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Mint Season 1 episode 3 features Jenil Thakker, CEO and Founder of Coinvise, who focuses on helping creators launch personal or community-owned social tokens on Ethereum. Coinvise is also Season 1’s sponsor and is helping make this podcast a reality.
On this episode, Jenil and I discuss how to improve the UX/UI around minting, his mission for Coinvise on it becoming a decentralized Reddit for communities and creators, how to get started in web3 as a creator, how do you keep people in your community contributing long term, utility and value frameworks, why creator platforms must stay decentralized, and much more.
Thank you to Season 1’s NFT sponsors!
1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/
2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/
Interested in sponsoring future seasons? Get in touch here!
Adam Levy: So let’s just get right into it. Give me a quick brief about yourself, your upbringing, how you got into crypto and kind of what you’re building right now.
Jenil Thakker: Sure. So I’m based out of India. I started like after I finished high school I moved, and I [Inaudible] And during that time, I really wanted to pursue a PhD in crypto economics. And so in my sophomore year, I applied for a research assistantship, but almost every professor in the CS department, and one of the professor’s got back to me, and we started working on ethereum. And that’s sort of how I got like accustomed to the space and got to learn more about it. So I started doing research. And we’ve worked on something called token reward protocol, which was later adopted by a company called zero chain, and we presented it at icnc 2019 at CES, and we worked on a few other protocols and mining pool security. Then, as we progress further, I really wanted to work on consensus protocol. So we messed around with dad for a little bit and sort of for fun just created our own. And as we move forward, after I graduated, I work again for zero chain. I was one of the early hires and they were sort of building a decentralised AWS, I worked briefly with them and a company called Luxo, which is working on digital fashion and tokenizing them. And they had a really interesting concept called the reversible Ico. And at the time, Icos were like no one as much as a scam, and I really wanted to work on making them better. So I got to work with Fabiana augustiner and got to learn about like, how he created the ERC 20 token standard, and what they were trying to build for consumer and social. That’s sort of where I got the inspiration for working in this space. And I think at the time, Roland rowdy were two platforms that were really deep involved in social tokens. But my idea was that if I want to build crypto and scale it to the next billion people I want to build for both a social network. And the main reason for that is like even after the quarantine, if you see the barrier to entry to create on the internet is starting to get lower or every year. And I think we’re only getting more lazier and just trying to be more on the internet, then do more conventional jobs. So keeping that in mind, I think it’s important that we migrate those people and give them an avenue for at least creators on the internet. I think the definition gets looser and looser, but just building a platform for them and see like how crypto can be beneficial for them. And that sort of the grain of time, we started building climbers, but in about November 2020. We started out as more like we’re all hackers and developers. So we were about four people. And we shipped out an initial version where anybody could create a token, it was all for free. Even today, it’s for free. And you could airdrop it to anyone on social media on just any platform really at the time. The idea was that we want to make interactions so simple that even grandma in Iowa can do it for you simply create a token. So that was fun. In about two weeks, we shipped it out. Today, the idea is that we’re trying to look more like a decentralised Reddit for communities and creators. And the train of thought is the same that we want to build these communities but aligned incentives and tokens are a great way to start that. And I think tokens and even NF T’s are some concepts that are easily digestible when you’re working with social networks. So that’s how we’re starting out. And eventually we’ll branch into 1000 critter dolls, which we can talk about later. But that’s sort of coin wise today and Rob running today on ethereum and polygon.
Adam Levy: Yeah, and so like you said the barrier to entry to become a creator is very low. People on tik tok are becoming influencers and gaining on hundreds of 1000s to millions of followers really, really quick. Right? All the attention is slowly shifting over there for millennials and Gen Z. But what is it about? Creators that like prompted you to go into this because it’s a very unique problem to get into, right? There’s defy, there’s daos there’s all these different moving parts within crypto. Why creators?
Jenil Thakker: Right? So I think creators are probably one of the more people that have like adopted technology as a form of work. And the whole idea there was like, when you date back to Instagram or YouTube, like having those microtransactions when you’re doing a live stream or something. The idea there was that How about we merge work and social together? Right. And the idea that fascinated me was like our definition of what a creator is, is maybe limited to like someone doing streams on YouTube or being an influencer on one of these, like, Instagram or Tiktok platforms. But it’s much more than that. If you have a bit of community if you have like a set of people that share the same idea as you and if you’re continuously creating value for them. I think that’s when you could also be like, labelled as a creator. And I think at some point, everybody’s going to be a creator. We just don’t see that as it yet but I think those are the people that are much more willing to adopt crypto and trying to navigate base to like monetizing, and finding new ways to like, level up every single time. So I think that was like the community that I really wanted to work with.
Adam Levy: yeah, a lot of people that get into crypto early on, you’re referencing how you kind of got started in college, working all these different projects, trying to get involved. I too, also started in school, and I think it’s a lot of people shit on going to school, but I think it’s a lot of work. Early ideas get spread, and experimentation gets done on a very intimate level with other students. And I think you guys come at a unique time where we are seeing these new social platforms come in and about, and people are, like I said, becoming influencers left and right, building their own communities. But they primarily live on these web 2.5 platforms, right. A lot of influencers. They’re building their audience across Instagram, tik tok, Snapchat all these platforms, but how do you monetize them? Right? And I guess that’s where kind of like coin bias comes into the picture creating in tokenizing. Community. So tell me more about coin vies? The vision behind that, how did that idea kind of come about? And where are you seeing the market that prompted that type of birth?
