A data and model-driven approach to redesign incentives in Stellar ecosystem

The Stellar network has the aim of providing a decentralised and efficient way of trading any kind of money, with the ultimate goal of creating an inclusive payment system. The absence of monetary incentives in the Stellar consensus mechanism ensures that participants are not motivated to game the system. However, overall level of participation in a system without incentives tends to be lower as users are not motivated to run nodes and participate in the consensus. In this project we propose two research directions to tackle the problem of incentivising the participants of the Stellar ecosystem. First, we will model Stellar consensus protocol and develop metrics that evaluate quality of the consensus. Second, we will investigate a redesign of the Stellar consensus protocol which includes various kinds of non-monetary incentives, with the final aim of improving the adoption and the size of Stellar verification network.