Rally Digest #29 (June 14, 2021)
Welcome to the Rally Digest, a weekly round-up of everything that’s happening around the Rally Network.
New Creator Coins:
Chris Messina: $HASH
Inventor of the hashtag. #1 Product Hunter. Ever-curious product designer and technologist. Previously: Google, Uber, YC W’18.
Thought Leadership:
- Fintech: The End Game- Rally co-founder Mahesh Vellanki was a panelist on the blockchain session
- NFT Summit- Rally’s Rob Simpson was a panelist on the “Creator Coins: Creating Independent Economies” panel
Rally in the News:
- Today Show- Rally anchored a segment on new ways creators are making money and engaging with their fans. Zach Carothers of Portugal the Man discussed re-inventing the fan club model for fans via their PTM Coin.
Industry News:
- The community builder and investor Pet3rpan dropped an invaluable guide to growing decentralized communities last week. He conceives of the process as a funnel with community values at the top and financial incentives at the bottom. The key is to gather enough people who believe in a mission to create a sense of ownership — only then does a token make sense to keep incentives aligned over the long term.
- The newsletter for founders, Trends.vc, gave an overview of the state of the social tokens space in a Twitter thread last week. It makes the case for social tokens to its 35,000 subscribers, and sketches out the major creators, tools, and platforms available (with lots of Rally community mentions). If you ever need to share a quick TLDR with someone about social tokens, this is it!
- Sotheby’s “Natively Digital” NFT auction netted over $17 million in total, a strong response to the claims that the NFT market is dead, Artnet reported. The auction, which ended June 10, featured works by stalwarts Larva Labs, Pak, Mad Dog Jones and rising stars like Sillytuna. Some 70 percent of buyers were new to the auction house, Artnet reported, suggesting that NFTs continue to bring a new audience to the traditional art world. The auction was also streamed in the metaverse inside a digital replica of Sotheby’s London auction house recreated inside Decentraland.
- This piece by Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal isn’t strictly about social tokens, but it gives you a useful framework for understanding how they work. He lays out the different visions for Bitcoin and Ethereum: the former relies on the faith of its users to retain its value; the latter doesn’t require faith, but it does require utility. Units of ether are more like the tokens handed out at entertainment arcade Chuck E. Cheese, which are required to operate the various games inside — no faith necessary. That’s sort of what social tokens are: coins that you use to unlock goods and services within that token community.
- The Bankless DAO is a new tokenized community that’s tearing up the charts with its $BANK token. It’s been a top gainer on Forefront’s token rankings, and is now in the top five social tokens by market cap, beating the likes of $FWB and $SKULL. Its DeFi-centric community has been busy coming up with proposals, including the creation of an index called $BED that will hold Bitcoin, Ether, and DeFi Pulse Index that could generate significant fees for the DAO. Serious innovation is coming out of the intersection of DeFi Degens and social tokens.
