There is a lot of discussion out there about how non-fungible tokens, or “utility” tokens in the terminology of the experts, can impact the long term value picture. For the purposes of this article, however, we will be focusing on the short term impact, which is the impact that they can have on an investor’s profit margin. This is not a particularly groundbreaking revelation. The basics of economics say that value creation and profits extraction are driven by two things: supply and demand, and when one or both of those things are lacking, prices tend to stay flat or fall.
So why do you think that value creation tends to be different for firms that issue tokens than for firms that issue coins? There are a number of answers to this, but the most important answer is that it has to do with supply. When a firm issues tokens, they are not necessarily trying to create value on the market in any way. They simply want to capture a segment of the overall supply of money in circulation. This is why they can afford to issue more tokens, because they do not need to worry about their supply ever decreasing.
On the other hand, when a firm tries to increase its supply, it is typically doing so because it wants to raise the value of the firm’s assets relative to those of other firms. When the supply of coins is increasing, the relative price of each coin rises relative to other coins. Now this isn’t rocket science. If you’ve been around long enough, you probably understand that this is basically what the supply and demand theory tell us.
The underlying logic here is that the firm will want to capture more of the overall monetary supply because it knows that future demand will always be greater than past demand. In the case of a token, the firm can use future demand to predict where demand will be in the future. This means that future price of the token will be determined by future prices of goods and services, which are how supply and demand works. And if a token has high demand, then it is an easy target for an investor looking to increase its value.
However, an entirely different reason to increase supply is because a firm wants to decrease the supply of a particular good, or to even out the supply of all goods and services. The problem here is that when a firm does this, it usually ends up raising its costs, and the subsequent effect is lower prices overall. So where does this leave us? It leaves us with the conclusion that we should always focus on current demand, because if you want to increase the value of your portfolio, you need to look at current demand.
The value of demand never increases, because there are always buyers. When there are no buyers, prices start to decrease. However, when supply exceeds demand, prices start to increase. The trick to maximizing your portfolio’s value is to never let supply exceed demand. Focusing on predicting demand in the next few years is a much better way to increase your portfolio’s value than focusing on predicting value in the next few days or months.