To do

Open work on this research library. Items marked help wanted are good places for others to contribute. Last updated November 9, 2026.

Research

• Lessons from payment systems that took off: UPI (India), M-Pesa (Kenya), WeChat Pay and Alipay (China), next to the Pix field study in Landscape.
• Group order interviews and money-flow mapping (area 11), following Group orders: research kit. Help wanted: Korean-speaking researchers for a second wave.
• Gifting research (area 16): interviews and co-design with diaspora families who send red envelopes or otoshidama across borders. Help wanted.
• Ideas that frame the research: Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money, Marcel Mauss on the gift, Prelec and Loewenstein on the “pain of paying.”
• Policy watch: GENIUS Act, CLARITY Act, tax exemptions for small payments, MiCA, Brazil’s stablecoin rules, Korea’s fundraising law, Apple’s App Store rules on crypto and NFC.
• Auto-research pilot: check every claim on one page with agents and audit the verdicts, following Auto-research.
• Prior research on bitcoin users and design: Bitcoin Design Community research, River and Fidelity owner research. Help wanted: pointers to studies we’ve missed.

Assumptions to check (from the November 8 review of shortcuts)

In order of how likely they are to change a conclusion.

• 1. Cost of paying in bitcoin when you don’t hold it. Compare a joiner paying a group order via PayPal Friends & Family with buying bitcoin, paying over Lightning, and the manager converting to won to pay the seller, including fees and spreads at both ends. Applies to gifting too.
• 2. Existing gifting tools: Lightning gift links, ecash tokens (Cashu), bitcoin gift cards and vouchers. What exists, what works, what doesn’t.
  • Include HongBao: physical red envelopes with printed on-chain paper wallets, designed for bitcoiners gifting to family (“Gift Bitcoin = Teach Bitcoin”). Open source, “used by 81 Bitcoiners” (November 2026).
• 3. Network effects behind red envelopes: how much of WeChat’s success came from its existing network, and what that means for gifts sent across borders through other apps.
• 4. Add a “Key assumptions” section to each deep dive (11, 16): what has to be true for the thesis to hold.
• 5. Replace weak sources with originals where numbers carry weight: the BIS working paper on stablecoin inflows, a16z’s State of Crypto, the Visa and Dune non-dollar report, Spiral’s 2022 survey details.
• 6. Flag competitor-authored sources: Spark’s research pages are cited several times; note their perspective, and find independent sources where possible.
• 7. Fix say-versus-do comparisons that compare different populations (Oobit employees versus Pantera’s crypto-paid respondents; Deel 2022 versus Pantera 2024).
• 8. Source the platform claims: iPhone versus Android share in Japan, Korea and among international K-pop fans.
• 9. Non-English sources: Korean, Japanese and Chinese sources for areas 11 and 16. Help wanted.
• 10. Note sample sizes where findings rest on very small samples (two managers in the teardown; 14 interviewees in the Venmo study), and soften conclusions accordingly.
• 11. Disclosure in the research kit: tell participants the full purpose at the end of each session, after recruiting without mentioning bitcoin.
• 12. Areas not yet covered: merchants and acceptance, savings, privacy, onboarding and education, Android and the Global South, gray markets. Decide which deserve scans.
• 13. State the library’s perspective before publishing: written by a designer building a bitcoin wallet, with areas and framing shaped by that.

To verify

• K-pop album sales figures in area 11 (Circle Chart, KPIA originals).
• Open USD’s launch date (area 3).
• Second / Bark and Arkade as the two main Ark implementations, and CoinOS running its own Ark servers (Landscape).
• Whether Second has announced stablecoin plans for Bark (areas 3 and 14).
• Paysable and KFriday: what they build for group order managers, with sources (area 11).
• Wallet of Satoshi’s stablecoin launch: an official announcement, to replace the secondary reports (area 14).
• Which bitcoin layers support dollar tokens: Spark, Liquid, RGB (area 3).
• Trails Coffee and BitTasker details (area 12; sites couldn’t be opened). Help wanted.
• Current volumes for Nostr zaps and value-for-value podcasting (area 16). Help wanted.
• SSPS status and adoption (area 18).
• Tando usage: payments to M-Pesa numbers, and how many recipients claim their addresses (area 18). Help wanted.

Maintenance

• Review pass: consistency between files, unlabeled claims, numbers that don’t match across files.
• Check early quick scans (12–15) against the current template (say versus do, “what could serve this”).
• Prepare for publishing: README, license (CC BY), contribution notes, final privacy check.