Everything can be tokenized, but should it be?
The ICO craze has attracted a lot of attention from Startups (and scammers) that see the creation of their own tokens as a way to raise money. The proposal is simple:
You give the startup money and they will give you a token in return that will bring you some sort of benefit in the future.
There are more than 100 ICOs happening each week so it’s hard to keep up with all the projects and is even harder to see which ICO could be a scam or not, I am personally staying away from 99% of ICOs and that 1% I do invest in needs to have:
- A well-known team
- A MVP to show with some lines Open-Source code
- Future demand for the token.
- And most importantly, the token needs to have a reason to exist!
We know today that everything can be tokenized, I can tokenize my steemit account and share the revenue of my posts, I can tokenize my car and share it with other token-holders, I can even tokenize my dog´s poop and say it has a limit inflation rate of 2 per day!
Blockchain has given us the ability to turn everything into a decentralized representation of ownership, but this doesn’t mean that everything needs to be converted into a wrapped up token and be sold to the public, most ICOs don’t have a real reason to exist.
Don’t get me wrong, tokens will change the world. In fact, I work in a company (waba.network) that focus on “creating community tokens”, this is exactly why I know that not everything should be tokenized and I am prepared to tell this to my clients. I have been asked to create some great tokens: a community currency for a local shanty town, greencoins and discount tokens. But I have also been asked to create some stupid coins, like a “token I can create to not pay my employees real money, just give them the tokens” or that time I was asked to build a “pyramid token, to use as…a pyramid scheme”.
The bottom line is that tokens need to have use cases, if tokens have use cases they will have demand, if they have demand, they will have value and if they can have value then and only then you can have yourself an ICO.
Originally published at steemit.com on November 27, 2017.
