What Is Token Engineering?

Transcript

awesome guys this next speaker comes all the way from Brazil uh she's going to do a talk on token engineering stakeholder analys analysis uh she's going to talk about the early findings of that so there not all the findings just the early findings I'm afraid ladies and Gentlemen please welcome your next speaker Livia desaya thank you is this the is just the slide okay great it was difficult for me to feel

connecting connected preparing for this presentation I've been wanting to connect with very small and grounded things I've been wanting to be in the body to connect with the micro the tangible the possible the abstraction has been putting us all in the clouds when there hasn't been a moment we need more to be grounded on planet Earth there is something real calling the necessity to look at interactions as the most precious thing not only with humans but with everything there is is I see economics as this huge map of

interactions every transaction is a statement of value being exchanged currently there's so much value still traveling the invisible it's like we are looking at a map of the Year 100 we are still interacting mainly with extractive value systems from Colonial cultures but there is an unmapped reality that will allow was to see so much further 2011 movements like Occupy Wall Street the Arab Spring and the Dig nado's movement in Spain emerged from a global financial crisis the root of this satisfaction where in um we in

socioeconomic constraints that prevent people from feeling free and leaving meaningful lives the problem is that people had no means for proposing economic reforms that could structurally change their environments on Monday we went on a walk with um organized by The Trusted seed with a co-op movement leader in the neighborhood of suns here in Barcelona I was surprised to hear such successful stories of collective social achievement and yet he said it's exhausting to find to fight the big Capital it is indeed

capitalism is a lose lose game we have a lot to learn with such spaces and agents of impact and resistance and we also have something to share we start to have means for economic transformation that can change the course of humanity and perhaps for the first time we're seeing tangible potential for transferring economic transferring economic Authority from centralized Giants to individuals and mission-driven communities token engineering is a nasin trans disciplinary movement concerned with the creation of token based socioeconomic

systems and um I'm here today to present this stakeholder study that was born out of the need to understand better what token engineering entails and what are the challenges es and needs faced by practitioners in order to advance the field so real impact can come from cryptocurrencies in safe and ethical ways the study is funded by the token engineering Commons and it was a collective effort since its Inception to this moment where I'll share some of our early findings the primary research question guiding the study was what is token engineering we recruited participants

who identified um who identified themselves uh who our team identified and who were recommended by other participants as token Engineers or working on the field of token engineering and overall we interviewed 41 individuals based all over the world this is a map I don't know if you can see well cuz it's like colored but that is the map of where our participants are coming from so quite spread um with various backgrounds and all contributing to the space so the design of the study was rooted in a constructive grounded Theory approach which focuses on exploring new and emerging phenomenon we

ask questions about participants career Journeys um how they see the field the definition of token engineering for them and ask specific questions about ethics um diversity finances in AI so the social researchers myself included uh three of us analyzed the data set using a constant comparative method so while we continue to make sense of the data we found we also want to share a few of the key findings emerging from this work Big E engineering um one of our participants

spoke about Big E engineering versus little e engineering he argued um token engineering falls under the Big E engineering umbrella which has certain kinds of processes values and ethics baked into it in counterpart to little e engineering from software engineering which is more experimental and it isn't so concerned with such standards many of our participants endorsed the term engineering when um talking about token engineering so we asked if token engineering was even an accurate term and a lot of people felt uh very connected to the engineering

aspect of it because it brings a tradition of ethics and safety when dealing with public infrastructure so some of the quotes we had was that um for me token engineering was a shelling point in the ethics space not a new technical field the extent to which we work on designing the automated procedures entrenched within our emerging organization is awesome but token Engineering in my opinion exists to bring attention to those ethics and those sort of you know design and validation practices that under guard public infrastructure and other sectors

of web 3 someone else said my understanding of engineering is that there is a code of ethics and also that token engineering has four pillars economic engineering technical engineering uh legal engineering and ethical or political engineering because politics is ethics uh build bridges for everyone this was an interesting story that came up uh one of our participants shared that um in one um when inquired about diversity and

inclusivity that there was a bridge that was built in New York City in the 60s and Engineers were um lobbied to make this bridge lower so buses couldn't cross the bridge because it was a reach area a reach Beach that they didn't want lower class accessing that space so they created an engineering impediment to uh an actual Bridge so the name engineering is not enough to bring uh ethics to the space and to ensure that that will happen uh but um we need to bring diversity to make sure that voices are represented

and they can mitigate this type of situation so uh discrimination is is not baked in design so a segue to that is um one of our participants from Nigeria shared how he thinks Mo most crypto systems are still being crafted for Europe and North America instead of looking at the top 20 countries that use crypto the most he argues that necessity can bring creativity and that is his quote that people need to realize that in several other places this crypto movement is beyond the means of livelihood it's a religion it's a movement it's a mindset

