Blockchain Economy Design Tools

The Starting Point — Mapping the Venture Centre Ecosystem

Our team has developed this living collection of Blockchain Economy Design Tools — a toolkit of practical, open-source resources — to help entrepreneurs, facilitators and mentors working in community spaces design ventures that are socially impactful, economically sustainable, and ready to operate on the Cardano blockchain.

Originally proposed through Cardano's Project Catalyst as the "Cardano Canvas, Cards & Calculator" project, this toolkit responds to a core challenge: how to make advanced blockchain-based business design accessible to everyday innovators. Whether you're running a local hub, hosting a workshop, or exploring how Cardano's infrastructure might support your venture, these tools are designed to help you visualise, experiment, and build with clarity and confidence.

The map below represents an early and important step in our journey to build these tools, by sketching out our own 'economy' realised as a platform for entrepreneur support. It began as an effort to visualise and name the real dynamics at play — who was involved, how value flowed, what roles were being played, and what gaps existed between intention and capability.

Venture Centre Entrepreneurial Ecosystem – Platform Canvas

This is a derivation of the Business Model Generation Canvas by Alex Osterwalder, Lean Canvas By Ash Maurya, The Platform Design Toolkit
and many other canvas studies by the team of Venture Centre found in the resources section of this website.

We focused on understanding the social, technical, and economic structures needed to support a purpose-driven ecosystem — one rooted in collaboration, relationships, and shared prosperity. It's where we started to sense the need for tools that could help us design ecosystems, not just services, and support distributed ownership of those systems over time.

Why We Built This Map

We built this map to answer some critical questions:

• Who are the different people and groups already part of the Venture Centre ecosystem?
• What value are they giving, getting, or hoping for?
• What kinds of services, infrastructure, and support would allow this ecosystem to grow and flourish?
• How do we make sure our platform logic aligns with our values — and is shaped by the people it serves?

We captured our working knowledge in a structured format to better understand how:

• Partners like iwi, funders, or local government contribute to outcomes.
• Stakeholders like course creators, facilitators, or learning hubs generate momentum.
• Peer groups like youth, parents, or SME owners engage with and benefit from the system.
• Value flows — in cash and in-kind, in credibility and connections.
• Infrastructure (both digital and human) is necessary to keep everything moving.

This early systems mapping didn't give us all the answers — but it helped reveal the shape of the questions we needed to ask. It made visible the invisible work that holds ecosystems together beyond the revenue streams, costs, key activities etc. found on the canvas that started it all — Alex Ostewalder's Business Model Canvas.

How We Used the Venture Centre Platform Canvas — and Many Others

This ecosystem map proved incredibly useful. It gave us a common language and clear view of the platform logic behind our work. At Venture Centre, we used it in strategy sessions, partner meetings, funding applications, and to align cross-functional teams. It helped us map gaps, visualise roles, and clarify value flows — especially for complex programmes like community capability-building, entrepreneurship support, and digital enablement.

We also drew on a wide range of other canvases and mapping tools — from the classic Business Model Canvas to other venture design canvases, from open-source tokenomics models to stakeholder rubrics to system dynamics maps. The Platform Design and DAO canvas's are particularly helpful.

We used the Liberating Structures and Wise Democracy Decks to prompt ideas around rules and how our ecosystem might work. The calculators gave us templates for bringing ideas to life with real numbers and each one of these tools helped us see a different angle, stress-test an assumption, or invite a new kind of collaboration.

Over time, these tools have become a meta-toolkit we could use flexibly: to prototype, facilitate, teach, and advocate. They helped us see the invisible infrastructure that communities, ecosystems, and ventures rely on — especially when building for long-term, intergenerational impact. They can help the rest of Cardano's community of builders too.

Why We're Sharing Our Collection of Tools with the Cardano Community

We're making the curated list of these tools public because we believe they are helpful and the Cardano community deserves design tools that are powerful, values-aligned, and practical. If we're serious about building regenerative economies, collaborative ventures, and accountable governance structures — we need shared scaffolding to build well, together.

These canvases, cards, and calculators from across the world and our first attempt at a Cardano native toolkit form part of the design layer of any ecosystem. They help teams reduce friction, clarify decisions, make room for diverse voices, and speed up learning.

We invite others to remix, translate, adapt, and improve on these resources (and share them back with us — we'll even help you do that if you get in touch). Our collective future depends on good design, not just good code.

Where to From Here

That first map wasn't the destination. But it did seed the moment we saw the road ahead.

The Cardano Canvas, Cards and Calculators toolkit project has been a great, first next step to turn complex system design into a shared, hands-on process.

Whether you're building a community currency, regenerative marketplace, DAO, or token-powered service, the tools will help you model how your blockchain economy behaves — and evolves.

Built for Cardano, to be tested in community spaces, inspired by real-world entrepreneurship, the aim of this Toolkit will help teams surface assumptions, clarify incentives, explore governance, align values, and design a blockchain ecosystem with long-term impact.

• Canvas to map the full shape of a venture: from actors and flows to risks and incentives.
• Card deck to prompt critical thinking, invite collaboration, and unlock design imagination.
• Calculators to help teams test the feasibility and sustainability of what they're building.

The Cardano Canvas, Cards and Calculator toolkit is now part of a broader movement to support ecosystem-led, community-owned infrastructure on Cardano — and to help builders stay grounded in values while engaging with real-world systems.

We look forward to working on future iterations alongside Cardano's community.