Simple Tokens Aims To Keep Tokening Simple – ICO Soon

Simple Token allows companies to launch their own branded tokens on scalable open side-chains anchored on the ethereum blockchain. The twist: Simple Token and member-branded tokens can be exchanged at any time for regional fiat currencies.

The new blockchain project arrives from Jason Goldberg, a serial entrepreneur who previously launched Fab.com , Hem and Jobster.com. After a string of high-profile startups, Goldberg built Pepo , a social media app. To differentiate the app, he wanted to use cryptocurrency to incentivize user participation. But he found the tokenization process was way more costly and complex than the consumer app team had anticipated.

Goldberg talked with Block Tribune about his process and the new token system, which launched last week.

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BLOCK TRIBUNE: Let’s walk through how this works. It appears from what I’ve read that it’s one-stop-shopping on all aspects of creating and managing a token.

JASON GOLDBERG: I founded a company called Pepo in early 2016 and one of the things that we realized as we were building out an economic model for Pepo was that there was a lot of technology user-experience problems to be solved for tokenizing one application, or for creating a one-token economy.

Our team has been doing Internet companies for 10+ years, scaling to tens of millions of users and billions of transactions. We realized that there was so much that we were going to have to build just to enable a token economy to be viable for Pepo; from figuring out how to add a scale on ethereum, to creating user-friendly wallets, to things like identity and Know-Your-Customer checks, to setting up various types of rewards and incentives and different types of tokens. We just realized that we were going to have to create so much stuff to do this for one app, and we, kind of, had like this ‘Aha!’ moment, where it was like, “rather than doing this for one app, we really should be building this as a service, as a software for any app.”

Over the last several months, we basically fleshed-out what we call the open ST protocol, which is a protocol that enables companies to take ST, which stands for “Simple Tokens,” and create their own branded currencies or branded tokens from Simple Tokens. Then, alongside that, we fleshed-out an entire software suite that we’re gonna be developing that enables companies to effectively create and manage their token economy. Because when you launch a token, it’s not just about, “Hey, we have a token, see what happens.” I mean, you’re dealing with supply and demand and there’s courses and, people’s economic behavior that happens when you have either too much or too little. So we’ve created a software package that companies can manage their token economies effectively as well.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: How will this work in your ecosystem as far as buying and selling?

JASON GOLDBERG: The key thing here is that Simple Token itself is an ERC20 ethereum token that will be a traded token, so anyone could transfer it to another party, buy and sell it. So it’s kind of a floated token. But the tokens that are created from Simple Token, or are powered by Simple Token, those tokens themselves are not floated tokens. Those are basically … Simple Token has staked against creating, but those tokens themselves are pre-floating and cannot be traded. There’s no secondary market for them. So we’re not an ideal platform. We’re not a platform for helping companies launch their own ERC20 tokens that are publicly traded.

What we are is a platform for any of the tens or thousands of companies and friends who could benefit from having their own branded economy, to provide incentives and rewards for users, to be able to power micro-transactions or person-to-person transactions or B2C transactions, to created ways for people to earn the tokens from contributing their own time or their content or their data rather than just buying tokens.

We enable these brands to launch the tokens, to manage those tokens, to do so on a blockchain without having to learn any blockchain technology themselves. So they can basically benefit from blockchain without the developers having to touch blockchain or become blockchain developers. And we nail them to do that as part of a much larger ecosystem, a network that takes advantages of the network effects, so that one brand and another brand and another brand who made it on their own but never launched a loyalty program or rewards program or points system, you know, any of these kind of things could be powered by the token, but would become a part of a much broader ecosystem where tokens could be transferred and traded between the member companies because they’re all Simple Tokens, all kind of supporting them all behind the scenes in the background.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: How do you make money on this?

JASON GOLDBERG: Well so we have two things. One is we have Open ST as a foundation. It’s a non-profit foundation that exists to manage the token supply, which companies will use to basically stake the ST against creating their own branded tokens and to also manage the open source software. It will generate revenues from member companies, who will need to acquire Simple Tokens in order to create their brand tokens. There’ll be a membership fee in order to be able to launch your branded tokens on the platform or network and to manage and operate the side- chains that will post these branded tokens for the uptake of the foundation.

