Last week was a busy one for the NYC crypto scene, so let’s dive right into it.
On Tuesday, TE NYC held its 4th meetup at Galvanize in Soho, hosted by Techstars. The folks at Paperchain and ConsenSys have been doing an amazing job putting together these monthly events for the token engineering community with top-notch speakers and discussions.
Also, a quick shout-out to Techstars who have been incredibly supportive of TE NYC and the broader community. Any blockchain start-up interested in partnering with Techstars should check out its upcoming blockchain-focused accelerator program with Alchemist starting next February (NOTE: Sign-up deadline 10/28).
After some mingling and snacking, attendees settled in for a trio of talks on token economics and governance per the usual format of TE NYC. Guest speakers for the evening were Cathy Barrera, PhD from Prysm Group, James Waugh from Cre8, and Danny Zuckerman from Commons.
Dr. Barrera started off with a thorough overview of the importance of economic incentives in token design. The desired behavior of each participant in the ecosystem should be incentive compatible for all available scenarios. Additionally, token engineers must not only consider the motivations of all stakeholders but also do the math to validate their design choices. It should be noted that not making a choice is itself a choice (and most likely a poor one if you’re serious about your blockchain model). For aspiring blockchain start-ups in need of guidance on token economics and governance, Dr. Barrera offers consultative services through her company, Prysm Group.
Next up was Waugh with Cre8.xyz, which is a marketplace for tokenized actions classified into “dimensions” that underpins a multi-dimensional self-governance structure. I’ll give you a moment to ponder that last sentence before attempting to unpack it. The motivation behind the ambitious project is to create a public organization focused on transparent collaboration that minimizes information asymmetry. Users contribute to dimension-specific governance decisions based on their tokenized experience with those dimensions, which serves as a proxy for reputation on the platform. Together, the collective composed of governance decisions representative of the multiple dimensions determine its overall mission (i.e., a multi-DAO structure).
Needless to say, a very cool and fascinating project. I only wonder if by focusing on those with reputations validated within a specific dimension of governance that potentially creative solutions from individuals from other non-specific, non-adjacent dimensions may be lost. Balancing between the desire to eliminate information asymmetry and recognizing individual capacities for processing information (to avoid information overload) is a consideration as well.
Lastly, Zuckerman’s project revolves around users discovering the best economic design choices themselves. The vision for Commons is a platform where experimentation in blockchain models is encouraged and informal communities rapidly iterate to the best solution for their specific pain points. Naturally-forming connections between these communities create a virtuous cycle of shared learning and continuous improvement of their blockchain models. Whereas many projects attempt to predefine the model for their users, this is a fresh and interesting approach that relies on the experiential learning of its users to drive their own model definition.
For more about his thinking behind Commons, Zuckerman also linked a couple of fun and educational games: networks and trust. Both are quick plays (< 30 minutes) and highly recommended for those with a general interest in economics and game theory.
In addition to the TE NYC event, the 2018 Mars Blockchain Summit NYC happened on Thursday—more info on that in an upcoming post!
**Any and all inaccuracies or misrepresentations above are due to my own misunderstanding and do not reflect the views of those described. Reader clarifications and/or critiques are welcome (please be nice!).