Web3 is evolving at lightning speed, and so is Coinvise. When we started Coinvise in November 2020, we wanted to give creators and communities economic freedom by letting them create a tokenized community and mint social tokens (ERC-20) in seconds.

A year and a half later, tokenized communities have shown their efficiency, and creators and communities’ needs have evolved way beyond minting their tokens.

After introducing many new features that allow creators to reward & pay contributors, avoid gas fees on transactions, and create trust at scale, Coinvise has quickly become the go-to platform for many of the most famous tokenized communities.

Yet, we noticed creators were still struggling with a few blockers when building a tokenized community:

• Initial liquidity for their tokens and monetization.

• Designing Tokenomics

• Kickstarting a community and granting access/benefits before introducing a token.

And we heard them.

We’ve been working hard for the past months to come up with innovative solutions, and we’re incredibly excited to expand today our product offering with Coinvise NFT Memberships.

We believe the future of tokenized communities will need efficient tools that can leverage both the power of NFTs and Social Tokens - and we’re here to build them.

Note: If you’re interested in minting your first Coinvise NFT Membership today, you can access a full tutorial on how to do it here.

1 - Introducing New Plugins & Dashboard

Membership tiers on Coinvise are represented by a NFT with a fixed price and limited supply. Each tier unlocks specific benefits for community members and can be renewed to create recurring revenue for creators and communities 💰

In addition to custom benefits, creators can add Coinvise Verified Plugins that enable sending an automated airdrop and accessing to a membership-gated discord. Because the flow is happening on our platform, and because we’re partnering with other incredible Web3 projects such as Guild.xyz, members can be sure to receive benefits when purchasing a membership.

In future we aim to partner with platforms that play complementary to our vision and integrate more plugins for token-gated utilities. Upcoming integrations include Unlock Protocol, Mintgate and more.

We aim to add more plugins that offer composable ways to create tiers with rich utility.

Finally, dashboard on Coinvise now includes real-time data on membership revenue, tokens distributed and a member directory to better understand your community.

2 - NFT Memberships Use-Cases

From our work with hundreds of web3 communities, we realized that building a community takes time and is hard enough without introducing the challenges of token design and distribution.

Launching a token at the outset is not always the easiest or most straightforward path to getting started. For those creators who aren’t quite ready to launch an ERC-20 token, but are still looking to kickstart their web3 community, we wanted to provide a new solution.

With the ability to create NFT directly from Coinvise, creators and communities have now access to entire toolkit to kickstart, then scale their most ambitious projects.

Here’s how we envision a potential communities' life cycle looking like moving forward:

• Step 1 - Kickstart A Community & Grant Access to Early Members - NFT Memberships serve as digital renewal keys for anyone to access a deeper level of engagement within a community, as well as a great way for community builders to engage and support active contributors. Your members want to be part of something special, want to be associated with your vision, and this is exactly what you can now provide them. Through different membership tiers, you’ll offer different levels of access and content to members, incentivizing them to be highly engaged to keep their status. This is powerful.

• Step 2 - Get Some Initial Funding To Achieve Your Vision - NFT memberships provide Web3 builders a great way to monetize their top 1% of fans along with community interactions and other benefits/services directly from the community. Monetizing through NFTs offers access to immediate liquidity that can be reinvested back into the community.

• Step 3 - Increase Engagement Ratio Within Your Community - NFT Memberships aim to ensure a continuous “high engagement ratio” by having members opt-in each season. NFT Memberships will become an essential part of your journey to retain active contributors and ensure contributors not fall below your community’s Minimum Viable Expectation (MVE).

• Step 4 - Share Governance Power Thoughtfully When Launching A Social Token - With NFT memberships, it’s now much easier to distribute governance power to meaningful contributors when launching a token. Simply use Coinvise’s feature and Airdrop automatically a fixed amount of tokens to existing backers (or new ones).

• Step 5 - Introduce Liquidity - With active members and a steady influx of funds, you’ll soon be able to introduce liquidity and give a financial value to your token, making your community ready to scale at a different level.

Closing thoughts

Throughout 2022, we've noticed more and more communities considering NFTs as their initial community token. We recognized the ease of getting started through NFTs relative to launching an ERC-20 token, and have been working hard on expanding our tools offering to match creators’ needs.

Moving forward, our vision remains building the essential toolkit for launching and managing tokenized communities—whether fungible or non-fungible. You can expect many additional updates coming soon that align with this direction we’re setting for Coinvise.

