Research Highlight: Trusting the Value of Impact Tokens for Higher Level Social Problem Solving
Today, we are excited to highlight research conducted by Emergence looking at the complexity of measuring outcomes associated with impact tokens. The full article can be read on Medium HERE.
Trusting the Value of Impact Tokens for Higher Level Social Problem Solving
Michael Cooper
Emergence
The role of Impact Tokens to help address common social problems is partly dependent on the ability of Oracle providers to accurately measure the cumulative alleviation of the social problem. Any alleviation of the problem results in new benefits which define the Outcome State represented by the Impact Token. As Impact Tokens are used as tools to help alleviate different types of social problems, Oracle providers will need to diversify their methods to account for increasing levels of complexity that enable these problems and the new benefits that result from the problem being solved. Measuring Outcome States is synonymous with measuring the benefits that result from the problem being alleviated. Expanding the universe of measurement methods and principles used by Oracle providers to reliably communicate the types and scope of these new benefits is important for establishing trust that the Outcome State is an improvement over the status quo.
Web 3.0 Measurement Challenges
Web 3.0 marketplaces are partly driven by demand for accurate and reliable data. Impact Tokens, as they are increasingly used to address more complex social problems, will face different challenges than other Web 3.0 data marketplaces. For example, supply chains managed on web3.0 face some challenges in ensuring that the state of off-chain assets match the description of the asset on-chain (i.e. that the crate of 35 medium sized widgets maintained below 40 degrees Celsius as recoded on-chain does not actually represent 35 large widgets kept at 45 degrees off-chain). But this challenge is easy to address using simple measuring collection methods. An eye test can tell the difference between a medium and large widget and remote sensors can record tempeture.
But the Outcome States that trigger the minting of an Impact Token could be increasingly behavior based, making them inherently complex and prone to high levels of uncertainty in their measurement. With complexity comes un-certainty, there is no way around it. If Impact Tokens are to be minted upon the attainment of an Outcome State that is dependent on a higher level of behavior change, the measurement methods used to validate the Outcome State must account for the complexity involved and the resulting implications on the degree of certainty that the Outcome State has been achieved.