it's a do or die in fact it is that it has to work right so when you're dealing with people like that that are willing to go the farthest to prove their points to do their research to do the due diligence they often come up with the quickest bright enough ideas that you probably were not thinking about jumping from that uh into legality and regulation that was probably the number one need challenge concern mentioned in the interviews so these are some of the

quotes of how worried people were feeling about regulations that if people were getting more and more worried about the existence of tokens the token being available to users then that's going to be a huge risk what keeps me up at night right now which is a very significant thing is the whole anti- toen sentiment by The Regulators I think that is somewhat unspoken or underappreciated the impact of the regulation on the decay of the industry the lawyers just follow what The Regulators State I think a more interesting thing is to work with lobbying groups to lobby for prot token

legislation and I put this slide uh after the last quote I just mentioned because that same participant had a provocation that um how projects worried about regulation are mostly focused on European and North American regulations but the top 20 countries that have the biggest crypto users might not um be in those states where regulations are so tight so what if uh there is a demand for real use cases in more flexible jurisdictions how can we shift our attention to build for

people that really need what we're building also uh token engineering is a highly multidisiplinary space our data set highlight Ed varying degrees of identification with different roles within uh the field suggesting uh diverge range of responsibilities and expertise and implying that uh more than a token engineering role um we are talking about a token engineering team so this cryptoeconomic flower was mentioned a lot and it has been around for a long time and it was still quite representative of the expertises that we

heard from participants but I think there is a few more to add when we uh go deeper in the research and one of them was cybernetics that appeared a lot and it's not represented here and also communication how people really feel the need for communication to happen from like translating complexity topics to clients for clients to understand better how to talk to token engineers and uh just for education in general so um the multidisciplinarity hints to a role of token engineer because it was very difficult to Pink what is a token engineer can we even say

that this is a role um so some of the quotes around that is that if you take any engineering field the set of people actually exercising an engineer role tends to be small compared to what engineering represents and this next quote uh summarizes an interesting point that is analog verification isn't as common of a thing anymore sorry isn't a common of a thing yet in token engineering and that's actually where a lot of the problems still exist right many hacks that we've seen in the last year year and a half or defi type hacks were where where it's um

about exploiting incentives so what uh he's talking about here is basically what we're calling a system auditor that is a person that would have the liability about the system they are building so who is responsible for the design of a token system uh is this person an engineer and traditional engineering uh roles the engineer is the person who is liable for uh the process there creating so we've been exploring this finding of a a system auditor as someone that could um say that they did the to the Token engineering for the process and uh one

last finding I want to highlight is education so how difficult it is to build educational materials in such a fast moving space that is multidisciplinary that has so many areas of knowledge and expertise that are constantly changing because everything is changing so fast um with that comes a need for um standardization for Providence uh there's so many things that could contribute to education education being more profound in uh token engineering and I want to give a highlight to token engineering Academy that is here is there logo uh they

created the first Bachelor level course of token engineering that is available for free and um it's still not enough but it's so much work and it's such a herculan work and I want to give a shout out to Angela who has been providing a lot of this education for years for token Engineers so if you want to study token engineering uh please go to token engineering Academy and start your Bachelor level course and also feel inspired to start looking at other resources for tokat engineering education education of the space education of the people education primarily to look Beyond token as a

financial tool we need to have educational ground if we want to go beyond Defi and if we want to build um the societies that we dream of it's a fast moving field that is definitely on the front here of human knowledge and this highlights uh how it changes so much and how challenging that is and having an a library of knowledge what's the best resources for token engineering is there a library of models like standard models is there a library of documentation about what a math spec is and how to build one or how to write one for a mechanism that you're designing um this is just yeah some of the early early findings of of

our of our analysis and we still have a lot to share around challenges and needs practices areas of knowledge contradition some golden nuggets that came out of this research and open questions we want to engage a lot the community on discussing some of the points that came up because this is so important for the crypto space uh in general not only for the discipline of token engineering so if you scan this QR code uh you're going to see what are the opportunities to engage with us and um sign up for our report when it comes up and I wanted to finish by sharing this

that I mentioned in the beginning how um it feels like what we're seeing now in terms of a value being mapped is almost as if the rolled map still look like this which is toam world map from the year 150 where like what is even there of what we know of the world today maybe something like North Africa Europe um it's so unrecognizable so imagine the shift in human awareness once the real size of the world started

to be understood we'll have a completely different image of the future and the potential of our interactions once crypto economies start to put more value on our maps of meaning we'll start to have a bigger picture of what is to interact of what is beyond capitalism and how we can create regenerative space for us to live in thank you so much never