A token is just another term for a model of privately issued currency. In history, sovereign governments issued currency and set its terms and governance; directing how our economy works with money as the exchange medium for value. With the blockchain, we now have new shapes of organizations who are issuing their own currency in the form of digital money as cryptocurrency, and they are setting their own terms and rules around its operations, creating new self-sustainable mini-economies.
IN THE BUSINESS REALM, WE CAN DEFINE THE TOKEN AS:
A unit of value that a corporate creates to self-govern its business model, and empower its users to interact with its services, while facilitating the distribution and sharing of benefits to all its stakeholders.
The Achilles heel of token-based models will be how they are concocted to interact with the business model that underlies them. However, much of the attention has been on designing ICO’s to optimize for crypto economics, a term that has come to describe the mechanics and specifics of token distribution, according to a given sale and ownership structure.
Going forward, the token usage relationships will be far more important than the design of its underlying crypto economics.