To demonstrate how far Blockchain, cryptocurrencies and digital assets have permeated the traditional world of asset management, the Token Investment Summit in Vienna (organised by Crypto42 and hosted by the Vienna University of Economics and Business) covered a number of topics of particular interest to institutional investors.

Brave New Coin Head of Research, Rafael Delfin introduces the General Taxonomy for Cryptographic Assets

William Mougayer kicked the day off, discussing the need to define “Blockchain fundamentals”. In particular, some of the token jargon needs to be better explained (air dropping, locking, burning), and some industry practices (token definition, protocol design, staking, and on-chain governance) require more formal and consistent standards. Projects need to address their “Token-Market Fit”; chains need to think about their scaling and interoperability; and tokens need to deal with decentralized exchanges, post trade clearing, and asset classification.

Next, Rafael Delfin from Brave New Coin presented the General Taxonomy for Cryptographic Assets (covered here before), followed by pitches on behalf of Rigoblock (decentralized fund infrastructure), HydroMiner (green mining), Conda (equity tokens via a crowdfunding platform), Artis (time-based value or asset transfer on chain), Streem (“start & end” events only) and Ocean Protocol (the data exchange network from BigChainDB).

There was an overview of ICO regulation, comparing some of the developments in Germany (Bundes Block’s Token Regulation Paper), Austria (University of Graz’s KryptoStaat project), Switzerland (FINMA paper on ICOs) and Gibraltar (GBX token listing using a risk-based model).

Much of the day was given over to discussing compliance, taxation, accounting, token economics and investment research (such as token valuation models, correlation analysis and crypto returns). There was also a local case study on the Optioment scam, and the potential criminal and civil breaches.

Finally, a panel of VCs provided their perspective how to navigate this asset class, as the industry weighs up the recent wave of more speculative tokens, and moves to more structured capital gains, especially from so-called security tokens.

Next week: CoinAlts Fund Symposium, New York