The Token Engineering Commons began as a collaboration between two existing communities: the Commons Stack Association and the Token Engineering Academy.
The mission at CommonsStack is to build commons-based microeconomies that sustain public goods through incentive alignment, continuous funding, and community governance. Their library of open-source, interoperable web3 components allow communities to raise and allocate shared funds, make transparent decisions, and monitor the development and production of public goods.
With these tools and methodologies, members of the token engineering community decided to launch the Token Engineering Commons project in collaboration with the Commons Stack Association -- with the goal of advancing the field of Token Engineering as an emerging field of science. The TEC began preliminary meetings in late 2019, and the development of a roadmap began to take shape.
The underlying goal of the TEC was to develop a well modeled crypto-economic system that could produce a continuous funding mechanism for the production of new technical primitives, education initiatives, and token engineering research that would enable this nascent field of science to develop alongside the rapid growth of Web3.
There are two key components of the Commons Stack open-source library that is being used by the Token Engineering Commons:
1.) an open-source ecosystem of token engineering tools & methodologies, which include the Augmented Bonding Curve (commons economic-engine), the Conviction Voting Module, and the Tao Voting module.
2.) a cultural initialization system that provides a framework for the design of these tools and a system of governance that manages its production. This is also known as the Cultural Build.
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The technical components of the Token Engineering Commons were designed to fund projects that discover, develop, and proliferate the best practices for engineering safe tokenized economies. However, the effective use of these components rely heavily upon the community managing it, and so the development of the Cultural Build was a necessary component that needed implementation.
The early members of the TEC acknowledged that the cultural development of a community around these tools would be a necessary antecedent to the projects overall success. As the community began to grow, different work streams began to emerge through working groups.
Each working group provided a necessary function for the TEC to find talent, seek funding, and develop the necessary infrastructure for DAO development. As the cultural and technical development of the TEC progressed, the community grew rapidly accounting for over 200 active contributors.
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In 2021, the TEC decided to initiate the implementation of the technical components of the TEC through what is known as the Hatch Process.
The Hatch Process is a two-phase system that allows for individuals to submit their own parameters for each set of smart-contracts that make up the technical components of the TEC economic and governance system. This is what we call collaborative economics.
The Hatch DAO was the initialization environment developed for funding the Token Engineering Commons. We can look at the Hatch DAO as being a starting template for the commons that existed for the purpose of receiving the initial funding for the TEC and upgrading the DAO with new features.
The Hatch DAO consisted of a Dandelion voting module, a vault, and a governance token. Before the Hatch DAO was initialized, the TEC community went through the process of educating each other on the parameters associated with the development of the DAOs core infrastructure.
Individuals were then able to submit their own parameters through the HatchDAO Configuration Dashboard. Each parameter set was a proposal that existed within a github repository that contained each parameter and justifications for their design choice. Members could review and even fork their favorite proposals!
After submissions were made, the community hosted param debates where each parameter was evaluated for their benefits, trade-offs, and risks. The use of TokenLog allowed each proposal to be voted on by community members. The top 5 proposals were then chosen to enter into a run-off, where proposal #83 was declared the winner. This parameter set then became the encoded rules within the HatchDAO.