I have been interested in the concept of investing in people since before I became  interested in crypto. I was planning to pitch to a venture capitalist on an “investing in people” concept back in 2017, but my backpack got stolen in San Francisco, I lost my pitch deck and excel model saved on the desktop of my computer, and I couldn’t bring myself to recreate everything from scratch as I got very busy working in investment banking at that time.

Fast forward 8 years and investing in people has once again become a hot concept, once again in crypto specifically. This time, we are calling them “creator coins”, a name which I am not a huge fan of because the shortening of “content creators” to “creators” I think does a disservice to the act of creation, which obviously applies to more than only the creation of content, which has always sounded low value to me, even though I guess I am one myself with all the tweeting, casting, blogging, and podcasting I have done over the years.

Anyway, the first time I made one of these kinds of coins myself was a few years ago through a platform called Roll. I remember how excited I was to launch $JAKE at the time. Launching tokens was not nearly as easy or popular back then. But Roll did most of the work for me. They called them “social tokens” at the time. Then there was BitClout, and I made a profile which came with a coin there too. After that came FriendTech, Wildcard, Stack, and a bunch of others you probably never heard of. Point is, I’ve had a personal token on many of these platforms.

More recently, a few months ago, I created my creator coin on Zora, which is largely responsible for this latest “creator coin” craze. And today, I am launching my “writer coin” via Paragraph. I like to launch early on these platforms because I like to operate at the edge of what’s happening in crypto and I do believe something in this category will work massively. I’m more confident in that than I am in my ability to predict which one it will be, so it seems wise to try all of them. I don’t know how it is going to do in the long run, but there are at least a few reasons I am interested in trying this Paragraph version.

First, it allows me to easily reward subscribers to my blog, collectors of my posts, and other supporters alike in a way they probably didn’t expect when they took that original action of support. This is one of the beauties of crypto to me. It passively compounds a permanent and publicly legible record of support, almost like “onchain karma”. And then various people and projects can use those records to reward the people who backed them before it ever seemed like doing so may pay. I think that’s pretty cool.

Second, while Paragraph is calling these “writer coins”, I think they could just as well be called blogcoins. This is supported by that fact that Fred Wilson (who partially inspired me to begin writing my own blog back in 2019) called his writer coin $AVC, named after his blog, as opposed to $FRED, named after himself (the writer). Blogcoins are a little different from personal tokens or “creator coins” as they seem scoped to represent the publication more than the person. I am most interested in tokens which represent the entire person, but i suspect there will only be one power law winning platform in that game, and it’s probably not going to be Paragraph. However, if you asked me a week ago, before I knew Paragraph was going to launch writer coins, which existing platform I thought was best positioned to successfully build a winning platform for writer coins, blogcoins, or whatever you want to call them, I would have said Paragraph, and I wouldn’t have known a second best option to even suggest.