Coevals: The New Tao of Business?
If you have been following Monkey Capital (MC), or have had an occasion to read their whitepaper, you have run across the term Coeval. It’s easy to confuse with COEVAL (COE), the embryonic token of the MC Family Tree that is currently trading and only second in price to Bitcoin. Read more about that here.
So what is a Coeval?
Essentially it’s the opposite of what you were most likely taught in school about how companies interact with each other. It’s a structure where, instead of competing with each other on things they have in common, organizations cooperate for mutual gain.
Yeah, I know that is abstract so we have to learn three key terms to start to make it clear. The following will be boring textbook drivel but do try to slog your way through it all.
Value Chain - This is likely how you were taught companies work.
Khan's Bakery wants to sell bread over the Internet. They contact the sales department of IT Consultants, Inc. A team of consultants come into Khan’s Bakery, look at their operation, and recommend hiring someone to build a website so they can sell the product. Khan’s Bakery hires WebDesign, Inc. who builds them a successful website.
Value Shop - This is the idea that you can use two different business divisions to complement each other for the overall good of the company.
In the example above, IT Consultants would have a team of web designers that work for their company. When their consultants decide a website needs to be built, IT Consultants can do it without Khan’s Bakery having to hire another company.
Value Network - This is the idea that companies that are unrelated but happen to share some of the same functions can use the same resources to perform those functions.
While building the website, IT Consultants recommends not building a special database to hold usernames and passwords for the website. Instead it would be better to use Google+ so that visitors can sign in with an account that they already have.
That’s finally over and you probably had just as little fun reading that as I did writing it but hopefully it gives us a baseline of ways that companies can become more valuable to the market beyond just competing in their own niche. But wait, there’s more...
Enter the Token.
Many of us still absentmindedly think of tokens as currency. We trade them like currency, sometimes we spend them on things, we even refer to them in a general sense as cryptocurrency. However this is becoming less and less accurate. A euro, dollar, or yuan can only ever be what it is; a concept and maybe a piece of decorated cloth. There really isn’t anything you can do with it besides earn it, hold it, or spend it.
For the most part that was what Bitcoin was intended to be, but as is usually the case, smart people came along and messed everything up by noticing latent potential. Soon the idea of money that could manage how it was spent was born. Smart contracts became the logical embodiment of business agreements; you no longer needed to bother threatening to sue someone for breaking a contract simply because the possibility had been eliminated.
Nowadays there are tokens that define identity, or processing power, or rental fees; the different kinds of values they can provide are unlimited and the market is stretching to hit that boundary every day.
Our final keystone concept is the simplest: value. Value is what you get when the benefit of doing something outweighs the cost. For the record, we are talking about positive value; negative value is a thing but that is for the eggheads to discuss at the sort of parties I have no interest in attending.
Well, if I have done a halfway decent job of putting this together, little ideas should be sprouting out of your gray matter right now. Using tokens to transfer value willy-nilly all over the place lets those tokens build Value Chains, Shops, and Networks wherever each is most effective and move easily from one to structure to another when the need arises.
Bet you forgot we were talking about Coevals, didn’t you? Time to get back to it:
Let’s take Monkey Capital as our example since they are really the only Coeval forming at the moment. Take a moment and read or re-read my post on how the various MC tokens create long-term value and apply the above concepts. Go ahead... I’ll wait here.
Looked a little different this time, didn’t it? Now you can see how the value is truly being transferred from the bottom up and back down but let’s add the same idea horizontally. The Coeval is a group of companies that aren’t just connected by Monkey Capital, they are a collection of entities that are cooperative.
They could potentially trade all kinds of value back and forth lowering the costs of doing business across the Coeval. At the same time Monkey Capital will have its hand on the throttle of obligation; smoothing out dips in revenue and allowing the individual entities breathing room to fix issues without the normal pressure from pesky stockholders that demand you grow every quarter.
As you can see this is an approximation of the complete opposite of what you were probably taught in school about how business supposed to work with each other. The advantages of cooperation over competition as fueled by tokens is quite blatant; they were always there lurking. They were just waiting for the right technology.
If reading this through doesn’t bring immediate and complete clarity, don’t despair. There are a lot of abstract concepts involved and it takes a while for the mud to settle. If you want to ask questions about any of this I invite you to come join us in the Slack channel; we tend to be an active and helpful lot for the most part.
In parting comes the usual: I am not affiliated with Monkey Capital though I do hold both COEVAL and DDF (soon to be MVS) tokens. If I have stated anything in here that is contrary to the vision of Monkey Capital, well, that’s on me. Don’t hold them to it.