NonCon 2020

Cryptoeconomics Track Summary

In time of the Coronavirus pandemic, Parallele Polis community managed to entertain and organise the NONCON 2020 virtual conference, and it was great! With 3 full-day tracks, 71 speakers scheduled from 3rd April to 5th April and no fees, the conference allowed everyone to participate from home and was a true success!

The topics were divided between 3 tracks, namely Parallele Polis track, Metatrack and the Cryptoeconomics track that was hosted by us. The Cryptoeconomics track strived to establish a virtual space where the aspects of complex blockchain-based systems such as applied token engineering, design and engineering of funding models, sustainable web 3 business models, data unions etc. can be explored together with the speakers. The amazing open-source software “Interspace” provided by Parallele Polis allowed for seamless interactions and a highly interactive environment. All talks were live streamed and are now available on Youtube. We prepared an overview of the talks from the Cryptoeconomics track to help you decide which talks to watch first.

Talks

Vinay Gupta — Taking our seat at the table: Blockchain and the real Game of Thrones
Vinay started off his talk by saying “Welcome to the end of the world everybody”! He expressed his views on the underperforming nature of crypto and the importance of wealth creation, rather than wealth transfer. Because the crypto space is still focusing on wealth transfer, an environment where criminal activity occurs far too often has been created. He continues with the arguments on how this could potentially be tackled in order to provide useful public services.

Krzysztof Paruch — From Bonding curves to configuration spaces and beyond
Kris presented research results of complex multiscale system design showcasing best-practice examples of design principles applied to bonding curves. These well-known cryptoeconomic mechanisms are widely used in practice as automated market makers, liquidity providers and continuous funding vehicles. What is new is their property of being able to act as primitives upholding desired macro-level properties of the system thus allowing to create purpose-driven crypto economies only realizing intended system states in the so called configuration space regardless of agent interactions.

Shruti Appiah — How to Engineer New Funding Mechanisms
Shruti introduced the concept of dynamically adjusting bonding curves, applied to social impact bonds. These bonding curves are far more resilient as they self adjust based on systemic risk factors when they are live. In contrast to static bonding curves, they don’t operate on fixed a priori assumptions. She demonstrates how to apply complex systems concepts to engineer economic systems through an exemplar for a continuous funding mechanism. The social impact bond mechanism is mathematically modelled and will be stress-tested for its sustainability, resilience, adaptiveness, and effectiveness in achieving system goals via multi-agent simulations.

Shermin Voshmgir — Purpose-Driven Token
Shermin talked about purpose-driven tokens that steer a distributed network of untrusted actors, and how they might provide an alternative steering mechanism to the current economic system. She explains how purpose-driven tokens incentivize individual action towards a public good: such as a social media network, a universal state, token curated registries or other type of DAOs. She also argues that tokenized economies are being fed real-time data, which will require new structure designs. For engineering such a system, Shermin argues there is a need for knowledge from fields such as economics, public policy design, legal engineering and the many existing tools we can apply.

Shaun Conway — IXO Impact Bonds — Economic Engineering of Risk Adjusted Impact Bonds
Shaun presented the use-cases of IXO protocol and what they are working on in regard to the development impact bonds. He then discusses results-based capital and what programmable capital systems are. Further, the importance of explicitly addressing the risks within the system design is introduced and the use of cadCAD modelling for impact bond projects is discussed.

Horst Treiblmaier — Blockchain and Sustainability — Overhyped or Undervalued?
Horst approached various sustainability topics from a scientific perspective, presenting us with concepts such as weak and strong sustainability. He briefly introduced Blockchain 4 Cities, a UN initiative and an evaluation framework as a guideline on what blockchain technology can do for sustainability. He then touches upon incentive mechanisms, positive and negative externalities and research on combining the eight principles of Elinor Ostrom with blockchain functionalities.

Matteo Tambussi — Sustainable Development Goals, Local impact and Blockchain
Matteo talked about the first ETH hackathon hosted in Italy, namely ETH Turin, hackathon focusing on impact related topics. He explains the importance of various SDGs and how different cities could create priority-clusters and make the cities interact towards a common goal. He then presents Commonshood, a project by the University of Turin on blockchain-based circular economy. Further, he talks about incentive systems for smart communities, what these communities have experienced in the past, and what introducing blockchain to them will mean.

Jeff Emmett — Red Cross Community Currencies: An Economic Vaccine for COVID19
Jeff presents an economic liquidity solution in the form of community currencies to address the ongoing challenges that will be posed by COVID19. He demonstrates the Community Inclusion Currency initiative by Grassroots Economics and the Danish Red Cross, who are using bonding curves for local economic inclusion in Kenya. Jeff then gives insight into what the Commons Stack is, and how their tools can help enable communities to implement similar economic interventions, coming to the topic of ethical economic designs in a time of global crisis.

