# Tokens Are Not All The Same Thing By [Lista DAO](https://blog.lista.org) · 2026-06-24 defi, token, crypto, blockchain, lista, education --- Moolah led us into a konbini. This was, on one level, unremarkable - Tokyo is made of konbinis, and we visited them roughly once per afternoon for one thing or another. On another level, it was the first time I'd ever seen Moolah inside a commercial establishment. The teenager at the register, to his immense credit, did not appear to notice an otter entering the shop. I don't know if this was a function of Moolah's magic or the legendary discipline of Japanese convenience store employees. Probably both. She padded directly to the register and gestured at the point-card display with one paw. "Priya. What is this?" "A loyalty card." "Good. Take it out. Look at it. What do the points on this card do?" "They… get me discounts, I think. Or free onigiris, drinks after I spend a certain amount." "So. Is it money?" "Sort of?" "Is it money I can spend at the café next door?" "No." "Is it an investment that might go up in value?" "No." "Is it a share of ownership in this company?" "No." "Is it a collectible?" "I guess some people collect them?" "Then what is it?" I looked at the little plastic card. "I don't really know what to call it. It's points. For this store. Redeemable for stuff here." "Exactly," Moolah said. "It has its own rules and values, which exist only in a specific context. And it's made of plastic, like a credit card is made of plastic, but nobody would confuse a loyalty card with a credit card, because the fact that they are both plastic rectangles tells you almost nothing about what they _do_." She waited for that to settle in. It took a minute. "The word 'crypto,'" she said, "is doing the same violence to English that the word 'plastic' would do if we used it to mean every plastic rectangle in your wallet. A driver's license and a Starbucks card and a credit card are all 'plastic.' These statements are true but useless. The interesting question is never 'what is it made of,' it's 'what does it do.'" We left the konbini. Moolah had, I noticed, somehow acquired an onigiri that I had not seen her pay for. I chose not to comment. "A token," she said, settling onto the bench, "is something that lives on a blockchain and can be transferred between wallets. That's the entire definition. The word tells you exactly one fact: it moves on the shared notebook. It tells you nothing about what the thing is _for_. Which is where almost every argument about crypto goes wrong." "Okay," I said. "Tell me the categories." "Gladly." She settled in. "First - _payment tokens._ Bitcoin is the purest example. The point of it is to be money. Transfer it, spend it, save it. That's the whole use case. Most payment tokens fail because being money is hard and most of them are worse at it than actual money. A few - Bitcoin, a handful of others - have carved out a real use as digital cash or digital gold." "Second - _stablecoins._ We talked about these. Dollars on the blockchain. USDC, USDT, DAI. Plumbing." "Third - _utility tokens._ These are access tokens. They get you the right to _do_ something in a specific system. Think of them like arcade tokens - you buy them, they work inside one arcade, you use them on the machines there. Most utility tokens are for specific services or networks. Pay with them, access the service. That's it." I was writing this down. "Like an arcade token." "Or a concert wristband. Or the chips at a specific casino. All physical-world examples of tokens that mean something inside one system and nothing outside it." "Fourth - _governance tokens._ These are voting rights. If you hold them, you get a voice in how a particular DeFi protocol runs. Who can propose changes, what fees are charged, how the treasury is spent. Closer to shares in a company, though the lawyers will tell you to be careful saying that, because if governance tokens are shares, then their issuers have a great many legal problems. So they are, officially, _not_ shares. They are governance tokens. A category invented partly to avoid a category." "And if the protocol makes money -" "Some governance tokens distribute protocol revenue to holders. Some require a more complicated process. Some are purely voting. The ones that distribute money look very much like shares and are the subject of approximately nine ongoing lawsuits." "Fifth - _meme tokens._ These are tokens whose entire point is that they have no point. Dogecoin, originally. Shiba Inu. Countless others. They are not pretending to be money, or access, or votes. They are a joke, or a vibe, or a tribe. And yet some of them have been worth billions of dollars for long stretches, because humans have always been willing to pay for vibes. Baseball cards. Beanie Babies. Art. Meme tokens are the crypto version of the same impulse." "Sixth - _non-fungible tokens._ NFTs. These are the ones where each token is unique - a serial number, a specific one-of-a-kind item. Think of a numbered print from a limited edition. We'll have a whole conversation about these later." "Are there more?" "Many. And this is just one of the easiest ways to explain tokens without getting into too much detail. Still, these are the big categories. And the thing I want you to take from this - more than any list - is that when someone says 'crypto is a scam' or 'crypto is the future,' they are making a claim about a plastic rectangle. They could be talking about a credit card or a parking pass. Always, _always_ ask: which _kind_ of token? Built by whom? For what? Distributed how? Held by whom?" "So 'what is crypto' is a useless question." "'What is crypto' is the question of a reporter who has not yet done their work. 'What is _this specific token, designed for this specific purpose, held by these specific people, and governed by these specific rules_' - that is the question of someone who is taking the thing seriously." I wrote in the notebook, in capitals: _CRYPTO IS NOT ONE THING._ Underneath, smaller: _payment, stable, utility, governance, meme, NFT. Ask which._ Moolah finished her onigiri. The bench was cold under my legs. Across the pond, a single black cormorant stood on a rock, drying its wings in the pale winter sun. "That's Part One," Moolah said. "Part One of what?" "Of your education. You now have the vocabulary. Wallets. Gas. Stablecoins. Ethereum. Consensus. Tokens. You know what things _are_. Starting next week, we talk about what you can _do_ with them. The system, in motion." Dev, who had been silent for most of the afternoon, spoke up. "This is where it gets fun." "This is where it gets _dangerous_," Moolah corrected. "Which is a different thing." She slipped off the bench and padded to the pond. The cormorant watched her with something that looked almost like professional respect. She turned back to us just before sliding into the water. "Read over your notes this week," she said. "All of them. Because now we start _using_ what you know." And then she was gone. --- *Originally published on [Lista DAO](https://blog.lista.org/tokens-are-not-all-the-same-thing)*