Designing a Token Economy: Incentives, Governance, and Tokenomics
This study addresses the absence of a systematic, reusable, and empirically grounded end-to-end approach that integrates incentive mechanisms, governance structures, and tokenomics in current token economic designs. To bridge this gap, the paper proposes the Token Economic Design Method (TEDM), which, for the first time, unifies these three dimensions into a structured and actionable design framework, with explicit emphasis on sociotechnical context and early-stage design considerations. Developed through the design science research paradigm and informed by qualitative synthesis, co-design case studies, and expert interviews, TEDM was empirically validated through its application to the Currynomics stablecoin ecosystem and subsequent expert evaluation. The results demonstrate that TEDM effectively supports the analysis and construction of tokenized ecosystems, offering practical and reusable design guidance.