Michel Bauwens — How to conduct the Post-Corona Cosmolocalisation of our Economy
Michael gives the three definitions of the commons, namely the objective, subjective and institutional definition, and continues to explore the importance of accounting and its evolution with the help of blockchain technology. He explains contributive accounting as a possible membrane between the actors who are collectively creating common value and the actors commercializing the products. Flow accounting as a flow of resources that can now be represented on the blockchain and thermodynamic accounting as a flow of matter and energy, the ignorance of which can be seen in the current Coronavirus crisis. Proper functioning of these accounting systems can be supported by a shared, distributed ledger allowing integrative evolution to take place.

Griff Green — Using Token Engineering to align incentives around non profit causes
Griff starts off by discussing some of the failures of our economy, especially around the creation of non-excludable value. Nonprofit organizations that create this value, do not have customers to create business models around, they fall prey to free-rider issues and must beg for funding to create value. The Common Stack’s vision is to realign the incentives around the production of public goods to create sustainable funding for these community focused organizations. He then elaborates on the tools of creating new economies, two sided markets and how the bonding curves solve the problem of market illiquidity. Griff also explains the transparency of the slippage in comparison to the traditional markets and explains the Common Stack’s Trusted Seed.

Raphael Haupt & Cem Dagdelen — CO2ken Genesis — Carbon offsetting for web3
Cem introduces Curve Labs, a design intervention laboratory with the focus on non-hegemonic data economy, P2P organizations and energy transition. The lab takes web3 primitives and redesigns them for the real world use-cases. Raphael then presents the carbon markets and traditional Carbon Offset Lifecycle, which consists of a number of intermediaries. CO2ken is a project that solves the problems identified in the traditional carbon markets, the architecture and a demo of which are presented by Raphael.

Marlene Ronstedt — The Web 3 Data Economy Will Win If It Eats Silicon Valley
Marlene talks about how Web2 applications can be amended through Web3 applications to improve data ownership. By exploring use-cases such as Netflix, she explains data ownership, data unions and what blockchain technology means to data unions. She also touches upon the Streamr Network and how they support and finance these kinds of projects and what economic incentives are needed for a data union to work.

Sebnem Rusitschka — Token Engineering Applied
Sebnem divides her talk in two parts, namely the design of a token economy in which we look into value creation, into identifying stakeholders and ensuring buy-ins for every stakeholder, and the engineering part that focuses on modelling and simulation, building an architecture and security audits. She presents the tools each part is using and the need for certain actors to interact and build such a system, a tokenized economy, together.

Will Ruddick — Networks of Community Currencies
Will gives a brief history of community currencies that arose from economic crises, like the one in Wörgl, Austria, and how these initiatives developed over time. In his projects by Grassroots Economics, community currencies are created by using a specific mechanism to support collaborative communities in Kenya. He then distinguishes between the credit system in which there is trust in communities and the reserve systems connected to the decentralized credit systems. He also provides insights into how they are supporting and identifying communities in Kenya.

Wassim Alsindi — Cryptoeconomic Systems Journal & Conference Series
Wassim starts off with the issues of the current publishing system of scientific articles and what contributed to their idea of setting up a new journal for the blockchain space, namely the MIT Cryptoeconomic Systems Journal and Conference Series. He describes the idea of journals as knowledge clubs, and shows a flow chart of how an autonomous tokenized journal might work. He then provides summaries of the past conferences in 2019 and 2020 and what role the journal strives to play in interdisciplinary research.

Michael Zargham — Foundations of Cryptoeconomic Systems
Zargham presents his academic work with Cryptoeconomics Institute in Vienna, research around coordinated decision making and the interdisciplinarity aspect of building on blockchain. In order to grasp the broad definition of economics, Zargham elaborates on institutional and behavioural economics, but also on complexity management and ethical engineering. He further explains how cadCAD, a python package facilitating model based systems engineering at BlockScience, fits into automation of operations, including what cyber-physical systems are and the challenges of designing adaptive systems.

Faris Oweis — The future of streaming and Data Unions
Faris explains how data unions allow users to monetize their data in micro payments in real-time. In regard to this, he talks about the problems and common goals in the streaming industry and what he is doing at Streamr Network. He also points out the importance of emergency when it comes to implementing new structures, such as in case of decentralized streaming platforms and the importance of incentive alignments.

Shiv Malik — How to Reclaim Your Data Dignity in a Few Clicks
Shiv shows what kind of data economy we live in and the three visions for a better data economy. He also explains why data ownership is so difficult to implement on the infrastructure and the technical level and then argues a possible solution has already been created. Data unions on blockchains are already being developed by Streamr Network and during the talk Shiv holds a demo on how Swash data union works.