Celebrating Progress: One Year into the Commons Stack Journey
Staging the Commons Stack Project with Iteration 0
Together with all of you we recently woke up in a brave new world, where we more than ever witness that a systemic and mindset change is needed to tackle complex issues. We have been tremendously inspired by our community that did not stop building for even a heartbeat. More than ever we believe in the importance of regenerative systems that empower communities and the open source toolkits to design them properly.
In Iteration 0 of the Commons Stack, our focus is on staging the cultural and technical initialization tools required to make complex systems succeed. After a quick summary of our overall vision, you will find a detailed run-through of the many projects we have launched or supported, and what is still in the pipeline.
We have been refining our strategy, growing our community, supporting community initiatives, contributing to research, … and a lot more is coming. The Commons Stack is nothing without its community, so first and foremost we would like to thank you, and invite you to continue to support our mission in any way you can.
The Commons Stack, Realigning Incentives to Support Public Goods
Before we dive into everything we have been up to, you might be wondering, what is the Commons Stack? And why does it matter?
Our current economic paradigm incentivizes the exploitation of the environment and systemically undervalues open-source software, open research, and other altruistic efforts to address our collective needs. We want to help build a world where public goods are valued and protected by the communities that use them. To achieve our vision of creating an entirely new way to sustain public goods, we aim to evolve how we design and build cryptoeconomic systems.
The Commons Stack isn’t a platform, but rather a modular library of well-engineered components that can be used to align incentives around contributing to public goods. Our planned components, which all have a cultural and technical roadmap, will facilitate governance, incentivize work towards shared goals, provide accountability, and monitor the health of the Commons.
Our long term mission is to support communities in using holistic Token Engineering design to create circular, purpose-driven economies powered by continuous funding streams and transparent decision making.
Refining the Strategy
The world looks different today: so much has happened since Giveth and BlockScience first teamed up and outlined a strategy, built a team of trusted advisors and core contributors, with POCs being hacked on at ETHDenver, ETHParis, and the Odyssey hackathon through the spring of 2019. More than ever, in the light of recent worldwide events, we see how important it is to collectively incentivize and govern public goods.
Our goal is to start very ‘small’ with communities within our ecosystem that are willing to experiment with our technical and cultural components, but our long-term vision is to be able to support any future Commons: we hope to support regenerative economies around any cause, whether it is open-source software development, creating and managing self-sovereign identities or COVID response and research.
To make this a reality, we’ve been hard at work on refining our overall vision, mission, strategy, and constantly integrating feedback from the communities for whom we are building this. The fruit of this labor is turning into a whitepaper that we hope to publish later this year. This content will also transpire into articles, AMA sessions and website content. If you are interested in any particular aspects of our strategy, we invite you to join the discussion!
“The Commons Stack plans to create a Cyber-Physical Commons toolkit, that is capable of providing continuous funding to open source projects. We’ll deliver it over 5+ codebase iterations, focusing on one layer at a time, starting with the sustainable funding layer where we will design and construct a general purpose Augmented Bonding Curve. Anyone can fork, customize, and implement the modular components produced by the Commons Stack as we release them.
This toolkit addresses the primary scalability issues for DAO ecosystems, namely continuous funding, accountable escrow, real-time decision making, and impact measurement. After we have completed the fifth iteration, we will have a Commons codebase that will be easy for any community to customize, deploy and use.”
‘Medium-term Mission’ — excerpt from the Commons Stack whitepaper (work in progress)
Growing the Community
We have been working hard over the past year to grow the community that will help steward this new kind of collaboration. First and foremost our focus is on building the Trusted Seed, a curated list of reputable & experienced community members who are aligned with our mission of creating sustainable funding for public goods. If you haven’t applied just yet, no better time than right now.
Next to this we have been presenting all over the world (live presentations in Berlin, Osaka, Denver, Paris, Barcelona, an AMA with the full team, interviews and podcasts, technical deep dives, and recently of course virtual conferences), constantly refining our strategy and messaging, based on our audience’s feedback.
We also published a number of articles, ranging from the importance of open engineering standards over an exploration of Cyber-Physical Commons ecosystems to component explainers and deep dives. You can find all of them under our Medium publication. Meanwhile we’ve been participating in the cultural build of what will one day be the Token Engineering Commons, we hope you will join them. Next to sustainable funding, introducing and integrating novel governance mechanisms are a key part of our mission, so we’ve been contributing heavily to the DGOV gatherings and calls, as well as collaborating with the Metagovernance project to expand the DAO dialogue.
A thriving Ecosystem
We are supporting, uniting and funding an ecosystem, not just a project: there is no Commons Stack without the Commons. It’s been inspiring to see such a vibrant community spring to life, experimenting and coalescing around the goals we set out to accomplish together.
We supported the open sourcing of BlockScience’s cadCAD, our token engineering foundation, which helps you design, test and validate complex systems through simulation. Their community has grown exponentially and many teams have been collaborating and integrating their research:
- Molecule recently built a novel crowdfunding route for researchers and put their Module Catalyst to the test with cadCAD
- Barnabé Monnot worked on Ethereum 2.0’s Beacon Chain, with an improvement on their first Beacon Runner, an economics-focused simulation environment for eth2, wrapping up the current eth2 specs in a cadCAD environment.
- Barnabé also simulated EIP 1559 which changes the gas fees from a first price auction (you pay what you bid) to making a mandatory base fee that fluctuates with how full blocks are with an option to tip miners.
- Grassroots Economics is using bonding curves to enable communities in Kenya to create their own currencies (aka Community Inclusion Currencies). They are now building a cadCAD Simulation of their system.
- The Graph has been working with the BlockScience team to validate their cryptoeconomic design.
