About
Mechanism and systems engineer for cryptoeconomic markets
Who I am
I came to this field from mathematics. My degree is in technical-economic mathematics at TU Wien — agent-based modelling, game theory, optimisation — with a detour through banking, startups, and a stretch of playing poker seriously enough to learn what an edge actually is. That combination turned out to be the right preparation for a field that did not exist yet.
In October 2018 I started the token engineering research stream at the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at WU Vienna. At the time the phrase described an ambition rather than a discipline. The work over the next few years was to give it a spine: what does it mean to state the properties you want from an economic system, design mechanisms that actually enforce them, and check the result before real money arrives? That question produced a set of papers — on bonding curves and their configuration spaces, on economic games read as estimators, and a survey of automated market makers that has since become one of the standard references for how these systems are compared.
Alongside the research I started running the token engineering meetups in Vienna, which turned out to matter more than I expected. HydraDX found me through them. I ran the first engagement myself, then brought the project to BlockScience and structured it into a research programme under their contract — role and mechanism maps, a formal specification, a cadCAD model, numerical experiments, an economic report, and eventually a course taught from the model. It remains the most complete example I have of the method running end to end, and it started with a room of people in Vienna rather than a business development pipeline.
I have taught the subject about as long as I have practised it: as a lecturer at WU Vienna, in the Deep Dive into Blockchain summer school at the UZH Blockchain Center, and as content lead for the Token Engineering Academy's fundamentals programme. Teaching is a useful discipline. A mechanism you cannot explain to a room of sceptical people is usually a mechanism you have not finished designing.
Between the research and now I spent time as CTO of Adim, designing a protocol for shared ownership of creative work — an economy whose participants were writers and showrunners rather than traders. It was a good corrective. Most of the hard problems in incentive design are not technical, and they show up fastest when your users have no interest in your infrastructure.
Token Engineering Labs is where that work lives now. It is an engineering firm rather than an advisory: I build my own prototypes and research systems, and support other teams on mechanism and system design. Recent work centres on prediction markets and market microstructure — pricing rules, information aggregation, how a claim is represented on-chain, and what happens at the seam where a primary market meets a secondary venue. Several of those systems are public and running; the write-ups are on this site.
The through-line is a preference for validation over assertion. Declare the properties, design the mechanism, then demonstrate it holds — in a specification, in simulation, and in a contract someone can trade against. The alternative is a slide deck, and there are enough of those.
Practice
I run Token Engineering Labs — Engineering firm for cryptoeconomic systems: own research and prototypes, plus collaborative support for other projects on mechanism and system design.
The public record below emphasises academic and community work I can stand behind by name: the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at WU Vienna, peer-reviewed publications, Token Engineering Academy teaching, meetups, and Ethereum conference talks. Named client engagements and collaborative write-ups still under authorship review are not listed.
Research
Peer-reviewed work from the token engineering stream at the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics (WU Vienna) and later collaborations — mostly market mechanisms and how to reason about them formally. Co-authorship is listed as published; these are not solo claims. Google Scholar lists 541 citations and an h-index of 5 as of 2026-08.
- SoK: Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) with Automated Market Maker (AMM) Protocols
- From Curved Bonding to Configuration Spaces
- Economic Games as Estimators
- Burn-and-Mint Tokenomics: Deflation and Strategic Incentives
- Sending Spies as Insurance Against Bitcoin Pool Mining Block Withholding Attacks
- Blockchain – Die neue Technologie: Chancen, Risiken und Herausforderungen aus der Perspektive des Kartellrechts
Teaching, academy, and affiliations
Long-running teaching and curriculum work sits alongside the research: WU Vienna lectures, the UZH Blockchain Center summer school, and content leadership for the Token Engineering Academy fundamentals programme.
- Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics, WU Vienna
- Initiated and led the token engineering research stream (papers, teaching, field methods) · 2018–2022
- WU Vienna
- University lecturer — blockchain and token economy · 2020–
- Token Engineering Academy
- Content lead for TE Fundamentals — curriculum and teaching materials · 2021–2022
- UZH Blockchain Center
- Faculty, Deep Dive into Blockchain summer school · 2024–
- Token Engineering Vienna
- Founder and host — the Vienna token engineering community, and the origin of several later engagements · 2018–
- BlockScience
- Independent contractor (2020–21, AMM research), then Token Engineering Labs as a delivery partner (2022–23) · 2020–2023
- Adim
- CTO — protocol design for shared ownership of creative work · 2023–2024
Talks, conferences, and meetups
Ethereum community venues (EthCC and others), recorded talks, and local Token Engineering organizing — including Token Engineering Vienna.
