 The past year has seen the rise of a new model for the funding of technology companies called initial coin offerings. In 2017 the amount of money raised by startups via ICOs surpassed early stage venture capital funding for internet companies. This is the first example of these new token networks already replacing one area of the traditional financial system in a substantial and we can note the speed with which that happens. Within the space of just a few months ICOs went from almost nowhere to today when new blockchain projects are able to attract hundreds of millions of dollars by offering tokens directly for anyone in the world with internet connection to purchase. The rise of ICOs as a new model for growing economic networks is no accident or random event. It taps into a new capacity of information technology first seen with crowdfunding. For people to fund their own projects directly out of the future value the project is expected to deliver. The centralised third party investor is removed from the equation which takes away the need to organise the project around investor profits and to remove value from the network for shareholders. Instead the network funds itself out of selling access to the future service that it delivers thus retaining the value within the network. Indeed this illustrates one of the important aspects to note which is that these networks are very autonomous. A network can fund its own initial development through ICOs but not only this it can then fund its own future growth through simply increasing the number of tokens and giving those to members who present initiatives projects or other forms of work that will be beneficial to the future success of the ecosystem. The network inflates its own tokens gives those new tokens to projects that will increase its future service delivery and thus will work to deflate the token in the future when more people demand that added future service. In this way no external profit seeking third party such as a bank or other financial institution is needed. By removing the third party you have the potential to also remove a massive amount of overhead costs and regulation. Likewise you stop value being taken out of the network and this can align the incentives between members much better. ICOs and prediction markets will be a central part of long term economic development on token networks but these will also be combined with advanced analytics as a primary mechanism for coordinating the network in the short term. The convergence of advanced analytics and blockchain networks will be a major part of the workings of these token networks. Like with the existing digital platforms of the current internet these blockchain networks are going to datify everything they're going to create a massive amounts of data and will be highly amenable to complex analytics. With the use of this big data business and economics will move from the realm of speculation and intuition to becoming more of a natural science where data can be gained theories tested and new systems engineered in an initiative process. Unlike our traditional economy which exists historically outside of information systems these economic networks exist by default within information systems. They are well defined in terms of software and they automatically create data. This means as soon as these networks are up and running we're going to start applying analytics to them using the data to adjust the incentive structures and iterate on that in a fast paced learning process. Likewise being open source projects anyone can see how the system is designed and coded and they will have the data to see how any changes perform. The functionality of these systems will shift to the software layer and if they're open source anyone may contribute and earn tokens if their contribution is successful as measured by the feedback loop in analytics. To date businesses have been largely secretive by defaults run by a few with decisions that ultimately made by the highest paid person in the room. Economies have been directed by whoever managed to get elected and abstract economic theories that have never been really tested on real data with direct feedback to see how they work in practice. Scott Nelson CEO of the Sweetbridge Project describes this well when he says what we do need in addition is to understand that we're dealing with the actual invention of something extraordinary new and very powerful and that is the ability to build economic games that actually are businesses and which are controlled by a community who's vested in the game and the countries that master this are going to be the railroad barren company countries of this century. I mean we're dealing with a seed change here that can't be underestimated because the power of economic engines to be tuned and now measured we can actually see the economic activity of the customer what they're doing and get very direct feedback loops about how the customer is using the system and when the transparency is extremely high in the environment this changes everything.