Brainstorm on the Future of Personal Tokens
On February 28, IDEO CoLab Ventures and experts including Bradley Miles, Reuben Bramanathan, Simon de la Rouviere, and 50+ others from around the world brainstormed new opportunities for social money and personal tokens. You can watch the full video here and check out the twitter thread here.
At IDEO CoLab Ventures, we’ve been experimenting with different ways to bring the magic of our design and collaboration process to entrepreneurs and makers world-wide via the web. Last Friday, we hosted a virtual brainstorm focused on the personal tokens trend our team has been following closely. We were fortunate to be joined by Bradley (Roll), Reuben (ex-Coinbase), and Simon (ex-Consensys), who are among the most interesting innovators and thinkers in the personal tokens space. They each helped create a glimpse of a future social money stack, comprised of ubiquitous and composable personal and social tokens.
What are Personal Tokens, really?
With the advent of the ERC20 token standard and other financial primitives (i.e., “money legos”) there has been an explosion of financial innovation in the crypto space. Recently, social money and personal tokens have emerged to enable individual creators to own, control, and coordinate the value they create on the web. New forms of collaboration, work, and social engagement are now possible.
Our panelists shared examples of people who are turning their social capital into something more tangible as they engage with their followers and communities. As Bradley put it, we’re seeing this social money stack enable “new forms of expression, behaviors, and sense of belonging.” One example he’s seeing at Roll is “social staking,” where personal tokens can be staked (i.e., locked for a period of time) as a way to gain access and privileges within a community — like a subscription or membership.
Reuben spoke to the convergence of “community, financial value, and social values,” and he was interested to explore how creators — who have valuable outputs but not a large following that would allow for demand and liquidity for their personal tokens — could be supported.
Simon was interested in extrapolating new behaviors to begin to imagine what might be possible. For example, could curators build reputation and capture value by boosting signal? If you squint, you begin to see new business models for social media and influencers, new forms of journalism, and more direct connections between creators and their patrons.
The feeling is that we’re close to a tipping point, where we have enough infrastructure to support emergent use cases. This will lead to an explosion of experiments and utility.
Future Applications for Personal Tokens & Social Money
We then asked all 60+ participants in the session to imagine the future of social money and personal tokens. What follows are the thematic areas and just a few of the ideas from the brainstorm.
Community, Cooperatives & DAOs
In the future, DAOs will use social tokens to tokenize membership by exchanging membership for social and crypto value. @mccallios
Alternative Finance
In the future, underserved individuals will use social tokens to generate alternative credit by leveraging susu funds (informal loans) to collateralize bank or business loans. @Nogoodtwts
Future of Work
In the future, forecasters & futurists will use social tokens to stake signals & trends with their communities, exchanging people’s buy-in for accuracy and being right (e.g., betting on the future). @danarosemartens
In the future, social network users will use social tokens to signal valuable advice and help by buying advisor and helper personal tokens for DAI. @RodolfoErgueta
Media & Entertainment
In the future, celebrities and influencers will use social tokens to earn revenue by exchanging their AI generated face and voice models for wherever their face and voice is used (e.g. in movies, Alexa voices, games). @arkhan
In the future, a musician will use social tokens to kickstart their career by exchanging money for tickets to future gigs. @simondlr
In the future, TikTok stars will use social tokens to give their fans a share in their 15 minutes of fame by exchanging tokens for revenue share. @Nogoodtwts
Thanks to all of our participants, panelists, and the whole @IDEOVC team who helped make this a great event. If you want to chat with us more about this topic or are working on a new project/startup in the personal token space, follow us at @IDEOVC or email us at startups@ideo.com.
Don’t miss our next virtual brainstorm “Flash Loans, Failures, and the Future of Finance” on Friday, March 6 at 9am PST. Register here: https://tinyurl.com/flashloans-register