- Le Grand Jeu is a hands-on tool to co-design sustainable micro-economies empowered by cryptocurrency, which you could see as a gamified cadCAD ‘front-end’ for interaction designers.
The Commons Simulator is a hands-on community project incorporating solarpunk art and storytelling to create a game where the player is a time traveler from the future tasked with inspiring the RadicalxChange community to create a Commons and prevent a dystopian future. The topic of this leap was chosen by the largest donor to the Commons Simulator Gitcoin Grant during CLR round 4, RadicalxChange community member Danibelle. The next leap (each level of the game is called a leap) has been chosen by Sebnem (the largest donor in CLR round 5) and will be the Token Engineering Commons.
The game simultaneously illustrates the power of cadCAD and how a Cyber-Physical Commons will work, allowing players to simulate building a range of successful Commons. To win the game, the players need to design a Commons that will create sustainable funding and social impact for the community. Once they’ve set their design parameters, the cadCAD backend simulates how this would play out. The highest scores win and they will be enshrined on our leaderboards. Contributors are actively rewarded, and you can join in on the project here.
Although we are still in the staging phase of the Commons Stack, this has not stopped people from diving into the designs of our four components and experimenting through various initiatives:
Augmented Bonding Curve ‘ABC’ (Iteration 1):
- The Grassroots Economics team has been designing a bonding curve for the Red Cross Community Inclusion Currency project and initializing a Hatch of a Community Inclusion Currency.
- Freeelio is researching ‘Fractal Ownership’ through the use of Augmented Bonding Curves with a concrete application within the ElectraSeed Fund Ecosystem.
- @randomshinichi, one of our contributors to the Commons Simulator, rewrote our ABC simulation.
- Sem, working with 1Hive, has started building a Commons template using the Aragon Fundraising App (connected to his CV app) and is looking to add alternate funding streams to it that are akin to entry and exit tributes.
Giveth Proposal Engine ‘GPE’ (Iteration 2)
- Our contributing developers Andre and Amin have continued to work on stabilizing our running version of the Giveth DApp (Donation Application)
- Meanwhile Max Semenchuk has been working on the design specs for the Giveth Proposal Engine, showing what Giveth will look like integrated with the Commons Stack’s ABC and CV components.
- The Coz team started working on what we call ‘Giveth 2.0’, the next evolution of the Giveth DApp, producing an MVP to collect funds for Covid research and a successful Gitcoin Grant that guarantees further development work.
Conviction Voting ‘CV’ (Iteration 3)
- David Lopp (Sem) implemented the first CV designs into a working Aragon Dapp, and continues to work on this under the 1Hive umbrella.
- 1Hive is creating the Gardens Project, a social network where individuals can easily create or join a decentralized autonomous community, leveraging a standard template combining Aragon Fundraising, Conviction Voting, and Aragon Court.
- KarmaDAO, another project out of the 1Hive community, is experimenting with new token issuance through Conviction Voting, where new recipients of $KARMA are voted on via CV of existing members, in recognition for the hard work & good deeds they’re carrying out.
Commons Dashboard ‘CD’ (Iteration 4)
- Multiply Charity is using funds received through a successful Gitcoin Grant to create a dashboard for donors to donate directly to Kenyans in need and see the impact of their donation. This impact data will eventually be able to be fed into cadCAD models of the system for optimization, effectively creating a first prototype of our Commons Dashboard.
Next to this we’ve also been consulting on and contributing to a whole lot of related research within the space that directly or indirectly contributes to our mission, such as:
- Foundations of Cryptoeconomic Systems, by Michael Zargham and Shermin Voshmgir
- Economic Games as Estimators, by Michael Zargham, Krzysztof Paruch and Jamsheed Shorish
- From Curved Bonding to Configuration Spaces by Michael Zargham, Jamsheed Shorish and Krzysztof Paruch
- Exploring DAOs as a New Kind of Institution, a paper by the Metagovernance Project and the Commons Stack
- Towards Open and Collaborative, Socially Pre-Distributive and Ecologically Sustainable Infrastructures of Value Generation and Distribution by Michel Bauwens and Sarah Manski (soon to be published)
- Upcoming academic paper in collaboration with the P2P Foundation, Economic Space Agency and Commons Engine
- Collaboration and consultancy on multiple aspects of technical and sociological research for Grassroot Economics and BlockScience.
Supporting the Commons Stack
There is still so much planned for Iteration 0. We will further refine our strategic approach and overall plan, continuously consulting our community and adapting our strategy wherever and whenever needed. We will continue to grow our community and support this fantastic, budding ecosystem with a special focus on the Token Engineering Community. We have been deeply impressed by how many people have been helping to build out the foundations of the Commons Stack.
Our next, very tangible endeavor is to work with a community to help them launch an ‘MVP’ Commons, as a part of our Iteration 0. If you are a leader of a technically savvy and culturally aware community providing a public good, we would love to help you bootstrap your work with our tools. Reach out to us!
For us to continue pushing the development of economies around causes we need your support. We invite you to contribute to our mission in any way you can. You can contribute with time to any of the above projects by joining the community.
You can also contribute financially to Iteration 0, and this would be highly appreciated — with extra funds you are not only supporting us as a core team, but a wide network of contributors. And every DAI contributed is spent transparently on the Giveth DApp.
No matter how you want to contribute, the first step is to apply to become a member of our Trusted Seed, where you can indicate in which way(s) you can support.
Join us
If you would like to support the Commons Stack initiative and help us create a new way to fund public goods and open source projects, you can do this by applying here.
- Join the Commons Stack community on Telegram or Riot
- Read more on what the Commons Stack is building
- Follow the Commons Stack on Twitter
- Find more resources on our website
Warm regards,
