Social tokens
Social tokens are crypto tokens issued by individuals or communities that represent ownership in and value provided by creators and communities. It is a broad category of crypto projects that often includes Personal Tokens, Creator Tokens, Community and Brand tokens.
By creating a participatory economy between creators, workers, community, and an audience, social tokens can build community power and enable thriving independent creator economies.
Using Social Tokens
They can be used in many creative ways, such as incentivizing and rewarding activity that helps to support the growth of a community. Each community can develop their own social token economy by first outlining how tokens can be earned by the contributors, fans, or audience. This can be different for each community and can be expressed in a multitude of ways:
Engaging a Community
Social tokens can be used as a tool to encourage active engagement within a network. This could include rewarding labor, promotion, interaction, community management, or any other behaviors or tasks that help build collective value.
Managing a Community
Social tokens are creating simple ways to reward community management, such as moderating a Discord, hosting meetings, helping with social media, or other communication and coordination tasks.
Self-Governing a Community
Social tokens can be used for community governance, allowing token holders to participate in democratic governance decisions by voting using their tokens.
Creating Social Value
Social tokens may be seen as a way to represent social currency or social signalling within a community. Those who contribute the most will earn more social tokens, and those who decide to hold onto tokens (instead of selling) are aligning themselves with the long-term interests and vision of a community.
Creating Monetary Value
Because social tokens are built using standards, like ERC-20 tokens, they allow for the ability to both be exchanged on a market and unlock abilities to leverage some of the tooling within decentralized finance. This means that social tokens have a unique ability to signify real financial value, which a community can build and share together.
Creating Perks & Access for Token Holders
Social tokens can be used as a kind of social currency within a community that can be used to allow for unique access, experiences, and perks for holders of a particular community’s token.
Using NFTs Alongside Social Tokens
By nature, social tokens are fungible, meaning they are not only mutually interchangeable, but also ownable and tradable. This allows social tokens to function as currency, to show equity/ownership, for utility, and for governance.
On the other hand, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) cannot be exchanged in the same way as fungible tokens, because they are unique to a specific digital asset/virtual item, such as an image, song, essay, or even a list of items.
Despite their differences, both fungible social tokens and NFTs can be used in symbiotic ways to represent membership within an organization.