(2021-02-06) Friends With Benefits A New Model For Social Tokens

Friends With Benefits: A New Model for Social Tokens. The Ethereum community gets to ask itself everyday, “what is money?” Before cryptocurrencies and tokens even emerged, a rich intellectual history has been written on the anthropology and sociology of money. Nigel Dodd in The Social Life of Money (2014) argues that money is a “claim upon society” since it expresses a form of debt between an individual and society as a whole.

This intellectual movement has included the likes of C.H. Douglas in the 19th century, who observed that the lack of finance was a consistent impediment to the development of the arts and literature, and introduced the concept of “economic democracy” through a type of social credit.

Just like with the growth of digital NFT art marketplaces, COVID-19, and really, the internet, has forced artists and creators to rethink how they can connect with their fans and monetize online. One such platform, Roll, is already beginning to catch on with celebrities like Lil Yachty, Akon, and Ja Rule, all of whom are launching social tokens. Roll uses a link-based system so you can instantly send social money to another user on Roll.

Tokens that provide access rights to online communities are now possible because of new tools like Collab.Land. Collab.Land acts as a bridge between chat applications like Telegram or Discord and your MetaMask wallet. One such community, Friends With Benefits ($FWB) uses Collab.Land, which to users appears a chatbot that ensures community members are holding enough $FWB tokens in their MetaMask wallet to access various Discord channels. FWB is now also using SourceCred to distribute $FWB tokens commensurate with upvotes on discussions ranging from music production, NFT discussions, breaking news, memes, Substack articles, and trading tips.

I spoke with the founder of the $FWB community, Trevor McFedries....

I took a job at Spotify and had my mind blown at how different technology products were from media products. That made me want to think about creating music projects more like software products.

there’s all this data that suggests that Will & Grace was largely responsible for gay marriage acceptance in the United States. The public polling of American’s point of view on homosexuality is tied to the ratings of that show. So it became clear to me that media was a great vehicle for creating social change.

That was kind of the seeds of building Brud which was like, okay if you could create a Will & Grace that could scale to touch billions, what would that look like? You would need to kind of rethink talent, that could scale like software, that could speak Mandarin, Portugeses, English, Spanish. At the core of all of that is the dream of decentralizing celebrity, and allowing celebrity to be this vehicle for creative people to share their talents through. People call that “headless brands” and Lil Miquela [which Brud is behind] is kind of that. We’ve got teams of writers, animators, stylists all pushing their talents through this character.

$FWB really stemmed from all those things coalescing from one idea. Every day I wake up trying to build a better future for creative people. We talk about the “Forever 21 economy,” where innovators and creators aren’t necessarily capturing a lot of the value they create. A lot of it is accrued in platforms and fast-follow copycats.

Is there a more collectivist approach to this, of contributing collectively to a space that also accrues value? What makes social networks valuable? It’s the kind of content we create. Is there a low-touch, MVP way to say, what if people creating all the value, participate in the upside?

Ameen from SpankChain was in one of my groups and he said, “The next OnlyFans will be built with Collab.Land.” I was like, what is this thing? Most people were using it for Telegram.

There have been attempts at tokenized social communities, like the Pepo App which was really cool, but struggled to scale before shutting down recently. Do you think it helps using Discord, a chat tool people already use regularly and are familiar with?

Candidly, I’ve had a lot of experience building communities.

Creating a value system is important — we were big on real identity in the beginning. Most Discord channels are anonymous. We asked people to put their Twitter handle in their nickname.

It looks like there are about a 1,000 members and a core group of about 400 individuals that are holding the minimum 55 $FWB to access channels.

One of the major challenges for communities is maintaining that high signal-to-noise ratio. The idea of Seasons was that we would create a new season, let anyone who was active earn the five tokens needed for free to move onto the next season. Anyone who wasn’t checking into the community would be gated out. They would still have their $FWB but can’t post in the community channels. The next Season was born out of us not anticipating that the token price would move as quickly as it did. We wanted to find a way for people to earn tokens. With SourceCred we found a tool we were thinking of building that measures the emotes and reactions that people are using. 2021-07-06-FwbSeasonThreeCreativeCooperation

We are also moving toward a DAO model. Originally, I minted these tokens, but the dream is to have a DAO manage the treasury.