We recommend readingToken Economy: How Blockchains and Smart Contracts Revolutionize the Economy (2020). This book is an attempt to summarize existing knowledge about blockchain networks and other distributed ledgers as the backbone of the Web3, and contextualize the socio-economic implications of the Web3 applications, from smart contracts, tokens, DAOs to the concepts of money, economics, governance and decentralized finance (DeFi). It builds on the educational work carried out by BlockchainHub, a thinking hub based in Berlin, with the aim to make the Web3 accessible to a general audience. Token Economy builds on the legacy of the past activities and goes one step beyond. It focuses on tokens, considered by the author as the atomic unit of the Web3, also known as the Internet of Value. This is an evolution of the internet of communication, enabling the transfer of value among peers in a disintermediated network.The basic structure of the second edition of this book, coming out in 2021 is the same as the first edition, with slightly updated content of existing chapters, minor corrections, revised terminology and four additional chapters: “User-Centric Identities,” “Privacy Tokens,” “Lending Tokens,” and “How to Design a Token System.”About the Book This book is an attempt to summarize existing knowledge about blockchain networks and other distributed ledgers as the backbone of the Web3, and contextualize the socio-economic implications of the Web3 applications, from smart contracts, tokens, DAOs to the concepts of money, economics, governance and decentralized finance (DeFi). It builds on the educational work that we started at BlockchainHub, an Info:Hub and Thinking:Hub based in Berlin, with the aim to make the Web3 accessible to a general audience. Blockchainhub.net was the first website to systematically compile and disseminate blockchain and Web3 knowledge to a general audience and has been operational since 2015, first with a series of blog posts, which were later compiled and contextualized in the Blockchain Handbook, available for free. Token Economy builds on the legacy of the past activities and goes one step beyond: The focus is now on tokens as the atomic unit of the Web3. The basic structure of the second edition of this book is the same as the first edition, with slightly updated content of existing chapters, minor corrections, revised terminology and four additional chapters: “User-Centric Identities,” “Privacy Tokens,” “Lending Tokens,” and “How to Design a Token System.”