TokenEngineering Academy receives Boson Protocol Ecosystem Grant

Sponsoring a program of research with the aim of fostering a better understanding of DAOs and governance.

Published in

BosonProtocol

3 min readJan 26, 2022

We are delighted to announce that the TokenEngineering Academy received a Boson Protocol grant during the first wave of our Grants Program.

Our ecosystem grants are designed to incentivize the thinkers and collaborators who will help us in our mission to create an entirely new decentralized commerce landscape. Token Engineering Academy’s objectives are so closely aligned with ours that we decided to sponsor a specific program of research with the aim of fostering a better understanding of DAOs and governance.

The Governauts Rewards Systems Research Initiative that we chose to sponsor is a three-month program to explore incentives in a DAO context. Why is this important for Boson? As we undertake a process of progressive decentralization and move certain decision-making functions to the Boson Protocol DAO, we need to be at the forefront of research into DAOs and how to incentivize contributions and coordination within the ecosystem.

The TokenEngineering Academy created the program because more and more blockchain projects are relying on decentralized governance as the form of decision-making for their protocol. This means handing power to tokenholders, delegates, or even joining forces and voting with other DAOs.

Rewards Systems are a key element for DAOs to grow the ecosystem value, reward contributors, and grant decision-making power (governance tokens) to those who provide value to a DAO. We are also faced with new challenges like defining effective voting mechanisms, maximizing community participation, or fighting voter fraud.

Participants in the program (which is currently ongoing) are exploring different DAO cases, analyzing data and design mechanism improvements and verifying their assumptions with experiments in real-DAO environments.

The program was aimed at co-researchers from many fields: behavioral economics, (computational) psychology, sociology, game design, engineering, math, data analytics or computer science — and of course: DAOists!

This grant serves as a reminder that there are many ways of helping to build an ecosystem. While Wave 2 of the Grants Program will primarily focus on rewarding technical build partners who can help us create the SDKs, APIs and other tools that we need for a productive and complete ecosystem, token engineering research will continue to be a major part of what we do. Our core exchange mechanism relies heavily on game theory and we continue to promote best practices in research, of which Token Engineering Academy is a perfect example.

About TokenEngineering Academy

Token Engineering is the youngest engineering discipline after software engineering was established in the 1960s. It deals with the design, verification and optimization of token-based economic systems (blockchain). Since 2018, the Token Engineering community has managed to gather researchers and engineers from many disciplines to formulate the token engineering body of knowledge, methods and engineering ethics. TE Academy is the first educational institution in this field, which traditional academia hasn’t even picked up.

All courses are free for students, and accessible online. Since 2020, over 900 participants from all parts of the world attended the courses offered in collaboration with partners like Boson, Ethereum Foundation, Balancer, Gnosis, NEAR, or Gitcoin.

Find more about TokenEngineering Academy’s programs and initiatives here.

Find out more:
Web: https://tokenengineeringcommunity.github.io/website/docs/academy-welcome
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tokengineering

About Boson Protocol

Boson Protocol is the decentralized network on which future commerce will run.

And it starts with metaverse commerce. Boson Protocol enables anyone to sell physical products in the metaverse as NFTs within our Decentraland space — Boson Portal.

With Boson Protocol you can build commerce applications that anyone can trust and everyone can use.

Keen to learn more?

Enjoy the dCommerce Stack outlining the services we’ll need to build a dCommerce ecosystem.

Want to get involved?

See our live job openings
See our Boson Portal website

Got more questions?

Our FAQs ought to have you covered.