Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ATARCA (Accounting Technologies for Anti-Rival Coordination and Allocation)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-04-01 al 2023-03-31
In simple terms, the ATARCA project has made it possible to incentivize and account for win-win arrangements among people, teams, and organizations in communities. As a result of this groundbreaking work, it is possible to quantify and record different contributions toward a community’s or network’s joint target. While this might sound rather abstract and even trivial, it is one of the biggest obstacles in facilitating collective action in our societies.
The benefits of such win-win arrangements –– or “anti-rivalry” as we say –– are obvious: it is rather clear that we could all be better off if we optimize our collective efforts instead of our individual actions. However, there is an apparent drawback of such collective focus, especially in the business setting: if I’m doing all the work while everyone else enjoys the benefits, I should be compensated for my work and the value I create. Such hindrances have, so far, largely constrained the collective efforts among organizations and individuals, despite the identified potential. The corporate world and market economy at large are driven by zero-sum exchange logic because we want to prevent free-riding. At the same time, there, of course, are communities and even societies which are driven by collective win-win aims, but such organizing is usually based on trust (which lacks then scale) or is based on centralized power (someone dictates the rules for collectivity). In contrast, we are interested in upscaling the “anti-rivalry” while not sacrificing the decentralization of power.
To this end, the ATARCA project has produced technology for addressing the issue: a shareable non-fungible token standard (sNFT), and related technological building blocks to take the standard to use in real-life cases. SNFT is a cryptographically secured entity for accounting individual contributions as a part of a larger whole, whether it is a community, network, or firm. While the sNFT technology indeed sits at the cutting edge of technological and scientific research, ATARCA has successfully implemented it in practical pilot use cases with people of various backgrounds and technological savviness. The cases have demonstrated that the same technological approach can be applied to both vast online communities but also to supporting local products and communities with high social impact, for example.
As a result, ATARCA has managed to address a seemingly simple but, in reality, surprisingly complex problem with a sophisticated technological solution. Yet, this solution can be implemented in an easy-to-approach manner to support different use cases and impact goals.
The benefits of such win-win arrangements –– or “anti-rivalry” as we say –– are obvious: it is rather clear that we could all be better off if we optimize our collective efforts instead of our individual actions. However, there is an apparent drawback of such collective focus, especially in the business setting: if I’m doing all the work while everyone else enjoys the benefits, I should be compensated for my work and the value I create. Such hindrances have, so far, largely constrained the collective efforts among organizations and individuals, despite the identified potential. The corporate world and market economy at large are driven by zero-sum exchange logic because we want to prevent free-riding. At the same time, there, of course, are communities and even societies which are driven by collective win-win aims, but such organizing is usually based on trust (which lacks then scale) or is based on centralized power (someone dictates the rules for collectivity). In contrast, we are interested in upscaling the “anti-rivalry” while not sacrificing the decentralization of power.
To this end, the ATARCA project has produced technology for addressing the issue: a shareable non-fungible token standard (sNFT), and related technological building blocks to take the standard to use in real-life cases. SNFT is a cryptographically secured entity for accounting individual contributions as a part of a larger whole, whether it is a community, network, or firm. While the sNFT technology indeed sits at the cutting edge of technological and scientific research, ATARCA has successfully implemented it in practical pilot use cases with people of various backgrounds and technological savviness. The cases have demonstrated that the same technological approach can be applied to both vast online communities but also to supporting local products and communities with high social impact, for example.
As a result, ATARCA has managed to address a seemingly simple but, in reality, surprisingly complex problem with a sophisticated technological solution. Yet, this solution can be implemented in an easy-to-approach manner to support different use cases and impact goals.
Following careful planning, design, and preparation, we defined three pilots to test the practical relevance of the visioned technological solution: ‘Barcelona Green shops’, 'Streamr Community', and 'Food Futures'. All pilots explored if we could improve a community's collective output by sharing information and knowledge among its members. These pilots focused on distinct communities motivated by different factors with varying levels of abstraction. ATARCA was particularly interested in how to support anti-rivalry through incentive systems using novel technologies, such as blockchain, which offer the potential to empower communities with locally governed rewards and accounting systems. Each pilot had a slightly different focus, but all investigated the impact of anti-rival incentive mechanisms.
1) In the Barcelona Green Shops pilot, community members in Barcelona were encouraged to shop more sustainably. Here, sustainability refers to both the products and the shops as the pilot was intended to both guide customers to make better choices in goods bought and consumed and help the shops to acquire and offer these products to their customers in ways producing a smaller environmental impact. Both shop owners and customers used a digital platform where they could receive tokens acknowledging positive contributions to the community (for example, when purchasing environmentally sustainable products or when shop owners collaborated with other green shops).
