2 research outputs found
Engineering Token Economy with System Modeling
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks have attracted tremendous attention
from their volatile price movements and the promise of decentralization.
However, most projects run on business narratives with no way to test and
verify their assumptions and promises about the future. The complex nature of
system dynamics within networked economies has rendered it difficult to reason
about the growth and evolution of these networks. This paper drew concepts from
differential games, classical control engineering, and stochastic dynamical
system to come up with a framework and example to model, simulate, and engineer
networked token economies. A model on a generalized token economy is proposed
where miners provide service to a platform in exchange for a cryptocurrency and
users consume service from the platform. Simulations of this model allow us to
observe outcomes of complex dynamics and reason about the evolution of the
system. Speculative price movements and engineered block rewards were then
experimented to observe their impact on system dynamics and network-level
goals. The model presented is necessarily limited so we conclude by exploring
those limitations and outlining future research directions
Token Economics in Real-Life: Cryptocurrency and Incentives Design for Insolar Blockchain Network
The study of how to set up cryptocurrency incentive mechanisms and to
operationalize governance is token economics. Given the $250 billion market cap
for cryptocurrencies, there is compelling need to investigate this topic. In
this paper, we present facets of the token engineering process for a real-life
80-person Swiss blockchain startup, Insolar. We show how Insolar used systems
modeling and simulation combined with cryptocurrency expertise to design a
mechanism to incentivize enterprises and individual users to use their new
MainNet public blockchain network. The study showed subsidy pools that
incentivize application developers to develop on the network does indeed have
the desired positive effect on MainNet adoption. For a startup like Insolar
whose success hinge upon how well their model incentivizes various stakeholders
to participate on their MainNet network versus that of numerous alternatives,
this token economics simulation analysis provides invaluable insights