B. Behavioural Change

The normative link between tokenomics, community and sustainability

Quite often in the crypto world such questions remain unarticulated or underthought. Many new projects end up replicating harmful engagement models inherited from the pre-blockchain era. Sedgwick (2019), for instance, asks if we would ‘accept tokens for viewing adverts?’ without pausing to ask whether advertisement-watching can be said to constitute a sustainable target behaviour.

As Dixon (2024) tells us, tokens themselves “provide a new way to skip advertising and acquire customers through peer-to-peer evangelism. While terms such as ‘evangelism’ and ‘customers’ are outmoded in this context, his larger point is compelling — are ‘self marketing’ because they “bake community ownership into their core design.

Sustainability is transformed from an intrinsic attribute into an ethical dimension when behavioural change meets community ownership. That is to say, a crypto economy becomes self-sustaining when its members develop a deep and abiding conviction that a particular form of behaviour must not only be preserved but encouraged. Notions such as alignment and moral innovation, which have a certain currency in the crypto space, are best understood in this context.