So I was recently at the Crypto Investment Summit (CIS) here in Los Angeles. It was a pretty well attended event.
Lots of various presentations that ranged from your standard questions about the future of crypto, Main Street vs. Wall Street, Centralization vs. Decentralization, Blockchain’s impact to the various industries and the disruptions that it will bring, and last but not least Tokenization….of all things.
It s this last item that I thought was very interesting. What I’m seeing is the proliferation of Tokenization for things that in the past was not necessary to be tokenized. Let me clear, I’m not against the idea of tokenization. I think in some cases, I think it makes sense but broadly speaking, I think tokenization for the sake of creating a token is completely worthless and pointless. For example, just because I want to create a new product, do I really need to create tokens as a way for me to raise capital or have the product trade the tokens? It would seem to be that the product should be sufficiently attractive on a standalone basis, token or no token. The fact that I need to tokenize means that I don’t have any capital to back up the idea, and that I need several dumb schmucks to help me raise capital for the product to be successful. This is where I think Tokenization has gone off the rails.
Here are some pictures of Tokenization services at the event.
(apologies for not being able to rotate my photo)
Someone mentioned to me, Tokenization for a product (in most cases) is for retail inventors who can’t raise money and know any institutional capital or high net worth individuals. Its Crowd funding for the ICO space. And unfortunately, despite my concerns, it seems that at the event there were several companies that are offering their services. I don’t have issues with these firms, I just have issues with the companies that are trying to peddle off these opportunities as something innovative or cool.
Look, if you need capital and you don’t know anyone, I guess tokenization is your only recourse. Or maybe you go to Kickstarter, or crowdfunding, or GoFundMe….whatever it is, kudos to you for successfully convincing people to give you funds, but for me, I’m definitely leery of the direction of tokenization and the proliferation of ICOs.
I was talking to someone after the event, someone who I won't mention but has been around the ICO space for several years and has made it big. When I asked him what he thought of the space, he acknowledged that the space has become very crowded and there are way too many firms thinking that ICO is the way to make big dollars. He just thinks there are a lot of bad apples in the ICO space and the Tokenization phenomena, is just furthering the myth.....
That's all...chat to you next week!