Jenil Thakker: I know. Sure. So I’ll probably give an example. Like my mobile personal example that I got really fascinated by was like, I’ll take back to college, when I used to, like, believe it or not, I used to pay my bills, like rent and food to get coin and get really, for I enjoyed gitcoin, because you could just write code, solve issues, or do any kind of work there that like fits your skill set, you can just browse through like an infinite scroll of like, all these issues, or, you know, things that fit your palette, and then you work on them. On GitHub, you put your code, someone verifies that, and you get paid directly in your Meta mask. And I survived to college to that. So I think that was like, What idea Dan was like, What if we could bring that experience to like, creators, and we could create like a social platform where monetization could look like that where funds are instantly no metamask. So the idea there was that we don’t want to just feel tools, but we want to create an experience around that where we can make those interactions simple. And monetizing shouldn’t be as difficult and really like when you look at that two platforms to take huge cuts, like how do we eliminate, eliminate that and keep it like a transparent process between them and their community? So I think that was something exciting. But even more so than monetizing, like how do you keep these followers or like your community long term and align them long term? How do you keep them consistently contributing value long term? So I think those are problems that were very interesting for me to solve. And I think Bitcoin was one of the earliest examples that did add that value to me. So coin wise, I mean, the idea there was that we want to make those interactions once a token is minted, let’s say, Adam, you have an idea and you create a Dao and you create a token around it. How do you interact around those tokens? How do you create, let’s say, a reward where your community can earn by contributing some value, and you can in turn, get some more coordination and engagement for your own like and grow it over time. So I think those interactions are really like something that I love.
Adam Levy: So let’s talk more about these interactions. Because when people are talking about utility, it’s really based off those level of interactions, right, from what I’m understanding. So when you’re talking about creating value, starting a Dao decentralised, autonomous organisation, for a problem that someone’s trying to solve a community, whatever it may be, how do you guys empower creators with utility with developing at least more utility?
Jenil Thakker: Right? So there’s two aspects of it, I think, more short term that if you look at it, there’s this sort of loyalty points approach where a lot of these utility are earning and spending, right. And we’ve seen like plenty of use cases there, and plenty of platforms building great products around that sort of use case. And the second approach is sort of ownership. And the whole idea of crypto like in my head, when I started out, or my professor always used to tell me that a crypto isn’t about money. It’s about decentralising power. How do you how do you decentralise power from one entity to like many people, and I think tokens is a form of ownership and seeing more examples, there is much more of a novel idea and useful idea long term. So and I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re part of, you know, like a music group, and a music creator creates an album and they do an NFT drum. If you have some form of ownership in a fraction of that NFT and you get royalties in perpetuity when that energy gets, you know successful, then you’re sort of sort of aligned that that success because you’ve invested in that. So I think those kinds of ownership mechanisms are very interesting to explore more into, but more short term, we’re going to see more like VR and fun use cases where you’ll see Okay, do this to earn x do that to earn x or spend it to like get an early access to this or tokenized access. I think those are some use cases. After dinner, I’d say more primitive and early.
Adam Levy: Yeah, you know, one example that comes to mind just because you’re referencing music is, you know, there’s all these like Sound Cloud artists that just throw shit online. And they hope to get some streams and listens and build an audience. And what if there was a way to kind of prove your early contribution as an as a fan, by getting some form of participation and ft for saying I was one I was within the first 1000 listeners of this album? So imagine you could do that with any mainstream artists that’s big today, when they’re just getting started and play that ego card. So is that is that kind of like the utility that you’re talking about, like creating proof of, of not necessarily ownership behind that, but proof of participation, proof of engagement? Is that what you’re referring to?
Jenil Thakker: Right, so I think, every single interaction that, you know, you can map up on the internet, it has a value to it. And when you when you bring in tokens, and you you’re essentially giving that sort of value, and giving it more sort of significance and making it more profound. So in this specific example, let’s say a music artist does an album and as an NFT and gives like fractional shares to people, early adopters of that NFT or like early adopters of LIKE, SHARE owners or whoever contributed early on, they could split the revenue long term, and everybody gets like a transparent equal proportion of that NFT or like, make that situation reverse where people pull in some kind of, you know, eat as a collateral and do it on a bonding curve, where long term as in when it gets more successful, the price of it increases and ultimately benefits the community as a whole. Which again, falls under the umbrella of like how to build positive sum game mechanisms. So I think those kinds of use cases we’ll see propagate like long term.
Adam Levy: so a lot of the main use cases that I see at the moment from social token communities is these discord channels, and using tools like collab land, and now you guys have something that you pushed out through coin buys, right, that competes with collab land to an extent that allows for communities to create essentially tokenized communities and kind of like, stake your time, your financial assets, beyond likes, clicks, subscribes and shares to be more ingrained in, in a more intimate setting. But those are like the main use cases I see right now. Like you can’t really reward people and automate the process for necessarily, let’s say, listening to this podcast episode, right? Like, like let’s pay, get contributed for listening or get contribute contributed for liking and proving that someone like, where does that kind of come into play? And you guys trying to tackle those problems too?
Jenil Thakker: Right. So I think, well, first of all, like, I think club Lang, like build a great product. And the whole point of like, just different products in the space is like more towards eliminating competition than bringing competition. So I think that a lot of these tools, like more long term are going to be ended up working together in some way, shape, or form than competing against. But I think, let’s say if we’re doing like something like a podcast or a stream, and how do you like sort of put value towards it, like more broadly speaking, and I think tokenized podcasts or tokenized, audio rooms, or any form of like, interaction that we have is doable, like entities are pretty restricted at this point to artwork and digital collectibles. But really, what NFC stands for is uniquely verifiable information. And I emphasise on the verifiability part, because let’s if we’re doing this podcast, and this is a form of content that you meant it, or it’s happening on chain, and there’s a copy of it, that other people can verify that at this given time, this NFT or this podcast to cuase. You could have you could pre programme it like programmatically distribute shares or programmatically distribute ownership of this entity to people. And then as in when you make revenue on this specific, assuming in this particular case, you’re making revenue in crypto. So since a lot of this is programmatic, as in when you make that revenue in crypto, it’s automatically distributed to the people who initially contributed. And again, this is verifiable. So anybody can see an on chain that okay, this podcast is full of content was minted as an NFT. So I think the whole point is like, in about two spaces, you cannot really verify that you cannot really put in value to that. But with crypto you can there’s a source of truth that you can point to Okay, this happened.
