co-authored by Gautam Dhameja, Tom Debus and Günsu Pancar.

direct or indirect intellectual input by Trent McConaghy, Tim Daubenschütz, Don Gossen, Jernej Pregelj, Rhys Lindmark, Jake Vartanian, Luke Duncan, Mike Goldin and Simon de la Rouviere.

An image to attract the attention of the reader.

Humans have the tendency of being egocentric. Personal gains are more tempting than doing something for the common good. It’s our will to survive and thrive and it’s easy to forget that collaboration probably leads to more sustainable solutions. But not all is lost… I hope…

One approach could be to give someone a reward when they accomplish some objectives. Self-interest is fed by the reward and steers the human to do something that’s useful for “the system”. Let’s now think of “the system” as the common goods, public interest and global governance. Worth a try…

Looking at game theories I stumbled upon token-curated lists. And they look pretty neat to me. Here is my take on it: steer token holders to curate items that should or should not belong to a list. If your opinion reconciles with the majority, you win more token. So, one is encouraged to predict what others think about that specific item. Here’s the catch: “predict what others think”.

Now, governance of the common goods is a bit more complicated than a single list of curated items. People and governed objects have various states, funnels, interconnections, dependencies and so on. Here we explore token-curated lists as building blocks for more complex curated automata.

Curated Governance

Belgium. A small country with 6 governments, 2 kings & queens, 3 communities, 3 regions, 9 provinces, 3 official languages, coalitions, oppositions and what not? In the meanwhile it holds the record for 540 days without a government. As a Belgian, it kinda felt as if nothing really changed and daily life went on as always…

Governance by tribes takes over in self-organizing communities (district0x, Aragon, nativetoken). Like-minded people signal ideas, opinions and influence. It’s necessary to build anti-fragile networks that flourish whilst remaining sustainable. See how tribes and subcultures form around common interest and reputation in social networks, knowledge platforms, open-source, art, and so on. Tribes exchange ideas and curate information they care about. Curation processes sift out the relevant information such that we know what’s hot or not and detect scams and time-sucks.

Give expert communities a carrot and a stick and they become self-sustaining. Reputation (reddit, StackOverflow, HackerNews, comics, music, peer-reviewed publications, …) or financial gains (crypto-economics, prediction markets, freelancing, …) pushes community members to process information within their expertise domain (curation, modeling, review, ….). Curators and curated topics have an incentive to form an integral connection with the community.

Token-curated lists (Mike Goldin et al.) and curation markets (Simon de la Rouviere et al.) show potential for incentivized community-driven governance. Items on these lists are vetted by the curators and may yield benefits such as attention, visibility, extended permissions and so on. We’ll cover an extended version that models multiple curated lists and dependencies between them. Much like a finite state machine or automaton.

However alienating the above concepts might sound, they are actually native to our current societies. One can think of how people get elected or achieve status, how bills pass through parliament, gaining gradual benefits when climbing up a ladder (credit scoring, KYC tiers, researcher’s status, …).

Screenshot of a knowledge graph from Sid Meier’s Civilization III

Knowledge graphs such as in Sid Meier’s Civilization and Starships and Tokens illustrate the point of tokenized governance. Here, one needs to evolve their civilization by allocating budget on specific research items. For example: once a civilization learned the alphabet, it could move on in learning how to write. Writing combined with pottery allows one to gain the knowledge of map making and so on. In a democracy, the allocation of budget requires consensus and misuse leads to revolts and looting parties. A related interesting read is Trent McConaghy’s blogpost on Starships and Tokens.

Token-Curated Registries

The principles of token-curated registries (TCRs) are simple: a group of like-minded souls curate a list of items using a propose-challenge mechanism. One can propose an item to go on the list and supports the proposal using bonded stake with a token that is native to the system.

Sketch of Token-curated Registries [image credits: Tim Daubenschütz, Don Gossen]

Each proposal can be challenged or not. During a challenge, stake is matched and a voting round starts. The winning party feasts from the looted stake and the losing party is slashed. When a proposal loses it is removed from the list.

This mechanism incentivizes curators to participate in the list, as each proposal for change could lead to a token reward. A useful strategy is to comply with the majority of the community by estimating or predicting the outcome of a challenge. Interestingly, individuals are rewarded by predicting community goals…

Labels & Rules

When dealing with multiple “tribes” of experts or distinct verticals, it might make sense to spin up multiple TCRs or allow to filter by labels and signals. Curation groups might then focus on different governance objects, hence separating signal from the noise.

A Labeled TCR. A Proposal might appear on multiple times on the list under different labels.

One example for Labeled TCRs can be the categorization of music by genres. Projects such as MusicMap and Spotify’s algorithmic map allow for a visual interconnected exploration of music. Currently there are only one or a few curators (the website owners) that use their expert knowledge to map songs onto genres and find connections between genres. If one can incentivize a community, subculture or other stake holders to map our music history in return for reputation, attention or token, this could lead to a drastically new approach to music discovery by curation.