2) The Streamr Community pilot was an open-source project including a data marketplace (a form of data commons) where community members are incentivized to strengthen the community. The focus of the pilot was to incentivise members of a digital commons to create contributions that support the community and help the community members to indicate the type of contributions they consider most valuable.
3) The Food Futures pilot introduced an application that allows you to log your meal choices, creating a record of the environmental sustainability of your food. By encouraging sustainable consumption, Food Futures contributed to the larger goal of combating climate change. This pilot was motivated by the most abstract challenge of the three pilots, as it intended to tackle climate change through highly various means.
The pilots planned and conducted in ATARCA took advantage of novel anti-rival incentive mechanisms. Put differently, the pilots introduced rewards based on cryptographic tokens that highlight the underlying human relations, effort, and the value of interactions. Through repeated interactions benefitting the members of a given community, the sNFTs provide means to study how relationships and contributions develop over time.
1) In the Barcelona Green Shops pilot, community members in Barcelona were encouraged to shop more sustainably. Here, sustainability refers to both the products and the shops as the pilot was intended to both guide customers to make better choices in goods bought and consumed and help the shops to acquire and offer these products to their customers in ways producing a smaller environmental impact. Both shop owners and customers used a digital platform where they could receive tokens acknowledging positive contributions to the community (for example, when purchasing environmentally sustainable products or when shop owners collaborated with other green shops).
2) The Streamr Community pilot was an open-source project including a data marketplace (a form of data commons) where community members are incentivized to strengthen the community. The focus of the pilot was to incentivise members of a digital commons to create contributions that support the community and help the community members to indicate the type of contributions they consider most valuable.
3) The Food Futures pilot introduced an application that allows you to log your meal choices, creating a record of the environmental sustainability of your food. By encouraging sustainable consumption, Food Futures contributed to the larger goal of combating climate change. This pilot was motivated by the most abstract challenge of the three pilots, as it intended to tackle climate change through highly various means.
The pilots planned and conducted in ATARCA took advantage of novel anti-rival incentive mechanisms. Put differently, the pilots introduced rewards based on cryptographic tokens that highlight the underlying human relations, effort, and the value of interactions. Through repeated interactions benefitting the members of a given community, the sNFTs provide means to study how relationships and contributions develop over time.
Coordination of action and resource allocation is one of those traits that make us human. Yet, the foundational structures of our economy are still based on concepts that far predate the modern era. Even modern cryptocurrencies are based on the same concepts: ownership and exchange.
Our project, ATARCA, started with respectfully disagreeing with this notion, as we investigated systems for sharing instead of exchange. The project addressed the challenges of incentivizing contributions toward a collective goal and making individual actions accountable. We argued that the economic structures and institutions need fundamental reform to fully leverage new technologies and digital resources. We embarked on a groundbreaking research project to explore and disseminate new solutions to facilitate accounting systems more adept with digital technologies and resources. We utilized participatory design, prototyping, and intervention-based action research, to design, implement, and deploy pilot experiments with these technologies.
The primary objective of the ATARCA’s technology development work was to develop accounting and incentive systems based on cryptographic tokens to facilitate anti-rival collective action and collaboration among community members. We have developed a new token type that complements the existing, perhaps most widely spread instance of cryptographic tokens called Ethereum, while being also compatible with any Ethereum Virtual Machine -based (EVM) blockchain. Our work has complemented the EVM ecosystem by providing an extension to its operating standard that enables tokens we label as shareable non-fungible tokens (sNFT). From the technology point of view, we see that the technological development conducted in ATARCA has the potential to be analogous to the manner in which Bitcoin implementation allowed a broad instantiation of various blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
Our project, ATARCA, started with respectfully disagreeing with this notion, as we investigated systems for sharing instead of exchange. The project addressed the challenges of incentivizing contributions toward a collective goal and making individual actions accountable. We argued that the economic structures and institutions need fundamental reform to fully leverage new technologies and digital resources. We embarked on a groundbreaking research project to explore and disseminate new solutions to facilitate accounting systems more adept with digital technologies and resources. We utilized participatory design, prototyping, and intervention-based action research, to design, implement, and deploy pilot experiments with these technologies.
The primary objective of the ATARCA’s technology development work was to develop accounting and incentive systems based on cryptographic tokens to facilitate anti-rival collective action and collaboration among community members. We have developed a new token type that complements the existing, perhaps most widely spread instance of cryptographic tokens called Ethereum, while being also compatible with any Ethereum Virtual Machine -based (EVM) blockchain. Our work has complemented the EVM ecosystem by providing an extension to its operating standard that enables tokens we label as shareable non-fungible tokens (sNFT). From the technology point of view, we see that the technological development conducted in ATARCA has the potential to be analogous to the manner in which Bitcoin implementation allowed a broad instantiation of various blockchains and cryptocurrencies.