Who wants personal tokens and why? Some data.
When we started off working on personal tokens, we were aware that the idea sounded crazy. So the very first thing we did, was to ask every blokchain enthusiast we knew, whether they would be interested in having one. Here are the results!
44 people responded to our survey. Half of them worked as technology entrepreneurs or blockchain developers and the remaining participants were composed in roughly equal parts of knowledge workers, freelancers, content creators and artists.
48% of the respondents got excited about the idea. When we talked to them in person we often saw sparkling eyes filled with imagination. The other half was slightly puzzled and mystified but mostly curious. Overall, the signal was strong enough for us to pursue the project and build a prototype. But we wanted to know more about the direction that people would want to take this. So we also asked what benefits and potential use cases they foresaw. Multiple answers were possible here and the percentages indicate the share of respondents that selected a given option:
The most obvious value proposition of creating a personal token seems to be the new business model it would enable for independent work. Personal tokens are largely seen as a new way to monetize one’s work and raise funds. But, apart from that, content creators also seem to appreciate it as a tool to strengthen their connection and alignment with an audience.
When it comes to concrete services that people would want to tokenize, the most popular services are the ones that everyone can easily offer: one’s time, attention and knowledge. This is followed by one of the more intuitive use cases for artists and content creators: tokenizing future creations (quite a few artists have already done this, e.g. Harm van den Dorpel or Sarah Meyohas).
The conclusions drawn from this survey proved invaluable in guiding our subsequent development towards a first public beta that will be released on mainnet on February 14th 2019. We want to extend a huge heart-felt thank you to all the people who participated. We also offered one personal token from the Convergent team as a reward for taking the survey and participating in a user test. Some of you already earned that reward and we kept track! Once the beta is out we will contact the other people who signed up, start another round of user testing and distribute all those reward tokens. In fact Convergent itself will be the first entity to have a personal token on the platform.
Things are about to get real and we will keep you posted on this. If you are near Berlin, join us at the next decentralized attention markets meetup which will also be Convergent’s official launch event on February 19th!
You can find the original survey form here. We are not accepting any more responses though — as explained above, the next time we will systematically collect feedback, it will be on our first public beta!!