Adam Levy: Yeah. So from more of these like web 2.0 2.5 platforms, do you see them integrating social tokens and NF T’s somehow into the infrastructure? And because they already built mass audiences and mass adoption, like Instagram first comes to mind like, right or Tik Tok? Do you imagine these platforms integrating these web 3.0 tools to empower the creators?
Jenil Thakker: I don’t think so. I think it’s going to start off like much more in the sense that either they peg it to their own currency, or maybe start with eat, or something more mainstream that can cater to a larger audience. But I think that structure we’re already seeing through microtransactions on every single platform, even I think they’re all doing the theatrical right now. But it’s only a matter of times, they’re going to pop it as crypto gets more mainstream, and everybody starts to use it. So I think that’s, that’s going to happen, but it’s just going to take, I can’t put a timeline to it, but it’s just going to take a while to get there. I think more short term, what I see is that web two and red three platforms are going to have to work together, then separately.
Adam Levy: Yeah, it’s funny, because now I read a rumour that Instagram is working on launching their own NFT platform to some extent, or integrating it somehow, I don’t know the full details. But that comes shortly after a bunch of these new NFT platforms saying they’re the Instagram killer, quote, unquote, you know, yeah. So once social tokens see more mass adoption and validation, I’m sure those conversations are probably going to take place if they’re not already happening right now. But if a creator that’s listening right now, okay, whether they be a tik tok creator, YouTube creator, whatever they may be on any platform, how do they actually get started? Like, where? Where do they start looking for if they want to take their communities, quote, unquote, public or build tokens around them, and create better incentivization structures? To keep their audiences engaged? How do you get started?
Jenil Thakker: Sure. So I think the easiest step to do is you can create like, either a discord or telegram server, I think a lot of these communities start there, you can create an you can just sign into coin lives by just connecting your wallet and you can create a token pretty easily, you can create it on a bonding curve, or you can create it on a fixed supply. MDF instructions on what that looks like by creating a token is really simple to find wise. And if you want to build incentives around those tokens, like creating rewards bounties, or doing tokenized, access, or even do NFT as ownership, I think those kinds of tools are comes integrated with that. And I think on top of that, if they want to extend that sort of community, they could even create a Dao and create a treasury by like getting started with the little wallet that they can share with their core team. And I think dollhouse doll house is also a great place to create a Dao if you’re looking to create a Dao and sort of extended more onto battery. There’s a service called snapshot where you can do governance and do proposals, which is quite interesting. So you can slowly start to migrate all of these activities. But I think the first step could be really simple. Create a discord create an idea have some people join in. And once you do have people join in, you can just go to coin wise and quickly create a token, and start messing around with incentives like you know, Senator reward, like, hey, join my Discord server for 50 tokens, or like, hey, join this event, and aren’t 25 tokens sort of scale, like coordination, collaboration between these people. And once that’s fun, you can sort of extend it to ownership, which is, which is also amazing.
Adam Levy: So let’s break this down. So come up with an idea, find a group of people, or at least more than one person, or at least two people that are excited about it, put them in a discord, go to coin buys, launch a token, create some form of formal documentation, like a one sheet or have a white paper explaining the problem you’re trying to solve. And then essentially, mint tokens, create a snapshot. So you can write proposals and vote on those proposals on the direction of the goal of the group. And then slowly get more people to join. That’s what I’m kind of hearing from you.
Jenil Thakker: Yeah, slowly get more people to join. I think one of the things that I tell everybody is like have a clear use case of what your community looks like, and how you plan on like, leveraging these tools to grow your community rather than reverse engineering it, like doing a token first and then reverse engineering, engineering somehow to like, make it work. I think the right way to do it is first figure out the use case, see how that token can leverage you can leverage that token to like scale collaboration, because that’s what it does. It skills engagement. Because when you have incentives for people to join, or people to do anything for a community, and you have incentive to do that for them, I think that’s like a mutually beneficial game, but like, decide what that incentives and that could be as simple as, join our discord to like earn 50 tokens, or a contribution on our GitHub on the source code. And if you do it correctly, earn 100 tokens. I think those kinds of use cases, define it could be really helpful and then see, like, how that could help and then have like proposals, and see how as a community, you can make decisions on snapshot. And once that’s done, then you can slowly transition into it. Now,
Adam Levy: What are the more unique use cases you’ve seen kind of executed with social tokens? Daos. And all the buzzwords we kind of mentioned, but mainly for like social tokens. What are the more unique use cases you’ve seen being implemented?
Jenil Thakker: Sure. So as of today, we’ve seen obviously at wb where initially they started pulling sort of these tokens that created a community where they could get access to a lot of these premium subscriptions. I think that was a pretty unique use case. One of the other use cases that forefront up unfortunately, here, there’s sort of an even global coin research, whether they’re sort of trying to crowdsource content and like, promote this idea of data mining, or decentralised journalism, where if you’re good at writing, if you do good research and analysis in the space, you can write an article for them, and you can earn X amount of FF or GCR tokens. I think that was also a really interesting use case. Because after that, we saw a lot of people sort of started writing on that platform, and they started making more and more content. So it’s not just one creator creating content, its multiple creators at that point. And as a collective, they’re creating content instead of just one person. So that was a really novel use case using those tokens. Then there were events. A lot of people were doing token gated events, but I’m actually more interested in not limiting access, but increasing access, right? How do you have more people attend these events and collaborate so you can earn tokens by attending those events? So I think those are some use cases that we see primitively, but I’m more interested to see like how we could use NF T’s as fractional ownership, or tokens as a means of ownership. You could not I mean, at some point, you could even give salaries or stipends to your people and just have all of these activities on chain.
Adam Levy: So just jumping back into global coin research and forefront. Okay, so global coin research is one that your name dropped when we were having private conversations on how they’re kind of using social tokens but more in the form of a security. If I’m understanding correctly to redistribute profits back to its contributors, is that what you were you were referencing?
