Learning token engineering elements

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Teach product managers and developers about designing the fundamentals of token engineering through video and written tutorials.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Developer Relations, trainer, content creator. Background in motion graphics, video & music production. Haskell and Plutus Developer. Currently studying evolutionary and institutional economics. Involved in Cardano and Catalyst since Fund2. Eastern Townhall Co-Organiser.

[GENERAL] Requested funds in USD.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Develop a series of short video tutorials explaining the fundamentals of token economics, incentive design, market mechanisms. Each tutorial will be high-production-value using animations and other visual aids to help explain token economic concepts. Each video will have documentation and sample Haskell or Python cadCad code, snippets to help developers realise the ideas in code.

Students will be able to incorporate this knowledge into their product development process. The content and documentation will help entrepreneurs, product managers, and developers build on Cardano to specify their incentive systems effectively.

The tutorials will draw from material such as Economic Design, Understanding the Blockchain Economy, Token Economy, and the Token Engineering Community along with many other sources. Framing the scenarios and examples in the context of Cardano, the EUTXO and Plutus.

All the tutorial content will be assembled into a micro-website explicitly developed for the tutorials. Documentation and example code will also be hosted on Github, while the videos will be published on Youtube. The content will be licensed and published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence. The source code will be licensed using a suitable open-source license.

The video captions and the documentation will be translated into at least three languages. Using the tremendous power of the Cardano Catalyst Eastern Town Hall community, the content will be translated into Indonesian, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Swahili.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Our tutorials will demonstrate the advantages of blockchain, especially Cardano, by providing entrepreneurs and developers with new concepts that will help them design better economic interactions, build open-source frameworks, construct DeFi protocols, or develop tools for DAO's.

Accessible knowledge: Early stage entrepreneurs and developers can leverage Cardano to effect change and scale collaborative networks by offering introductory education materials on token economics and engineering topics.

Align open-source effort: Having a common language of core token engineering concepts allows different projects to understand each other and work out how they can interoperate, Leading to collaboration that improves interoperability. With many new developers and entrepreneurs coming to Cardano, the ecosystem needs ways to share knowledge about using the underlying technology. The tutorials help build an understanding of market mechanisms and token economics to help teams build better tools.

Education for software development: We can only imagine solutions to wicked problems using the conceptual tools at our disposal. Developing software is a knowledge and labour intensive endeavour. If DApp product managers and software developers don’t know about token economics or token engineering concepts, they will design sub-par solutions. Understanding token engineering gives people knowledge and the power to solve local problems globally.

Incentive systems generate business value: Blockchain is institutional technology designed to regulate agents' behaviour through explicit rules and the immutable recording of interactions (transactions). Most tokens are simple, used as digital monies or unique digital property. It is like treating the automobile as a "horseless carriage." More advanced incentive systems and value creation can help solve coordination and collaboration problems. Token engineering aims to provide the conceptual tools and software implementation understanding to help design these more advanced incentive systems. By introducing these ideas in an approachable and open way, we can encourage more people to think differently, putting Cardano at the forefront of the emerging discipline of token engineering.

New forms of governance and collaboration: Direct democratic systems don't scale, and if we have to rely on voting— plutocratic, quadratic, approval, or one-person-one-vote— we are just reinventing a digital bureaucracy. Markets and incentive systems scale and are more decentralised. Market mechanisms can be used to implement more scalable governance in ways that develop sustainable ecosystems and enable people, companies, and DAOs to contribute back to the community.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

I’m learning token engineering myself. The proposal’s mantra is, “One of the best ways to learn something is to teach others.”

Developing clear, coherent explanations of complex ideas: Lacking extensive knowledge in the token economic field, I may not be able to explain concepts as an expert. However, by having a fresh mind, explaining new concepts may make it easier for others to understand, based on what I have learned. However the complexity of the material may mean some topics are harder to simplify and therefore take longer to work out and produce.

I have connections to experienced individuals in all the topic areas I’ll be covering, and I will seek their input and review. I will also engage a professional content editor to ensure the material is easy to read and grammatically correct.

Project scope: I have worked on individual video tutorials using different durations, production values, and styles. The increase in scope and subject matter are new challenges. I have a solid production pipeline and experience creating multiple tutorials and workshops. Instead of taking on the entire project as one complete production exercise, I plan to produce each module stand-alone, completing one module before starting on the next. 

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

The objective is to deliver bite-sized, digestible video tutorials to help learners understand the steps in designing and specifying token systems. Each module is self-contained, building upon previous topics. The production and publication timeline for each module:

Month 1:

Module 1 - Token engineering and token economics overview: Crypto-economics and economics. Money and tokens. What is economics away? Why do you need token engineering, and what is it.

Month 2:

Module 2 - Markets design: Thinking differently about markets. Markets as Computational Systems. The role of markets compared to firms. The different types of markets. What is Price? Price and value don't confuse the two. Price formation and price discovery. Market case studies.

Module 2 - Markets design: Thinking differently about markets. Markets as Computational Systems. The role of markets compared to firms. The different types of markets. What is Price? Price and value don't confuse the two. Price formation and price discovery. Market case studies.

Month 3:

Module 4 - Token Design + Token Polices: Token design overview. Ethical design for tokens. Token bonding curves. Token policies. Monetary policies for tokens.

Module 5 - Incentive Design: Incentive Design: Ledger and tokens as a co-ordination technology. Property Rights. Fractionalised ownership. Types of token sales.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

The requested budget is for wages and expenses for three months of the project. I will deliver the initial material, animations, videos and related documentation. I plan to create five modules with expenses and wages accounted for each module.

Module One: $7,200 (22%)

Module Two: $6,850 (20%)

Module Three: $4,950 (15%)

Module Four: $7,350 (22%)

Module Five: $6,300 (19%)

Software Services: $750 (2%)

Total: $33,400

All modules follow the same structured process which includes: research, scripting and storyboarding (pre-production), production filming and motion graphics, and post-production editing. A normalised hourly rate of USD$70 for the includes all overheads, adjusted for the short term intermittent nature of project funding.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Jack O'Brien: Haskell and Plutus software engineer. A graduate of Massey University College of Creative Arts, in Commercial Music, Technology. I am experienced in music, video, and film production. I Co-organise the Catalyst Eastern Townhall, setting up and maintaining the translation pipeline and providing open-source training materials and workshops for the community. I am studying Evolutionary & Institutional Economics.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

The intent with this proposal is to be a one off event describing a basic overview of the field by equipping product managers and developers alike with the basic information they need to explain and reason through networks and structure markets

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

This proposal will be using Obit Gravity as its primary KPI, and documentation and code examples will be pushed to GitHub. Progress will be measured in:

• Github issues and pull requests to documentation.

• Videos uploaded to Youtube and tracking of their view count.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

The tutorials are completed to a high production value, explain advanced concepts, and are available in many languages. The tutorials are widely watched and shared. Ultimately people in the Cardano Community use token engineering terms, and we see sophisticated incentive designs appearing in Catalyst proposals.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is an entirely new proposal.