an emergent field of thought inquiry. Making enough progress to support market growth will require a whole new generation of independent thinkers. These are mainly long term issues and questions. Our “meta” solution is nGage...

KK Jain

Social media networks and applications like Facebook and Twitter have become a primary means by which many people exchange information on a day-to-day basis. This exchange is made public more often than not; a musician might publicize, for example, that she’s performing at a local hotspot for her family and friends, who could then share the announcement with a broader circle of contacts in turn...

KK Jain

In ordinary contexts, the term ‘incentive’ refers to an individual’s reason for acting towards a particular goal. Within the blockchain community, the concept of an incentive is becoming increasingly popular, although here it takes on a more technical meaning. We say, for instance, that an incentive-centered design is one that aligns the incentives of an individual with the overarching goal(s) of a system...

KK Jain

At nCent Labs one of our aims is to unlock collective talent and appropriately attribute value within communities. As such, we think a great deal about incentives, incentives, and incentives; and how to best leverage them to support a broad set of diverse communities. Incentive markets are a natural application for blockchain. To put our crypto where our mouth...

KK Jain

The 2008 Global Credit Crises was a crises of confidence in markets, — — but also a breakdown of trust in central authorities. Out of this chaos, Satoshi Nakamoto birthed Bitcoin. This decentralized currency promised to work without requiring parties to trust one another. Other properties of blockchains proved useful in this paradigm including...

KK Jain

In recent years, we have seen an explosion in the number of cryptocurrencies. Ethereum is an adaptable blockchain on which Turing-complete “smart contracts” can be programmed to implement a mind-boggling assortment of applications. The ability of Ethereum to effectively emulate other cryptocurrency schemes raises the question...

KK Jain

We at nCent Labs think a great deal about incentives, incentive design, and incentive markets. We invite you to share some of our mindshare — and join our summer incentive hacking reading list...

KK Jain

July 11th, 2018… This date has special meaning for me and many in our community. Ten short days ago, we embarked on a blockchain protocol right of passage: we downloaded telegram and created our group, nCent Nation. Today, we crossed 10,000 users...