Jenil Thakker: So it was it wasn’t way too well, they weren’t doing an intro to security, I think they were doing it in phases, where the initial phase was that if you write on their platform, you can earn X amount of these tokens, then they pull liquidity, so the token is worth something. Again, the token doesn’t have to be worth something, it could be purely utility, as long as it does hold some value in it. But in that, in that particular case, they did pull liquidity and the token at some value. So whoever the contributor was, can instantly swap it against swap if they wanted to. So I think that was their phase one. I think the phase two is more like community on where ownership of GCR is getting more and more decentralised.
Adam Levy: Think about it for many users are becoming so powerful, you know, if there’s all these communities, incentivizing users attention in collaboration, the user can start getting greedy with who they give their attention and collaborations to an extent, like every community is paying them with tokens, rewarding them, that they could easily cash out or swap or depending on whatever that contracts aren’t, right. But if users keep getting paid and incentivized and rewarded for participating in the communities that they love, do you think that these users like now I’m like really thinking right, because obviously, this is not happening right now, it’s the other way around, where platforms are using users, users are going to be using platforms, I feel like it’s like an entire shift that’s happening, you think it’s getting, we’re going to get to a point where users are going to get super stingy with their time and their resources on, on who they contribute to and in, and so on, and so forth. You know what I mean?
Jenil Thakker: Right, and again, we’re going back to this idea of like, bringing social with work together, right, and you’re doing sort of this gig economy where you’re just tipped in these tokens, and you have like an entire portfolio of these either like valuable coins or invaluable coins that may or may not be worth something. So you’re going to start to see like, Okay, how do I segregate my time and use my skillset wisely to optimise for, you know, just like doing the most amount of participation for the things that I value the most. And I think that that’s the distinction between a like web two, or like the attention economy, and three, which is sort of the ownership economy. And wildlife, these sort of gig economy are like, getting paid in crypto, a lot of these tokens are like primitive use cases, I think more long term approach is going to be like something like what good coin did when I was a good coin user, and you could go claim on their website, if you were a user for a good point for a while. And you could use that sort of ownership, more so than participating on what the direction of that community is going to be. And based on your stake, that sort of, you know, direction matters. And you can sort of have that sort of say in where this project goes. So I think that’s going to be much more fun long term. So if you’re doing a lot of like attention to like, maybe communities that don’t matter to you. I think that wouldn’t be as valuable but we’re going to start to see more time management there.
Adam Levy: Yeah. Every day I hear more and more and more people betting on this greater vision, where the greater economy coincides with web 3.0. How does that kind of look like at Coin base? How are you guys thinking about this? I know you guys are building tools and resources to empower these creators, but like, what, what’s the vision beyond that?
Jenil Thakker: So we want to space where we can sort of also give the sort of idea of this discoverability. So one of the things that Instagram or just about two partners weren’t able to give is that if I’m not Adam Levy fan, I’m not interacting. But you know, other fans that are out there, I’m not interacting with other like, let’s say creators that are out there, like there’s no communication between an Adam Levy fan and let’s say, a Ted Cruz fan. What we’re sort of also providing is that we’re building a social experience where you just browse through a lot of these doubts, or create our communities and see what they’re up to and see, you know, if you can join them, and by joining those styles, or community if you can add value to them. And ultimately, what we want to see is like, let’s say I, as a user, I have some form of ownership and multiple doubts, and doubts really act as communities or like start-ups. So having that sort of ownership and just scrolling through coin licensee, let me see, like what f wb is up to let me see what GCR is up to and just scroll to like, what they’re putting out as, let’s say rewards or incentives. It’s great to explore those. So that’s worked for me. And it’s a social experience, because I get to be a part of these communities intimately and have ownership in that. So it’s starting out with social tokens, NF T’s. But my, the one thing that I say to everyone is going to look like a social network for daps, where people don’t know it yet. But when you do a token, and when you do an NF T and when you move slowly to unchained activities, you’re really acting as a doll. So ultimately, as a community as a whole, we want to get to a place where we can get out of other smaller dolls. So that’s the grand vision of coin wise, where we can build like a social experience where you can explore all of these styles and be a part of them. If you if you have an idea yourself quickly create a token someone tell have some interactions and incentives built around it, manager Treasury, and sort of building experience where, you know, we march this idea of social network?
Adam Levy: Yeah. And what when I hear people talking about web 3.0, and it’s merged with the creator economy, a lot of people tend to have conversations around the creators themselves, they don’t really talk about the platforms and their users per se, to, to an extent. I mean, there’s, there’s talks about that, but I’m kind of coming to you from the point of view right now that users are building such data rich profiles of themselves on the block chain, by participating in all these different vows in these communities. And these organisations, that companies like Facebook, I imagine, might even be incentivizing users to use that data by paying them with their own native token to an extent, you know what I’m saying here, like I’m participating in this music Dao, but I’m also participating in this food Dao. I’m also participating in these organisations, these communities. And based off what the tokens that I hold, based off the interactions that I’ve had these you’re essentially able to build, even though it’s anonymous, you’re able to build a profile of what this quote unquote, individual looks like that then platforms and companies can leverage for their own, I guess, benefit, right? And at the same time, use that data and incentivize users to allow them to use that data, like are these conversations you’re seeing people have right now? Or is that just too far too far advanced and thinking?
Jenil Thakker: Yeah, I think in terms of like privacy, and having that sort of user data, a lot of the whole idea of like, sort of pseudo anonymity is that I don’t know Adam Levine, all I know is Adam, eat online. And whatever you portray your identity on, let’s say, a social network that runs on web three to coin wise, Showtime or any other social network, I see that persona of you. Now that may or may not represent what’s what the real view is, in the real world, I don’t even know what Adam really looks like, I don’t even know what that person is. And even if that data is, you know, sort of an accurate representation of what you are as a person, or how you work, what your persona or your digital identity that you’ve created, where the only thing I know, is ethereum address, and we sort of understand bytes and bits of these people. I think that’s much more interesting to me. And I think that’s the purest form of like, you know, privacy where you just disclose information that is required, enough to like communicate with other people, but not enough for someone to manipulate you.
