Why I’m Advising Mom.Life: A Breath of Fresh Air for Social Networking (and Blockchain Adoption)
For all of the promise of blockchain and crypto, their path to widespread adoption has remained elusive. I hear a lot of talk about how we might better educate a mainstream audience about blockchain, about how the common consumer can come to understand its value. I think that line of inquiry largely misses the point.
What will drive widespread blockchain adoption is not the common consumer coming to understand it, but rather the launch of blockchain-based consumer applications that achieve widespread adoption without the need for users to ‘get’ blockchain at all, or ideally even be aware of it.
Mom.life is just such an application. It is an active social network with a highly engaged user base of 1.4 million moms and moms-to-be across the world who come to Mom.life to be themselves, rant, ask questions, seek advice, make new friends, and connect to other women who share their reality.¹ And Mom.life already has real revenue from major advertisers who are themselves seeing real ROI, enjoying a direct line of engagement with one of the most powerful yet elusive economic sectors on the planet.
The essential purpose of the upcoming Mom.life token economy is to channel that revenue directly to the users of the platform, mainly through mutually beneficial interactions between consumers and brands, such as engagement with content and the exchange of tokens (‘Blooms’) for products.
Huge numbers of moms will become instant users of Bloom tokens — and, by extension, the blockchain — at no cost to them. Meanwhile, the advertising revenue will function as the real-asset backing that gives the token economy value, right from day one.
Of course, this is not only good for the future of blockchain and crypto. It’s great for the moms. And this is what makes Mom.life a truly for-benefit enterprise: here we have a successful social network choosing to largely disintermediate itself and share its revenue directly with its users. That’s an inspiring story that ought to serve as a model for social networking moving forward.
For many moms, the Bloom rewards will be a welcome bonus that will help pay for essentials and further incentivize them to engage with the platform and refer friends. For others — those in more challenged financial straits, including many single moms — it will be a godsend, turning their value-creation on the platform into a vital income stream.
Mom.life thus has the makings of both operating within the highest moral ideals of the decentralization movement and succeeding at rapid adoption where plenty of other right-minded organizations have not.
I suggest keeping an eye on this promising blockchain project. One way to do so is by joining the Telegram. Another is to read this excellent article by Chelsea Rustrum, another Mom.life advisor, for more detail on what makes this such a promising and inspiring project. You can also find the whitepaper and a shorter ‘teaser’ at Momlife.io.
¹ This sentence borrows some language from the aforementioned article by Chelsea Rustrum.