ASTRATUM invited to “The Token Economy: the Rise of Tokens and Protocols.” Berlin, Oct’17
- Event Report: The Token Economy: the Rise of Tokens and Protocols
Note: Thank you, BTC-Echo as leading German Cryptomagazine to cover again our event here (German). Thank you, Watch our recordings, which were livestreamed with 360 degree cameras on YouTube. You can find the slides of the presenters here. Subscribe to our newsletter on our homepage to stay up2date.
ASTRATUM’s event series at the ASTRATUM Garage @ IKONIC is increasingly becoming a Berlin’s focal point for people interested in blockchain, tokens and all the shebang.
On 8th of November, Astratum hosted a blockchain event around the Token Economy: an evening around the tokens, protocols and their regulations — as well as exciting new blockchain projects in robot economy and aerial mobility, real estate and a new geo-spacial protocol.
The Token Economy is a term that describes the economic ecosystem around tokens, which are usually generated via an ICO or token sale, where Open Source projects can raise an early-stage funding in much more efficient ways than via venture capital. Conversely, the Token Economy also includes people investing in those projects early on. The laws that govern the token creation, their circulation and the rules of the game together with token themselves and agents using these comprise together the Token Economy as we know it.
The tokens purchased in an ICO can usually be traded on different exchanges. However, the really interesting thing about the token economy is that these tokens provide additional features: they can help the owner to co-decide on the funds they have raised, they can be linked to important functions of the planned project or they can also be paid regularly to the token holder to lead. All of this can be implemented in the token.
ASTRATUM — Cryptocurrencies Are the New Pension
Astratum’s Sven Laepple first outlined the development of the Token Economy by going as far back as the ’68 movement, through the Phreakers and Cypherpunks, through Open Source and Occupy movements, to Bitcoin and Ethereum. The introduction of the ERC20 token on the Ethereum Protocol, while not claiming the invention of an ICOs, had a lasting impact on them.
Due to the impact of the Token Economy, Sven sees a disruption of the financial system despite all the difficulties, concerns and scams in the ICO ecosystem. That’s what the New York Times said:
“Our grandparents had a pension plans, this generation has cryptocurrencies.”
In addition to this classification of the Token Economy, Sven became more specific and introduced the different types of tokens: In addition to the classic cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, a protocol like Ethereum is enabling a wide range of so-called utility tokens, which can be much more than a payment system. Finally, tokenized securities were mentioned, tokens that give investors shares/equity in a project.
Businesses and projects planning to finance through an ICO are encouraged to think about three issues:
· What is the function of the token?
· How does the token support the respective business model?
· What is the financial relationship between business model and token?
Conversely, investors should do their due diligence before participating in an ICO:
· Does the technology behind it make sense?
· What kind of developers are behind this?
· What can one say about the economy behind it? How high is the premining?
· How is governance regulated in the project?
Sven concluded his presentation with some examples of interesting new projects within the Token Economy, namely ERC725, Orchid, Ocean, Polkadot, and thus led to the next lecture.
Aira — Drones and machines, who speak and transact with each other.
Sergey Lonshakov shared his vision behind Aira. Aira with their experts, also from the prestigious ITMO, is a global leader in the nascent field of the distributed aerial and robotics infrastructure: Aira aims to create a financial system for robots. Aira makes it possible to connect a variety of different robots to a marketplace for robots’ capabilities , using Ethereum for the direct sale of sensor’s data, ordering of logistics services, and organization ordering of personalized products at fully automated enterprises.
A video showed autonomous drones, controlled by an Ethereum smart contact. This approach opens up new opportunities in inter-machine communication and the programmable economy, where machines can seamless interact with each other. Smart Contracts can then be used, for example, to provide drones on demand, or to decentralize Urban Traffic Management.
Sergey and Sven share a common vision of the future, where the sky will be the space for a new urban infrastructure. This lead them to create together with other international visionary engineers from the University of Singapore and the reknown ITMO University in St Petersburg the creation of the international Distributed Sky Alliance.
Currently, Distributed Sky is exploring various opportunities to demonstrate with industry partners proof of concepts of a resilient and efficient, self-organizing and self-governing solution for aerial traffic.
