Token Engineering Fundamentals
TL;DR
TE Academy will build the first bachelor-level education program and NFT-based certification, open job-boards and matchmaking activities for projects seeking Token Engineering expertise. Via this offering, weāll define standards for this new discipline. Additionally, NFT-based certification opens the door for new value flows in TE education and research.
The problem we solve
- tokenomics is success-critical for any crypto project
- experts are hard to find
- token engineering is a new field, difficult to determine if job candidates are a good fit
- this proposal is about bridging this gap with
- education
- certification
- matchmaking
Our ask
Our ask to TE Commons is to co-fund this major step for TE education with $100K.
We see TE Commons as the key organisation to establish standards in Token Engineering, particularly for Token Engineering ethics and values. The impact of this program for defining these standards will be huge.
The TE Fundamentals program will be free and open to any student in the world. To fund the development, TE Academy is currently reaching out to several DAOs and partners with a total funding target of $500K.
Our goal is to have several ecosystems on board to support TE Fundamentals. Plus, weāll create matchmaking activities with funding partners to provide a career perspective for graduates.
About TE Academy
Over the last two years, the Token Engineering community has managed to gather researchers and engineers from many disciplines to formulate the token engineering design process, validation methods and a body of knowledge. With TE Academy weāve created the first educational institution in this field, which traditional academia hasnāt even picked up. Since its launch in July 2020, more than 800 students from 21 time zones have attended our courses.
Our YouTube channel offers session recordings of most of our programs, publicly available and free.
TE Academy has led various educational initiatives with partners like Balancer, Gitcoin, Boson Protocol of Ocean Protocol.
Weāre glad that our proposals have been successful in various DAO votings, like for the DAO Rewards Systems Research Initiative with Ocean DAO, Near DAO and Gnosis DAO.
About Token Engineering
How Token Engineers contribute to crypto projects
Token Engineers exercise various critical and supportive functions related to the Engineering Lifecycle of a token project. Some of the main tasks include:
-
Systems Engineering:
Define the strategic roadmap of a project, categorize subsystems, their boundaries and interrelations, and derive requirements for the systemās economic architecture and design -
Mechanism Design:
Analyze stakeholder roles and define the structure of interactions in the system (like staking, bidding, buying and selling), design fundamental market mechanisms and find ways to incentivize behavior to ensure the expected outcome while addressing and eliminating attack vectors -
Software Implementation Oversight:
Translate new designs into algorithms to be implemented in code
Typical Tools used by Token Engineers
To perform solid recommendations and interventions, Token Engineers have to make use of a variety of interdisciplinary knowledge sets and tools, which can include:
-
Cryptoeconomics:
Address the alignment of individual incentives with community goals over time in digital decentralized tokenized economic systems accounting for the multilayered structure of the economy -
Control Theory
Design feedback loops, monitor and automatically stabilize or optimize a system (like dynamic fees to balance supply and demand) -
Operations Research
Apply graph theory and network analysis to monitor network healthiness and provide information on risk and vulnerabilities -
Data Science
Gather, analyze, and make sense out of various forms of quantitative information -
Modeling & Simulations
Create simulations of the system to verify new designs, or make predictions on how the system evolves in specific scenarios (āWhat if we offer single-sided exposure for liquidity providersā)
TE Fundamentals Content (WIP)
TE Fundamentals will cover the following topics:
1) Crypto-economic systems
- What are cryptoeconomic systems
- Why we decentralize
- Purpose-driven, political economies
- Cryptoeconomies as complex systems
- Engineering Ethics based on TE Commons mission, vision and values
2) The Engineering Design Process
- TE Process Overview
- Discovery:
- System requirements and context
- Metrics
- Agents and their goals
- Design:
- Stock and Flow Diagram
- Mathematical Specification and formal description
- Mechanisms
- Deployment:
- cadCAD implementation, digital twin
- cadCAD experiments & simulations
- System Identification
- System Governance
3) Introductions (incl. exercises)
- Economics for Token Engineers
- Mathematics for Token Engineers
- Systems Theory for Token Engineers
- Simulations, Scientific Computing for Token Engineers (Python)
4) Partner Content
- tbd with partners, based on existing documentation, whitepapers etc.