Building impactful web3 communities has never been as easy. Launch your tokenized community today 👇

Coinvise

Powerful Tools For Creators To Build & Operate Tokenized Communities

https://www.coinvise.ai

Want more?

Follow Coinvise on Twitter and join us on Discord - Thanks for being here! 🔥

Allowing access to knowledge to all researchers has always been a significant struggle. The fight for Open Science, a movement to make scientific research and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional, has been ongoing for years.

Some public figures have emerged in the past years, trying to lead the movement, such as Alexandra Elbakyan, that has created Sci-hub, a website permitting to bypass paywall, making research papers accessible to the mass. I can also think of Aaron Swartz, an MIT student that fought this industry of research papers' resellers by illegally uploading millions of articles online.

Unfortunately, the intermediaries, which we could compare to modern mafias, are fighting hard not to lose their position in the scientific industry.

Alexandra is now in Russia, facing multiple trials, and Aaron has been pursued by the FBI and killed himself under pressure.

These icons have pushed forward a whole movement but can't fight alone against such powerful institutions. For DeSci to reach a whole new dimension, there's a need to have fundamental changes in approaching the problems. Through DAOs, Social Tokens, and NFTs, Crypto seems to be a viable solution to explore.

1 - The problems researchers are facing today…

Before jumping into the potential solutions crypto might help with, it's crucial to understand the current situation and the processes that researchers are going through today, helping understand the problems they're facing better.

Today, most research papers, once finished, are going through a proofread mechanism organized by private companies, as researchers need volunteers to evaluate the quality of their work, the methodology etc.. Scientists send their drafts to editors (Elsevier being the more famous - with a profit of 3 billion in 2017), that take care of sending these drafts to other (volunteer) scientists and publishing them once done.

The process seems fair, you might think. Scientists end up with a better article and don't lose time finding volunteers. Well, not exactly…

Editors are not doing that for free and are publishing the research papers behind a paywall. Concretely, that means they receive new articles for free, make them proofread by volunteers (again, for free), and end up publishing them on their platform, making other scientists pay to access the paper.

The problem is that the scientists writing papers are being paid by public money, volunteers scientists as well, and scientists wanting to pay to access the newly released research papers are doing it with public money (our taxes). The government is paying three times for a research paper, while private companies take this money and profit.

What's even more problematic is that, with less government budget for research, scientists end up not being able to pay to access these new research papers, and the whole situation limits innovation and progress.

I think it should be an affair of State. Everyone should be outraged by the situation and join the DeSci movement. Sadly, most people aren't aware of these processes, and it demands a lot to raise the awareness of a mainstream crowd.

2 - …And why they can't escape them.

Unfortunately, given the current context of this whole system, scientists can't do much to boycott these editors.

The reason being scientists are struggling to get funded and have to think about their careers.

In the life of a researcher, publishing essays in publications such as Nature or Science is critical. Some journals beings more prestigious than others, researchers fight to get a paper released on one of those, often resulting in promotions, better jobs, and honors.

This hierarchy between the publications, and the fact that researchers worldwide are all competing for the same publications, has an enormous impact on the research world and causes mainly three problems.

First, as every researcher is trying to publish in those publications, they make their results a bit "sexier" for their career. As these publications only highlight the most impressive results, and scientists' careers depend on these publications, they are biased to manipulate some of their results.

Second, those publications mainly want to publish impressive discoveries. This system disincentives scientists to do further research on past experiences, as there are often much fewer merits attributed to the second discovering things and have less chance to be published.

Third, this system results in researchers rarely publishing failed experiences, which is extremely important for other researchers to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

This system continues to happen for the sake of scientists' careers. And we can't blame them. When recruiters are looking to hire, the first thing they do is to check the "Impact Factor," a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year, of a scientist on Scopus.

The whole system is unfair because incentives are misaligned.

Researchers depend on those publications similar to that creators depend on social platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. This system gives scientists and researchers no choice but to continue using these intermediaries, as these publishers are selling prestige and have the power over the credibility and reputation of scientists.

This creates a situation where researchers who actually produce the content are underpaid and don't fully capture the value they are making. With this broken model, researchers don't have much choice but to continue to give out their papers for free.

As you can imagine, this model is unsustainable for everyone, and we need to give back scientists ownership over their content and ways to monetize it more efficiently.

3 - An DeSci Media DAO - the path to a new economy?