Sven is looking for industry partners, who are interested in exploring New Mobility solutions, where smart contracts power decentralized marketplaces for allocation of flight routes in air corridors. Airspace gets monetized and this enables autonomous vehicles to prioritize their demand via a bidding system.
Later, Sergey presented a truly daring vision to use smart cities and smart companies as sensors and actuators to fulfill the Paris Agreement. With the help of a global network of measuring points, emissions from factories and cities should be continuously adjusted so that mean global warming is controlled below 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. Climate Engineering in the truest sense of the word.
DWF — The Legal Implications of Token Sales.
In this panel discussion, lawyers from DWF, an international law firm, discussed the legal aspects of tokens and ICOs.
With representatives from Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain, this panel provided a good overview of the regulatory situation regarding ICOs and token sales across Europe. It seams that the British lawmaker have the most relaxed attitude, while Germany is sticking to correctness as always, regulation is the most scrupulous.
Nina Siedler, who is with Sven Laepple and other blockchain experts a founding member of the German Blockchain Association, initially pointed to the different characteristics of tokens, and made a legal distinction between cryptocurrencies, utility token, and tokenized securities. A cryptocurrency can act as a medium of exchange, be an investment or a clearing unit. Utility tokens may take a form of licenses or coupons, while tokenized securities are not different from traditional securities such as stocks.
The token class and its use-case has different legal implications. Regulation and restriction applicable to tokenized security do not necessarily apply to a utility token. The authorities often use the so-called “duck test”: what looks like a duck, sounds and moves is de jure a duck and must meet the same legal requirements as any duck.
For those interested in ICOs, it was pointed out that BaFin (German Financial Regulation) is working on a document regarding the regulation of Token Securities. There even might be a Global Mutual Statement on this matter coming from Oslo.
In its publication, BaFin points out that the organizers of a token sales must adhere to certain requirements. These are regulated in Germany by the Investment Act and the Capital Investment Code.
Many have taken the BaFin statement with skepticism. People are worried that the German administrative apparatus will hinder innovation again through prohibitions and regulations. While these concerns are understandable, BaFin’s interest should not be ignored: the ICO market is a high-risk market, in which people have not only burned their fingers, but been financially harmed by scammers. Regulation is also in itself an implicit recognition: if a tokenized security is taken as seriously as traditional security, it is a strong signal for the Token Economy.
FOAM — location-specific tokens and smart contracts.
After a networking break with delicious beer from the Black Forest, sparkling cider from Berlin and tasty quiches from Bona Collective, the quests returned to their seats to learn about FOAM from New York, the first project addressing geospatial data and location on the blockchain.
Originally, FOAM started as a real estate dApp, but realized the benefit of a geospatial protocol. FOAM created a location protocol that enables location-specific smart contracts by combining geohashs with an Ethereum address. This adds a spatial dimension to the blockchain, enabling location-specific tokens and proof-of-location.
There is a huge number of devices nowadays and an increasing demand for verified location data. This is for example driven by the IOT, Smart Cities and the New Mobility industry. Now, this new protocol enables a large number of devices to verify each other’s location. FOAM matches these by creating a marketplace for location validations and is setting up economic incentives to do so using an own token.
FOAM Spatial Index is an application similar to Etherscan, but it plots out the smart contracts on the map. Spatial Index is Open Source, accessible through Metamask and will soon be ready for the public to play around with.
By combining smart contracts, tokens and spatial index, FOAM is creating an Open Source standard for locations on Ethereum. Tokens act as a way to fund and incentivize the building of the ecosystem. The company positions itself as a protocol layer and an interoperable location standard for various dApps. One can stake a certain amount of tokens and other actors and dApps providing an incentivation to contribute to the system by validating each other’s location.
Potential applications are vast: Drones, IoT, Data markets, Real Estate, Supply Chain, VR/AR and many others.
FOAM is currently running first trials and has set up first validators in its office in New York and is currently exploring expanding its testing to Berlin. ASTRATUM is very excited to see how the project is advancing and is exploring prospects of collaboration.
REIDAO: Vacation Home Co-ownership on the Blockchain.
The last presentation of this interesting evening was the project Crowdvilla from REIDAO , originating from Singapore. Aim of the project is to create a digital representation of real estate on Ethereum by way of programmable crypto-tokens. Other blockchain-based services will be able to utilize the property token for their applications.
