As mentioned at the beginning of the essay, protocol tokens are financially valuable in large part because of the "threat of the fee." Taking this idea to its extreme, a token’s governance power is powerful because it gives you the ability to conserve the vibes. As a builder on the protocol, you hold to help ensure that you can’t get deplatformed.... See more

Membership Tokens: tokens that represent membership in an individual community that falls under a “network’s” umbrella. 

While using a token doesn’t inherently make a community self-managing or decentralized, the benefits of (and value accrual to) the token aren’t maximized unless those criteria are upheld.However, no organization will fulfill the first 6 criteria purely on day one. Tokenized communities are progressively working to fulfill the above criteria, making... See more

While short-term value may accrue to the token through gating access (e.g. to Discord, content, product, events, etc.), long-term value accrues when community members are holding to:

Thus, community tokens can be broken into two categories:

Let’s take some examples:Krause House: own and operate an NBA team.Gitcoin: support and fund public goods.Forefront: support and build tokenized communities.Being meme-driven is a necessary component of tokenized communities – it makes “sharing in common” valuable. 

Community tokens serve as financialized coordination tools in previously unfinancialized communities.So how do tokenized communities economically sustain themselves? This is primarily a question of how individual members and contributors get paid, so that they aren’t forced to allocate time elsewhere. Unlike protocols, people need to be paid. 

Aspirational: actively working to progressively fulfill the first 6 criteria. 

Network Tokens: tokens that represent a shared meme that act as a “schelling point” to connect other communities that aim to proliferate that meme in a specific way or for a specific audience.