Quinn DuPont, PhD

Biography

Quinn DuPont is a senior research scientist at blockchain.lab in Schulich School of Business at York University. Previously he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Business at University College Dublin and a Senior Information Specialist at IBM. He has a PhD in Information Science from the University of Toronto.

He is the author of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains (Polity 2019); Associate Editor, Frontiers in Blockchains; Research Fellow at University College London, Center for Blockchain Technologies; and Affiliate at The Future of Money Research Collaborative.

He has held visiting research positions at Rutgers University (Digital Media), Leuphana University (Digital Cultures Research Lab), and the University of Victoria (Electronic Textual Cultures Lab). His multidisciplinary writing has been published in journals such as First Monday, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Communications of the ACM, Global Policy, Metaphilosophy, amodern, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice, and other venues.

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Research

Discovering Digital Polycentric Governance in Crypto Commons

Research grant in development | open to collaborators and students. We are developing analytical and machine learning methods to explore the emergence of digital polycentric governance in crypto commons. This research is motivated by the sociological model of Web3 described in this essay: "Progressive Web3: From Social Coproduction to Digital Polycentric Governance". Using large (on and off-chain) datasets and methods drawn from computational social science, we can now explore voting and community dialogue at scale to find new insights about how bottom up, participatory forms of resource management work. Using a comparative approach, we investigate governance dynamics across crypto (Bitcoin, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, etc.). This empirical work aims to inform and extend neoinstitutionalism by developing a policy science centered around community self-governance of digital assets (i.e., cryptos).

"Progressive Web3: From Social Coproduction to Digital Polycentric Governance" (working paper) in CryptoCarnival (2023)
"What's Digital about Dance Notation?" (working paper) in Defining Digitality (2023, MIT Press)
"On the Limits of the Imaginary: A Reply to Jacobetty and Orton-Johnson’s “Blockchain Imaginaries and Their Metaphors”," Social Epistemology Review and Reply (2023)
"Shaping Ethical Computing Cultures," (64)11, Communications of the ACM (with Katie Shilton and Megan Finn) (2021)
"Experiments in Algorithmic Governance: An ethnography of “The DAO,” a failed Decentralized Autonomous Organization" in M. Campbell-Verduyn (Ed.), Bitcoin and Beyond: The Challenges and Opportunities of Blockchains for Global Governance (pp. 157–177). New York: Routledge (2017).
“Prolegomenon to contemporary ethics of Machine Translation.” In H. Moniz and C. Escartin. (Eds.), Towards Responsible Machine Translation. New York: Springer Nature, Machine Translation: Technologies and Applications Series (2021) (with Wessel Reijers).
“Cryptographic Media.” In J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, & Matthew M. (Eds.), Second International Handbook of Internet Research. New York: Springer (2020).
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains (Polity Press, 2019)
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Art, Culture, & Digital Media

Speaking & Teaching

Please contact me to book speaking engagements about: decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), cryptoeconomics, microeconomic and policy design, digital polycentric governance, digital political economy, and decentralized identities.

Teaching York Univerisity, OMIS 6710 "Operations Management and Information Systems" (Summer 2023)
Teaching University of British Columbia, LIBR 559 "Blockchain Technology for Information Professionals" (Spring 2023)
Invited Symposium, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Oxford 2023
Invited Workshop, DAO Harvard . Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, Boston 2023
Invited Workshop, Blockchain Constitutionalism: the Role of Legitimacy in Polycentric Systems. Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence 2023
Invited Speaker, "Discovering Polycentric Governance in Crypto," Bates College, Lewiston 2023.
Host, IEEE Research Notes in Blockchain (2021-2023)
Interview, "Overthrowing The Network State: Untangling Balaji’s Helical Theory of History," Blockchain Socialist podcast 2023
Invited Workshop, Plurality Workshop. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley 2023.
Invited Speaker, “Dance Notation: Grammars for Understanding and Controlling the Body.” Digital Matters, Seigen, Germany, 2022.
Interview, "Digital Ethnography in Blockchain and Governance," RMIT Mint and Burn podcast (2022)
Invited Speaker, "Technologies and Best Practice for Next-Gen Organizations" Huawei STW 2022
Interview, "Understanding Crypto: An Interdisciplinary Approach" Rational Reminder podcast 2022
Interview, "We’re de-pegging Terra for “research purposes”," Blockchain Socialist podcast 2022
Organizer, Researching Web3 Workshop 2022
Invited Speaker, “Guiding Principles for Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, and DLT Research,” Frontiers in Best Practice in Research Ethics. University College London 2022.
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Consulting

Please see Crypto Research Consulting for more information about my IT and management consulting services.

Contact me

I maintain a virtual open door policy. I am always interested in speaking with students, researchers, and technologists with similar interests. If you would like to speak with me please book a date and time on my calendar.

Twitter @quinndupont
Email: quinndupont AT ieee.org

Financial disclosure

I maintain small balances of cryptocurrencies for personal use and research purposes. I do not invest in cryptocurrencies; see my research on the ethics of research and development for a more thorough explanation.