A Design-Stage Diagnostic Tool for Tokenized Collaborative Economies

Abstract

Blockchain-based social and collaborative token economies, such as complementary currency systems, rest on radically different assumptions from Decentralized Finance: they serve local communities rather than global end-users, and their tokens represent non-monetary values such as reputation, access rights, and individual contributions. Moreover, they are particularly oriented to managing the governance of commons. General-purpose frameworks to model and simulate token economies exist, but they offer no diagnostic criteria for judging whether a design is structurally sound or sustainable. Recent work formalized six failure modes for collaborative token economies, ranging from token oversupply to governance capture, grounded in established economic models. Yet the application of that framework to concrete cases remains manual: specifying the token economy and deriving each failure-mode condition is complex and error-prone. We present a formal verification tool that automates both steps: a structured specification flow captures the design parameters, and an SMT-based engine verifies every failure-mode condition over the entire parameter space, classifying each as sound, fragile, or broken and returning concrete counterexamples and parameter repairs. Unlike prior approaches, our tool requires no programming expertise: it embeds the failure-mode conditions natively, making it suitable for non-technical stakeholders, and it is specifically tailored to social and collaborative token economies. It provides formal guarantees and remediation suggestions at design stage, when corrections are least costly.