Fairmint & the Democratization of Upside

Fairmint is like Kickstarter on steroids, mixed with Carta, embedded right in the products we use and love. They’re building the picks and shovels for founders to turn their equity into the most powerful tool to engage with their contributors.

But as much as crypto fans want to believe they’ve created something startling and revolutionary, in reality, the experience feels: unfamiliar (payments happen off-platform), overwhelming (you end up in a confusing maze of wallets - jumping from Coinbase to Metamask to Uniswap, often unclear what you own), and pyramid scheme-y.

Whether they acknowledge it or not, tokenized communities are so focused on token price that they lose sight of why they were created to begin with--the shared values and interests, the intrinsic motivators, the glue that is left when all other bindings are stripped away.

Better economic alignment between platforms and participants is coming, and will enable the advent of true stakeholder capitalism to give billions of people the opportunity to build wealth alongside the products and services they love and use.

In an excellent post, Kim reflects on the challenges of token-based communities:

As large platforms get richer off their users’ personal data and time, people are trying to regain control. We spent the last fifteen years working for gig money, likes, retweets, or follows. The platforms gave us reputation or cash, but no ownership, upside, or voice in its evolution.

In the same way the internet was a democratizing force that gave everyone in the world the ability to easily create and share information, the next step is to give everyone in the world the ability to easily create and share value.

The digital economy has radically changed the nature of the relationship between customers and corporations. Individuals have switched from being passive consumers to being an essential force in creating value, either through their actual work (Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Sofar artists, Wikipedia editors, Airbnb hosts) or their data (Facebook, Google, ... See more

If companies can provide incentives for early adopters to participate before critical mass is achieved, they’re more likely to pose a credible threat to incumbents. As Charlie Munger said, “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.” A lot of business models that failed in Web 2.0 will become viable in Web3. The next generation of platf... See more