Community Token Economies: Steemit as a Case Study

Outlier Ventures are a forward-thinking blockchain think-tank and investment fund. They often publish interesting and sometimes provocative white (or colourful) papers.
Their latest publication puts forward the notion of Community Token Economies and analyzes strengths and weaknesses of recent ICO.
Token-based financing of disruptive innovation is indeed one of the killer applications of blockchain technologies, however they argue that the current ICO model could be improved and made more efficient by e.g. reducing duplication of effort and unnecessary competition between teams developing similar projects.
The emergence of Community Token Economies (CTEs) is advocated, where otherwise competing teams, including startups and possibly incumbents, combine their efforts early on within a focused theme.
In other words, siloed innovation is replaced by a more cooperative model, where potentially synergic projects cooperate to create a sort of consortium and jointly and issue "Community Tokens", as well as more specialized app tokens.

This approach is conceptually interesting, and they advocate that it could be extended to industrial/IoT communities. I see big challenges in the industrial context, as such communities traditionally do not have an Open Source culture, which is instrumental to the success of CTEs.

Anyway...the paper is interesting also because a whole section of it is devoted to the study of Steemit as a case study for a multi-token economy. Nice to see Steemit becoming a textbook reference!

Image from pixabay.com