For as long as homo-sapiens have existed in communities, built arms-length relationships, and conducted economic activities, social capital has been essential as the foundation of trust-based relationships – both within commerce and within general community engagement. Now, the way it is measured, traded, used, and monetized is moving from informal and invisible channels into formal and visible ones via the new technological primitive of a Social Token / Creator Coin (“CC”).
Social Tokens / Creator Coins are a crypto-native tool that combines social signaling with consumer engagement, loyalty, and community-building functionality. They provide a foundational element of a digitized personal Net Promoter Score (NPS) score. Like fiat currency, they can be used both as a store of value and a medium for transfer of value.
The Value of Social Tokens
For most individuals, the future of work will encompass a much more seamless hybrid online-offline identity and contractual arrangement encompassing more fluid transitions between singular full-time employment with a corporation or a DAO, and ongoing solopreneur / freelancing ventures. This flexibility and fluidity will become both a preference and a necessity for many workers, as well as for companies / DAOs looking for greater workforce flexibility.
Web3’s blockchain-native, value-infused internet protocols open the door for both individuals and organizations to access, create, and exchange value in new ways and at new levels. They also make it much more feasible for individual humans to cultivate, engage and reward communities they interact with – whether fans, consumers, prospective employers, prospective clients, sub-contractors, or companies cost-effectively and efficiently.
Today our identity and social graphs are already valuable, but their value has been intrinsically understood. It has not yet materialized in any form of observable and tradeable asset.
The Changing Career Path
Today the title of ‘influencer’ is largely dedicated to someone whose full-time job is making content for social media distribution. The 0.1% of ‘influencers’ are largely indistinguishable in their operations from traditional digital media brands.
As global competition increases and digital social communities further coalesce around interests, issue areas, and identities rather than geographic or language barriers, the coming decades will see many of us becoming “creators” in our own right.
Today, non-celebrity executives at large publicly traded companies already recognize the importance of their personal brand and visibility on social media. Being seen as a leader inside their organization and being viewed as the leader of their organization externally compels them to have a strong, visible public brand.
Many executives are also increasingly taking on side hustles (i.e., David Solomon, Goldman Sachs CEO’s DJ’ing gig; Dharmesh Shah’s YouTube channel) and ‘micro advisory engagements’ (i.e., Gerson Lehrman Group, Guidepoint, etc.), further monetizing their passions and any free time they might have.
At the same time, web2 platforms cultivating ‘experts’ and offering paid access to them for long-term projects (e.g., TopTal, etc.) or limited-duration consultations (i.e., Intro.co) has also become normalized.
Today these platforms link out to individuals’ social media profiles and use third-party payment processors. While many have a customer feedback/rating system, they do not integrate into one’s social profiles and are, therefore, viewable only by users of that specific platform.
As these so-called “white-collar” jobs become increasingly commoditized and/or outsourced, this type of activity is going to trickle down into the rest of the labor market. Most of us will soon be founders and CEOs unto ourselves, making personal asset allocation decisions of time and energy between long-term contracts with large corporations, and shorter-term projects.
The ‘Fidgital’ World is Normalized
The lines between online and offline identities, activities, and engagement will continue to blur.
Online trust building and reputation is already the default first step in many instances and will increasingly become the norm. For example, before joining a meeting with a founder, the first thing an investor does is “Google” them and review their LinkedIn or other web2 social channels. Similarly, the founders preparing for a big sales meeting or investor pitch use online information to draft backgrounds and bios on all key stakeholders and decision-makers. The same could be said about corporate hiring processes.
So, the value of social identity, capital, and reputation is here online already. We already perceive the value and essentially trade on it freely. It's just not yet codified into a tangible, transferrable asset. That will change with social tokens.
Web2 Limitations
Many of the core primitives of digitalizing social capital in a way that facilitates commercial activity, exist already in web2. Because of the way the web evolved over a period of years with online commerce and payments processing coming first, and then social engagement, there is far more friction in the current system than would be optimal if both were built simultaneously.
For example:
- Conducting business online requires a third-party transactor with embedded fees, rather than a one-click P2P payments process.
- Venmo already offers P2P payments and allows some basic social primitives such as a publicly visible explanation of what the payment was for. But it is separate from other social graphs.
- Social-media profiles and engagement are separate from hiring and recruitment platforms (whether indeed.com for long-term placements, or Indeed.com for short-term gigs, or GLG for subject matter expert advisory consults).
- It is now too easy to ‘buy’ reviews and ratings for products on e-commerce sites.
- ‘Follows’ don’t demonstrate the depth of the social tie, only that there is one in some form.
What the current web2 approaches lack is the seamless interoperability between social identity and interactions, financial transacting, and commercial activity.
Furthermore, the verifiability of social identity information is limited at best. We inherently believe that most of what is put online about a person (whether put there themselves or by others) is accurate – both in a situation of commission as well as omission. As deep fakes become more of a reality, we will need additional ways to assess the accuracy and veracity of one’s digital reputational content.
By integrating social and financial capabilities into a single digital-native primitive tool, many of those interoperability challenges can be overcome. This will open up a host of new avenues for value creation and sharing, as well as real, deep, trust-based relationship building, rather than shallow transaction-based engagement.
By creating this interoperability primitive, Creator Coins allow people to exponentially expand their sphere of influence beyond the individuals they encounter based on geographic proximity. They open a new channel for demonstrating and building trust and value in a way that is not constrained by physical location, nor by formal contractual arrangements.
The net outcome is an enhanced ability to develop meaningful, non-transactional relationships.
An earlier version of this essay appeared first on Diamond.