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... See more

Layer on top of that the onboarding frictions for social money once you're in Discord, and you have the perfect recipe for good ol' country churn. Crypto communities have developed a real affinity for using tokens as access gates (i.e., the channels you can see are a function of how many tokens you hold). This approach presumes a high degree of... See more

In summary, while tokenized access was the first type of social primitive that showed the potential of tokens, it alone lacks the ability to create meaningful sustainable social token communities. Here are the problems it suffers: