Token Taxonomy
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BROUGHT TO YOU BY TOKEN TAXONOMY The Need for Open-Source Standards Around Digital Assets Don Tapscott Blockchain Research Institute February 2020 A BLOCKCHAIN RESEARCH INSTITUTE BIG IDEA WHITE PAPER Realizing the new promise of the digital economy In 1994, Don Tapscott coined the phrase, “the digital economy,” with his book of that title. It discussed how the Web and the Internet of information would bring important changes in business and society. Today the Internet of value creates profound new possibilities. In 2017, Don and Alex Tapscott launched the Blockchain Research Institute to help realize the new promise of the digital economy. We research the strategic implications of blockchain technology and produce practical insights to contribute global blockchain knowledge and help our members navigate this revolution. Our findings, conclusions, and recommendations are initially proprietary to our members and ultimately released to the public in support of our mission. To find out more, please visitwww.blockchainresearchinstitute.org . Blockchain Research Institute, 2020 Except where otherwise noted, this work is copyrighted 2020 by the Blockchain Research Institute and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. To view a copy of this license, send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA, or visit creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode. This document represents the views of its author(s), not necessarily those of Blockchain Research Institute or the Tapscott Group. This material is for informational purposes only; it is neither investment advice nor managerial consulting. 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Contents Message from the President 3 Idea in brief 5 Tokens and digital assets 5 The state of the token 5 First-principles thinking 7 Introducing the Token Taxonomy Framework 8 Characteristics of tokens 11 Types of tokens 13 Behaviors and property sets of tokens 14 Benefits of shared token standards 16 Ease of use 16 Interoperability 17 Communication 18 Security and speed 19 Our role in co-creating standards 20 The need for collaboration 20 The need for stewardship 21 The need for certification 22 Conclusions 23 About the author 24 About the Blockchain Research Institute 25 About the InterWork Alliance 26 Notes 27 TOKEN TAXONOMY Message from the President The InterWork Alliance (IWA) is a nonprofit organization formed by bringing together technology and business innovators who envision the need to collaborate in simplifying the world of token- powered digital interchange. Our mission is simple: to empower all organizations to adopt and use token-powered distributed services in their day-to-day business operations anywhere in the world. To that end, we are very pleased to share with you this research from the Blockchain Research Institute. It focuses on our work to establish a set of global, open standards around digital assets while remaining neutral on the selected technology platform. Many people envision digital tokens as the best model for the storage and interchange of value across shared ledger networks. However, the lack of standards governing token definitions is inhibiting momentum toward this goal. With no common means of defining and triggering token behaviors and linking them to contracts, organizations cannot easily interchange value among tokens of different types produced by different technology platforms. The resulting technological disparity across platforms inhibits the level of business interworking necessary for web-scale adoption. This lack of standards as well as the tendency to describe tokens in a technical language makes it difficult for a businessperson, consumer, auditor, or regulator to understand or convey what these tokens represent. The IWA breaks down these barriers not only by creating a simple, standardized, and descriptive language to define tokens but also by providing the tooling needed to help developers build distributed applications, ultimately to increase business innovation with token-enabled ecosystems. In this research, Don Tapscott, CEO of the Tapscott Group and executive chairman of the Blockchain Research Institute, makes clear the need to address these issues with a universal standard that are both industry-inclusive and technology-agnostic. He delivers a very detailed review of the IWA’s first deliverable, the Token Taxonomy Framework (TTF), a composition framework and standardized set of basic terminologies that allows discussions across organizations using the same language with reference points so that value can be more easily exchanged point-to-point. 3 © 2020 BLOCKCHAIN RESEARCH INSTITUTE TOKEN TAXONOMY At the IWA, we continue to refine and improve the TTF as we look at how organizations can achieve interworking at higher levels of the application stack. Having published the TTF to define how to represent value as tokens, IWA turns to standardizing how we link contracts to those tokens. IWA will develop a set of universally agreed-upon specifications, which we are calling the IWA InterWork Framework, to address how organizations can compose multiparty contracts from clauses that directly correlate to the tokenization standards. Additionally, the IWA will standardize ways in which multiple parties can agree on shared schema for analytical workloads. The IWA Shared Analytics Framework will open the door for market-driven multiparty analytics on top of core trusted infrastructure, so that multiple parties can gain insights ordinarily difficult to ascertain. The IWA sets the standards for building composition frameworks around agreed-to definitions of value, contractual clauses that interact with those definitions, and shared data schema for analytics. This research from the BRI is very useful in helping business leaders and digital token practitioners to understand the importance of digital asset standardization across all industries. It helps to set the stage for tremendous new business opportunities using tokenized assets. RON RESNICK President InterWork Alliance 4 © 2020 BLOCKCHAIN RESEARCH INSTITUTE TOKEN TAXONOMY Idea in brief » Digital assets, sometimes called tokens, are poorly understood. That may be why they are used to describe a variety of things, some of which are contradictory. We know that they are important, but we need greater concurrence on what they are and how we define them in terms of code. » The InterWork Alliance (IWA) is a new standardization effort championed by a who’s who of enterprise blockchain, from Accenture to Web3 Labs.1 It will help unify our understanding of the token economy without sacrificing the decentralization that makes it so powerful. » The IWA's Token Taxonomy Framework (TTF) is a first- principles model for understanding tokens. It starts with token types and progresses to token properties, with a goal of enabling anyone—technologist, businessperson, or regulator— We know that digital assets to understand what is happening and how to take part in are important, but we need token projects. greater concurrence on what they are and how we » Standardization requires a commitment to collaborating define them in terms of with competitors, stewarding shared creations faithfully, and code. developing certification programs that make it easier for users to detect fakes and harder for unscrupulous designers to claim the use of standards while deviating from those standards. » The benefits of shared token standards are many: increased ease of use, improved interoperability, easier communication, and faster and more secure development of the token projects that we’d like to see in the world. Tokens and digital assets The state of the token Few concepts are more widely discussed and poorly understood in today’s blockchain world than the token. The world seems to know that tokens are important, but little else; the word token is used in myriad ways today, many of which conflict. 5 © 2020 BLOCKCHAIN RESEARCH INSTITUTE TOKEN TAXONOMY Perhaps the most common modern usage of token is as the latter part of what some call “security tokens,” by which they mean cryptocurrencies that governments are justified in regulating. Security tokens are the ostensible antithesis of “utility tokens,” by which crypto enthusiasts mean cryptocurrencies that governments should not clamp down on—especially the ones they’re developing for their blockchains.2