Token Economy: How Blockchains and Smart Contracts Revolutionize the Economy

by Shermin Voshmgir

The book caters to an interdisciplinary audience, academics & practitioners alike, and is also an ideal primer to the technology and token use-cases, and could also serve as a textbook for students. It is blockchain/DLT agnostic and covers the technology basics from a token perspective. The book introduces a token taxonomy from an economic and governance perspective and deep-dives into selected use cases (stable tokens, asset tokens, social media tokens (Steemit), attention tokens (BAT), token curated registries (TCRs), purpose-driven tokens like CO2 tokens), and other aspects like token sales, token exchanges and atomic swaps. Inside the Blockchains & smart contracts have made it easy for anyone to create a token with just a few lines of code. They can represent anything from an asset to an access right, like 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 infrastructure like a blockchain, the understanding of how to apply these tokens is still vague. The book refers to tokens, instead of cryptocurrencies, and explains why the term "token" is the more accurate term, as many of the tokens have never been designed with the purpose to represent a currency. However, since tokens do have similarities to fiat currencies, the role of money as a medium of exchange is analyzed at length in this book. This book gives an overview of the mechanisms and state of blockchain, the socio-economic implications of tokens, and deep dives into selected tokens use Basic Attention Token, Steemit, Token Curated Registries, Purpose Driven Tokens, Stable Tokens, Asset Tokens, Fractional Ownership Tokens, Libra & Calibra (Facebook), and many more.

Genres: Business

314 pages, paperback

Published June 27, 2019

About the author

Shermin is the author of the best selling book Token Economy, that was released in its third edition in 2025 and has helped thousands of people understand the world or Web3 & tokenization. She is also the founder of Token Kitchen. In the past she started BlockchainHub Berlin, was the director of the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics which I also co-founded, and she was a curator of the TheDAO. In her books, she tries to make technology accessible to a non-tech audience so that all those who use technology can also take part in the decision-making process of co-governing the technology they use. As an Austrian, with Iranian roots, she now lives in Portugal where she work on the intersection of technology, agriculture, art & social science.

Reviews

[Yvo Hunink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thorough overview of the state of tokens. Many ideas popped up in my head during the reading of this book. It also did make me realise more and more how hard it is to design tokens and that in many situations it might just be easier to stay away from is. Nevertheless, if designed properly, and with the right governance protocols to incorporate changes in human behaviour, we might see very nice tokenized value incentive systems coming up. I myself would like to find one for participation with citizens.

Also this book gave me an idea for a fictional story on a completely tokenized world, where values like freedom, or regenerativity are tokenized, but create immense side effects that threaten society itself. Plot needs some work ;)

[Pooja Rao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great introduction to token economics and Web3. Reads like a textbook (this is not a criticism). Very well-researched and referenced, the author is careful to be neutral, always pointing out both positives and negatives of all the protocols and experiments she described. The token engineering section would benefit from a few more examples of successes and failures.

[Agustín · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good starter manual to tokens on blockchain and their use cases, utility values and mechanisms. It'a great summary if you are new to the topic. It comes with a great amount of references to go deeper with your learning.

[Dinesh Mandade]

Good book

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an industry researcher, this is the most comprehensive introduction to the space out there, free of any sort of singular project bias. Nothing is only Bitcoin slanted or Altcoin slanted, but presented from the unbiased view of a knowledgeable researcher. The best part is I believe this book is easily understandable for a wide audience, at least from the general business world.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bestes Buch zu DLTs und den Möglichkeiten, die diese Technologien eröffnen.