Token Engineering Commons — Public Archive
This site is the public, curated archive of the Token Engineering Commons (TEC), an open experiment in commons development and onchain coordination that ran from 2019 to 2025.
TEC operated as a research commons, a grant-making DAO, a governance laboratory, and a site of sustained economic experimentation. This archive preserves the record of what was attempted, what emerged, what failed, what endured, and what was learned, so future builders, researchers, and critics can study the experiment on its own terms.
The Token Engineering Commons is retired.
Start here
- Archival Intent — why this archive exists and the principles behind it
- Overview — what the TEC was, in brief
- History — how the TEC began, and the two-phase Hatch
- Timeline — the full lifecycle, 2020–2025
- Sources — the platforms this record is drawn from
Browse the archive
- Overview — mission, vision, values, and how the token system worked
- Governance — decision-making and mechanisms, the rules and processes, the working groups, and the source documents
- Economics and Token Design — the Hatch, the Augmented Bonding Curve, rewards, and treasury
- Research — token engineering research, ethics, and education initiatives
- Code and Technical Artifacts — the smart contracts, apps, and tooling repositories
- Perspectives — first-person reflections from people who were part of the TEC
Key concepts
Deep dives on the mechanisms that defined the TEC:
- Ostrom and the Cultural Build — building on Elinor Ostrom’s commons principles
- The Hatch — the two-phase community launch
- Augmented Bonding Curve — the continuous-funding economic engine
- Praise — the culture of gratitude that became Impact Hours
About this archive
- Archival Intent
- Archival Policy
- Archive Publication Checklist
- For Researchers — how to use the data repository (datasets, schemas, downloads)
What this archive is
A browseable knowledge base with notes, timelines, and indices are stitched together with references to the public source systems (Discord, Discourse, YouTube, onchain) and summaries of TEC’s governance, economic, and technical evolution.
What this archive is not
A raw, complete dump of every message ever sent. Privacy and consent matter, so direct messages, private channels, and personal data are excluded, and personal names in internal working records are redacted. See the Archival Policy for details.