Token metrics III — taxonomy and user guide for Trivial
By: Kacper Wikieł
Tags: Token Economy, Ethereum

Classification of tokens:

Creation and distribution

Single issuer: most ICO’s

Multiple issuers: coins with a mining mechanism (Bitcoin clones), anybody can mine and get new coins

Masternodes: usually staking is required

2. Purpose of a token

Bitcoin has a simple purpose — it’s a financial incentive for miners. As long as the majority of miners aren’t attacking the network (which would be costly) then the transactions of Bitcoin itself will be processed like clockwork with an average 10 minute block time

Many ICO projects introduce complicated schemes of how their token will be used (as payment mechanism, staking requirement, etc.)

3. Quantity of token issued

Fixed supply

Infinite supply

An interesting fact about supply is that tokens with tail emission are infinite, yet may have a very low inflation rate. So in order to compare multiple inflation schedules one needs to create a cutoff point (e.g. supply in 2050 for comparison). Such data is available at OnChainFX

4. Persistence

Most tokens are persistent in nature

A time limit on token existence may introduce a way to experiment with token economics without risking another large scale DAO problem

5. Token rights

Currency tokens don’t grant rights or yield dividends

Interesting example: C20 token is a crypto20 index and represents Net Asset Value of an investment

Property (token may represent ownership of another good/asset):

Some tokens are indeed “securities” on the blockchain, giving partial or full ownership of either on-chain or off-chain revenue:

Binance

Maker

How to use Trivial for browsing tokens:

First let’s start with quick sector analysis:

Projects that provide messenger capabilities: what’s intriguing is that a project with $268M market cap still has only roughly 4k monthly unique senders

(a proxy for usage)

Also it’s great tool to check if one should invest in some niche tokens — $2.5M valuation for protocol with 40 users?

Market Cap / Monthly Users View

Fitrova seems to have a good valuation per user, but one must dig further into the validity of the token by exploring its value proposition as laid out on its website, whitepaper, social media, price action, etc.

Tx / Holder / Month

“Velocity of usage” — it seems like people use currency tokens frequently. For this transactional metric per holder, two of the top three tokens are stablecoins.

DYOR meme

People oftne say ‘Do Your Own Research”, but with 1600+ coins, spending 8 hours per coin, would take you 800 days!

So how to research effectively?

Check Trivial for token profile

Read Messari report for token

Check basic usage data (Daily Active Users, Reddit activity, Github commits, etc.)

Ask and post your questions on Trivial’s Forum:

What problem is Trivial Forum solving?

If you head to the official channels of a project you will probably get a rose-tinted vision of how everything will work. Potential issues are described as FUD , and its difficult to find level-headed, impartial analysis and debate. Put simply, you won’t get two sides of the coin. What’s needed is a source of objective facts and data, combined with high quality, opinionated discussion. Below is link for subscription to become a Trivial analyst. We welcome you onboard!

https://trivial.launchaco.com/