Published by: Shermin Voshmgir on March 27 2023

Given the fast paced developments in the crypto/Web3 space, I started to update the book Token Economy early 2022. The previous edition of the book was published slightly before the first DeFi boom and bust cycle, so there was much to cover in a new edition about the rapidly emerging DeFi space that had not been covered yet. On an infrastructure level, the Blockchain protocols themselves have also evolved and become more modular, and the concept of DAOs is not an abstract theory anymore. A range of decentralized organizations that are steered by at least on type of purpose-driven token have emerged that merit in-depth analysis.

The fundamentals are well covered and valid and the second edition still seems to be a useful primer to people who are new in the space — at least concluding from the feedback I get from my readers on social media — but many of the use cases are outdated and some important developments in DeFi space are missing. At this point, blockchain years have to be counted like dog years. Objectively the book was less than two years old when i started to work on the new edition, but to industry insiders the book might feel like 14 years.

I initially thought that updating the book would be a lot of work, but not as big as a big task as writing the first edition. However, as soon as I started working on the third edition I got overwhelmed by the scope and depth of the amendments that I thought were necessary. As a result, the book was getting thicker and thicker and I was way off of my self set schedule. Updating the schedule and pushing deadlines did not seem to help. The more I pushed deadlines, the more topics I thought were necessary to cover. Eventually I came to realize that my task was quite different this time, which was the probably the reason for my struggle.

When writing the first and second edition, my focus was to get the scope of all related topics right. In this third edition, I needed not only to sharpen the scope but also go much deeper into each single chapter than I had done in the two previous editions. This, however, also resulted in the fact that the word-count of the book grew so much, that I had to chop the book up into three volumes:

Over the scope of this year I will be publishing the three volumes independently from each other, but not in chronological order. Volume 2 and 3 — which both cover the chapters with the use cases that needed the most updating — will be published before summer. Volume 1 will be published after summer. The different volumes will be independent books that can be read separately as they cater to the different needs and interest of the readers.

Once all volumes have been finalized and published, an additional omnibus edition containing all three volumes will also be released which might be a particularly useful as a textbook. However, until the omnibus edition with all three volumes is released, the second edition will be available to be purchased or read online, on Amazon and other bookstores & sites (find out about all available versions here).