A Chemical Analysis of Hybrid Economic Systems—Tokens and Money

Abstract

With the influence of digital technology in our daily lives continuously growing, we investigate methods with the purpose of assessing the stability, sustainability, and design of systems of token economies that include tokens and conventional currencies. Based on a chemical approach, we model markets with a minimum number of variables and compare the transaction rates, stability, and token design properties at different levels of tokenisation. The kinetic study reveals that in certain conditions, if the price of a product contains both conventional money and tokens, one can treat this combination as one composite currency. The dynamic behaviour of the analysed systems is proven to be dynamically stable for the chosen models. Moreover, by applying the supply and demand law to recalculate the prices of products, the necessity of previous knowledge of certain token attributes—token divisibility and token–money exchange rates—emerges. The chemical framework, along with the analytic methods that we propose, is flexible enough to be adjusted to a variety of conditions and offer valuable information about economic systems.

Keywords

• digital technology
• blockchain
• cryptoeconomic design
• economic system
• chemical analysis
• tokens