Foundations of Cryptoeconomic Systems

Kajetan Olas

28 Feb 2024
Foundations of Cryptoeconomic Systems

The significance of cryptoeconomic systems extends beyond the mere functioning of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. These systems underpin the entire blockchain technology, enabling not just financial transactions but also the creation and execution of smart contracts, the development of decentralized applications (DApps), and the realization of complex governance models. By ensuring the integrity, security, and continuity of decentralized networks, cryptoeconomics not only challenges traditional financial systems but also paves the way for a new era of digital economy.

Understanding Cryptoeconomic Systems

What Are Cryptoeconomic Systems?

Cryptoeconomic systems blend cryptographic security with economic incentives to sustain decentralized networks. These systems enable secure, decentralized transactions and operations without central oversight. They achieve this by leveraging cryptography for security and economic principles to align participant incentives.

The Intersection of Cryptography and Economics

  • Cryptography in cryptoeconomic systems secures transactions and data. It involves digital signatures for identity verification and hash functions for ledger integrity, ensuring that transactions are both authentic and immutable. This security mechanism is vital for preventing fraud and maintaining trust among participants in a decentralized environment.
  • Economic incentives play a crucial role in motivating participants to maintain and secure the network. Tokens or cryptocurrencies are awarded for validating transactions or contributing resources, aligning participant actions with the network's health. This incentive structure is designed to encourage honest participation, securing the network against attacks and ensuring its longevity.

Together, cryptography and economic incentives create a self-sustaining system where security and participant cooperation are intrinsic. This synergy not only eliminates the need for central intermediaries but also introduces a more resilient and transparent way of conducting transactions.

Complexity of Cryptoeconomic Systems

There are however challenges in designing and managing decentralized systems. While these systems are engineered to incentivize positive contributions, their complexity can lead to unpredictable outcomes. Such property is called emergence.

Navigating Complexity

To mitigate the risks associated with complexity and emergence, developers and participants in blockchain systems must employ rigorous testing, continuous monitoring, and adaptive governance mechanisms. This includes:

The Design Principles of Cryptoeconomic Systems

Cryptoeconomic systems are distinguished by their reliance on principles that combine cryptographic security with economic incentives, directing the behavior of decentralized networks. This section examines the role of reversed game theory and decentralization, with a focus on how emergence and feedback mechanisms influence the design and functionality of these systems.

Reversed Game Theory in Cryptoeconomic Systems

Reversed game theory is pivotal in constructing cryptoeconomic systems, emphasizing the creation of mechanisms that guide participant behavior towards desired network outcomes. This approach contrasts with traditional game theory by prioritizing the design of rules and incentives to induce cooperative and honest behaviors, rather than merely predicting outcomes based on existing strategies.

Consensus algorithms like Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) are practical applications of reversed game theory. They align individual incentives with the collective goal of network security. There are many more consensus protocols, with different trade-offs, so when designing a blockchain its good to examine pros and cons of each one.

Emergence and Feedback Loops

The complex interactions within cryptoeconomic systems can lead to emergent behavior, where collective outcomes arise that are not directly predictable from individual actions.
Well-designed Feedback loops are critical in this context, as they allow the system to adjust to emergent behaviors, enhancing resilience.
For instance, automatic difficulty adjustments in mining algorithms respond to changes in network participation. This maintains consistent block creation times despite fluctuating levels of computational power

Testing

While designing a cryptoeconomic system, creators make a set of assumptions on how rational participants will act in different situations. Based on these assumptions, they identify possible risks, and implement safeguard mechanisms. Even though this fosters network’s resilience, it’s often not enough. Reason is that developers can foresee only a certain number of interactions, and emergent behaviors may still disrupt the system. Luckily there are more reliable testing options. Studies have shown that probabilistic methods can be used with good success to detect unexpected risks. 

Decentralization: Trade-offs and Benefits

Decentralization distributes network control across multiple participants, reducing reliance on central authorities and increasing system robustness. This principle significantly influences the design and operation of blockchain systems. It introduces many structural benefits and challenges, coming from the lack of central power.

Benefits:

Trade-offs:

Design of cryptoeconomic systems is deeply influenced by game theory and the principles of decentralization, with special consideration given to the roles of emergence. These elements collectively ensure that systems are secure, transparent, and adaptable, capable of responding to unexpected behaviors and evolving network requirements. Addressing the inherent trade-offs in these designs is crucial for the continued development and success.

Conclusion

The exploration of cryptoeconomic systems reveals a fascinating intersection between cryptography, and economy, creating a framework for decentralized networks. Consensus protocols are result of interedisciplinary research, and they allow cryptoeconomic systems to achieve their core functionality. This functionality is to store and process transactions in secure, and censorship-resistant fashion. They also enable the development of custom decentralized applications. Cryptoeconomic systems come with both benefits and challenges, so it's best to tailor technology that's used to individual's needs.

If you're looking to design or test a blockchain-based system, please reach out to contact@nextrope.com. Our team is ready to help you create a system that aligns with your project's long-term growth and market resilience.

FAQ

In simple words - what are cryptoeconomic systems?

  • They are protocols combining cryptography and economic incentives to secure decentralized networks.

Are there challenges associated with the complexity of these systems?

  • Yes, complexity necessitates testing and adaptive governance for stability.

What future developments can be expected in the field?

  • Currently, research focuses on improving scalability, without the loss of decentralization.

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Aethir Tokenomics – Case Study

Kajetan Olas

22 Nov 2024
Aethir Tokenomics – Case Study

Authors of the contents are not affiliated to the reviewed project in any way and none of the information presented should be taken as financial advice.

