This white paper is a review of the current state of the ICO (initial coin offering) phenomena that has emerged since 2013, and has now gone mainstream in the early part of 2017. It discusses its benefits as an innovation, primarily to better enable open source communities to self-finance and realise new decentralised digital economies that are inherently less fragile when compared to traditional venture capital backed models.
It looks pragmatically at the flaws of ICOs and how they can be improved upon. In particular, we provide an analysis of a trend we are seeing organically emerge from the space called ‘Community Token Economies’ (CTE). This is where multiple parties join forces to realise what we have termed Minimum Viable Community (MVC) in order to achieve network effects more efficiently and rapidly compared to going it alone.
Finally, we describe the implementation of a new framework being developed at Outlier Ventures to allow this to happen in a more structured and effective manner. Our aim is to ensure these new digital economies are increasingly self-sustaining.
CONTENTS
1 The Opportunities & Challenges of Tokens
2 Stronger Together: the Community Token Economy
3 Main Concepts
4 Planning and Phases
5 CTE Economics
6 Technical Scoping & Decision-Making
7 Governance Models
8 Corporate Structuring
9 Bringing the CTE Concept to Life
