Your Financial Utility Belt — Pt. I
Seamless Micro-Investments into Crypto-Assets
Cryptocurrencies or “cryptoassets” or “digital currencies/assets” in recent times have become a major hot topic along with the technology that underpins it — blockchain. Many experts in the financial, political, and economic worlds nowadays claim that cryptocurrencies to be useless. Likewise however, similar experts have labeled cryptocurrency as a “new asset class”, a revolutionary piece of technology, and an enabler of blockchain by similar experts in the entrepreneurial, technological, and sociopolitical & socioeconomic worlds.
The Digital Asset Trinity
First Component — Cryptoassets & Cryptoeconomics
The latter cannot be more true, as cryptocurrencies or cryptoassets will indeed play a major role in bringing forth a new way to transact, do business & commerce, and generate value in the digital revolution we’re currently in. Cryptoassets aren’t merely a fancy and shiny new coin for you to simply make more money. It’s not just about a diversification of your revenue streams even though it is. It’s actually a means to an end — a way for you to futureproof yourself — to be better prepared as we continue to forge ahead in the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Many in the industry have claimed blockchain to be the next evolutionary step of the internet and while this may be true, the next evolutionary step of capitalism has also arisen as a new discussion point. This “Capitalism 2.0” is aligned with the sibling technology of cryptocurrency as it sits parallel to the rise of what is known as cryptoeconomics. As discussed in this article below
Cryptoeconomics is the use of incentives and cryptography to design new kinds of systems, applications, and networks.
Second Component — Tokenization & Tokenomics
In doing so, we create a new system whereby a society is built on value-generation and not “money for money’s sake”. What this means is simply — we transition from a world of “money” as a means to an end to “the end value that is desired being both an ends and a means”. Money doesn’t become an incentive for agents in this system, rather “money” is redefined under the term “cryptoasset” or a “token”. This then treads into complex territory as buzzwords such as “tokenomics” and “tokenization” are brought to the forefront.
But what you need to know is this — cryptoassets matter! They matter because they’ll form the ammunition, tools, and gadgets that become part of what we at “Belt” call your “financial utility belt”. In order to understand what all of this means, you will need to understand what this concept of the “token” (a digital representation of value),but simply put — it’s a “coin” that’s instead of being made up of raw materials from beneath the earth’s crust such as copper, nickel, and zinc it’s made up of 1’s and 0’s that each have their own logic built into it. It’s a coin that possesses internal utility due to the business rules that are built into it. To learn more, William Mougayar — a top venture capitalist in the field talks about it below.
We’re moving away from the “software is eating the world” model that Paul Graham talks about in his essays to a “tokens are eating the world” model.
