Fostering a knowledge economy at Toreon using cryptocurrency
Torbuck is our own cryptocurrency. It will enable our employees to value their knowledge and be rewarded for sharing it. Effectively, we are creating a knowledge economy within Toreon.
The Torbuck will be published on the Ethereum blokchain. In May, all of our employees will be able to access their Torbucks using a standard cryptowallet. They will be able to spend Torbucks on external training, as well as get paid by colleagues for their own knowledge sharing efforts. If a Toreon employee organizes an internal training, their colleagues will pay Torbucks to attend.
Our ICO (internal coin offering) came about when trying to solve a few issues we had.
First, as a cyber security consulting company, Toreon is all about people and their knowledge. Our people have to learn constantly. We try to stimulate knowledge creation and exchange as much as possible. Although everyone has a large personal budget for attending external training, internal knowledge sharing never comes easy. Putting it in our company bonus plan has worked only partly. The Toreon management never likes to use a top-down approach, but we’ve found ourselves forced to organize knowledge events ourselves to stimulate knowledge exchange. We needed a good incentive system to reward knowledge sharing.
Second, Toreon is an innovative company. We had identified Blockchain as a technology to watch and have actively tried to learn more about the technology, in order to assess early on what the security challenges could be. Our R&D effort has largely meant listening to other organizations trying out blockchain technology. It seems blockchain is ‘a technology looking for a use case’. We hadn’t really been able to find a project that would allow us to participate in the technology and apply our security knowledge.
Torbuck fills both needs: It allows our people to get rewarded for sharing knowledge. And it allows us to develop our own platform, to learn about blockchain development, its many pitfalls (a very immature technology) and of course security. The Torbuck will be a tool as well as a playground for our techies. Our ethical hacking team can’t wait to launch their attacks!
What’s in the future? If Torbuck is successful, we can expand its use. We could give our clients Torbucks as part of a loyalty program to spend on our services. It could become an integral part of the internal reward system. But first and foremost, it is a way to learn and share knowledge and not just about blockchain.