Token Engineering Workshop #3

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Our speakers tonight:
Jason Teutsch, CEO and Founder of TrueBit.io
Surya Bakshi, Research Assistant at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Philippe Honigman, Co-Founder of Tribute.coop

Intro:
Jason Teutsch, CEO and Founder of TrueBit
will give us insights on token engineering at TrueBit and beyond

Project deep-dives:
Project #1: https://www.truebit.io (Jason Teutsch, Surya Bakshi)
Project #2: https://www.tribute.global (Philippe Honigman)

Seats are limited to 40, we aim for attendees and presenters actively collaborating to learn and improve. No waiting list, please make sure that you register early on.
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#1 TrueBit
Decentralized applications hold promise for the future. They operate in a transparent, tamperproof, unstoppable manner. They leverage incentives and solve coordination problems on a global scale.
But there are obstacles in the way.
Decentralized computation is expensive and bound by the block gas limit, rendering many applications costly or infeasible. Anything beyond simple business logic has a hefty price tag attached.

Truebit solves this problem.
It does this by moving computation off-chain; and verifying its correctness via an interactive crypteconomic protocol.

Project overview: https://medium.com/truebit/truebit-the-marketplace-for-verifiable-computation-f51d1726798f
Initial token considerations: https://medium.com/truebit/a-token-based-roadmap-to-trustless-computation-2264e80e82bd
Whitepaper: https://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~teutsch/papers/truebit.pdf

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#2 Tribute
Tribute's purpose is to contribute to a generative economy in which organizations are incentivized to share more value than they capture. Tribute helps organizations build and strengthen their network of contributors. We enable them to design and manage a customized reward system based on economic incentives and transparency.

Contributive tokens
Tribute enables organizations to use a new form of incentives under the form of contributive tokens. Contributive tokens (CTs) are used to reward any kind of non-monetary contributions. They exist strictly within the confines of the firm, thus relying on the social, legal and market consensus between the organization and its community, rather than on the sole use of a trustless blockchain. Allocating CTs can be programmed in order to achieve specific goals, such as attracting an early crowd of supporters, retaining key contributors, or reinforcing the cooperation between peers on a project ("smart incentives").
Using Tribute, organizations can set up a reserve fund (RF) with coins that have a market value and are traded on public exchanges (e.g. ETH). The RF is used to provide liquidity to the CTs. Liquidity is totally under the control of each organization, which decides of its monetary policy regarding CTs and of its business policy with respect to the RF. Those policies are public, the RF being managed through a smart contract on a public blockchain. Each token holder can make the arbitrage of holding vs. redeeming her CTs against her share of the RF.

Governance
We intend to build Tribute as a commons. Its business model is aligned with the interest of its users: the platform's fees are paid under the form of each organization's CTs, as a fixed percentage of the quantity of CTs actually granted to contributors. As a result, Tribute is inclusive towards any kind of organization, regardless of the level of liquidity they can actually offer to their contributors. Member organizations receive a governance token that gives them a voice in decisions affecting the network and how profits are being used. Those decisions are made via a multi-stakeholder governance system anchored in a legal personality.

Workshop challenges:

• CT+RF vs. direct payment in crypto // collecting feedback on the dual mode
• RF in any tradeable coin vs. a platform coin (OST model)
• CT issuance vs. pre-issuance - predictability/volatility issues
• Use of an index token for the Tribute fund