Blockchain

5Proteiform and Multi-sectoral Transformations

5.1. Tokenization of the economy and bartering

In order to study the tokenization of the economy, it is necessary to look at the qualification of crypto-assets in relation to pre-existing categories and to identify the different categories of crypto-assets.

5.1.1. Progressive evolution of the monetary approach to crypto-assets

From a monetary, banking, and financial perspective, crypto-assets could currently be described as digital units, mainly fungible, issued by a multitude of mainly private actors, to which users attribute a speculative value and/or a future use value on ecosystems.

The classic functional definition of currencies is that a currency must meet the following conditions: a unit of account, a reserve of value, and a trading vehicle. The first research on crypto-currencies, focusing on Bitcoin, mostly denied the qualification based on this definition¹. In the early days of Bitcoin, it was very difficult to acquire it without mining activity (in the absence of trading platforms) and it was almost impossible to buy anything with; see, for example, the story of an American engineer who had difficulty buying two pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoins in 2010².

Currently, crypto-currencies and particularly Bitcoin have become quite liquid and more and more people recognize that some crypto-currencies at least partially meet the functional criteria of currency³ and deserve to be taken into account in the framework of monetary policies ...