TOKEN ECONOMY

The first edition was published in June 2019 under the title “Token Economy: How Blockchain & Smart Contracts revolutionize the Economy” and had two amended editions. A second revised edition with four additional chapters was published in June 2020 with a modified subtitle “Token Economy: How the Web3 reinvents the Internet.” This third edition has expanded in scope and depth compared to previous editions and is being published as three separate books that constitute the Token Economy Series.

Shermin Voshmgir

For all those who want to read a primer to Web3 infrastructure & applications, the second edition is still available for sale, since it contains chapters that will be updated it the upcoming book “Web3 Infrastructure” of the third edition. Once all three volumes of the third edition have been released, the second edition will not be available for sale anymore. As for now, the second edition is also available in several languages:

The book is a primer to the Web3 and describes how tokens are the main application of this new generation Internet. It starts out by explaining the fundamental building blocks of the Web3 to a non-tech audience and describes why blockchain networks & other distributed ledgers as the backbone of the Web3. The books maps the socioeconomic implications of Web3 applications such as smart contracts, DAOs and tokens to the concepts of money, economics, governance and decentralized finance (DeFi). The basic structure of this second edition (published in June 2020) is the same as the first edition (published in June 2019) 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” (more on how second edition differs from the first edition in this blog post.) 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, fractional ownership tokens (art & real estate), purpose driven tokens, social media tokens (Steemit, Hive and Reddit), Token Curated Registries (TCRs), BAT (Basic Attention Token), privacy tokens, and stable tokens are explored, including the role of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) and Facebook’s Libra. The book builds on the legacy of our work at BlockchainHub Berlin from 2015 to 2017 where we published the first educational posts on this matter that culminated on the Blockchain Handbook which was published in 2017 for free that has had over 100.000 downloads. Continuing the open source legacy of the content, the English edition of Token Economy was released on Github in 2020 under a non commercial creative commons licence, and was subsequently translated into several languages. 10 months after the book was released for free on Github, it was been translated by a group of volunteers into 9 different languages 6 of which are complete (Portuguese, Brazilian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Farsi) and 3 partial translations (Chinese, Japanese, French). The English and German version were previously published by the author. Some of the translations (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Brazilian) have also been commercially released as print and ebook versions in consultation with the translation teams, and the royalties have been split between the translators and the author.

Crypto Asset Conference, March 2020, Frankfurt NYC Token Meetup, Dec 16 2019, New York International Monetary Fund, Dec 12 2019, Washington Soho House, Nov 11 2019, Berlin Soho House Nov 6 2019, Amsterdam The Next Web: Hard Fork Summit, Oct 17 2019, Amsterdam MIT Media Lab, Oct 6 2019, Cambridge Kunsthalle, Sept 20 2019, Vienna Siliconalps, Sept 17 2019, Graz Techfest, Sept 5 2019, Copenhagen TEGG – Berlin Blockchain Week, Aug 23 2019, Berlin 1E9 Conference, Jul 12 2019, Munich