- incl. examination questions
5) Computer-aided, token-based governance
- DAOs
- Governance surface
- Algorithms as policy
- Computer-Aided Governance Process
Deliverables/Milestones
all timelines refer to the grant approval date.
Milestone 1 / 6 weeks (of total grant amount)
- content outline (total course)
- chapter 4 content outline
- wireframes course platform
- min 50 pre-sign ups (students)
Milestone 2 / 4 months
- TE Fundamentals content script
- examination questions
- UX/visual design course platform
- NFT certificates user flows
- +50 pre-sign ups (students)
- launch event scheduled
Milestone 3 / 5 months
- content final incl. post production (= .mp4 file for students, incl. final videos, visuals, audio recording of speakers)
- course platform in beta
- NFT certificate implementation
- launch event final stage
- min 8 promotion/onboarding events scheduled (crypto/beyond crypto)
Milestone 4 / 7 months
- TE Fundamentals online course live
- launch event delivered
- first students enrolled
- run study groups on a monthly base
Milestone 5 / 8 months
- NFT certification in production
- deliver 4 events per month for student inflow (online or live)
- ramp up talent matchmaking activities
- min. 50 students enrolled
- run study groups on a monthly base
Milestone 6 / 10 months
- deliver 4 events per month for student inflow and talent matchmaking (online or live)
- talent matchmaking activities
- min. 80 students enrolled
- run study groups on a monthly base
Milestone 7 / 12 months
- deliver 4 events per month for student inflow and talent matchmaking (online or live)
- talent matchmaking activities
- min. 100 students enrolled
- min. 50 graduates
Note: TE Fundamentals aims to establish new value flows for knowledge creators, while making content open and accessible for students. This is why none of the funding partners will hold any TE Fundamentals IP or copyright.
Budget and payouts
We suggest to split the total amount of $100K into quarterly payouts of $25K each. For every completed milestone weāll report progress to the community. This way we provide maximum transparency, accountability and a good basis for voting on the next payout.
Team
Angela Kreitenweis
Founder TE Academy
Discord: akrtws (TE Academy)#4246
- background in early-stage startups (both at
startups and investors - more than 10 years in digital product
- more than 8 years of experience as a trainer/mentor
- co-founded Token Engineering Community in 2018
Kris Paruch
Content Lead
- background in Economic Mathematics
- Token Engineer and Cryptoeconomist at Cryptoeconomics Institute, WU Vienna
- and for various crypto projects at BlockScience Complex Systems
Engineering
Andrew Penland, PhD
Educational Formats
- background in Mathematics
- Associate Professor at Western Carolina University
- awarded with MAA Teaching Award 2021
Peter Hacker
TE Academy Educational Programming
- Bachelor degree in Economics and Mathematics
- four years in eCommerce data analytics and business strategy
- active TE community member (TEC, cadCAD, BlockScience, Commons Stack)
Patricia Gil de Brolezzi
TE Academy Community Team
- Bachelor degree in International Relations
- six years in board game design & development
- TE Academy communications and facilitation
Ana AntuniÄeviÄ
Legal, NFT Certification
- Lawyer
- Consultant NFTs
- Crypto Assets Regulation
Raul Martinez
Certification, Smart Contracts
- Smart Contract Lead @Forta
- Co-Founder & Token Architect
Advisors
Michael Zargham, PhD
TE Academy Advisor
- Founder of BlockScience
- Inventor of cadCAD
- R&D at @crypto3conomics
Trent McConaghy, PhD
TE Academy Advisor
- Founder of Ocean Protocol
- Inventor of TokenSPICE
Jessica Zartler
TE Academy Advisor
- Governance Researcher at BlockScience
Danilo Lessa Bernardineli
TE Academy Advisor
- Cryptoeconomics Researcher
- Teaching Assistant at University of Sao Paolo
- āProfessor of Hackologyā at cadCAD.education
1000000000000% yes
āIt would be super cool if there would be some in-person meetings as part of the program.
