Today we had a talk with @ned over on SteemSpeak about Community Tokens.
It's a little bit like an idea that @mughat and I were thinking about. Here are our previous suggestions:
Keep in mind that back then, we were calling it "sub-steem" as a naming convention to tie in how Reddit works. And the core functionality we were looking for had to do with issuing tokens.
Since then, Steemit, Inc. has been doing some heavy development on Communities, which has many of the non-token features we were looking for.
But the token is key and I'm very happy that they're looking to expand into adopting tokens.
User Issued Assets
At its core, a Community Token is like a UIA (User Issued Asset). But, as Ned pointed out in the talk, in order to launch a UIA, you must have some kind of product (or the promise of a product). Otherwise, why are you issuing an asset?
Can you launch a UIA without a product? Sure, it's flexible enough for that. And there are plenty of examples. But it's not that compelling.
Contrast that with Community Tokens. These tokens, issued on the STEEM blockchain, will have an instant product: The Community. They'll have a distribution through their own reward pool. They'll have value by trading against STEEM.
Market
Does this mean that STEEM will have all of the trading pairs that BitShares has? My theory is no. You will probably only trade against STEEM and maybe SBD. There probably won't be any other (non-community) assets. Why? Because this will require external price feeds and other required features associate with Smart Coins. I just don't see this happening in the first round of development.
But that's ok. We only need STEEM pairs. This will greatly benefit the platform. It will create demand for STEEM in order to facilitate trades between other community tokens.