Apart from that, we have a company called the Simple Token Company. And that company will be a software company. It will be selling software services that will be done on a software-to-service model that will give people the tools they need to manage their token economies. Some of it might be priced based on the amount of tokens, the number of transactions, or the number of users that they have in the branded economy. Some of it will be based on risk that the Simple Token company takes on on behalf of the member companies, both in terms of price stabilization, as an example, which will be provided as a service, or enabling companies to have low starting price points, but still have the full value of their economies backed by Simple Tokens, so almost like an insurance policy. So that will be a profit-making company. It will have its own sort of tools and products that it’s selling.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Are most of the legalities that are associated with ICOs avoided by having it as part of your ecosystem? In other words, if you don’t trade outside and you’re not touting these as a sort of security, do you manage to bypass a lot of the concerns that are out there?

JASON GOLDBERG: Yes, exactly. One of our lawyers, kind of walked them through a few times, and they had like this ‘A-ha!’ moment. “I got it, you guys are providing all the technology the companies need in order to launch their own tokens without the heartache and headache, including the headache that goes the legal regulatory risk of having your own floated token.” The reason why a lot of companies have gotten kind of…I wouldn’t say in trouble yet, but kind of the warnings or risks around launching your own token is that a token … for most, it can come down to one or two categories. Either it is a utility token or it’s a security. The utility token is what we’re doing with ST. The utility of ST that you use it, you use the protocol, you use the software to create your own branded tokens from it. It’s a product and unto itself. And a lot of these other companies, the tokens on their own would maybe just fall into the security category, where it’s really just stored value or a way to trade between different parties. And that’s where you have to be really cautious.

So what we’re trying to do is pave the way, kind of the legal regulatory headache and heartache that companies would otherwise have with trying to go it alonel and kind of enable them to just do it under the guise of Simple Token.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: What’s the value of creating a token versus just dealing with your customers one-on-one?

JASON GOLDBERG: The benefit of tokenizing or creating a branded token or branded currency, there’s many positives. If you think about it, we’ve been using tokens that aren’t backed by currencies for a long time, things like airline point programs, loyalty programs, reward programs. The problem with those, because they’re not backed by any kind of cryptocurrency or block chain, is that they’re kind of black holes. You don’t know exactly how you earn and what the conversion rates are. You never know how much the value of what you’re holding is, and the power of having things like that on a blockchain is that it’s all transparent, and there’s a mutability and you can enable these kind of trusted transactions between otherwise untrusting parties.

So a company or a brand … the reason that they would want to launch their own token or have their own kind of branded token economy, it comes down to they want to provide incentives and rewards to their users. Do they want another way to enable micro-transactions, peer-to-peer transactions? And a lot of these things are hard to do if you’re just working with cash. So, for instance, lets say that I wanted to give you an incentive to come write content on our platform. If I give you a dollar, you’re just gonna spend that dollar. But I could give you ,a special kind of token that you can earn by contributing your content but maybe you can’t spend it wholly within. You can’t cash it, but you can spend it on others things. You can have warm-up tokens that you give out to users for free, that they can’t just put cash in their wallets, they can only spend it so other users can get the market liquidity going.

You can enable a study of people, companies and brands to create loyalty programs, points programs that are tied to real value and transparent value, that they maybe wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. You know, a lot of folks shy away from doing their own loyalty programs. An example is, they don’t have scale on their own, so by connecting it to a broader ecosystem, you can have economies of scale, Everybody can be part of a larger thing.

Micro-transactions is another example. If I need to pay you 30 cents for something, I’m likely to take out my credit card. But if it’s through tokens, then I could cross a number of micro-transactions.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: Are you planning your own ICO at some point?

JASON GOLDBERG: We are in the midst of working on a token sale. We need to generate simple tokens in order to have the ability, to have the utility to create these branded tokens. So the beginning of every single one of these branded tokens is a equivalent amount of a stake simple token, and so we do need to have a token generation event, a token sale event. We are planning our token sale event for the 14th of November for public sale, and we are currently in private pre-sales to accredited purchasers.