In this article we analyze tokenomics of Aethir - a project providing on-demand cloud compute resources for the AI, Gaming, and virtualized compute sectors.
Aethir aims to aggregate enterprise-grade GPUs from multiple providers into a DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network). Its competitive edge comes from utlizing the GPUs for very specific use-cases, such as low-latency rendering for online games.
Due to decentralized nature of its infrastructure Aethir can meet the demands of online-gaming in any region. This is especially important for some gamer-abundant regions in Asia with underdeveloped cloud infrastructure that causes high latency ("lags").
We will analyze Aethir's tokenomics, give our opinion on what was done well, and provide specific recommendations on how to improve it.

Evaluation Summary

Aethir Tokenomics Structure

The total supply of ATH tokens is capped at 42 billion ATH. This fixed cap provides a predictable supply environment, and the complete emissions schedule is listed here. As of November 2024 there are approximately 5.2 Billion ATH in circulation. In a year from now (November 2025), the circulating supply will almost triple, and will amount to approximately 15 Billion ATH. By November 2028, today's circulating supply will be diluted by around 86%.

From an investor standpoint the rational decision would be to stake their tokens and hope for rewards that will balance the inflation. Currently the estimated APR for 3-year staking is 195% and for 4-year staking APR is 261%. The rewards are paid out weekly. Furthermore, stakers can expect to get additional rewards from partnered AI projects.

Staking Incentives

Rewards are calculated based on the staking duration and staked amount. These factors are equally important and they linearly influence weekly rewards. This means that someone who stakes 100 ATH for 2 weeks will have the same weekly rewards as someone who stakes 200 ATH for 1 week. This mechanism greatly emphasizes long-term holding. That's because holding a token makes sense only if you go for long-term staking. E.g. a whale staking $200k with 1 week lockup. will have the same weekly rewards as person staking $1k with 4 year lockup. Furthermore the ATH staking rewards are fixed and divided among stakers. Therefore Increase of user base is likely to come with decrease in rewards.
We believe the main weak-point of Aethirs staking is the lack of equivalency between rewards paid out to the users and value generated for the protocol as a result of staking.

Token Distribution

The token distribution of $ATH is well designed and comes with long vesting time-frames. 18-month cliff and 36-moths subsequent linear vesting is applied to team's allocation. This is higher than industry standard and is a sign of long-term commitment.

  • Checkers and Compute Providers: 50%
  • Ecosystem: 15%
  • Team: 12.5%
  • Investors: 11.5%
  • Airdrop: 6%
  • Advisors: 5%

Aethir's airdrop is divided into 3 phases to ensure that only loyal users get rewarded. This mechanism is very-well thought and we rate it highly. It fosters high community engagement within the first months of the project and sets the ground for potentially giving more-control to the DAO.

Governance and Community-Led Development

Aethir’s governance model promotes community-led decision-making in a very practical way. Instead of rushing with creation of a DAO for PR and marketing purposes Aethir is trying to make it the right way. They support projects building on their infrastructure and regularly share updates with their community in the most professional manner.

We believe Aethir would benefit from implementing reputation boosted voting. An example of such system is described here. The core assumption is to abandon the simplistic: 1 token = 1 vote and go towards: Votes = tokens * reputation_based_multiplication_factor.

In the attached example, reputation_based_multiplication_factor rises exponentially with the number of standard deviations above norm, with regard to user's rating. For compute compute providers at Aethir, user's rating could be replaced by provider's uptime.

Perspectives for the future

While it's important to analyze aspects such as supply-side tokenomics, or governance, we must keep in mind that 95% of project's success depends on demand-side. In this regard the outlook for Aethir may be very bright. The project declares $36M annual reccuring revenue. Revenue like this is very rare in the web3 space. Many projects are not able to generate any revenue after succesfull ICO event, due to lack fo product-market-fit.

If you're looking to create a robust tokenomics model and go through institutional-grade testing please reach out to contact@nextrope.com. Our team is ready to help you with the token engineering process and ensure your project’s resilience in the long term.

Nextrope Partners with Hacken to Enhance Blockchain Security

Miłosz

21 Nov 2024
Nextrope Partners with Hacken to Enhance Blockchain Security

Nextrope announces a strategic partnership with Hacken, a renowned blockchain security auditor. It marks a significant step in delivering reliable decentralized solutions. After several successful collaborations resulting in flawless smart contract audits, the alliance solidifies the synergy between Nextrope's innovative blockchain development and Hacken's top-tier security auditing services. Together, we aim to set new benchmarks, ensuring that security is an integral part of blockchain technology.

Strengthening Blockchain Security

The partnership aims to fortify the security protocols within blockchain ecosystems. By integrating Hacken's comprehensive security audits with Nextrope's cutting-edge blockchain solutions, we are poised to offer unparalleled security features in our projects.

"Blockchain security should never be an afterthought"

"Our partnership with Hacken underscores our dedication to embedding security at the core of our blockchain solutions. Together, we're building a safer future for the industry."

said Mateusz Mach, CEO of Nextrope

About Nextrope

Nextrope is a forward-thinking blockchain development house specializing in creating innovative solutions for businesses worldwide. With a team of experienced developers and blockchain experts, Nextrope delivers high-quality, scalable, and secure blockchain applications tailored to meet the unique needs of each client.

About Hacken

Hacken is a leading blockchain security auditor known for its rigorous smart contract audits and security assessments. With a mission to make the industry safer, Hacken provides complex security services that help companies identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in their applications.

Looking Ahead

As a joint mission, both Nextrope and Hacken are committed to continuous innovation. We look forward to the exciting opportunities this partnership will bring and are eager to implement a more secure blockchain environment for all.

For more information, please contact:

Nextrope

Hacken

Join us on our journey to deliver top-notch blockchain tech and a safer future for the industry!