Adam Levy: You know, I’m thinking about this more from the perspective now. I’m a musician myself, I have been playing the drums for however long I can remember. And before I got into crypto, all I’ve been doing was music. And now that I’m seeing more of these artists get into the picture. That’s what really excites me and joining more DAOs that surround around that surround the musicians, the artists that I love most like I can’t wait till I don’t know Tame Impala releases a Dao and I could participate and contribute somehow and earn Paula tokens, you know, and but even from that point of view, if and I don’t know why I chose Tame Impala, right, but let’s say Tame Impala has a Dao, there’s a bunch of uses in that Dao, assuming those users also participate in other DAOs. And other organisations to Impala could start leveraging that data to create more intimate experiences and cross collaborate with other dals. To create one big hole, juicy community kind of thing. Overlaps with a bunch of different interests. It’s so interesting how this will kind of play out. So let me let me ask you this, why, why is tokenizing more of like an emerging critical element for these individuals and communities? Like I’m hearing more and more people talk about we got to tokenize the world and every single element of the world needs to be tokenized. Why is that such like a prevailing factor, I guess, from a macro perspective of what’s happening in the world.
Jenil Thakker: Again, I mean, we attribute a lot of value to money, I think. And tokens are a way of representing value. So let’s say you’re forming and to have someone that takes attendance in [Inaudible], and they reach out to you and that you guys want to gel together and create a token. I think the token somehow represents a value. And I think that’s what we’ve been attributed to, like, if you date back to history, we started out with shells, there was barter system, and money sort of evolved into what we have today. But that’s sort of how we sort of structure. Even people socially, like even in the social hierarchy, we, we sort of see people inferior or superior. And that’s how we associate power to, I think tokenizing, what really done that three is a decentralised is power in the sense that you sort of have control over your own economic structure instead of US dollar, where, let’s say 25% of the total supply was minted in the last six months, you have no control over that you have no control over how those markets are regulated. Whereas if you do a token, you can sort of have access or have control over how you’re regulated create that economic structure that fits best on what your community’s future lies instead of like treating the entire world as one just community or having these like smaller silos that can have like a token that serves that specific purpose. And then they could use claret something like coin buys, where a lot of these vowels can have inner communication and overlap where people can discover and that sort of communication layer is built on top of it. But that’s just how I see why tokenization has been an emerging trend, apart from just like, gimmicky use cases that we’ve seen, for sure.
Adam Levy: So I know you guys are working on a doubt project right now a DAOs product through Coinbase. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Jenil Thakker: Right, so it’s less of a product or more the idea that we want point mice to act like a doll. And we want to build an ecosystem where a lot of these dials are just a social network for 1000 Simply put, on like a decentralised Reddit where we’re not really a centralised team building this, we want an entire community that we’ve built to have access over and have a lot of these dials have some form of stake in what we’re building. And vice versa. We want to work with a lot of these dads that are created on coin wise, and sort of continue to add value to them. So I think long term, what we’re trying to see is coin by starting to turn as a DAOs, which is what a lot of these companies that were forming today in crypto are going to act as launch our own token, and leverage that token to incentivize more collaboration, but a lot of the sales. So that’s the idea of Bitcoin lies and like I said, ultimately, NF T’s and social tokens have too much attention. I think they do hold like value. And they’re sort of heart of what a Dao is. But ultimately, you want to be at a place where you make that interaction so seamless, that you can create a summon, a Dao, create a token and have these interactions done seamlessly. So the learning curve on getting into battery is really short.
Adam Levy: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And I’m thinking this more from the perspective of Okay, so let’s say in the grand scheme of things, I don’t know, let’s say we have, give me an example of a top crater that like you guys want to work with or that you’re working with right now.
Jenil Thakker: I’ll give you an example of someone right now. So forefront is one of our really like favourite dials that just sort of built out and is one of our successful interactions or more in terms of NFT. We’ve worked with a comedian called Mark Normand, who did their nit, but I think forefront is one of the DAOs that are doing curation. So the first step was again tools. Then the second step was like web three networks. The third step was probably dals. But there’s another layer where there’s a lot Seems like Yep, or forefront that are doing curation and talking about a lot of this next layer or next generation of like tokenization, or read through protocols. And I think that’s one of our favourite creators because we try to invest in creators that are upcoming, then someone who’s already established. People are concentrating, and sort of have potential in future and forefront is one of them that we truly see and, you know, work with is Does that answer your question?
Adam Levy: So yeah, so if Justin Bieber came to you right now and said, I want to start a doubt for his for his him and his audience. So that would be a less attractive type of individual to work with, you guys want to work with more of these premature type of creators and build and grow with them.
Jenil Thakker: I mean, it’s not the Justin Bieber wouldn’t be the ideal user, what we’re trying to do is, the whole point of like, leveraging crypto is to uplift and open access to Brian Weiss did not have access to. It’s like, we’d love to have Justin Bieber. But how do we create value for Justin Bieber, like Justin Bieber himself is, has quite a strong community. And I think that would translate very well on chain. But I think it’s much more fun to work with creators that are up and coming and sort of uplift them and see how crypto can get them from zero to one really quickly, rather than like, getting taken down by Instagram, taking huge cuts defeated by the algorithm, none of that.
Adam Levy: So let’s play on this a little bit more, because I think there’s a distinction between a premature creator and an already established creator. And I think a misconception is that to have a successful social token Tao, you have to have some type of following. I don’t think that’s necessarily true right? Now, but these creators that are established that have millions of followers, they’re also to some extent a prime opportunity, because they’re more web 2.0 2.5, native rather than 3.0. Native, right. And it’s more of empowering when these tools like it, could you see that as a value is it within itself rather than looking? You know, because like, a lot of people are talking about mass adoption, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? All these buzzwords that, and energy that a lot of is just conversations, but there’s a lack of education, a lack of tools and resources to make it easier to onboard a non-crypto user and make them more crypto native. And I think I think that’s a lot more of the opportunity is to like the network effect that can come with that with adopting a new platform, and educating an existing fan base of millions, right on how to become more crypto. I think there’s a lot of value in that you don’t think so?
