This is the official cryptocurrency of the platform. It is the fuel that drives the entire ecosystem. In other words, a token is a way to gain funding, which is necessary to continue the platform's workflow.
The blockchain is an irreversible record system and any data it records will be permanent. So to ensure privacy and transparency it splits data into two profiles public profiles and private profiles. This ensures that no sensitive data will ever appear on the blockchain and that no sensitive data is stored in IPFS.