The NFL draft is entertaining, but it's also the setting for high-stakes negotiations where teams often simultaneously seek a competitive advantage and cooperate with each other by trading draft picks. These deals are complex, fast-paced and rely on a clear understanding between the teams involved. That's exactly the sort of setting where blockchain smart contracts could be useful, according to a paper put forward by systems engineering researchers.
To learn more, we talked with the researchers: Brandon McConnell, an associate research professor in NC State University's Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Lieutenant Colonel Mat Fukuzawa, an assistant professor of mathematical sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. McConnell and Fukuzawa proposed the idea of bringing blockchain to the NFL draft in a journal article published last year.
The Abstract: What was the problem or challenge you were setting out to address here?
Mat Fukuzawa: There is nothing wrong with the NFL draft; it runs smoothly from year to year and participants and fans generally accept its design. So, we were not attempting to fix a broken process.
Brandon McConnell: However, the NFL draft is an interesting context for exploring blockchain applications, because it is a high-stakes setting in which sequential decisions are being made and in which various parties are cooperating or competing (or both). Specifically, we wanted to explore blockchain-enabled smart contract systems designs that improved the ability to cooperate/compete.
