 How's it going, guys? Kanichiwa, it's really nice to be here in Japan. Thank you for coming. I'm going to talk about aligning incentives around funding open source. I have been committed, by the way, my name is Griff Green, and I've been committed to the Ethereum Commons for about three years. I focus almost all of my efforts on contributing to the shared resources of this economy. And it's really fun. But it's also really difficult. It's really hard to find sustainable funding for open source projects in general. And that's why I'm kind of putting all these projects on hold. I got too much on my plate. And I'm really trying to put it on pause so I can focus on the common stack. Because the mission behind the common stack, I think, can help all of us on our open source endeavors. The goal is to bring continuous funding to open source projects. We want to build a foundation of tooling and documentation so that everyone can build decentralized alternatives to solve their own unique situations. Because open source is actually the same as nonprofits. They have the same issues. It's a tragedy of the comments. Everyone is working really hard to find a reason for people to give them money so they can produce value. And it's almost impossible because there's no incentives for people to give you money. And it's sad, right? Like you have to beg for grants, find donors who are acting against their own best interests to fund the common good. Contributors are overworked and underpaid. And in the end, if you actually want to create a business model, you usually have to sacrifice your ideals and sell out. Create some piece of closed source software that you can sell to an individual or provide a service for someone. And this is the same situation that happens in the nonprofit space because, well, open source is a nonprofit. And what's interesting is what is the difference between a nonprofit and a for-profit anyway? A large nonprofit has employees. It has assets. It has an organizational structure. It has a bunch of people who are committed to working together to produce value for everyone. And that's where it's a little bit different. Nonprofits are producing value for shared resources. They're producing value for a community. Whereas for-profits can find a way to satisfy an individual's want or need. And this is a problem with our current economic models. The default economic model, as it stands today, only values people who satisfy individual wants and needs. And that means that if you are providing something for the common good or just writing open source code that anyone can fork in a permission this way, you suffer from free rider problems. People can get the value without contributing. And that sucks. And what's even worse, though, is that for-profits have an incentive to exploit the externalities of our economic models. As in, for-profits have a huge incentive to take your code and run with it and make a bunch of money and not even contribute upstream changes. They don't even add any value to the underlying good. They just keep it closed source. And this is also present. It's really easy to see in the for-profit space, where it's like, if you have a factory on a river, everyone wants the river to be clean. Even the people that own the factory, they want a clean river. No one wants a polluted river. But the factory has to look at their spreadsheet. And their spreadsheet says that if they pay money to get rid of their pollution ethically, they'll, it'll hurt their bottom line. So they actually have a fiduciary duty to pollute that river. And that's just fucking douchey. Oh, sorry. I meant to not drop the F-bomb. Oh, well. Well, and this is the case with everything. Whether it's a community well or a water bottling facility, if you're developing Linux or you're working for Apple, if you're providing a common good, you are going to probably be exploited by a for-profit company if it can work for their business model. And blockchains have actually solved this. And I know Ellen Rossum would kind of roll her eyes at me because the tragedy of the commons isn't that big of a deal. There's ways to get around it without blockchains. But man, the incentive alignment of blockchain technology helps a lot. And if you look at Bitcoin just right, you can actually see it's providing a common good for all of humanity. Almost all blockchains are. They've created their own economy to incentivize contributions to the public good. In Bitcoin, it's a global payment system. In Curecoin, the proof of work is folding proteins for cancer research. There's ways that we can start using the incentive models that blockchain technology provides, basically creating microeconomies that can incentivize properly, providing value through shared resources. And that's what we're trying to do with the common stack. We're trying to create a continuous funding stream for open source. And we can use blockchain incentive alignment tools to actually incentivize contributions to physical world open source applications. We're calling this the cyber physical commons because it's bridging that gap between the blockchain space and actual real world applications. Now it's a little complicated. I'm not going to lie. We have a lot of work to do. And let me make sure I'm in that black box. OK, we have a lot of work to do. And it's not really that easy to just slap a bonding curve on a Dow and then say, hey, we're done. We actually need to do a lot of simulation work because these are complex systems. They're complex pieces of