Bibliography
Papers, research and essays
Author lines are given as each publisher states them. Much of this was written with other people, and several of the pieces I am listed on I edited rather than authored.
Google Scholar ↗ORCID 0009-0006-3157-3700 ↗All Things Decent ↗
Peer-reviewed
Published in a journal of record.
- Challenges and Approaches to Scaling the Global Commons
Felix Fritsch, Jeff Emmett, Eric Friedman, Rok Kranjc, Sarah Manski, Michael Zargham, Michel Bauwens · Frontiers in Blockchain 4:578721 · 2021
Why commons-oriented economic frameworks stall at scale, read through three attempts to get past it: the Commons Stack, Holochain's Commons Engine, and the Economic Space Agency.
Book
Written with Jessica Zartler and Sadie Morris, and readable in full online.
- Exploring MycoFi: Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 & Beyond
Jeff Emmett, with Jessica Zartler and Sadie Morris · Book, readable in full online · 2024
Fungal networks as a reference architecture for economic design: allocation toward scarcity, reserves held through winter, exchange across species boundaries without a central ledger.
BlockScience research
Research reports published through BlockScience, newest first. Several were collaborations with the communities the work was done for.
- BlockScience as a Cybernetic Organization (Cyb-Org)
Jeff Emmett, with Dan Furfari and Michael Zargham · BlockScience · 2024
The Viable System Model applied to the firm writing it: five functional areas held together by feedback rather than hierarchy.
- The Windfall Protocol: Blockchain-Based Infrastructure to Accelerate Building Retrofits
Jessica Zartler, Jeff Emmett, Michael Lewkowitz, Brent Kopperson · BlockScience · 2024
A coordination protocol for energy-efficiency data, aimed at the retrofit rate Canada needs to hit net zero by 2050.
- Introducing Neural Quorum Governance
Danilo Bernardineli and Jakob Hackel, with Jeff Emmett and others · BlockScience for the Stellar Community Fund · 2023
Layered voting-power attribution combined with group delegation, designed against voter fatigue rather than against attackers only.
- Flatcoins: Inflation-Adjusted Stablecoins
Jeff Emmett, Danilo Lessa Bernardineli, Jamsheed Shorish · BlockScience · 2023
If a stablecoin holds a peg to a currency that is losing purchasing power, it is stable in name only. Controller-based designs offer a way out.
- Model-Based Institutional Design (MBID) & Analysis
Michael Zargham · BlockScience · 2023
The frame most of my governance work sits inside: institutions treated as engineered systems that can be specified, simulated and revised.
- Disambiguating Autonomy: Ceding Control in favor of Coordination
Michael Zargham, Jessica Zartler, Kelsie Nabben, Rika Goldberg, Jeff Emmett · BlockScience · 2023
Four kinds of autonomy — tactical, strategic, individual, collective — and why conflating them produces DAOs that cannot decide anything.
- Computer-Aided Governance in Action: Steering Complex Systems Using the CAG Map
Jeff Emmett, with Jessica Zartler, Kelsie Nabben, Michael Zargham and Burrrata · BlockScience · 2022
The eight-step governance loop, walked through with the trade-off it exists to manage: participation that is inclusive against participation that is informed.
- Complex Systems Modeling of Community Inclusion Currencies
Andrew Clark, Alexander Mihailov, Michael Zargham · BlockScience, with Grassroots Economics and the Danish Red Cross · 2022
Transaction data from Kenyan community currencies, modelled as a complex system rather than summarised as a pilot report.
- Aligning the concept of Decentralized Autonomous Organization to Precedents in Cybernetics
Michael Zargham, Kelsie Nabben · BlockScience · 2022
DAOs are not new. Stafford Beer's viable systems work describes most of what they are reaching for, and names the parts they keep dropping.
