Who Stores the Private Key? An Exploratory Study about User Preferences of Key Management for Blockchain-based Applications

Applications based on blockchain technology have become popular. While these applications have clear benefits, users are not yet familiar with their usage, which could hinder further applications of this technology. In this paper, an online survey with 110 potential users, as a representative of an average citizen, was conducted. The focus of this survey is to explore their preferences concerning the interaction with blockchain-based applications by mainly focusing on how to handle private keys. To best of our knowledge this is the first study where average citizens are asked about the preferred management of a private key, which is necessary when interacting with blockchain-based applications. One of the main results was that about 80% of the participants would like to have the benefit of data sovereignty despite the cost of being fully responsible to backup their credentials.