Token Genies (Part 3): #Connect2Evolve Challenge
In this part we introduce one of two Token Engineering (TE) Challenges and the domain mentors during the #Diffusion2019 Hackathon hosted by Outlier Ventures 19.-20.October Berlin. Sign up here! Check out part 2 of this series for TE mentors.
As a bonus you will already learn a bit about the practice and process steps of token engineering. Stay tuned for the last part of this series before your initiation on Saturday for a deep dive into the modelling process with cadCAD! You can find out more and connect with fellow hackers and mentors when you sign up and look for the #connect2evolve Challenge in diffusion2019.devpost.com.
The Setting
The Solartainer® is a self-contained solar smart microgrid, including solar panels, storage, satellite internet, and grid cabling. Within 6–8 weeks it is capable of bringing electricity, information, and financial services to off-grid rural villages with a population 4,000 people. How that looks like you can watch in this documentary.
Over 20 Solartainer® are powering villages with more than 100,000 people already and counting. It’s a game of numbers and comes down to cost-effectively scaling the funding side: cost of capital. The positive impact is — literally — not even taken into account yet!
#Connect2Evolve is an innovation project driven by ingenuity and purpose. A community of innovators within Siemens started in 2016 with a vision that Electrification, Digitalization, Automation can and must have positive impact on people’s lives — and an unstoppable curiosity whether and how tokenization and new forms of decentralized organization play a role. The team is working at the front line of open innovation. Together with their network they are now planning crowdfunding campaign for a Solartainer® powering a village in Senegal.
The Challenge in the Challenge: “Fractional, fluid ownership”
Designing a mechanism to transfer ownership of the Solartainer and its future energy production to the broader ecosystem and measuring the effects of doing so.
As a token engineer, your first challenge is to forget about the token ;) and start thinking in systems:
The system is there for a reason, a purpose. It is made up of parts (agents or entities) — and those parts each have their own goals. They create value and must share the value such that the system can sustain itself and fulfill its purpose. Representing this value as tokens and developing mechanisms that align incentives (goals) is called token design thinking. Applying systems design and agent based modelling supported by a unified framework like cadCAD is called token engineering. Here is the link to a recent Zargham Lecture at the Fields Institute earlier this week. It lays out the high level message and rigorous backdrop, we’re digging into the actual practice of engineering at #Diffusion2019 (also check out the other challenges in our track!).
If you are wondering, “Does it have to be this complicated, though?” then you have not yet internalized the great power (and great responsibility) of programming incentive mechanisms that one can embed into infrastructures of modern life. And you might be mixing complicated with complex:
Token Engineering helps us to “consciously manage complexity.”
If you already have an intuition, you may be asking yourself, why pick that one challenge above? Of course in a complex adaptive system, made up of
- the local Community (as individual energy users and as a collective),
- the Solartainer Operator, its Construction Company,
- the Solartainer itself (it observes and decides and hence will get its own agent logic in your model & simulations),
- the Crowdfunders,
- the local government and weather
there are many more token design challenges: such as incentivizing optimal use and optimal operations of the infrastructure, or even bigger ones like incentivizing sustainable development. The tokenized representation of the value that the Solartainer creates, and the distribution of that value by means of (re-)distribution ownership is but one high leverage mechanism that will have effect on those other token design challenges.
During the hackathon you will implement agent behavior models that are informed by data (ask Colin your tech mentor) and assumptions (ask Sylvia and Tanja, your domain mentors, see below). The beauty of using cadCAD (ask these guys!) is that you’ll be managing those data, assumptions, agent models and system dynamics specifications and code — all in one repository with version control.
A very quick primer on the modelling process with cadCAD
Part of the challenge in Token Engineering track is also that you apply and improve best practices, and learn to design and implement token economies as complex adaptive systems by means of computer aided design framework.
The typical path is to layout the system dynamics and agent goals, which you can by using adapted versions of the platform toolkit.
- In the Canvas, you are putting the purpose of the system at the center and layout key players, contributors, and/or users in your ecosystem.
- Once you have them, use the Motivation Matrix to see who creates value and who shares value with whom in that system.
- Now you are ready to use Stock (value creation) & Flow (value sharing) diagrams, and enter complex systems design. cadCAD community uses an adapted version to help you clearly define agent decisions.
- From there it is one more leap that separates you from actual coding: defining the dynamics using differential syntax specification.
Finally, you can start programming business differential equations — and you will never ever look back.
Of course, this is not all the support you’ll get to get the hang of it. Stay tuned for the next parts of this Token Genie hackathon series! Now without further ado:
Your Domain Mentors
The #Connect2Evolve team is a “two pizza team,” and you can certainly reach out and connect with them before and after the hackathon. Two of them will be available throughout the weekend to spar with you and discuss any domain questions you might have:
Tanja Romahn has been working for Siemens since 2007. Starting in Corporate Communication, she
changed later into the technology and innovation department within Power Generation Services.
Within #connect2Evolve Tanja helped the creation of a Siemens internal crypto token, and smart contracts.
Sylvia Niewiem is Senior Project Manager special projects, business administration, and blockchain enthusiast. Sylvia holds university degrees in business administration and European studies. She has a broad background in the field of energy through working for one of the four big audit companies, a political foundation and a Solar company before joining Siemens in 2012.
Both of your domain mentors developed business models and helped define smart contracts for various charity focused blockchain projects from within Siemens.
