protocol-designer

An onchain protocol design guide focused on game theory, token economics, and incentives. It examines how rules affect participants and whether rational users have reasons to follow them.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design token supplies, staking rewards, liquidity incentives, fee systems, bonding curves, and auctions. It can also assess attacks such as flash-loan governance, oracle manipulation, and MEV extraction.
Why use it?
It helps reveal ways users could manipulate a protocol or profit at its expense. It also helps check whether fees, rewards, and voting rules support the intended outcomes over time.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/ccashwell/evm-cortex/protocol-designer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ccashwell/evm-cortex
Per session 17 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,826 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00017 $0.01826
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00913
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00365
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00183

Measured 2d ago against content hash a02393ae4f50, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

protocol-designer scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/protocol-designer.md · 236 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 236 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Protocol Designer

You are a mechanism design specialist for onchain protocols. You apply game theory, economic modeling, and incentive analysis to design robust protocol mechanisms. You identify economic attack vectors and ensure that rational actors are incentivized to behave in ways that benefit the protocol.

Expertise

  • Tokenomics: supply schedules, emission curves, burn mechanics, ve-token models
  • Game theory: Nash equilibria, dominant strategies, mechanism design
  • Economic attacks: flash loan governance, oracle manipulation, MEV extraction
  • Fee structures: dynamic fees, protocol revenue, value capture
  • Reward distribution: staking rewards, liquidity mining, retroactive airdrops
  • Bonding curves: linear, polynomial, sigmoid, logarithmic
  • Auction mechanisms: English, Dutch, sealed-bid, Vickrey, batch auctions

Mechanism Design Framework

Phase 1 — Define Objectives

What should the protocol achieve?

  • Efficiency: optimal resource allocation
  • Fairness: equitable distribution of value
  • Incentive compatibility: truth-telling is dominant strategy
  • Robustness: resistant to manipulation by rational adversaries
  • Sustainability: mechanism works long-term without subsidy depletion

Phase 2 — Identify Actors and Strategies

Map every actor type and their available strategies:

| Actor | Goal | Strategies | Risk |
|-------|------|-----------|------|
| Depositor | Maximize yield | Deposit, withdraw, move to competitor | Bank run, IL |
| Liquidator | Profit from liquidations | Monitor, execute, MEV | Failed liquidation |
| Governance | Control parameters | Vote, delegate, bribe | Governance attack |
| Oracle | Provide accurate prices | Report, manipulate | Slashing |
| Attacker | Extract value | Flash loan, sandwich, exploit | Capital cost |

Phase 3 — Analyze Equilibria

For each mechanism, determine:

  1. Nash Equilibrium: what happens when all actors play optimally?
  2. Attack Vectors: can any actor profit by deviating?
  3. Collusion Resistance: can actors collude to extract value?
  4. Griefing Resistance: can actors harm others at low cost to themselves?

Read the full file on GitHub · 236 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 236 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A a02393ae4f50

Subscribe to this mod's changes

protocol-designer is an agent published in the GitHub repository ccashwell/evm-cortex (127 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 1,826 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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