In this book, leading practitioners and academics provide comprehensive coverage and novel insights into blockchains and the token economy. Real world case studies from a wide range of industries provide practical examples of blockchain-based tokens for real estate, logistics, insurance, recruitment, collectibles, reservations, metaverses, and more. The cases show how tokens provide an innovative way to create and transfer value without relying on traditional intermediaries. Readers will better understand the business and social benefits of tokenization, but also its challenges. Chapter 3 and Chapter 8 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Blockchains & smart contracts have made it easy for anyone to create a token with just a few lines of code. The book gives an intro to tokens and the underlying technology, the socio-economic implications, and selected use cases. It is written for a general audience, features many graphics, and could be a useful textbook for university students.

This is the second edition of the book Token Economy originally published in June 2019. The basic structure of this second edition is the same as the first edition, with slightly updated content of existing chapters and four additional chapters: "User-Centric Identities," "Privacy Tokens," "Lending Tokens," and How to Design a Token System and more focus on the Web3. //Part one outlines the fundamental building blocks of the Web3, including the role of cryptography and user-centric digital identities. Part two explains Web3 applications like smart contracts, DAOs & tokens. The last two parts of the book focus on tokens as the atomic unit of the Web3, explaining the properties and functions of money and outlining the emerging field of decentralized finance (DeFi) that might power a potential future digital barter economy. Use cases such as asset tokens, purpose driven tokens, BAT (Basic Attention Token), social media tokens (Steemit, Hive and Reddit), privacy tokens, and stable tokens are explored, including the role of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) and Facebook's Libra.//Tokens - often referred to as cryptocurrencies - can represent anything from an asset to an access right, such as gold, diamonds, a fraction of a Picasso painting or an entry ticket to a concert. Tokens could also be used to reward social media contributions, incentivize the reduction of CO2 emissions, or even ones attention for watching an ad. While it has become easy to create a token, which is collectively managed by a public Web3 infrastructure like a blockchain network, the understanding of how to apply these tokens is still vague. This book attempts to summarize existing knowledge about blockchain networks and other distributed ledgers as the backbone of the Web3, and contextualize the socio-economic implications of the Web3 applications such as smart contracts, tokens, and DAOs to the concepts of money, economics, governance and decentralized finance (DeFi).//The industry keeps referring to “Blockchain” as different from “Bitcoin,” creating an artificial divide that is often misleading. There seems to be too little understanding about the fact that Bitcoin is a blockchain network, which is (a) globally managed by people who mostly do not know each other, and (b) enabled by the consensus protocol that (c) incentivizes all network actors for their contributions with a native token. The governance rules are tied to the minting of a native blockchain token. The Bitcoin token can, therefore, be seen as the currency of a distributed Internet tribe, called the Bitcoin network, where network actors are rewarded with Bitcoins, just as the Ether is the currency of the distributed Internet tribe Ethereum network, or Sia is the native currency of the Sia network. The Bitcoin network and other distributed ledgers all represent a collectively maintained public infrastructure and are the backbone of the next generation Internet, what the crypto community refers to as the Web3.

In late 2008, under the long shadow cast by the most severe economic crisis in generations, a revolutionary new form of currency was quietly being shaped. At the time no one could have predicted that an obscure form of electronic money would in less than a decade prove to be the most important financial innovation of the 21st century—a tool that would spark an entire new economic institution: crypto economy. That once-obscure money was known as Bitcoin, and today it is the highest valued digital coin. And though consumers continue to scramble to cash in on the trending currency, the technology behind Bitcoin known as Blockchain, which allows the currency to bought and sold without regulation by a government, remains a mystery to the public. In Crypto Economy, Aries Wanlin Wang provides the definitive blueprint for understanding how Bitcoin, Blockchain, and other digital technologies are disrupting traditional financial institutions and forever changing the world of commerce.

