Primavera De Filippi: Build your own economy —the tokenization of everything

Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. Her research focuses on the legal challenges and opportunities of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, with specific focus on governance and trust. She was a founding member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). Primavera is the author of the book “Blockchain and the Law,” published in 2018 by Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright) and she was recently awarded a €2M research grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to investigate how blockchain technology can help improve institutional governance through greater confidence and trust, and how it can contribute to global governance.

In addition to her academic research, Primavera acts as a legal expert for Creative Commons and is part of the stakeholder board of the P2P Foundation. As an artist, she produces mechanical algorithms that instantiate her legal research into the physical world, such as the Plantoid project.

In this seminar, Primavera will explore how blockchain technology has enabled the emergence of alternative value systems, relying on crypto-currencies or blockchain-based tokens. These tokens can be used for a variety of functions: from the funding of new initiatives via Initial Coin Offerings, to the selling scarce digital artworks trough NFTs. The particularity of these new value systems is that they are not based on debt (as most fiat currencies are) but rather on value: new tokens are minted when new products or services are created, whose market value will depend on the perceived value that these product or services hold in the eyes of consumers. However, the tokenization of everything also brings the risk of promoting a process of hyper-financialisation of many facets of society that had been until now protected from speculative dynamics.