Tokens are equity in Internet-native businesses

Perhaps the most common misunderstanding today about digital assets is that they are all related to money. The term “‘cryptocurrencies” is still the typical way to describe these assets on most major price trackers visited by users. However, with the growth of decentralized finance and crypto finding use cases beyond payments using speculative currencies, the currency narrative is about to flip for a stronger one -- crypto tokens being equity in Internet-native businesses.

It’s not surprising that we are still stuck with outdated terminology. After all, Bitcoin was designed to be a new money (in addition to a payment network) and the top eight crypto assets by market capitalization are most often all described as cryptocurrencies. It’s been clear ever since the 1990s that a system with digital scarcity (such as Bitcoin) could be used to create money and that has indeed been its first use case. Projects like the decentralized exchange 0x adopted the idea of application-specific currencies, and the ZRX token was originally used to pay for transaction fees on the platform before a change to a more equity-like model.