The Control - Issue #21

There was another $220M+ raised in token sales in the past two weeks. The ICO craze does not appear to be slowing down yet, but my belief is that it is only a matter of time before it does. I don't think slapping a token on a centralized business model is very compelling for users long-term. 

Creating new types of decentralized organizations is compelling for users though, and I believe this trend is just getting started. Enabling user-owned decentralized organizations is really what token models are all about. 

I wrote about some of the major issues token-based projects face from a cryptoeconomic perspective this week: Antifragile Cryptoeconomic Systems

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Required reading this week

Token Summit Panel on Attention Tokens — www.youtube.com

We released the rest of the Token Summit videos last week. This was a fun chat on attention tokens with a panel that included Brendan Eich from Brave, wh launched the Basic Attention Token (BAT) a few weeks later.

Why Own Bitcoin — blog.xapo.com

Wences Casares lays out a concise argument for why everyone in the world should allocate 1% of their net worth to Bitcoin.

Change the Incentives, Change the World

Incentives are the lowest common denomination that aligns groups of people and this is simple truth explains the power of token models. Vitalik explains that nicely in this piece. 

Bancor Is Flawed — hackingdistributed.com

Bancor just raised $144M in the biggest ICO in history. Emin describes why their approach is flawed.

Analyzing Token Sale Models — vitalik.ca

There have been many different approaches to token sales to date, and there's no clear optimal approach. Vitalik provides a great overview on what we've seen in the space to date.