Overview
The Cardano Token Engineering Lab studies how blockchain projects design their tokens, and publishes what it finds for anyone to read. Each of its case studies takes one project at a time and works through the same plain questions: what the token is actually for, how new ones enter circulation, what behavior the rewards encourage, and where those incentives could be gamed1.
The Lab works on Cardano, and its case studies cover borrowing and trading applications built there. It was funded through Project Catalyst, the grant program Cardano holders vote on. The Catalyst record for the Lab names Miguel Saldana as its proposer2. He is a professional engineer who spent years in the energy industry before moving into token design3. Alongside the written research, the Cardano Token Engineering Lab keeps a public record of economic exploits and maintains an open-source toolkit for pulling token data off the chain.
Key Features
- Protocol case studies with a fixed structure. Every review covers the same five things: what the token is used for, how it is distributed, how incentives are designed, where the economics could break, and what should change. Each one is built mainly from the project's own published documentation, with every source listed1.
- A public record of Cardano economic exploits. The Lab keeps a running table of cases where a protocol's own economic design was exploited, leaving out wallet drainers and phishing scams to keep the focus on design flaws4.
- Finished papers on Liqwid, Indigo, and Minswap. The completed reviews are published as documents in the Lab's public code repository, alongside a paper on structuring decentralized organizations written with Xerberus, a risk-rating project5.
- Free data tooling for modelers. An open-source Python toolkit pulls token holder, transaction, and swap data from Cardano into a table you can analyze, drawing on the Blockfrost and Koios data services6.
- Written for Cardano's accounting model. The research is framed around eUTxO, the way Cardano tracks balances, which differs from most other blockchains and narrows which token designs actually work3.
What to Expect
The website itself is a shopfront: an about page3, a page setting out the review method1, the exploit table4, and a handful of blog posts on subjects such as oracles and economic security7. The finished protocol papers are not on the site. They sit as documents in the Cardano Token Engineering Lab's public code repository, which doubles as its publishing channel5.
Developers get the most from the toolkit, which installs as a Python package and runs either from the command line or inside a script6. Anyone weighing up a Cardano project will want the case studies. They are footnoted throughout, and they end with specific recommendations rather than a score.
Several topic pages on the site are outlines rather than finished writing, so the code repository is the better place to start for anyone who wants the substance.
