cadCAD came out of a real need at BlockScience, a complex systems engineering, R&D, and analytics firm to enable faster system iteration cycles by orders of magnitude.

Each time additional computational experiments were added to system design projects, the significant manual reconfiguration was adding weeks of delay to projects’ critical path. Professional engineering on blockchain-enabled networks would be practically infeasible without the right computer-aided design (CAD) tools, and there was no software to support rigorous engineering of complex systems from the ground up — from the verification and validation of simple systems (subsystems/components) with explicit assumptions up to more complex, stochastic, dynamically networked systems with emergent properties in line with specified requirements. However, this full range of capabilities is necessary for proper system engineering, especially when adversarial behavior is commonplace.  

To fill this critical gap in open-source data science, cadCAD was conceived as an open-source and business-oriented equivalent to MATLAB (a closed-source scientific programming environment) with specialized toolboxes for decision systems design, system identification, and automation under uncertainty. It was built with two major design requirements serving as pillars of the value proposition:

- Flexibility to describe complex systems at any level of abstraction
- Continuous simulation and improvement with real-world feedback enabled by a seamless integration with the data science computing stack

Examples of work done with Gitcoin:
https://www.gitcoin.co/blog/towards-computer-aided-governance-of-gitcoin-grants

https://github.com/gitcoinco/gitcoin_cadcad_model

https://www.gitcoin.co/blog/how-to-attack-and-defend-quadratic-funding