Gamification, Nudge Economics and Distributed Autonomous Communities (DAC)

Dr Jane Thomason, a world-renowned futurist, author and advocate for sustainable societal change through innovation and technology.

The inequality and fragmentation that characterises COVID-19 cries out for a new value system — one that values people, society, and our environment, and preserves the planet for future generations. But how do we do that?

Can we use Blockchain tools to collaborate on a global scale and reach out across sectors and geographies and build global innovation communities to solve big and small problems?

Blockchain can enable digital communities to connect and form networks or cooperatives through token economies. Users can have direct access to token capital, investment, and a real stake in the system. They can be rewarded or paid with tokens. The user is no longer a passive consumer of a service: they are a stakeholder. In DACs, individuals become the agents of innovation in a distributed model of collaboration.

Can we create DACs which enable and incentivise digital communities to connect and form networks around a major global problem?

Gamification increases people’s engagement and motivation and activates people. A nudge is a small change in an existing touch point that can facilitate choices or unlock bottlenecks. Gamification with a nudge can be used to help encourage people make better choices in their day to day lives. Perhaps this can even extend to civil obligations by using various gamification techniques and rewards to motivate virtuous social behaviour: rewards such as collectables, virtual goods, challenges, collaboration and a virtual economy where users are stimulated to spend their credits to obtain rewards and purchase virtual assets, then to earn new credits to achieve social goals. Such schemes have successfully been deployed for years and many of you reading this will be members of loyalty programs that often alter your behaviours as you collect points and credits to be later used to obtain upgrades on flights or discounts on future purchases. Historically, these loyalty programs were in the form of something physical e.g., having your Starbucks card stamped when you buy your daily coffee. However, as with many other aspects of our lives, the loyalty and rewards sector is becoming digitised and technology is playing an increasing role and making the collection and use of loyalty benefits easier.

% of people who make purchases and earn loyalty benefits several times per week

Source: Teamblockchain

There is a growing body of literature on whether blockchain technologies could foster the rise of new forms of blockchain-based governance for global commons problems. Rozas et al have researched the principles of commons governance present in self-organised collectives and identified the blockchain-based tools for commons governance. These are:

· tokenisation

· self-enforcement and formalization of rules

· autonomous automatisation

· decentralisation of power over the infrastructure

· increasing transparency

· codification of trust

The capacity of blockchain for tokenisation provides new capabilities to experiment with the use of different types of tokens in collaboration platforms. The distribution of tokens allows for participation rights to be more easily and granularly defined, propagated and revoked. Blockchain tokens can represent both the participation in an organisation and the voting rights and power of each actor, such as Aragon and DAOStack. Large online communities can use blockchain technology to automate certain rules and enable the monitoring of communitarian behaviour transparently. Global online communities managing digital commons may implement such interoperability among their communities using blockchain applications. This would enable the creation of federations of online communities and enhance the exchanges and interactions among them. I predict these communities will change over time from purely speculative communities to sustained and purposeful global collaborations.

The Blockchain community has been furiously innovating during the COVID-19 pandemic, with Bitcoin reaching a valuation of over $1trillion and Ethereum got to $500billion. Meanwhile the total locked value DeFi exceeded $100 billion and the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace has created over 730,000 NFTs todate. Many millennials, which account for 22% of the US population, and the blockchain community have a genuine desire to ‘change the world’ and use technology and funding to create sustainable social change. Social impact is deeply embedded in their personal values, and a driving force behind their actions

Digital tools now allow large groups of like-minded people to connect, allow members to determine causes worth supporting, improve both the way we collaborate and the outcomes of these collaborations for all, and enable individuals and groups to support other individuals and groups who pursue causes they believe to be of value to others.

Tokenonomics is a combination of cryptography, computer networks and game theory used to secure systems and realise a set of economic incentives or disincentives. DACs can make distinctions such as ‘members’, ‘investors’, ‘advisors’, ‘customers’ and ‘technology partners. Network tokens can be offered in exchange for contributions to the ecosystem. This allows a blockchain organisation to expand its reach as well as crowdsource from a large pool of people worldwide to complete tasks or projects. Tokens can be for services, user inputs, products, and any other work the platform needs to be able to grow. Blockchain networks give us new ways to design and build incentive systems and we have the capacity to rapidly build and implement large-scale structures for incentivising human behaviour. How to create incentive systems which align the interest of the individual with the overall beneficial outcomes for the planet is a central issue.

Blockchain networks are all about protocols that enable coordination between actors. The great innovation of blockchain networks is a new system for incentivising a network of autonomous nodes towards maintaining a shared infrastructure. Token economics builds upon this underlying technological innovation.

Back in 2017, I predicted that many DAOs would change over time from speculative communities to sustained and purposeful global collaborations. I suggested they may be about climate change, saving the oceans, banking the unbanked, bringing women into the economy, or predicting the next pandemic. I had no idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was so real and so close! We missed that opportunity! But let’s use what we now know, to look at how the combination of game theory, nudge economics, and blockchain technology can mark the beginning of a new paradigm for representing and communicating human value. Nudging is about prompting people to think in new and different ways, to elicit a desired response. We have the tools to create tokenised incentivisation to architect people’s choices on a global scale. Could this be the ‘sleeping dragon’ of the fourth industrial revolution?