Call Me Crazy, But Noble Needs a Token

Polkachu Intern | 2024-03-07

Congratulations to the Noble asset issurance chain for surpassing $200M USDC issued and flipping Polygon and Tron within 24 hours.

Now let's talk about serious business. Call me crazy, but Noble needs a token.

Why Token?

The mid-curve take is that Noble does not need a token because it is doing just fine without. That's like saying we do not need to go to the moon because the earth is fine. The earth is indeed fine, but we must accelerate and go to the moon wif hat staying on.

Token is the the most sophisticated human coordination mechanism that we have ever invented. Today, many teams are working on the project to make asset issurance easy in Cosmos: Circle, Noble, StrangeLove, probably many other entities that I am not aware of. As an outside, I couldn't help but wonder how the coordination has worked so wonderfully so far with just a few bracelets.

In the long run, however, incentives matter. If Noble becomes a runaway success, who will get the most rewards? If Noble wants to attract new players into the ecosystem (say, a real estate company that helps with tokenizing RWA), what's in it for them? If Noble wants to incentivize the usage of Noble USDC by the community, what levers can it pull to accelerate this?

The most interesting use case I can think of is to use the token incentive to encourage people to convert bridged USDC into Noble USDC. This will attract non-Cosmos users to try Cosmos for the first time, further improve the Noble USDC liquidity, and in turn lift the usage of all chains depending on Noble USDC (for example, dYdX).

How Token?

However, in today's regulatory framework, a token for Noble is tricky. First of all, it cannot be a security, so that's that. Maybe we can make it a governance token. But this might be an intellectual dead end too, because Noble has too many final bosses that a token community cannot overrule through governance. For one thing, Circle has the final say in USDC issurance, so do any other RWA issurance partners in the future. For another, the US government is looming large in the background because USDC is pegged with the US dollar.

So this leaves a utility token the only option. "A utility token is a type of token that is used to access a particular product or service within a blockchain-based ecosystem." If Noble can develop some kind of product that people want to use with their Noble-issued assets, then the token can serve as a gate for access.

So here is the bottomline:

1. Noble works fine without a token, but it will work much better with one.
2. The path to a token is narrow, but never say never.
3. I am not a lawyer or a tokenomics influencer, but an intern wif bracelet writing sufficiently degenerative crypto insight in a shitpost.