infrastructure that need to be well-designed. Think of building a bridge. If you build a bridge, you need to do a lot of math up front. You need to simulate that bridge. You need to take all the best practices and learnings that have come to you and actually formalize the designs in math, simulate, and then implement feedback into the simulations when your implementation details change, and then build the bridge. You can't just build the bridge and then make a pull request and expect everything's going to work out. And that's how we often fall into designing and working with blockchain systems. We write a white paper and we just go for it. And that works when you're building websites and things that you can just make a pull request for, but it doesn't work for public infrastructure. And so we're really excited about using CAD-CAD to design our system and use the open source nature of CAD-CAD's simulation tool so that everyone can take our designs, tweak them, and see if they'll work for their application. I wish I had more time to talk about CAD-CAD. It's a really powerful tool. If you have any desires to simulate your systems and actually allow other people to use your simulations and design their own systems, CAD-CAD is the answer. So check out Block Science and all their work there. But what we're using it for is to build a four layer system that will solve the continuous funding issues that open source projects often have. And I'm a little behind, so I need to just speed through this. But in the end, we're taking these different tools and we're going to take one at a time and implement and design them. But we want to build the community around having lots of different options on the shelf because there's not one size fits all governance solution. There's between conviction voting, which is designed specifically for a proposal framework, or quadratic voting, or future hockey. Depending on your system, you may want to use one thing or another. So the Comments Act hopes to modularize all these different components so you can kind of plug and play. We are really loving what's going on with Molek and MetaCartel. They're trying to address the same problems that we are. They want to solve the issues of funding for open source development in the theorem space. The problem is that they're not sustainable. They still suffer from the same incentive alignment issue. They require donors to be self-sacrificing and lose money to support the common good. But they're headed in the right direction, especially culturally. I have to give it to Amin and Peter and the other Molek Dal leaders. They have really nailed the way that you bring a community together. There's a lot of us, we're building revolutionary tech. We don't know the right way to do it. We really have to reinvent some things for blockchain tech. But we probably don't need to reinvent the wheel for how we organize ourselves. This is a quote that I used to hear back in the Chemical Engineering days. A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple hours in the library. And that's pretty much how we organize ourselves in the blockchain space. And we can do better. There's so many opportunities to learn from other people's research. And outside our organizations or outside our normal community, just a few things that you guys can look up. And then, of course, inside our community, we really need to also especially look at the fails, the failures, the Dow, the Argonne Co-op, and other ways that these communities have collapsed on themselves. The Common Stack is excited to kind of lead the community around putting all of this information in one place, creating an open source wiki of how to Dow, and really nail down the cultural needs of these communities. There's a lot of issues that need to be addressed and need to be explicitly told to community leaders. But I'm going to focus on one that I think is sadly not really on the forefront of our minds called the Trusted Seed. Every decentralized network that has succeeded has actually started with a Trusted Seed. And that may be surprising because you think, oh, it's a decentralized network. Well, these decentralized economies will not work without the people who are starting them caring more about the value that the network is producing than short-term profits. If all they care about is making money, they'll just dump their coin, obviously. If Satoshi wasn't a benevolent Trusted Whale, Bitcoin would have failed in 2011. He would have cashed out, made $1 million, and it would have been done. We wouldn't be here today. The Ethereum Foundation, same thing. We know they have a mandate to actually provide value to the Ethereum community. And the countless failed shitcoins, they're the exact opposite. They don't care about the underlying value of the community. That's why you don't buy them. Because you can see they're just trying to make money. And so if they don't care about the value the network is producing, their economy isn't going to thrive. But the Trusted Seed doesn't have to last forever. Once you get to the point, like if Satoshi sold all his Bitcoins now, it would go on. Yeah, the price of a tank or whatever. But they have a clear direction. Bitcoin is a store of value. A few years ago, they didn't really have a well-defined mission in scope. There were some people that said it was a medium of exchange. Some people that said it was a store of value. And when it came down to it, they had to fork, because that wasn't clearly defined for the community. And that's a