Explore the differences between ICOs, cryptocurrencies, and tokens (offerings), enabling the reader to understand the ICO landscape, how millions were raised in minutes, and where the future of the tokenized economy is heading. Take a real-time journey, cutting through the myths, understanding token choices available to everyone. Key FeaturesInterviews with key figures in TokenomicsUnbiased evaluation and comparison of the different offeringsConceptual analysis of the market’s reactionLeague table showing current exposureAn account of the theoretical and current legal foundations of alt coins and tokensA complete introduction to the phases of an initial coin offeringBook Description Tokenomics is the economy of this new world. This is a no-holds-barred, in-depth exploration of the way in which we can participate in the blockchain economy. The reader will learn the basics of bitcoin, blockchains, and tokenomics; what the very first ICO was; and how over a period of 5 years, various projects managed to raise the enormous sums of money they did. The book then provides insights from ICO experts and looks at what the future holds. By comparing the past, current, and future of this technology, the book will inform anyone, whatever motivates their interest. The crypto shift of blockchains, ICOs, and tokens is much more than just buying bitcoins, creating tokens, or raising millions in a minute in an ICO. It is a new paradigm shift from centralized to decentralized, from closed to open, and from opaqueness to transparency. ICOs and the creation of tokens during the craze of 2017 needed a lot of preparation, an understanding of cryptocurrencies and of emerging legal frameworks, but this has spurred a new movement to tokenize the world. The author gives an unbiased, authoritative picture of the current playing field, exploring the token opportunities and provides a unique insight into the developing world of this tokenized economy. This book will nourish hungry minds wanting to grow their knowledge in this fascinating area. What you will learnThe background of ICOs and how they came to beThe difference between a coin and a token, a utility and a security, and all the other acronyms you’re likely to ever encounterHow these ICOs raised enormous sums of moneyTokenomics: structuring the token with creativityWhy it’s important to play nicely with the regulatorsA sneak peak into the future of ICOs from leaders in the industryWho this book is for With the media hype about bitcoin, this book appeals to anyone, from those with a general interest in anything crypto, or those with some knowledge of the nuances between cryptocurrency, ICOs, IPOs and the Token economy.

Blockchains are the distributed ledger technology that powers Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But blockchains can be used for more than the transfer of tokens – they are a significant new economic infrastructure. This book offers the first scholarly analysis of the economic nature of blockchains and the shape of the blockchain economy. By applying the institutional economics of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, this book shows how blockchains are poised to reshape the nature of firms, governments, markets, and civil society.

This third edition of Token Economy is published as a series of three books: “Money, NFTs & DeFi,” “DAOs & Purpose-Driven Tokens,” and “Web3 Infrastructure.” The purpose of this book – DAOs & Purpose-Driven Tokens – is to explain the institutional impact of blockchain networks and tokenization – both from a theoretical and a practical perspective – with the goal of providing a common understanding of the concept and practice of Web3-based institutions. The history of money and finance, and the impact of Web3 and tokenization on money, real-world assets and financial markets are discussed in the book “Money, NFTs & DeFi.” The technical and political aspects of blockchain networks and core Web3 infrastructure will be discussed in the book “Web3 Infrastructure.” The book critically reflects the concept of DAOs, starting with its first real-world example – the Bitcoin network – and how the groundbreaking cryptoeconomic mechanism behind Proof-of-Work paved the way for a novel type of organization that is steered by purpose-driven tokens and relies on “trust by math” rather than “trust by legal contract.” The first two chapters of this book will explain the concept of Web3-based decentralized organizations – its origins and impact from various perspectives: history, cybernetics, organizational science, political science, economics and complex systems. Since there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the design of DAOs, theory alone will not do justice to the complex nature of this topic. Any meaningful organizational design, including that of the purpose-driven tokens which steer Web3-based institutions, will always depend on the purpose and political principles of said organization/network/Internet community/cooperative. To provide a more tangible approach to the best practices and pitfalls of DAOs, a range of DAO use cases will be analyzed based on a DAO design thinking framework, which was developed specifically for this book. Best practices for designing DAOs and the purpose-driven tokens that steer them are still underdeveloped. Many early use cases lack a sustainable token design to achieve their self-declared purpose, which is why a wide range of purposes were selected to display different purposes a DAO can achieve or aim to achieve, even though some of the use cases selected have considerable design flaws. While all use cases have compelling value propositions, and in some cases even considerable traction, they sometimes display unintended design flaws that contradict the purpose and political principles upon which they were designed. The use cases selected are: P2P money & payment network (Bitcoin), P2P stable token (DAI & MarkerDAO), P2P social networks such as Steemit.com or friends.tech, P2P Telco Network (Helium), P2P Data Exchange (Ocean Protocol), and biodiversity tokens (Rebalance Earth). Except for Rebalance Earth, all use cases have a long track record of protocol evolution. They provide historical data to correlate token design choices to their effects, i.e. power structures that emerged over time, and the long-term success of the protocol/network/organization in question. The analysis of the use cases in the second part of the book is mostly qualitative. Additional quantitative analysis could be carried out as well, but that is not the purpose of this book. Quantitative analysis only makes sense once one understands what needs to be analyzed, and in which context the data should be interpreted. A metric such as a “market cap” or “gross network value” of a token is not significant on its own, if one does not first consider the purpose of the token design, the industry in which the DAO operates, the stakeholder structure, and many other qualitative aspects relevant to different types of DAOs.