Launching a Token Engineering Grants Program

Using Small Grants to Create More Dynamic Funding in the Field of Token Engineering

The Token Engineering Commons (TEC) is a DAO founded to advance the new multidisciplinary field of token engineering. This new field brings engineering rigor to the design, verification, and optimization of complex crypto-economic systems.

The use of token engineering practices would have identified the weaknesses in UST/Luna before its collapse and prevented the subsequent losses suffered by so many ordinary people who believed in its design.

Last year, the TEC distributed some $240,000 USD in public goods funding to advance the field of token engineering. Most of these grants ranged in size from $20-50K. We are now interested in developing a small grants program to support promising new initiatives earlier on in their development cycle to help inject more dynamism into the token engineering ecosystem.

Our plan is to launch the program in late March. This ENS small grant would fund the planning and design of this new program. We are in conversation with Gitcoin about using their Allo Protocol to also provide a quadratic funding matching component to the program. Our goal is to run a very small initial round and then do a first full small grant round of $10-15K USD within one to two months.

We are excited to partner with ENS to extend small grants public goods funding into the critical field of token engineering. We believe this grant will have a disproportionately large impact and serve as a great use of ENS funds. We look forward to learning from each other in running small grants programs and strengthening the relationship between ENS and the TEC.