Thoughts about social tokens and tokenizing the world

There was once a world where all interactions were recorded in a decentralized distributed ledger system. In this futuristic world, every sale of an object is recorded in this register under the watchful eye of miners.

In this wonderful world, buying and selling things like cars or houses is a regular thing but, that’s not all! It is also possible to buy governance shares to be able to vote on the direction a project can take!

Then this idea evolved into a new stage, the “human governance”. Let the community vote on the life choices of the person who initiated the sale of these tokens. What does it mean today to “tokenize yourself” on the blockchain? What are the use cases and conditions related to these new types of tokens?

Let’s explore together what appears to be the next generation of tokens.

The first contract: Mike Merrill

In the beginning there was no cryptocurrency or blockchain. In 2008, Mike Merrill decided to sell the decisions of his life to Shareholders. Decisions that concern both his professional choices and his love, and each time he has obeyed his shareholders.

Today there are 600 of them who can decide on the next actions of his life and their latest idea isn’t not the most ethical one… Even if he did not put this contract on the blockchain, it is still the one that inspired quite a movement a decade later.

The second contract: Alex Masmej

Alex is a French entrepreneur who is behind the NFT Rocket project, which provides loans and borrowing from NFT.

He subsequently made the same crazy bet, the one of leaving life choices to a vote of the community. Taking the form of an ERC-20, the $ALEX token serves as a governance token for his life projects. The sale was originally intended to finance his move to San Francisco, but COVID-19 has slightly delayed its plans.

Thanks to this experience, the term “Personal token” was created! According to Alex, this “Personal token” is used to sell shares of oneself.

The third contract: Marguerite deCourcelle

Also known as coin_artist, the CEO of Blockade Games (Neon District) had a slightly different idea: to tokenize the “coin_artist brand” and not a real person.

The difference is that it will not let buyers tokens decide on life choices but rather the brand, avatar, and the syndicate. All voting decisions are for the virtual space only and will have no impact in the real world.

The NFT is separated into several ERC-20s, the $COIN, which will be used to gain privileges in the E-Den virtual syndicate created for the occasion. These privileges could be information in preview, advanced functions, voting rights concerning the decisions of the Syndicate E-Den and other bonuses in the virtual universes which will use it.

The sale is expected to take place in mid-August, while waiting for coin_artist NFTs that can be purchased on OpenSea. The Ethereum collected in this way will be used for the liquidity of the $COIN thereafter.

Choices of life

These three projects have something in common, and that is having third parties who can influence an individual’s free will, all with their prior consent.

There are several ways to look at these experiences:

• Accept and participate in them
• Denounce a potential drift
• Take an interest in it from afar
• Acknowledge a technological and social evolution

It is difficult to determine who is “wrong” or who is “right” but, what is certain, is that it raises ethical questions since the fundamental freedoms of a human are concerned. Fortunately, for the moment the initiatives of the crypto community mainly concern the projects that are related to it. And right now, that doesn’t apply to all lifestyle choices.

Nevertheless, the line is rather blurry on what will be possible to vote afterwards. What if Alex decides not to obey a vote imposed on him? The irreversible nature of the blockchain gives an even more immutable tone to the taken decisions…

What’s next ?

It’s impossible to predict what tomorrow will bring, but it’s interesting to see that Alex’s project created some kind of standard for the “community token”. These ERC-20 can have several uses but the main one is above all to support the project or the affiliated person.

The $WHALE token is a great example, it’s a token that was created by WhaleShark, one of the biggest and most influential buyers of NFTs in the market.

Long term, the value of the token is set to be backed by the value of the NFTs that WhaleShark owns. In order to ensure the true value of its assets, Whaleshark has asked NonFungible.com to audit the vault contents and estimated monetary value on an ongoing basis.

You can download the first two audits built by NonFungible.com team, in order to give the highest level of transparency on the actual value of the Vault, which are public:

• 1st Audit – May 2020
• 2nd audit – July 2020

There are several ways to get $WHALE:

• Actively participate in the community
• via airdrops that take place on their Discord
• Arriving to sell an NFT in $WHALE

And to spend them, you just need to go to OpenSea and find the sellers who accept it!

Others have tried it like Connie Digital and $HUE, but also Laurel Driskill and her $TINGLE. The first allows you to buy exclusive artwork while the other allows you to ask questions of the artist or see private videos.

What Connie, Alex, Laurel, and WhaleShark have in common is the use of the Roll platform which helps to create your own social currency so that it can be used for social purposes.

Conclusion

The value of the tokens depends on several factors such as the reputation or “seriousness” of the project, utility, hype-momentum, or the nature of the assets in the case of WhaleShark’s NFT vault. There is therefore a strong speculative potential in the very nature of these new types of tokens!

The use of these new tokens is still in the early stages and it is interesting to see that the first uses concern video games, governance or the artistic community.

Sources :

• The sudden rise of the Ethereum-based ‘social token’
• Ethereum token now lets you control one man’s life choices
• The World’s First Publicly Traded Human Goes NSFW
• Introducing “Control My Life”: use my cryptocurrency $ALEX to vote on my life choices
• Why I Turned Myself into an NFT