To overcome this situation, some solutions have already been explored, such as convincing thousands of scientists to run up against Elsevier's paywall, an effort that the community of researchers hasn't really respected, or creating new publications to compete with Nature or Science, but which struggle with the discoverability dilemma.

The real problem today is the lack of cohesion within the scientific community, and there's currently no solution to help them collaborate and make decisions together. Researchers face the prisoner's dilemma, where they know that if they don't play the game, some other will, resulting in a lose-lose situation.

To help the whole Open Science movement grow, researchers need to create a strong community with values, culture, and a space to coordinate.

It doesn't require technical skills, but social ones.

And this is why I think researchers would benefit from adopting Crypto and DAOs specifically.

Indeed, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs for short, have proven to be an efficient structural model to create momentum around an ambitious project, gather a community worldwide quickly, and facilitate collaboration, with recent successful examples such as Constitution DAO or FreeRoss DAO.

DAOs are virtual places where people wanting to work toward the same goal decide to join forces to achieve high-ambition goals. Basically, a DAO is a group of people that leverage Web3 tools to create trusts, collaborate in a decentralized way, meaning with no proper hierarchy, and share governance power. This new model of organizations, compared to traditional companies, is open, global, and transparent.

Exactly what the researchers' community needs.

Through a Media DAO, the researchers' community could create a whole new economy that replaces the one created by publishers such as Elsevier. They could create a group to share the best resources, fund new projects and initiatives, or collaborate on research.

Through a Media DAO, researchers could create a publishing platform, where writers would get paid in community tokens ($NAME), the virtual currency of the DAO, created easily through Coinvise, for example. Writers would be incentivized to publish in the DAO rather than on traditional publishers as they would earn tokens and wouldn't give out their content for free anymore. Proofreaders would also be paid in community tokens and stop providing work for free as "volunteers."

You might wonder, ok, one would get paid in tokens to publish essays and help them with the operations of the DAO, but those tokens don't have any financial value, they are just virtual currencies created by a few people. And you would be wrong.

Any token can get a social value by having a Liquidity Pool. Liquidity Pools (or LPs) are pools where DAO leaders can bond their token with another crypto that already has financial value. Put simply, anyone can pool some community tokens with another crypto (providing liquidity) and facilitate trading by being willing to buy or sell a particular asset at any given time. By doing so, liquidity providers allow anyone to trade some crypto in exchange for the community token for a specific price, giving the community token ($NAME) a value.

With a token that has financial value and a DAO to facilitate collaboration, a whole new economy is possible.

Indeed, the Liquidity Pool (and therefore the token) could be funded since day one by crowdfunding through an NFT as it has already been done in the past, or by better monetizing researchers' articles, keeping their work under token-gated channels ( paywalls), and pushing back the money earned directly to the LP, making the value of the token grow.

Matt Stephenson

@stephensonhmatt

The first Open Science NFT just sold for the mindblowing amount of 13 ETH ($24,000)!

10% of that will go to @OSFramework and the remainder will fund a full replication of the study.

Thank you so much to everyone who bid and helped make this happen. I'm stunned.

Matt Stephenson

@stephensonhmatt

The first Open Source Science NFT is now live for auction! Find it here:

opensea.io/assets/0x495f9…

Now let’s list some reasons why someone (you?) might think this is cool...

108

12:47 PM • Mar 31, 2021

The latter would reward researchers more fairly by paying them and keeping only a tiny portion of the sales to fund the DAO.

The more researchers help the DAO grow or publish articles on the DAO's platform, the more tokens they earn and the more essays they can access. This is a win-win situation and a sustainable business model.

With a token gaining value over time, more researchers would be incentivized to post on the DAO's platform instead of current publishers, to get paid fairly for their work, creating a positive feedback loop. Ones would also be attracted by the possibility to access token-gated articles in exchange for their time and effort, not money.

Actually, many Media DAOs are already thriving with this exact model in place. I can think of Global Coin Research, a decentralized community of learners and investors in Web3 (join the community here) that pay writers in $GCR when they publish on their platform, or BanklessDAO, a DAO that acts as a steward of the Bankless Movement progressing the world towards a future of greater freedom, also paying writers and contributors helping the DAO grow.

4 - Leveraging Web3 tools to foster collaboration

More than creating a DAO for the new structural model it allows, the researchers' community could also leverage all the Web3 tools at their disposal to make their organization work better and more efficiently.