huge problem. But if Satoshi was around, he would have just said one and everyone would have went with it. And so for the Trusted Seed to exit and for the community to continue on, you just have to define these certain things. I don't have enough time to really dive into it, because I do want some questions. But that's the cultural side. If we want to do this, there's also the technical side. And we're a hair at DevCon. That's probably what people want to hear about the cool incentive alignment tools that we have at our disposal today. So you have to remember, incentive alignment doesn't solve the tragedy of the commons. It doesn't fix anything. That's an interface for people to connect to your network with and to not burn out. There's also the work layer. This is where people actually do work. In Bitcoin, it's the proof of work. They're actually sharing their computing power. In the common stack, because we're doing real-world applications, it's more about proposals and escros and accountability, so that you know the work is going to get done. And then, of course, there's the decision layer, the governance layer, where you have to actually decide which proposals are we going to choose. And the monitoring layer, which is where you actually can understand the health of the system, where people can be informed about what's going on. Is this thing working? Do we need to change something? We need constant monitoring for these commons to work. But I'm going to focus on the incentive layer. That's the whole point of this talk. I see four main solutions for incentivizing the commons within the blockchain space. The one that most people can think of is initial allocation, the pre-mine, the founder's reward. This is actually, it's a great solution. It works as long as you add vesting or some kind of long-term, sustainable incentivization. If you just give them tokens at the beginning, you'll see huge problems. Because they'll be in the same situation where they don't have this constant incentive and constant reward for doing good. They'll burn out. It's like, hey, I got all this money. Why am I not enjoying myself in Hawaii or something? Inflation is the first one. That's the one Bitcoin uses and the one most blockchains use, including Ethereum. And it's solid, but it doesn't have that initial seed fund. If you do what they call a fair release of a blockchain, Ethereum really nailed it. They had a seed funding round. And then they had continuous funding through inflation. And that's what we want to do with token bonding curves. It can provide that same kind of scenario. But before I get there, let's talk about Harvard attacks. Harvard attacks is a really interesting solution for incentivizing the commons. How many people have actually heard of this? You want to get a hand raise? OK, so not many people. Let me just say that for the cameras. Harvard attacks is pretty interesting. Instead of owning something and hodling, you actually, if you want to buy this artwork as always on sale, which was the first implementation of this on Ethereum, you have to buy it from someone else who set the price. And then you set the price yourself. Whatever price you set, you're going to pay a constant tax. Every block, a small amount of whatever the deposit is, ether or die, will end up being allocated to the underlying commons. For this artwork, it's always on sale. It just goes to Simon, who's the artist that created it. But he now has a constant stream of funding that can incentivize him to create more art. And Deather is implementing it so that you can actually be the person who sells the crypto in a certain area. And then if someone else comes in and buys it from you, then they're the main producer or the main person to go to to buy and sell crypto with. And Wild Cards is doing it in the way that we're really excited about where they're funding support for endangered species by little tradeable collector cards. So you buy a collector card. Maybe it's a gorilla named Vitalik. And then you set the price. And you have a constant stream of funds going to support saving the gorillas. I really wish I had more time. But Harberger Tax is an amazing tool. I can't give it justice in the one minute I had to do. So go check it out. There's a lot of research on it that it's very promising. But what most people are working on in this space are token bonding curves. It's a little bit more developed. There's lots of actual implementations, the biggest one being Bancor. That's what a lot of these groups use. Although a few people are starting to roll their own token bonding curves. And to really describe what a token bonding curve is, I'll use the one that we're actually building, which we're calling the augmented bonding curve. So a bonding curve at its core is just a smart contract. And you could think of it as representing ownership in the community. And if it's just a pure bonding curve, you can buy the tokens whenever you want from the smart contract and they will be created. And when you wanna sell the tokens, they'll be destroyed. And the price of that token is determined by the amount of collateral in the pool. This usually correlates to the actual supply of the token, but it doesn't have to. So when you are buying or selling into this curve, the price is determined by how much collateral is in the pool. And this allows you to start this economy for micro-economies. There's this huge issue that token bonding curve solves, which is liquidity within small market cap points. If you wanna create a token