Last week I wrote about a special kind of content coin. Today, I will zoom out a bit. Content coins are tradable tokens that are created mainly because the creator has something to share. This can be anything: a poem, a photo, a piece of art, a song, whatever. These content coins are among the main origins of the CoinAge.

Social sharing with crypto rails, that is what decentralised social (DeSoc) is all about. In the beginning, there was text, of course. And quickly that evolved in to image sharing à la Insta. Zora led the way in that, and quickly others like Rodeo and Drakula entered the scene as well. The basic premise here was that you could earn from your posts, because people could collect them or tip you by liking them. Blockchain tech, especially the L2s on Ethereum, is ideal for this.

However, just like with other NFT platforms, there is a big challenge: most do not reach escape velocity, to use a popular term. What I mean by that is that only in exceptional cases did art get collected by people outside the NFT artist bubble. Most of the earnings were made from other creators who were active on the platforms. There was a certain crowd of crypto artists who would support eachother, but it was rare for 'outside' money to come in. Zora figured it was a great idea to get that larger crowd in the crypto scene to play ball. This larger crowd are the traders: people who try to make money trading coins. What if you could get these traders to trade art or content?

And thus, the content coin was born and the CoinAge launched into being. The idea is simple: let trader play their casino games with content, so creators earn money from outside their own bubble. Other platform teams liked this idea and followed suit. You can trade this article, for example, as also Paragraph decided to switch from NFTs to coins. And on TBA, or The Base App, the social corner of Coinbase that runs on the Farcaster protocol, every post you make is a tradable coin, if you switch that on.

The mechanics are that if you create a post, you create a coin and you get an initial supply of that coin as a reward. The more people buying your coin, the more that coin is worth. With that, your share is worth more. If you manage to sell that. There are some challenges there, though. Traders don't like it if the creator of a coin sells off supply. Dumping is frowned upon, so the increased value of your coins can not be exchanged without reputation cost for actual value you can pay your rent with. The risk is that traders stop trading in your coins if you don't hodl. Secondly, value is determined by an algorithm. If your coin does not take off, the algo overestimates the value of the coin, and you cannot actually trade it, because there is not enough liquidity in the market to sell off your supply.

I have created several content coins to experiment, including posts on TBA. The earnings I had from that last platform were exclusively creator rewards, a bonus you get for posting there. As for my coins on Zora, of which there are several, I think I had a few that earned me a bit, but most earnings were from trading fees: the small reward you get on trades made with a coin you created.

The content coins I created that made the most sense to me are the cocreated language coins I wrote about last week, and my Poésies éphémères collection of poems, where the volatility of tradable assets is part of the art, as I am juxtaposing the immutability of blockchain tech with the ephemeral nature of the medium (paper, sand, snow for example) I create the poems on and the fleeting nature of the moment I record with these poems. But that has not yet resulted in big earnings.

Have you created content coins? Share in the comments how that works for you.

Last week I wrote about a special kind of content coin. Today, I will zoom out a bit. Content coins are tradable tokens that are created mainly because the creator has something to share. This can be anything: a poem, a photo, a piece of art, a song, whatever. These content coins are among the main origins of the CoinAge.

Social sharing with crypto rails, that is what decentralised social (DeSoc) is all about. In the beginning, there was text, of course. And quickly that evolved in to image sharing à la Insta. Zora led the way in that, and quickly others like Rodeo and Drakula entered the scene as well. The basic premise here was that you could earn from your posts, because people could collect them or tip you by liking them. Blockchain tech, especially the L2s on Ethereum, is ideal for this.

However, just like with other NFT platforms, there is a big challenge: most do not reach escape velocity, to use a popular term. What I mean by that is that only in exceptional cases did art get collected by people outside the NFT artist bubble. Most of the earnings were made from other creators who were active on the platforms. There was a certain crowd of crypto artists who would support eachother, but it was rare for 'outside' money to come in. Zora figured it was a great idea to get that larger crowd in the crypto scene to play ball. This larger crowd are the traders: people who try to make money trading coins. What if you could get these traders to trade art or content?

And thus, the content coin was born and the CoinAge launched into being. The idea is simple: let trader play their casino games with content, so creators earn money from outside their own bubble. Other platform teams liked this idea and followed suit. You can trade this article, for example, as also Paragraph decided to switch from NFTs to coins. And on TBA, or The Base App, the social corner of Coinbase that runs on the Farcaster protocol, every post you make is a tradable coin, if you switch that on.

The mechanics are that if you create a post, you create a coin and you get an initial supply of that coin as a reward. The more people buying your coin, the more that coin is worth. With that, your share is worth more. If you manage to sell that. There are some challenges there, though. Traders don't like it if the creator of a coin sells off supply. Dumping is frowned upon, so the increased value of your coins can not be exchanged without reputation cost for actual value you can pay your rent with. The risk is that traders stop trading in your coins if you don't hodl. Secondly, value is determined by an algorithm. If your coin does not take off, the algo overestimates the value of the coin, and you cannot actually trade it, because there is not enough liquidity in the market to sell off your supply.

I have created several content coins to experiment, including posts on TBA. The earnings I had from that last platform were exclusively creator rewards, a bonus you get for posting there. As for my coins on Zora, of which there are several, I think I had a few that earned me a bit, but most earnings were from trading fees: the small reward you get on trades made with a coin you created.

The content coins I created that made the most sense to me are the cocreated language coins I wrote about last week, and my Poésies éphémères collection of poems, where the volatility of tradable assets is part of the art, as I am juxtaposing the immutability of blockchain tech with the ephemeral nature of the medium (paper, sand, snow for example) I create the poems on and the fleeting nature of the moment I record with these poems. But that has not yet resulted in big earnings.

Have you created content coins? Share in the comments how that works for you.