Lessons from Round 1 of the Token Engineering Grants Program — Token Engineering = Public Good Since its launch in January 2021, the Token Engineering Commons (TEC) has granted $460,000 to token engineering projects. Token engineering is an emerging discipline for building the safer and more resilient blockchain systems that will foster public trust and adoption of Web3 technologies. As such, it is a powerful new…

Joining a DAO is Agreeing to the Way It Works — To understand how people join a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (a DAO), there’s no better place to start than with the idea of “permissionlessness.” Good definitions can act as keys for unlocking understanding, and I like this one for permissionlessness: A technosocial system is deemed permissionless if it is possible to…

Tackling civilization’s great challenges will require a new breed of organization. Token engineering is how we get there. — A Failure of Organizational Imagination Governments, corporations, and non-profit organizations just can’t seem to crack society’s biggest challenges. It’s true that these entities have done much good in the world, but they also have serious structural flaws. Governments can be unresponsive and vulnerable to special interests. Nonprofits struggle to make meaningful impact because their philanthropic…

Why onboarding people into a DAO is so hard — Onboarding community members into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) isn’t like hiring people at a traditional company. One of the main reasons this is so is that DAOs are “permissionless.” Much the way you don’t need permission to send transactions on a public blockchain, you also generally don’t need permission…

Everybody has bias when thinking about the future. For me, it’s an odd combination of catastrophizing and idealizing it. I see worrying trends and tend to extrapolate, but I also see the good in things and believe it will win out in the long-run. We may be headed for rough…

I’m starting a new job, not just in a different organization or even in a new industry. I’m moving into a whole new economy — on the blockchain. “Web3” decentralizes and transforms the web. If the first version of the web was for exchanging information, and the second interactions, then…

Over the next few years, the way we relate to businesses and other organizations is going to change quite radically. The unlikely catalyst for this change? Chatbots. This technology represents a significant innovation that will change the way we connect with institutions and, I believe, even shift the way we…

Lots of revolutions start off with shaky first steps that obscure the enormity of the changes they’re setting in motion. Messaging chatbots are the initial, shaky steps of a revolution in the way we relate to organizations through their products and services. Messaging Chatbots, as New Communications Medium Chatbot technology is going to have a huge…

Many of us have a second job. We steal time from our family, from our employer and from our hobbies in order to work on it. It doesn’t pay anything, in spite of the tremendous amounts of creativity and time we invest in it. Somehow, we convince ourselves it’s worth…