Rally Digest #26 (May 24, 2021)

Welcome to the Rally Digest, a weekly round-up of everything that’s happening around the Rally Network.

New Creator Coins:

Wuki/ $WUX

Grammy nominated producer DJ known for mashups / remixes

Thought Leadership:

• NFT Virtual Summit- Rally founder Kevin Chou and a16z’s Chris Dixon discussing the interplay among “fungible” social tokens and NFTs, and how this can help create new models and long-tail communities of fans for creators
• CoinTelegraph- Rally founder Kevin Chou joins a panel of crypto experts to debate decentralization vs centralization

Industry Updates:

• The all-round internet raconteur Sean Bonner is getting into the social tokens space. He minted $CROWD tokens, named after his newsletter called The Crowd, as an experiment two days ago. What are the tokens for? He doesn’t know yet. But he’s giving them out to friends and buyers of his NFTs. Here’s a post he wrote on his thinking behind social tokens.
• Social tokens news and data site Forefront has dropped its first piece of merch, a collaboration with MetaFactory. It’s an all-black long sleeved t-shirt with the Forefront logo on the front and its tagline (“Value. Culture. Community.”) on a sleeve. It’s an edition of 150 so grab them now before they’re gone forever. Psst… we hear there are $FF rewards for buyers.
• How do people feel useful in modern society? According to thinker Dror Poleg, society is being reshaped by networks enabled by the internet. This in turn enables companies to harness massive groups of people to create mega-businesses. However, these “network effects” mean that winning companies and individuals get entrenched. What happens to everyone else? They need new ways to feel productive and useful, Poleg says, and social tokens are one of the mechanisms by which that happens: “Once you invest in someone, you have a clear incentive to help them succeed.”
• The star Wall Street money manager Cathie Wood did a talk in the Metaverse last week in her own Decentraland gallery. The series of events, co-organized with advisory firm Signum and the Mirage Gallery saw the opening of Wood’s own ARK gallery, with talks and events featuring crypto and social tokens luminaries. Richard Kim of Galaxy and the $RNG token discussed social tokens in CryptoVoxels while Wood talked investing in Decentraland.
• The members-only marketplace of NFTs and other rare products Basic.Space has brought on the analyst Elena Burger to figure out its crypto strategy. Burger name-checked social tokens as one of the things she’ll be researching to empower creators with crypto. Check out the soundbite she gave Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal on being “ETH pilled.”