A Token Curated Registry for Occupational Licensing

Token Curated Registries are increasingly propositioned to have a plurality of use-cases. In this post, I outline an application where token curated registries are absolutely necessary. A decentralized, censorship resistant platform that requires licensed or credentialed members.

I invested in bitcoin five years ago because I thought there was tremendous value in the world’s first decentralized, censorship resistant currency. When I invested in Ethereum a couple of years later, I believed there was value in a protocol that allowed the development of censorship resistant, decentralized applications. Today, I still hold both Bitcoin and Ethereum for that same fundamental reason — censorship resistance.

The ICO craze from 2017 lost sight of this. The vast majority of ICOs paid little homage to censorship resistance when they splashed the word “decentralization” across websites and white papers. It wasn’t until late 2017 that more sophisticated investors began to ask the obvious question, Why do you need a blockchain? I have participated in many calls with blockchain startups where CEOs struggled with that question. This was not particularly surprising as many of them just learned about cryptoassets a few months earlier and had never personally invested in digital assets. Rather, simply stated, crypto was a hot new way to raise money.

The result of this period of euphoria was blind investments in “payment tokens” whereby the token was merely an application specific medium-of-exchange. Most ICOs in 2017 and early 2018 sold payment tokens. Now, after further deliberation, it is becoming apparent that payment tokens capture very little value — surely not the billions of dollars raised in ICOs over the past year.

Today, the vast majority of these tokens are down over 90% from their all time high prices. With liquidity on exchanges evaporating by the day, many investors cannot exit their positions and have effectively lost 100% of their investment. Furthermore, the chances of price recovery seem bleak since the growing consensus is that payment tokens approach a value of zero with increasing token velocity.

With payment tokens now falling from favor, many blockchain enthusiasts are left with an ever dwindling number of use cases for ERC20 tokens.

While still a nascent concept, Token Curated Registries (TCRs) are expediently becoming a hot topic as a great use case for the blockchain. If traction continues to grow at this rate, it is possible that TCRs may become a massive wave in the next rally of blockchain fundraising and development. This may be surprising since the idea was only first conceptualized less than a year ago in Mike Goldin’s seminal blog post, Token-Curated Registries 1.0.

Since then there has been a growing archive of articles on the subject matter. Nevertheless, this archive can still be digested in hours, and to my knowledge, there is no article that outlines a use case where TCRs are absolutely necessary. Prior to burying our heads and resources in the development of TCRs, it is imperative that we take a step back and ask the question, When do you need a TCR?

Instead of listing potential applications where TCRs may or may not optimize markets, I will focus on an application where TCRs are undeniably necessary. That is, applications that cannot exist without a TCR.

The applications that require a TCR are the same applications that require decentralization. What do I mean by decentralization? Instead of creating my own definition for decentralization, I will reference the first blockchain platform that largely pioneered the creation of decentralized applications (DApps). The Ethereum Foundation states, “Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.” This is what I mean by decentralization.

Finance, gambling and healthcare are a few of the most censored and regulated markets in existence. Governments around the world will not allow certain applications to exist in these markets. Companies launching applications that do not carefully adhere to these rules will experience the full force of domestic or foreign governments, resulting in not just termination of the application but in some cases fines or imprisonment for the founders. A truly decentralized app is not subject to these rules though. Without a central point of failure, a DApp that provides value to its users will persist despite pressure from domestic or foreign governments.

In what markets is a TCR absolutely necessary? With over 10 years of experience in clinical medicine and healthcare startups, I see a TCR as the key to unlocking tremendous potential for technological advances in healthcare.

For the past decade, telemedicine (the remote diagnosis and treatment of patients) has been touted as the next major wave in health technology. Imagine the convenience for both patients and physicians of receiving or providing medical care from the comfort of home and without the overhead/expenses that accompany traditional office visits. Many experts argue that the failure of governments to provide favorable regulatory climates and reimbursement structures for telemedicine has stifled its expansion. Deploying telemedicine in a decentralized, worldwide health system though could be the perfect environment for unbridled growth.

A TCR is necessary for any decentralized application that requires a registry of licensed or credentialed members. On the one hand, a telemedicine platform or global healthcare market without trusted, licensed professionals has little value. Conversely, a registry of licensed professionals procured by a single company or entity is not decentralized and is limited by the regulatory constraints from one sovereignty to the next.

The TCR solves this problem by procuring a registry of verifiably licensed healthcare professionals ready to service any healthcare DApp at an instant’s notice. Only by accessing a TCR can a healthcare DApp be truly censorship resistant.

Over the past several months, we have been developing a TCR to unlock this potential in medicine. The MedX TCR will be the first censorship resistant registry of physicians that will be instantly accessible by any 3rd party DApp that requires physicians from a multitude of medical specialties.

A Token Curated Registry for healthcare may just be the first example of a use case in the larger landscape of occupational licensing. Down the road, perhaps there will be a global registry of professionals for a vast array of licensed occupations. Nevertheless, freeing arguably one of the most restricted markets around the world from regulatory constraints — healthcare — may unlock technological progress that has been stifled for decades.