Blockchain - The Technology That Creates New Financial Instruments

This article presents the preliminary results of the authors' research on the development potential of blockchain technology in finance. This potential deal mainly with tokens that should be seen as new financial instruments despiting the differences between them. However, a growing number of blockchain implementations leads to the creation of unknown earlier token types so classification methods continuously need amendments. The paper starts with a brief presentation of historical background for the research. Its main part presents a short discussion on the token classification approaches resulting with a classification allowing for the market capitalization analysis by token type. The classification used for the research meets the requirements of financial analysis and - being rather a conceptual framework - allows for continuing the research in more sophisticated financial areas. The results emphasize the role and potential of utility tokens both as crucial elements of blockchain networks and financial instruments that may play a significant role in future financial markets. The market evaluation analysis results define a starting point for further research.