A Data Centered Approach to Investigate the Ethics Issues on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT): Trust, Privacy, Transparency, and Fairness

Project Summary:

Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform that has attracted many technical experts and enthusiasts to establish applications because of Ethereum’s novelty and scalability. Among the various programs and applications, Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is one of the most popular applications. Although the NFT market has rapidly developed in size and volume, potential ethical concerns, such as informed consent, transparency, accountability, privacy, fairness, and trust, have emerged. Recently, researchers have identified ethical challenges on the blockchain, covering privacy, transparency, accountability, and fairness aspects. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, no research has been reported to address the ethical issues on NFT. Therefore, we aim to draw on terminologies from the field of blockchain and AI ethics research and further investigate NFT ethical issues related from the following aspects: trust, transparency, privacy, and fairness.By adopting and applying a data-centered approach together with qualitative methods from existing ethics research, we desire to describe, identify and categorize ethical issues and concerns on NFT, and develop guidelines for NFT ethics that enable NFT designers and developers to address those potential issues. Moreover, inclusion and diversity attract more participants and promote the development of commercial projects, which is the consensus of many researchers and business analyst. Thus, if the NFT ecosystem and Ethereum community are going to innovate and evolve further, the ethical issue must be addressed.

Acknowledgments:

Our project entitled “A Data-Centered Approach to Investigate the Ethics Issues on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT): Trust, Privacy, Transparency, and Fairness” is funded under the Data + X Program by Data Science Research Center, Duke Kunshan University.