Jenil Thakker: Yeah, 100%. And I think from that perspective, just looking at it, I think that’s also like a really interesting way of looking at it in the sense that if let’s say you have a pre-established creator, I think that would create much more network effects. And we’ve been sort of pushing in both of those directions. I think it’s been fun working with someone who’s either a celebrity and has a huge audience, or someone who’s up and coming and then seeing them flourish and be successful. I think it’s it. I mean, we do put a lot of emphasis on followers. But I think what’s more important is how you engage with them, and how you build a community around. And if you do have that, I think then you can create a lot of more network effects than you would otherwise if it’s just like a following where it’s just one direction of value, like it should really be bi directional. And crypto enables that. So how do we solve a problem for Justin Bieber in this community? Right? And we’re all friends, when you see these craters on stage, they say that I am who I am, because of my fans, yeah, and, and deep down, they also know that without those fans, they’d be nothing. So 100%, I do think that this could be really useful like in just like specific terms of claim lies, it could be useful to this established creators, but also like, from a just grand scheme of things. Looking at it from a higher level, I think it’s, we’ll see a lot more like I think UFC did a token recently on socios. And we’ve already seen, like, a lot of these bigger companies, or individuals or celebrities do their own token, and launch them and have successful interactions around them. I think that’s going to create a lot of, you know, early days of YouTube back in 2008 2008 2009. It was like that, like, there were a few people creating and then that caused those network effects tend to everybody to be a YouTuber.
Adam Levy: But now everybody wants to be a YouTuber, and YouTube is screwing their creators and freaking taken away majority of their, of their payments in their, in whatever that comes with that. But yeah, crazy. And I think that’s like, that’s the problem that social tokens are trying to solve to an extent is creating better monetization schemes for these creators that are getting basically fucked by these platforms while they’re building an amazing audience. And those platforms have provided them with tools to gain those followers and those fans, they do a shitty job with helping them monetize them. And I think that’s, that’s the beauty behind what we’re about to experience. But let me I brought this up earlier. The misconceptions Behind social tokens, because all this stuff is super fresh and quite frankly, very overwhelming to someone who may not be as crypto native, what have you seen some of the misconceptions being around social tokens? And I guess people like wanting to get started, like, what are some that you’ve seen?
Jenil Thakker: You know, a speculation, making it all about prices. I think when you see it, you see things like tokens, when the core aspect of it is either, you know, to scale collaboration and coordination and sort of represent ownership, and you sort of sort of map that to financial value and try to speculate on it. I think that’s something that, you know, gets skewed down the line. And not, I mean, not to mention, a lot of these communities down the line aren’t going to be their own sort of cities or silos, or even billion dollar like dolls. And that’s awesome. But I just think that just looking at it from like this monitor mess lens of just price and discovery. I think that’s something that is a misconception, I think it’s much more than we’ve seen a lot of good implementation of vows, that don’t actually have a value at all, like they don’t have a US dollar value, or they’re not sort of created a pair with ease, they’re just different token and the value is that it creates scarcity or some kind of thing that you know, it filters out. So that’s a huge misconception that I’d like to solve. And the second is that mean coins and check coins, I think that’s been sort of the narrative in the past few months. And yes, we’re going to see a lot of those should coins and mean coins being made. But I think that’s not the whole picture, though. Like people, whenever you talk about social tokens, people generally attribute it to meme coins or ship coins. But as we see more like successful dolls, or tokens being created and interactions around them, that narrative is going to change. But I think the biggest misconception is it maps to this. And that’s not the whole picture. So I probably say those are the two things that focus too much.
Adam Levy: Let’s dive deeper into the first one really quick, because I think that’s what attracts users in the beginning, because they see a number on the screen that fluctuates, that’s tied to their brand, and their community. But how does a tokens value get, I guess, issued in place that launch? Like why did why do some tokens trade at 20 cents or two cents a token rather, our others trade at like $1 to $2 $3? At the Genesis like we’re where does that come from? How do people determine that? Because I’m sure that’s a lot of like, one of the major questions these people are like thinking about like, are you just creating value out of thin air?
Jenil Thakker: Right. So typically, what, what happens is when you do create a token, to give it some kind of value, you can go to something like uniswap, or kurtzweil, if you’re on a different chain, or banker or balancer or any sort of automated market maker where you can see it, but some capital. And that sort of capital determines the value of a token, if it’s mentioned on a bonding curve, we can start bonding curve itself acts as its own automated market maker. So if you pull some liquidity, and create a pair of with each, or put it as collateral that creates some seed value of that token itself. And then going forward from that, how uniswap prices, its tokens, based on like the supply and demand of that token itself, how its traded long term, the value of it gets determined, and that sort of makes the difference of it being at $1, or $10. And it’s not necessarily that the token creator has to list the token on one of these exchanges and start trading it. Anybody can do it for that matter. And they can list a token and seed it, but some capital, and that capital also like you decide if you want to, you know, put 0.1 eat for 110 eat or whatever, that’s capitalism create a pair. But generally, if you want to seed it, but some value, you can do it on uniswap, which is probably one of the most use platforms today. Where you can put some kind of eat and create a pair of it’s a particular ERC 20 token or a social token. And that means something called liquidity tokens. And again, going back to investing, you can also have a piece and LPs get point 3% of every transaction if they’re, they’ve like invested in the liquidity pool initially. So there’s some incentive there. But that’s sort of automated market makers work. That’s what gives value.