system for your community, you need, and you don't use a token bonding curve, you actually have to sell it on the open market. You have to find someone to buy your token. And there's not always a buyer. And if there's not a buyer, the token's worth nothing. And so if it's a small market thing, if you're trying to incentivize a small open source project, you're probably not gonna have very many buyers and sellers and are gonna have a liquid market. But with the token bonding curve, you can have, it's a one-sided market. The smart contract will always buy and will always sell tokens. And it can really scale with the supply and demand of the market. What we do in the augmented bonding curve is we take this pure bonding curve and we add another, we basically add a dow to it. And we implement almost like taxation into this economy. So you are opting in to supporting the common good. And you have this little micro economy that really cares about providing this open source software. We're actually gonna use it first to incentivize token engineering research and unite the community around developing more tools like this. Next year, I hope that I don't have to just talk about augmented bonding curves and a hardware tax. I wanna see five, 10 other ideas that can come out. And we just need these token engineers to be able to avoid having to sell out and do client work and start doing the research that they really want to investigate and dive into their ideas and prove them out. So what we're going to do is we're gonna build the trusted seed. We're gonna find people who care about adding value to the token engineering community. And we're gonna get them together and we're gonna have them effectively crowdfund themselves to do their own research. What they'll do is they will send their funds into a token bonding curve. And if you need to know, if you know anything about token bonding curves, you know you wanna be the first person to buy into a token bonding curve because the price is super cheap. And to mitigate that, we do two things. First, we make everyone bulk buy so they all get the same price. And then we also take a huge cut of that bulk buy and we send it into a DAO. You can imagine it like a Moloch DAO where it's a decentralized grant funding organization. In that way, they know that they're donating. The people who are buying into this token bonding curve and buying into this commons, they need to be altruistic. Because if they're not altruistic, you'll have a prisoner's dilemma issue and they'll start to escape. But if you know that they care more about the value of the token engineering community themselves, then it will actually thrive. And they'll have these tokens that will allow them to decide how to support each other and which grants to give. So anyone who has the token will actually decide which grants to give. And if they do a good job at making those decisions, other people will want to participate. And they can actually build an economy around supporting token engineering. Because if you're the Ethereum Foundation, for instance, you have two choices now. You could either send money to the token engineer that you want to support directly and lose 100% of your value, be completely altruistic and self-sacrificing. Or you could actually buy tokens in the token engineering commons, use those tokens to allocate funding to that same organization and receive a financial asset in return. You may lose money, I mean, you're set to lose money, but you may also make money. And oh, the collateral pool, this hatch tribute, as we call it, the tax at the beginning for the trusted seed, that's the seed funding realm. But as people sell the token, it will actually, there'll be a tax there too. We call it the exit tribute in Homage to Moloch, who's really done great work with their tributes. So when you sell the token, 10% is going to that funding pool. So anytime someone leaves the economy, they're supporting the common good. And that's the whole point of token engineering. It's to align incentives so that when you're supporting the economy, you are rewarded. And when you are taking from the economy, you are disincentivized. But in a way, you are always supporting the economy. So we have an amazing team. We're very lucky. It's basically a give-it-plus-block science endeavor. And we have incredible advisors, including Simon Daily Rivier, who is one of my favorite token engineers of all time. And Jordy is in the crowd right there. Thank you, Jordy, for coming. We also have a good legal team because this stuff is sketched and we don't want to make any wrong moves. But we're looking to build the Trusted Seed. We want to build a Trusted Seed for all of the commons that we're producing. And we need people who are altruistic that actually care about funding open source projects. And basically I'm looking at you guys, okay? If you care about funding open source, please go to our website commonstack.org and click apply and let us see, we're going to filter people because the Trusted Seed is very important. And we're going to find token engineers and people that we can trust that really care about funding open source projects. We're going to get them all together and we're going to start this thing. Join us on Telegram to learn more. We're actually kicking it off on November 5th. Remember, remember, the 5th of November it's happening. The common stack is going to start this Trusted Seed. So become a member of the common stack and we'll talk more on Telegram. Thank you guys. Thank you.