Development of a Token Design Framework
Niels Schubert, Daniel Obermeier, Felix Kohlbrenner, Philipp Sandner · 2021
Apart from the financial success of Bitcoin, blockchain technology has not yet made the leap from emerging technology to mainstream application. The introduction of blockchain tokens could now offer a major contribution to making this happen. Blockchain tokens can be representations of real-life assets or rights and are, therefore, central for connecting blockchains to real world applications. Despite their pivotal role, their mainstream adoption is still lagging behind. One reason for this is that companies struggle to develop relevant use cases. They are hampered by the rapid development of the complex technology and the lack of development processes. Existing development processes no longer apply to the new decentralized structure of token use cases. As existing research on token systems is either too technical by focusing on a very detailed description of a single use case only or too general by providing token typologies without implementation guidance, companies have no choice but trial and error. It turned out that there is a lack of structured approaches or best practices for the development of token systems. To solve this problem, we follow a design science research approach and develop a framework that guides the design of token use cases. It provides decision support for all steps of the design process and further comprises basic token types which can be used to develop standardized modules. This approach leads to a faster and cheaper development process. We build this framework based on an extensive literature review, enhance it with expert interviews and finally validate its applicability by using it to implement a decentralized parking system based on tokens.