How decentralised companies disrupt shareholders…
A company is owned by whoever holds their stock, a.k.a. shareholders. If the majority of shareholders are unhappy, then management needs to go. As such shareholder demands, or their proxy voters, are on the top of the priority list for executives. That is about to change…
The decentralised revolution today
What if you and some friends came together and decided to write a white paper on how your idea of a decentralised marketplace will change the world, a.k.a. Future World. You describe how this next revolution will be powered by a new token. You call it FutureToken or FT for short. Your white paper is so strong that some token investors are willing to buy FutureTokens at a discount, e.g. $0.01 for 500M tokens out of a future total of 50B. You now raised $5 millions and can start hiring a team, building a prototype, create a community around the FutureToken and produce a lot of marketing material.
Your prototype is amazing. Your marketing material already describes the future world of tomorrow as if it already happened. Your community is in the thousands. You now go and prepare a coin listing for other early token investors to be able to buy your token before it becomes available on decentralised token exchanges. You generate 50B tokens and you tuck away 39B tokens in a non-profit foundation, 7.5B are set aside to reward future community member contributions, you distribute 2.5B among founders, early employees, advisors,… [these cannot be sold for 24 months] and you already sold 500M to early investors.
You list the remaining 500M tokens, either for $0.1 if the token investor agrees not to sell for 1 year or $0.2 if they want to sell immediately. You announce a lot of partnerships and you do the token listing. Your token sale is a big success and you raise $75M. Some weeks later others can start trading FutureTokens [or FT for short] on distributed exchanges.
You now use the money in the following ways:
- The $75M is invested in a low-risk crypto investment and generates $500K monthly interests which you use to pay the team that is working for the foundation and building the first version of the core platform.
- The 7.5B community tokens go into a grant programme where the community can vote on which proposals will help Future World become reality sooner.
- The 39B tokens remain locked up but you can use part of them in lending schemes if the token price is too high which would generate millions of dollars but can bring the price of the tokens down if used in excess.
2 years later
Two new tokens have come to live:
- FPT — Future Pay Token — which is used to pay for digital products and services. 1 FPT = $1USD.
- FVT — Future Voting Token — which is used for community members to vote. They cannot be bought and sold. You can earn them by helping the community to be successful.
Future World version 3 is released. Lots of buyers and sellers inside this distributed world are able to exchange digital products and services and pay with FPT. Whenever a buyer and a seller transact, FPT moves from one to the other. The FutureWorld only charges 0.1% commission for each transaction which it distributes to several automated processes and involves no humans. To get FPT you either need to have FT or buy with real USD. The price of FT is volatile but has been between $0.75 and $15.2 in the last two years.
The early FT investors have sold their FT for $4 each, netting almost $4B based on their initial $5M investment. The original foundation employees own private islands and a collection of luxury cars. Given that all control is now based on community voting including how the foundation is managed, they retired. The foundation is about to be dismantled because every asset has moved to the Future World.
An active finance system has grown inside Future World based on lending, investing, borrowing,… all with commissions tens to hundreds times lower than traditional finance companies demanded.
Future Voting Tokens are also used to vote on political decisions or resolve conflict.
There is not a shareholder in Future World. You are either a participant or you have the impossible challenge to compete with a global ecosystem which moves products and payments around the world in sub-seconds for virtually no commission.
National governments have fruitlessly tried to ban Future World. Thousands of servers in hundreds of countries are powering this new economy without one single central control point. Take out one server or one company and the next day two take over in another country. Some tried making trading on Future World illegal and saw their tax revenues drop with 30% the next day.
Conclusion
If I told you twenty years ago that rockets would fly to space to launch thousands of satellites come back and take off again; that cars would start driving autonomously; that your phone will allow you to buy anything you can imagine; then you would have called me crazy. In the last 20 odd years I have been in the center of the Dotcom boom, the mobile app revolution, the cloud revolution, the AI revolution and the IoT revolution. I can only tell you that the decentralised revolution is going to dwarf all of them. Shareholder disruption will be just a detail in the bigger picture…
