When people ran over to categories like meme coins or governance tokens that just like you're voting for like nothing, you don't even have direct technical control over the smart contracts through voting.

Think of these as like the SEC under Gensler swung down this hammer and people scattered.

They just scattered away from like real economic value

and they went in a bunch of random directions to try to cover their asses. And the result was

nothing but negatives. What's positive is taking advantage of the best characteristics of the

blockchain, transparency, legibility, verifiability, property rights. That's the whole point. That's

where we need to go. And the way you get there is with very clear, very well understood economic

models.

Welcome to Web 3 with A16Z. I'm Robert Hackett.

Today we're diving deep into the defining concept in crypto, tokens.

We're moving beyond conventional categories like governance tokens or utility tokens or even

mean coins to present a full taxonomy that details what tokens are,

what they aren't, and what they're capable of becoming.

Questions we'll explore include, what is a token?

Is it a form of money, a piece of data, something else?

How many types of tokens are there, and who is in control of each?

And how should we think about their actual economic, legal, and technical characteristics?

We'll also dig into different token designs and their uses, where tokens derive value from,

how all of this jives with securities laws, and much more.

In this conversation, you'll hear from several experts on the A16 Z crypto team

who have developed a new seven-part framework for classifying tokens,

which you can find linked to in the show notes.

...