When experts talk about the far-reaching consequences the COVID-19 pandemic will have on the world, the economy is often cited as one of the biggest non-human victims. Due to the world-wide quarantines and lockdowns, everything is coming to a halt. This leads to shortages of essential goods like food and medicine, and a surplus of non-essential things like luxury items.
On the other hand, since many salaries are being cut and many people are losing jobs, governments that rely on tax payments from those salaries are also feeling the hit. That means they have to encourage everyone to spend more - and nobody wants to spend on anything they don’t need in the crisis, since they don’t know how long it will last.
Blockchain offers a temporary solution which can minimize the effects of the crisis: governments can issue tokens, backed by their national resources for example, that can later be redeemed for fiat currencies. Individuals can tokenize their work time - instead of working for just one employer, they could be offering their services to multiple people and getting paid accordingly. This means employers are still effectively saving up money as they’re paying only the amount of time employees actually spend working, while individuals can choose how much they want to work (and earn) on a daily basis.
Companies can tokenize their output. Governments then buy those output tokens and put the companies to use (either using their machines or their services) based on the amount they purchased. Then, companies buy the employees’ workforce tokens, completing the circle. The system is not too different from what currently exists in the world, but bringing it onto the blockchain makes it run faster than it has before, minimizing paperwork and bureaucracy, and the tokens act as promises which additionally prevent forgeries and double spending due to the nature of blockchain.
