Overview — What the TEC Was
The Token Engineering Commons (TEC) was founded in 2019 as an open experiment in commons development and onchain coordination. Its question was whether a globally distributed community could advance the emerging discipline of token engineering through shared research, funding, governance, and practice.
Over its life, TEC functioned as:
- a research commons for token engineering,
- a grant-making DAO that funded public goods in the field,
- a governance laboratory that tested mechanisms like Conviction Voting and an Augmented Bonding Curve, and
- a community and culture held together by contribution-recognition systems such as Praise and Impact Hours.
Explore the archive
A guided reading order through the record, from what the TEC believed, to how it launched, governed itself, funded work, and what it built:
- History — how the TEC began, launched, operated, and wound down
- Mission, Vision & Values — the vision, values, and mission the TEC set for itself
- Timeline — the full lifecycle, 2020–2025
- Economics & Token Design — the economic system, end to end, and why it was designed that way
- The Hatch — the two-phase community launch that raised capital and formed the community at once
- Augmented Bonding Curve — the continuous-funding economic engine
- Ostrom and the Cultural Build — building on Elinor Ostrom’s commons principles
- Code & Technical Artifacts — the smart contracts, apps, and tooling
- Tokens of the TEC — the several tokens of the TEC and the role each played
- OP Migration — why the TEC moved from Gnosis Chain to Optimism, and how
- Grant Program — how the TEC funded token-engineering public goods, and what it funded
- Research — token-engineering research, ethics, and education initiatives
- Dissolution of the TEC — how and why the TEC deliberately wound itself down
Governance, the working groups, and the Praise culture now live in the Governance section.