Cryptoeconomics – an excerpt

How does crypto fit into a broader analytic and economic framework?

According to noted economists (and authors of the highly influential economics blog Marginal Revolution) Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, crypto is one of the economics ideas that has been discussed the most over the past decade… yet is still not a common topic in principles of economics classes.

So in this new chapter of their popular textbook Modern Principles of Economics, the economists examine crypto through the lens of economic reasoning, and explain smart contracts, bitcoin, DeFi, NFTs, and the possible “tokenization of everything”. Cryptoeconomics not only combines cryptography and economics to produce new methods of communication, cooperation, and organization – but, the authors argue, “we might say that cryptoeconomics brings the invisible hand to computation”.

Full chapter pdf available for download here (shared with permission from the authors)