The Indices

How Cogito's tracercoins will track progress of humanity

Three tracercoins

Cogito will initially create two indices that are periodically rebalanced to track the progress of humanity, which will be reflected in the fair value of their respective tracercoin.

GCOIN - environmental progress

GCOIN is tied to the Green Index, which tracks green indicators reflecting environmental progress, e.g. greenhouse emissions, air quality, health, freshwater resources, etc. GCOIN, as it has low volatility, will act as the stablecoin of the system and aims to become a preferred payment currency on Cardano.

XCOIN - progress towards a technological singularity

XCOIN is tied to the Technological Index, which tracks technological indicators reflecting progress towards the technological singularity, e.g. processor speed, the cost of sequencing a human’s genome, the size of the smallest engineered machine, etc. XCOIN has a higher volatility than the GCOIN (yet should still be considerably more stable than Bitcoin or Ether) and will offer a new asset class for users with a higher risk appetite.

The indices will be constructed as weighted averages of a reasonably large set of quantitative indicators, with data coming from trusted third-party sources such as the World Bank, OECD, United Nations, etc, which are free of protocol-level dependencies.

Data-driven design

Based on our work doing quantitative modeling and intensive simulation of the data from the past 40 years, we have reasonable confidence that the indices should trend upwards at different velocities. Additionally, the nature of the indicators underlying each index should ensure that the index itself is reasonably stable without large, sudden changes (except in the case of genuinely long-tail events like a world war, an asteroid hitting Earth, or sudden epochal engineering breakthroughs like the creation of artificial general intelligence or low-cost molecular assemblers). While some of the constituents of the indices will only be measurable, say, quarterly or annually, the algorithm will also include an interpolation and smoothing equation that allows it to have an estimated value each day so that the index’s value changes relatively continuously day to day, rather than having a huge jump when new data is released. A global committee of cross-disciplinary experts will be assembled to manage the components and weightings of the constituents of the indices each year and will be subject to community governance for major changes. The construction of the indices will have maximum transparency since the data is publicly available and the model is open-source and can be verified at any time.

Data Oracles

Finally, one of the most important value-adds of Cogito is that the tracercoins provide an alternative solution to the Oracle problem of blockchains, at least in certain aspects. Our protocol is connected to both on-chain and off-chain networks so that it can fetch data from one or multiple external sources and bring the data on-chain via the creation and tracking of indices.