Blockchain: practices and perspectives

Claudio J. Tessone is Assistant Professor for Network Science at the University of Zurich (Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics). He co-founder and member of the Steering Committee of the UZH Blockchain Centre. He holds a PhD in Physics (on to the role of heterogeneity in complex systems) and an Habilitation on "Complex socio-economic systems" from ETH Zurich. He is an expert in the modelling of complex socio-economic, and socio-technical systems from an interdisciplinary perspective. His approach can be summarised as establishing the link between microscopic agent behaviour, unveiling the role of local interaction rules and the macro properties of socio-economic and socio-technical systems.
Blockchain-based systems and cryptocurrencies are a pillar of his research (being among the first to study them). This includes crypoeconomics (from financial aspects to meso- and macro- properties, such as their emergent centralisation), big-data blockchain analytics and forensics, design of blockchain-based systems, and characterisation of economic incentives that are present (by design or set inadvertently) in them.