There’s a Tron Treasury Company

Among other things, crypto developed an alternative way to take companies public, or at least to take quasi-companies quasi-public. Traditionally, if you had a business idea, you would form a company to do that business. The company would receive the future profits of doing the business, and to raise money you would sell shares of the company, that is, rights to a portion of those future profits. Those shares are securities, and US law regulates how you can sell them: If you want to sell them to the general public in the US, you have to register them with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and provide financial and other disclosures.

Crypto found a new approach. I mean, sort of; arguably it found new labels for the old approach. If you had a crypto business idea — “I am going to start a platform to store value and do transactions and program smart contracts and trade derivatives” is the main crypto business idea — then you could form a decentralized crypto ecosystem to do that business. Instead of future profits accruing to a company, the future economic value of that business would accrue to the users of the ecosystem. Tokens of the ecosystem would be required to use the ecosystem, would represent a sort of quasi-ownership stake in the ecosystem, and would grow in value as the economic value of the ecosystem grew. And to raise money to start the business, you would sell some tokens.