Adam Levy: Got you. So when people are creating or when creators are initially building and strategizing the launch of their token, what kind of factors do you guys use to guide these individuals who, let’s say are brand new to the space to determine their launch based off a bonding curve, or more of a traditional linear curve.
Jenil Thakker: So there’s so on coin rise, there’s typically two options. Like starting from the beginning, you when you create a token, you could either created as a scarce asset on a fixed supply, which is 10 million tokens, which is, which is pretty conventional. And then on a bonding curve, which is something that we were trying to recommend and more than universal. When you’re sort of trying to act up the Dow in perpetuity, you don’t want to really cap those. We add more liquidity and bins at the time. And then even when you do have that bonding curve done, you can like change the slope and adjusted over time, which is really cool. If you think about it. So that’s, that’s an idea that we just introduced very recently. But to answer your question,
Adam Levy: can you repeat that last part, it cut out for a minute, you said, so when you’re when you’re let’s say, You’re minting a 10 million tokens you were talking about.
Jenil Thakker: So either you can do it on a fixed supply, which Okay, are or something that we recommend highly to most people that we work with, which we recently introduced was a bonding curve, where you can sort of adjust. So the way when it comes to like put simply work is that as the distribution grows, or as the token is distributed more the price of it increases over time. And you define the function in that. So you can sort of define the function in a way where it goes linearly or in a sigmoid function or logarithmic mickley. So I think that’s going to be much more interesting, because then you can create the token that fits much more like your use case than just having one size fits all. Like so far, we’ve seen only like fixed supply use cases where just as 10 million tokens, I think it’s going to be really interesting when people start minting tokens on a bonding curve. And the way it works is that when you do have a bonding curve, you can select how much capital you want to seed it with. So let’s say you can do 0.18, and then you can mint those tokens, and that’s going to seed it with some value, which sort of acts as its own automated market maker. And then going forward, you can adjust it. So now it’s not growing linearly, you can do it in a sigmoid function, which is really cool, because that really fits with like specific use cases.
Adam Levy: Yeah, there’s so many. And this is why I feel like it’s such a great opportunity for creators and for individuals, communities to jump on board and to tokenize their communities. But while the tools in the process, you guys make it super easy, you just go on coin vines, you can mint tokens instantly. Right? It’s still a lot of process and thinking and strategizing on how to utilise that token. What the dynamic and I guess the economics behind that token should be and yeah, it’s interesting to see how this will kind of play out down the line.
Jenil Thakker: Yeah, I think I mean, one of the things that it does is like its lower lowers the barrier of entry. And like one of the things that as a team and coin wise, we’re trying to do is like, create more discovery for a lot of the successful creators that created their tokens. So if you’re someone who is maybe clueless about how you want to do this process, or it seems intimidating at first, you can just explore a lot of these people that created their own token and see how they’re using it and how they’re utilizing it. You can just its pretty transparent, you can just scroll through a list of rewards or explore to people that created their own token and just explore for like, really fun beer or useful use cases. And I think the second thing was that how do you get that initial like, so some of the normal ideas that were either setting up rewards or bounties, but the second was, again, ownership. And to get to a point where you can do all of that I think crowdfunding or investment in public goods was something that we’re trying to push for. And I think that’s something that we’re trying to bring to coin buys in the next few weeks, is that we want to be able to have these communities crowdfund easily from their community, either for straight staking or NFT, fractionalization. And I think that’s a really novel concept that plays into this idea of you can either invest into the community that you find it successful, and going forward, you can get paid either in royalties in perpetuity, or you can earn like, or you can like, essentially own a percentage of it. So I think I think crowdfunding is going to help a lot of these creators get started, and get those funds to, you know, Kickstarter, career bears, and that too, that’s something that’s very difficult to do, like, how do you get funded? How do you raise funds from institutional VCs?
Adam Levy: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I’m excited to see how this kind of plays out and the level of experimentation between bonding curves and token supplies and I’d be curious to see like, how are these how more of these mainstream creators individuals communities, however, however, we want to call that effect, there are so many terms, utilize this to empower their fans and power their audience, and do so in a way where on one end of the spectrum, because there are two users to this, right, there are the investors who are going to be speculating on the token price and trading these creator communities, right. And then there are the fans who are actually going to be buying into this stuff and leveraging its utility for what it has to offer, right? And while a lot of creators are treating this from the membership loyalty rewards point of view of access, right? On the other side, you have the people who are going to be basically trading these people like, like a human stock market, a community stock market to an extent, right. I’m like thinking Black Mirror right now. Okay. Is it ethical? Is it ethical? Like you can’t ditch that point of view of experimenting with social tokens and all that stuff, right? Do you think that’s ethical? How do you think people will kind of respond to that [Inaudible]?
Jenil Thakker: So just coming to the point in terms of investing, it’s either you can you can bet on institutions, or you can bet on bet on individuals. And I’d rather bet on someone like, let’s say, let’s say Elon Musk, right? For an example, just out of the blue, I’m just picking one name. And what if I could just bet on like, whatever this guy does, and I think a great example of that, is Alex master page. When he did his token, people were just betting on his career and his success going forward. And they get they got, like, basically a say, and what he’s going to do next. And that was like a really fun experiment, which was like more like a human Ico. And I think that taught like, it seems dystopian, but it’s not really as dystopian because we’ve seen a lot of people do it. And like I said, in the beginning, a lot of these days are individuals act like companies, where they have people helping them, they have like, they’re creating some value on the internet. And what they’re really are, is they’re acting like start-ups or companies that in their very early stages, and it’s completely okay to have their own token and sort of, you know, regulated as long as it’s done properly, as long as it’s done in a way where you can create positive some games, like one of the misconceptions that have been trying to solve is that it’s one of the use cases or utility that I’ve seen that shouldn’t be promoted as much as gated access. Like it’s, it’s not really about getting access, it’s about opening access, like it should be the reverse where you didn’t pay to attend an event as I can already do that for Fiat. But with crypto, I should get paid to attend an event. And there’s, there’s a great service called kickback that already does that. And if you don’t attend one, it sort of splits the revenue by all the people who attended actually, which is really cool. So I think a lot of those kinds of like use cases or utility that we’re going to see unclaimed lies are going to be really interesting to see going forward. But I don’t think that’s where dystopian that individuals are going to act like companies or start-ups, or even Daos.