- Alpha Bonds: Risk-adjusted Bonding Curves for Financing Impact
Shaun Conway, Jeff Emmett, Jessica Zartler, Harry T. Goodnight, Michael Zargham, Shruti Appiah · BlockScience with ixo · 2022
Bonding curves that take a live risk signal from a prediction market, so impact finance prices delivery risk instead of assuming it away.
- Announcing cadCAD 1.0: Foundations for a New Era of Open Modeling
Jessica Zartler, with Michael Zargham, Jeff Emmett and the cadCAD team · BlockScience · 2022
The simulation framework underneath nearly every model on this site, rewritten around spatio-temporal programming.
- Introducing Automated Regression Market Makers (ARMMs)
Matt Stephenson, Jamsheed Shorish, Michael Zargham, David Sisson, Jessica Zartler; edits by Jeff Emmett and others · BlockScience with Hedera and the HBAR Foundation · 2021
Price discovery for assets that are not interchangeable — renewable energy credits, carbon offsets — where a standard AMM has nothing to quote.
- Summoning the Money God: Applying Control Theory to Cryptocurrency Monetary Policy
Michael Zargham, Danilo Lessa Bernardineli, Andrew Clark, Jamsheed Shorish, Jeff Emmett · BlockScience with Reflexer Labs · 2021
Parameterising the RAI controller before mainnet: governance surfaces, stress testing, and choosing parameters under genuine uncertainty.
- Deterring Adversarial Behavior at Scale in Gitcoin Grants
Kelsie Nabben, Danilo Lessa Bernardineli, Michael Zargham, Jeff Emmett · BlockScience with Gitcoin · 2021
What quadratic funding does when collusion is cheap, and which countermeasures survive contact with a real grants round.
- Mapping the Computer-Aided Governance Process
BlockScience · BlockScience · 2021
Observe, question, map, model, present, debate, enact, monitor. The loop the CAG work keeps returning to.
- Exploring DAOs as a New Kind of Institution
Michael Zargham, Primavera de Filippi, Jeff Tan · BlockScience and Commons Stack · 2020
Institutional economics read against on-chain organisations, before the category had settled into a template.
Essays & primers
Written to be readable by someone encountering the mechanism for the first time. The 2019 pieces predate most of the vocabulary that has since settled around them.
- Breathing New Life into Web3 Economies
Jeff Emmett · Bonding Curve Research Group · 2024
The case for issuance mechanisms over fixed supply, written for people who have watched a token launch fail from the inside.
- From Monoculture to Permaculture Currencies: A Glimpse of the Myco-Economic Future
Jeff Emmett · BlockScience · 2023
One currency per economy is a monoculture. What grows instead when currencies are allowed to be local, plural and purpose-built.
- Exploring Bonding Curves: Differentiating Primary & Secondary Automated Market Makers
Jeff Emmett · Bonding Curve Research Group · 2023
A curve that mints and burns is not the same instrument as a pool that swaps, and treating them as one is where most token designs go wrong.
- Deep Dive: Augmented Bonding Curves
Commons Stack · Commons Stack · 2020
The mechanics of routing a share of every buy into a common pool, and what that does to the incentive to hold.
- Announcing the Conviction Voting cadCAD Model Release
Jeff Emmett · Commons Stack · 2020
The simulation that turned conviction voting from an idea into a parameterisable mechanism.
- Architecting the Cyber-Physical Commons
Jeff Emmett · Commons Stack · 2020
What has to be true offline for an on-chain commons to hold any real resource.
- Conviction Voting: A Novel Continuous Decision Making Alternative to Governance
Jeff Emmett · Giveth · 2019
The original write-up: decisions that accrue rather than decisions that are called.
- Automating Ostrom for Effective DAO Management
Jeff Emmett · Commons Stack · 2019
Ostrom's eight design principles, taken one at a time, asking which parts a protocol can carry and which parts it cannot.
- Establishing Open Token Engineering Tools & Standards
Jeff Emmett · Commons Stack · 2019
Written while the field was arguing about whether token engineering was a field.