Social Token Paradox

If the goal of web3 is to overturn the Internet status quo, then the structure of social tokens today is fundamentally flawed from the ground up. Tokenized communities are centered around what you have — often social or financial capital — while they should instead be centered around what you do.

The problem here — in what I call the Social Token Paradox — is that with this mental model, tokenized communities are incentivized to uphold exclusivity. Let’s work backwards: if you want your community to be valuable, you need your community’s token to go up in price. This makes sense, sure. But to make the token go up in price, you have two choi... See more

If we can democratize access to a veblen good, status becomes about being a part of something, rather than how much money you have. We already see this in products like Fractional and PartyBid, which enable collective ownership of highly sought-after NFTs, as well as in products like RabbitHole, which allow users to earn crypto by using the latest

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Once we solve the Social Token Paradox, capital will no longer be the primary status symbol in web3. Instead, status will be composed of how many communities you are a part of, or how many things you’ve done online. The more online history you have, the richer your own story is, and the more things you can be a part of in the future.

So how do we solve the Social Token Paradox? As an ecosystem, we need to rethink the value of a token from the ground up. The decentralized communities of tomorrow will be centered around what we do, instead of what we have. This will be accomplished through both pre-existing on-chain data, as well as through a more robust DAO onboarding process th... See more