Staking Assets Management on Blockchains: Vision and Roadmap

This paper introduces and explores the vision wherefore stakeholders and the process of staking —that is, the idea of guaranteeing the quality of a process by risking valuable assets on their correct execution— may run both on and off a blockchain while in the context of cloud-enabled services and processes. The emerging trend behind blockchain-oriented computing and the reliance on stakeholders therein make distilling and evaluating this vision a priority to deliver high-quality, sustainable services of the future. We identify key defining concepts of stakeholders and the staking process, using three very different staking scenarios as a base. Subsequently, we analyze the key challenges that these stakeholders face and propose the development of a framework that can help overcome these challenges. Finally, we give a road-map to steer systematic research stemming from the proposed vision, leveraging design science along with short-cyclic experimentation.