- Engineering Workshop — Designing Prediction Market Protocols
- Keynote — Market Microstructure and Performance Evaluation in Prediction Markets
- Workshop — Designing Prediction Market Protocols: From First Principles to Deployment
- Speaker — Token Engineering Labs (prediction markets, mechanism design)
- Panel — Bridging TradFi and DeFi: Best Practices for RWA Tokenisation on Ethereum
- Program Lead — TERSE (Token Engineering Research Symposium)
- Moderator — TERSE (Token Engineering Research Symposium)
- Token Engineering workshop (with Bancor)
- TE Unplugged — Incentives at the Edge: Valuation and Verification in Crypto Protocols
- Token Engineering Vienna — ongoing meetup series
Recorded
Public build record
Open write-ups for systems that are already public. Named client work is intentionally not listed here.
- On-Ledger Market for Event Contingent Claims
- A deliberately simple on-chain market, intended to demonstrate key infrastructure and functionality: on-chain transactions, on-chain collateral, account abstraction, on-chain role management, wallet-native trading, and contract management
- ERC-20 Prediction Market
- Same LMSR rails as the ledger market, with Yes/No claims as ERC-20s in the wallet — composable, and honest about token sprawl.
- ERC-20 CFMM DEX
- Secondary xy = k pools over ERC-20 outcome tokens — swaps reassign ownership without rewriting LMSR inventory.
- UZH World Cup Prediction Market
- Field experiment at the UZH summer school during the World Cup — participants traded live on the ERC-20 prediction market.
- Claim Representation and Implementation Standards
- From binary ERC-20 claims to combinatorial state spaces — Conditional Token Framework as the settlement layer between one-token-per-outcome markets and multi-outcome systems.
- Specifying Uniswap: A Worked Formal Specification
- State space, mechanism mapping, and state transitions for a constant-product AMM — what a formal specification actually contains, worked end to end.
- From Business Case to System Specification
- The client team had a business case for tokenizing IP and rewarding contributors, not an engineering plan. Discovery, requirements, and segregation into three subsystems — the phase every other write-up here is downstream of.
- Attributing Contribution in Collaborative Production
- When a dozen people co-produce one asset, who made what? Peer evaluation scored against a truth-telling term, so honest assessment is the individually rational strategy.
- Reputation as a Measurement Layer
- A reputation vector rather than a score — aggregation, weight choice, decay, and sizing point rewards as a control problem against system metrics.
- Shared Ownership of Creative IP
- Splitting governance from economic rights so a collective can reward contributors without ceding creative control — and pooling revenue so the claim is diversified enough to move.
- Sequencing a Token Economy into a Live Product
- Utility before liquidity. Four transferability stages gated on conditions rather than dates, and decentralisation kept as an engineering backlog instead of a slide.
Common questions
- Who is Kris Paruch?
- Kris Paruch is a cryptoeconomist and mechanism designer, and the founder of Token Engineering Labs in Vienna. He holds an MSc in technical-economic mathematics from TU Wien, started the token engineering research stream at WU Vienna's Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics in 2018, and is a co-author of the ACM Computing Surveys systematization of automated market maker protocols. He lectures at WU Vienna and teaches in the UZH Blockchain Center summer school, and builds working prediction-market and secondary-venue systems.
- What does Kris Paruch do?
- He designs and validates the economic mechanisms inside on-chain systems: pricing and allocation rules, market structure, and incentive design. The work runs from formal specification through simulation to deployed smart contracts, rather than stopping at a token distribution plan. Current focus is prediction markets, information aggregation, and the interaction between primary markets and secondary trading venues.
- What is Token Engineering Labs?
- Token Engineering Labs is an engineering firm for cryptoeconomic systems, founded by Kris Paruch and based in Vienna. It builds its own research prototypes and educational deployments, and collaborates with other projects on mechanism design and system design — not as a classic consulting boutique.
- What has Kris Paruch published?
- His most cited work is 'SoK: Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) with Automated Market Maker (AMM) Protocols' in ACM Computing Surveys (2023), a systematization of AMM design that is widely used as a reference for comparing these protocols. Earlier work with Michael Zargham and Jamsheed Shorish covers bonding curves and configuration spaces (IEEE ICBC 2020) and economic games as estimators (MARBLE 2020). He also co-authored a game-theoretic analysis of burn-and-mint tokenomics (IEEE WF-IoT 2023).
- Where does Kris Paruch teach?
- He has lectured on blockchain and the token economy at WU Vienna since 2020, teaches in the Deep Dive into Blockchain summer school at the UZH Blockchain Center, and was content lead for the Token Engineering Academy's fundamentals programme.
- How do you contact Kris Paruch?
- Reach Kris by email (kris.paruch@tokenengineeringlabs.com), Telegram (t.me/krisparuch), or LinkedIn. Open calendar booking is not offered.