THE REPLY OF THIS CALL CAN BE FOUND HERE ON MEDIUM
We’re having a Cambrian Explosion in crypto. Just as the Cambrian period enabled the creation of a multitude of new life forms, the emergence of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralization is opening up a wide range of previously unavailable markets as well as new ways to compete against entrenched incumbents. Sure, many of the new crypto entities coming in to being today will die out, but many of the ones that survive will be epic.
I believe that one of the most under-appreciated factors that will determine success and failure of many of these entities is Token Economics. As defined by William Mougayar, a token is:
A unit of value that an organization creates to self-govern its business model, and empower its users to interact with its products, while facilitating the distribution and sharing of rewards and benefits to all of its stakeholders.
If that sounds complicated, it’s because it is complicated. William wrote a great post on token economics that is a terrific primer for this call. In the post he proposes a set of 20 questions every ICO-based organization should ask itself, including:
- Is the token tied to a product usage, i.e. does it give the user exclusive access to it, or provide interaction rights to the product?
- Does the token grant a governance action, like voting on a consensus related or other decision-making factor?
- Does the token enable the user to contribute to a value-adding action for the network or market that is being built?
- Does the token grant the user a value based on sharing or disclosing some data about them (passive work)?
- Is the token required to run a smart contract or to fund an oracle? (an oracle is a source of information that other a smart contract can use)
Token Economics is dense. Token economics is in it’s infancy. At the moment, one the ways I’m thinking about token economics is:
An Actual Original Thought of Mine
I’m confident that in the near future some of the smartest college students in the world will be graduating from major universities with degrees in Token Economics. It’s a thing. So we’re hosting a conference call on the topic.
On this call, we’re asking three leading Token Economics experts to share their knowledge about how to design the optimal token economy. What are the factors to consider? What tradeoffs do you have to make? Is it better to have just one token, or multiple tokens? How does governance co-exist with token economics? What game theory is relevant?
Whether you’re a crypto investor, your thinking about doing an ICO, or you just want to get smarter on the crypto ecosystem, I think a lot of what will be discussed on this call will blow your mind (at least that’s my hope).
We’re excited to have four experts who have looked at Token Economics from different perspectives. Each will bring their real world experience, as well as some theory in terms of how to design the best token economy. After the three experts are done with their formal comments, we’ll have plenty of time remaining for questions from the audience.
Click here to register for the call at GoToWebinar
Our four esteemed speakers are:
Tom Bollich — Lead Architect of MAD Network, a decentralized ad tech ecosystem dis-intermediating programmatic advertising. Tom was previously a founding team member at Zynga where he helped create the token economies for games like Mafia Wars before he started advising Fortune 500 companies on “gamification”.
Mark Smargon — Co-Founder & VP of Blockchain at Colu, which uses blockchain technology to create local currencies that drive more people to shop local, eat local, and buy local, strengthening the local economy, and keeping the control of money in everyone’s hands. Colu is currently scaling local currencies in London, Tel Aviv, Liverpool and Haifa. Mark was previously a Co-Founder of Bitgo, a Bitcoin payment provider in Israel.
Jake Brukhman — Co-Founder and Managing Partner of CoinFund, a blockchain technology research company, advisory team, and proprietary cryptoasset investment vehicle. CoinFund helps companies in the blockchain space optimize how blockchain-based economics can be used for a variety of applications across industries. Prior to CoinFund Jake worked at Triton Research and Amazon (as a Technical Product Lead).
Ben Perper — Director of Product at YouNow/PROPS, a decentralized many-to-many video provider**.** Ben was previously a Senior Product Manager at Zynga, launching new titles, and running game operations reaching hundreds of millions of users. While at Zynga, Ben honed his skills in analyzing user behavior, optimizing virtual economies, and prioritizing product roadmaps in order to hit aggressive KPIs.
Click here to register for the call at GoToWebinar
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