Adam Levy: So you think that all these token-based discord channels, they’re actually doing it wrong? To an extent depending on the use case, depending on the use case, obviously, fragile benefits a unique community. But like, if musicians actors?
Jenil Thakker: go ahead and been doing it wrong, but it’s not really like, like, you could do the same thing with Fiat or like, like, how are you using crypto to create like a positive-sum game are mutually beneficial a game? Right? Like the core idea of Rick remember how to both parties win? Like how does everyone sort of getting transparent, truthfully, like equal access and freedom, right? And if you’re sort of getting access, you can already do that, by the way, with only fans and like other like similar platforms where it’s not really hard to do, like we’ve seen subscription models, like, what they really are is just filter mechanisms, and that what gated access is, so it’s not really a wrong approach. It’s just not a unique approach that are like you’re not just using crypto to leverage something even more powerful. So I think using crypto to increase access, or increased collaboration is what I’m interested in. And while we still provide that sort of feature, but I think I’m more interested in seeing that over getting access.
Adam Levy: Interesting. Yeah, that’s a good perspective to have. Because a lot of these communities that I’ve seen come into play, they have their discord channels, and I keep referencing discord because it’s the more plausible use case that I’ve kind of seen come to life. And they limit interaction and create exclusivity and FOMO by creating these token gated experiences, and I think if you’re trying to create a new type of fan base, and target your more hard-core fans, where you can provide them a financial stake in what you’re doing, I think both can exist. And in a creator’s community, I think there can be the token gated experience, and I think there could be the very open and loose and flexible type of Thank you for coming here as an airdrop type of experience.
Jenil Thakker: Yeah, it’s, it’s like what you’re looking for. Are you looking? Let’s say I have to give like a specific example. I look into your community, like how are you incentivizing collaboration, right? Like how are you like making that engagement goes from, like, 100 people doing something for you and you’re doing something for them to 1000 people working together. Do gaining access to the best way to get to 1000 people now are using is the best way to get 1000 people. And let’s look be specifically Adam has a really novel idea that helps a lot of people, how does he get to 1000 people faster getting access or increasing. So I think we’re going to see a lot of that in one click coexist. And we’re going to like really successful interactions like f wb. And it’s always nice to see those. But I think like six months from now, we’re going to see like, a lot more like, investment in public goods, kind of like novel ideas, bear sort of opens up access, and everything is transparent, no, FOMO get in right away, and, you know, come join us.
Adam Levy: But then if it’s easy to join, and it’s there is no FOMO, then will people want it? Because if everyone can get it, and there’s no exclusivity to it, there’s no quote unquote, scarcity. Will it make it appealing for people? And now we’re just talking general sense, right? We’re talking strategy. You know what I mean?
Jenil Thakker: Right? So I think, so we can talk about FOMO, FOMO can be like, you can still do far more and keep it relatively open. So let’s say I join a community, and it was like fairly easy to join, like, there was no barrier to access, right? Like, there was no like, you need to have X amount of tokens in your wallet to join this committee. Like none of that I joined it pretty easily. I think there could be FOMO on interaction, like, and I keep going back to good coin is because Good point, the way it works is that like, like, let’s say I could do a volunteer or reward for doing kind of some work, I can apply for it. And then multiple people can apply for it. And only one of them gets selected. Whoever is the best skilled at Sure. So you could still have FOMO but FOMO on interaction FOMO not unlike access.
Adam Levy: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Okay, final question. Okay. So, I want to talk to you about the stages of the internet’s development. Okay. So we had web 1.0, which was very read only type of experience that transition and gotten eaten alive by web 2.0. And now we got really beautiful interfaces, we were able to create online communities social interactions, we had these web 2.5 platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc., etc. And now we’re transitioning into web 3.0. Okay, because it’s building on top of the primitives of web 2.5. What do you think is going to one, eat web 3.0 alive, just like web 2.0, 1.0. Right. And then what might be its downfall, if any?
Jenil Thakker: I think so just taking a more philosophical approach or the IQ to destroy the board decreases by a point every year. And what retreat does is democratises access, but it also democratises disruption. So when everybody has equal power, or somewhat of a power or stake, it makes it easy to destroy it. So I think it’s sort of like a double edged sword when something is so powerful, and I think when you when you democrat democratising this, I think disruption is also like one thing that and we’ve already seen it, like if you’ve seen a lot of these exploits, where a lot of these protocols are been exploited programmatically by a lot of these hackers, that have figured out some more vulnerability where they either like, you know, sort of explored a protocol or even have more centralised access to it in the sense that they somehow find a way to get more stake into the game or more skin in the game, and make it more like a centralised game and sort of a decentralised game. I think those are some pitfalls that were taken down. But ultimately, I’m optimistic that, you know, the space or like that three years overall is going to survive, because just going back to like the genesis of crypto by some time fault tolerance, where you assume that a set of people are going to act irrationally. And, but there’s going to be more people and based on the mechanisms that we build, if we can incentivize good behaviour or bad behaviour. And what my professor likes to always say is you want to create a mechanism there. Make it more profitable to be a good actor than a bad actor. So I think overall, like long term, I’m more optimistic, but as soon as we design like the right incentives, like Adam is more incentivized to perform like a good actor, because that’s more profitable, then become a bad actor, because then you gain nothing from that. I think that’s like good design. And if as long as we design those kinds of protocols, really secure, I think we have a great future.
Adam Levy: It’s a good way to end off Jenil you’re the man, thank you for being on. You’re so sharp and so insightful. I really hope to have you on again, Thanks for being here.
Jenil Thakker: Really appreciate it, brother.