Sean Au is a blockchain researcher and trainer with a B.E. (Hons) in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Engineering Management from the Canterbury University in NZ. His masters' thesis 19 years ago was titled "Information Intermediaries," but with the rise of decentralization, that old model has surely crumbled.

With over 15 years of experience in the field of IT, Sean started out as a programmer, and prior to entering the blockchain rabbit hole, he was an integration architect and consultant, joining cloud systems together.

Sean is a Certified Bitcoin Professional (CBP) and designed and delivered NZ's first blockchain training course in association with the Blockchain Association of New Zealand (BANZ). Sean is the immediate past president and current education chair of BANZ and a member of the NZ ISO/TC307 committee on blockchains and distributed ledger technologies.

Sean continues to contribute by building practical applications and sharing it with the local community as the co-organizer of the Wellington blockchain meetup and organizer of the Wellington smart contract meetup. Some of his projects include "Ubering Energy on the Blockchain" and placing his land title on the blockchain.

This book is the culmination of two minds from different ends of the spectrum with over 24 months of research. It was designed to capture a special moment in history and paint a picture of how the ICO craze came about. It is for the generations to come that want to hear and want to re-live the events that launched the token economy.

There are plenty of people who helped bring this book to fruition, and we are grateful to all of them. First of all, this book would not be possible without the great team at Packt who have done a fantastic job. Producer Andrew Waldron, project editor Radhika Atitkar, development editor Joanne Lovell, technical reviewer Reyan Lamrani and Rick O'Neill, founder of Look Touch & Feel, a digital marketing and automation agency for authoring chapter ten and his expert knowledge in the digital marketing space.A huge thanks to those that Thomas and I have met on this journey and inspired us in one way or another.

Thomas Power is an author of 7 books since 1998 and has made over 1000 speeches in 56 countries covering all aspects of technology, social media, community building, cloud, and SaaS Apps.

Now the world has shifted its attention to Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, ICOs, Tokenomics, Cryptonomics, Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence, and Thomas has shifted with the times, making presentations on these subjects to conferences and board members around the globe.

Thomas is ranked No 11 in the Crypto 100 most Influential People. Thomas is also ranked No 9 in The Blockchain Fintech 100 People.

Thomas has over 290,000 followers on Twitter and is ranked No. 1 in the world on LinkedIn with 680 written testimonials.

Thomas is a board member and Director of six companies, including 9Spokes PLC in New Zealand who supply Barclays, Royal Bank of Canada, and Bank of New Zealand with Cloud SaaS AI solutions for small businesses and Team Blockchain Ltd based in London.

As GDPR kicked in May 25th 2018, Thomas has woken up many executives to the power of Community Building on The Blockchain to avoid the penalty fines of 4% of global turnover.

The next big development is for us all to hold our identity on The Blockchain so we can go through Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) processes with Banks and Financial Services companies in one click like Amazon Pay. This will further allow us all to trade with tokens for products and services from Brands so we are incentivized and rewarded with every interaction… much like the opening show of Black Mirror part three.

Reyan Lamrani is from a traditional finance background and is currently building an economic and financial framework adequate to the Blockchain ecosystem. Reyan primarily works on Token Model Design and Token Valuation for ICOs. He helps the start-ups going through an ICO to define a relevant Token ecosystem to attract rational buyers. He puts the value creation at the heart of its analysis. Reyan is the Founder of Token Capital Market, a consulting firm for the crypto market.

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