Bonding Curve Research Group: Update #1
Hello TEC Community friends! Bonding Curve Research Group (BCRG) here with an update of what we’ve been up to in our first few weeks…
Beginning with Gratitude
We would first like to acknowledge the support and generosity of the community in entrusting us with funding to catalyze this thread of research, and continue providing valuable feedback for this project, research direction and outputs.
We are excited for the opportunity to serve the core mission of creating Token Engineering public goods via research, educational content and analysis of our own economic mechanism of the ABC, to advance the field of Token Engineering
Hitting the Ground Running 
We are entering our 3rd week of 12 in this planned Research & Education (R&E) sprint and as promised, this is the first of our tri-weekly updates to share progress, and keep the community informed.
For efficiency and speed, the BCRG now has three workstreams and three corresponding weekly meetings to expedite explorations and progress:
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Research & Ideation - Core of the initiative that informs the other groups -
Education & Content - Refines research material into digestible content -
TEC Bonding Curve Analysis - Focusing on TEC Bonding Curve (near-term)
For those interested to follow along, you can find the meeting notes (which also include the recordings) along with other resources in this Notion document.
General Research Direction
For the first 6-12 weeks, we’ve chosen to concentrate on Primary Market Issuance and Redemption Bonding Curves to narrow the scope of our research. Bonding curves present numerous untapped possibilities, and to avoid getting lost in them, we’re focusing on a single, crucial, and less explored area. We’ll be examining Primary Market Issuance and Redemption Bonding Curves through case studies to gain insights and assess each project with a commons perspective in mind.
Some notable projects that have employed these types of Bonding Curves include TEC, Nexus Mutual, Gotchi DAO, DxDAO, and Gyroscope.
It’s important to note that our focus is not on Secondary AMMs like Uniswap or Balancer pools. Those platforms serve as liquidity and distribution mechanisms for tokens rather than primary issuance tools, and there is a lot of existing research in these realms.
Deliverable Tracking Gantt Chart
We have created a beautiful Gantt chart to keep track of our deliverables and the documents arising from those deliverables. You can click on the links for each week and see notes that have been taken.
Team Update
We are excited to share we’ve welcomed a few additional members into our group including core contributor Hashir Nabi, who works in Communications and Research with BlockScience, and has a background in Data Science and Engineering (lovingly nicknamed “The Human GPT”).
The BCRG has also welcomed notable observers including Achim from Outlier Ventures, Daniel from Polygon, Ata from Inverter, who will be participating in discussions and offering subject matter expertise and research questions.
As the BCGR progresses, we have received increasing interest from others. In order to build a solid foundation for the group and maintain focus and momentum, we are currently considering the group as “semi-permeable,” with limited entry at this time. After producing some content later in the research period we will be hosting some public discussions and workshops, to be announced at a future date.
RACI Template
The RACI Template assists us in keeping track of the individuals and their roles within our research group
Review Goals & Progress
As outlined in our funding proposal there are four primary goals/motivations for the group and updates on how these are being met through the work so far:
1) Create content
Work is in progress and will be public facing resources for anyone interested in the topic of bonding curves. You can see what has been done so far, via the following links which are works in progress that we will continue building on:
Knowledge Library
Case Studies
Bonding Curve Classification Notebook
A few tweets have been sent out that are not included in our six education content pieces. This will continue overtime and will help build our network.
2) Provide analysis, dashboard & Python updates for the TEC Augmented Bonding Curve & dashboard
The TEC dune dashboard is being put to the test! The analysis team is reviewing the dashboard query by query to examine how the data can be piped into the team’s data-driven research environment. Several queries have been identified as particularly important such as the TEC Price Chart.
The analysis team has setup their Python environments and gained access to a Beta version of the Dune API client thanks to Rxxs’s connections to the Dune team. To access the data remotely, the team is using the cow protocol supported dune-client, a python sdk that gives access to dune query results as dataframes. The team is creating a python library that uses the dune-client to provide direct access to TEC dashboard queries. You can track the progress of this and other research repositories in the bonding curve research team github.
3) Create a sustainable flywheel for further R&E (&D), service offerings and new grant opportunities for this research thread and the TEC/TEA communities
The BCRG is already attracting quite a lot of attention, and is in discussion with some groups for potential collaborations and future grant and service opportunities. We are however limiting our engagement with outside parties at the moment to maintain focus on completing this first phase of research.
4) Structure further research & lines of inquiry for continuing Research, Development & Education
In the discussions, material reviews, research and exploration process so far, the group has uncovered dozens of threads and questions. For the scope of this project we have narrowed the focus, but already have a wealth of curiosities which will be distilled and published upon completion of the work.
The end!
Thank you for reading! We’ll post another update in three weeks - until then, feel free to drop any feedback, questions, comments or inquiries in the comments below.
This post was drafted by Jessica Zartler and Curious Rabbit with contributions, edits and input by Shawn Anderson, Jeff Emmett, Rxx and Hashir Nabi.