CrowdVilla is the first project to bring forward tokenized shared ownership of holiday properties into real-world scenario — with actual utility and benefits for the token holders.
The project introduces an ecosystem of two tokens, one asset-backed, CRV, and a utility one– CRP. The asset-backed tokens are generating burnable utility tokens over time. CRV token is backed by the CrowdVilla real estate assets and represents a co-ownership of real estate. CRP is a spendable token and is used for CrowdVilla vacation property rentals and is anchored to the time value of the property.
Thanks to the great audience, who was engaged and raised good questions. Thanks to the great teams, and speakers and all others, who supported us with lots of wowz for this event.
Thanks to the friendly crew at the bar for the tasty quiches and fresh drinks.
Yes, it was a great evening. Again. We had fun, despite being long. It was informative and inspiring and yes, we will do it again. 2018.
Cu in Berlin.
ASTRATUM team
Just drop us an email at sayhello@astratum.com, if you want to get in touch with us, or if you’re interested to present your blockchain project at our next event. Or just follow us on Twitter Astratum.
2. ASTRATUM Update — November
Apart from conducting The Token Economy event in the beginning of the month, ASTRATUM went to South Korea’s capital Seoul. Korea is domicile of the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume Bithumb and accounts for up to 40% of global ETH, BTC and BCH trading volumes.
Apart from being the largest crypto trading market worldwide, Korea is making a lot of progress on the regulatory front. We have attended and co-organized three meetups: CoinoneBlocks here, Bitcoin Center Korea here and the Kangnam Crypto Club here. Remember “Gangnam Style”? Yep, that’s here. A detailed report from the crypto-Seoul is coming soon, so stay tuned!
Our CEO Sven participated at a CXO roundtable in Munich with professors of the Technical University Munich, board members of large corporations and entrepreneurs to discuss the state of blockchain and how blockchain, tokens and smart contracts may disrupt traditional business models and the economy and how best to deal with this challenge.
Also thanks to our friends Julian and Felix, who organized a nice workshop to explore together with them and a bunch of blockchain lawyers, engineers, investors and corporates various options how to structure a crypto-fund.
Register NOW for the FOAM Workshop in January 2018
Due to the high interest in this new geospatial protocol, which Arthur presented at our last event, we deciced to organize together with our friends from FOAM in January a workshop in order to explore, together with you, the potential use cases of their geospatial protocol.
Whatever your professional background and whether from mobile, IoT, law, mobility, insurance, real estate, advertising, media, city adminstration, and more. The FOAM protocol extends with their“Proof-of-Location” the capabilities of the Ethereum blockchain.
Participation are limited to ensure high productivity. Just contact us via sayhello@astratum.com, if you’re interested in participating and developing with us the understanding on the vertical implications of this new location protocol. Blockchain gets real.
—
ASTRATUM is a blockchain venture studio, developing blockchain strategies, solutions and ventures. For example, we developed a next generation mobility solution with blockchain, smart contracts and IoT devices for a global leader in the automotive space, detailed a blockchain strategy for one of the world’s largest business network operators, assisted a leading European venture capitalist with his large investment in the leading decentralized crypto exchange and introduced with our dine&talk events cryptocurrencies and blockchain to top executives from leading German financial services. Further, we are also involved in the tokenization of assets, ranging from the token design, whitepapers, due dilligences, audits, token sales, advise on the right structures, technical implementation, cryptotrading strategies and additional services around the monetization and tokenization of digital and physical assets. Our international team rely on experts with outstanding professional experience and the necessary skillset to address the interdisciplinary challenges, coming with the cryptoeconomy. We believe that decentralized tech like blockchain is a game changer, and that a blue ocean strategy is the best approach to develop meaningful innovation.
Besides corporate innovation in e.g. mobility, fintech 2.0 and real estate, we develop together with partners our own ventures. One of them, project Vaagnar, is a distributed Unmanned Aerial Traffic Management system. It is based on the research done by our founder around blockchain and drones and marketplaces for the Internet of Autonomous Things. Another one is in real estate, addressing the global nomadic lifestyle and the desire for authentic moments in life. For our ventures, we are collaborating with investors and team up with exceptional individuals or teams.
We are proud to be founding member of the Blockchain Association Germany (Bundesverband Blockchain) and of the Distributed Sky Alliance.