The community could, for example, create a proper treasury to fund initiatives and provide grants. While extremely complicated to do so with people worldwide that you don't know, DAO's members could create a Multi-signature Wallet using Gnosis safe to ensure trust. A multi-sig is a crypto wallet that allows you to manage your community crypto assets (tokens), with the option to require a predefined number of signatures to confirm transactions. As it is necessary to have multiple team members to execute every transaction, it prevents unauthorized access to the funds in this wallet. No one can leave with all the money as it would require the authorization of the majority of other members.

Contributors in charge of distributing the tokens would also provide voting power proportional to the number of tokens they hold, meaning proportional to the value they've brought to the community, allowing the most engaged researchers to vote on future strategic decisions. 1 token = 1 vote. Thanks to tools like Snapshot, it's fairly easy to implement such a voting system and makes the whole process trustworthy and scalable.

Finally, researchers being part of the DAO could create a more efficient reputation system by using tokens as a reputation score. The more engaged members have been (by publishing essays or helping DAO operations), the more tokens they hold, and therefore, the more skin in the game they have. It's pretty easy to measure participation in DAO thanks to tools like SourceCred, and even incentivize collaboration through Coordinape or by implementing a tipping system with Collab.land.

The possibilities are almost endless, and the power of a DAO to foster a community worldwide is yet to be discovered. To accomplish their high-ambition goal of bypassing the current industry of research papers' resellers, scientists, and Open Science believers will need strong community leaders to pave the way and create the infrastructure for others to join the movement.

Closing thoughts

As seen in this essay, a DeSci DAO would create an entirely new economy and bypass the current intermediaries, organize a whole movement better, foster innovation, and facilitate collaboration between researchers worldwide through tokens.

Crypto mechanisms, Web3 tools, DAOs, and Tokens could result in solutions far beyond what the Open Science movement and Web 2.0 for science have achieved in the last decades.

Author notes: While DAOs and Social Tokens are still new, many guides are available to help anyone to jump into this revolution. I recommend you read The Ultimate Guide to Designing Effective Token Launches, How to Launch a DAO and the fundamentals of Tokenomics. If you’re reading this and are interested in launching such a DAO to help the Open Science movement, please reach out. I would be happy to help.

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The situation was simply not sustainable. It needed to change.

In 2021, we saw the premise of a new era for musicians with the rise of Web3, a term that englobes many new technologies (NFTs, Social tokens, DAOs, etc.), allowing creators and fans to connect directly without intermediaries. Those new tools have gained momentum amongst the music industry with artists such as RAC, who made more money out of one NFT drop than during a 15-year career as a musician, 3LAU, who sold various NFTs of his album Ultraviolet in an auction and generated $11.7 million in sales, or major artists such as Snoop Dogg and Steve Aoki backing Music NFTs.

But for Web3 to become mainstream and profoundly change the music industry, we need to help more artists understand what's possible and how to experiment with those new technologies.

In this essay, we will explore three ways for musicians to leverage the power of Web3 to interact better and monetize their audience, analyzing the use-cases and the trade-offs of each possible solution.

Without further ado, let's get into it 🔥

1 - Leveraging NFTs to better connect with an existing audience.

TLDR; NFTs provide a way for super fans to show their loyalty and provide liquidity for creators.

The easiest way for artists to jump into the Web3 revolution is to create NFTs.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) provide a way for highly-engaged fans to access premium experiences with artists. They could be compared to virtual passes or golden tickets and come with status, scarcity, and belonging within a specific community.

For artists, NFTs represent an easy way to sell art and crowdfund future projects through the community, allowing them to better capture the value they're creating by easily removing intermediaries such as streaming platforms.

By buying the NFT, the "top 1% fans" can access a private group (e.g., Discord server or close friends on Instagram), be part of a sustainable community (less spam), connect with other members who have skin in the game (not only passive members or commenters), and have a space to build initiatives and make the artist more desirable over the long-term (the more desirable the artist, the more valuable the NFT will be). In short, NFTs represent an indirect way for fans to bet on an artist's career (with the hope of reselling the art later for a higher price), showcase their fandom, and have an intimate connection with their favorite artist.

NFTs are a great solution for already well-known artists wanting to better monetize and give more to their "top 1% fans".

However, NFTs also come with trade-offs for artists.

• NFTs create scarcity, resulting in reduced opportunities for the free flow of funds across the community.

• Artists launching NFTs need an already large and engaged audience, with fans keen to purchase expansive passes to access premium experiences.

• NFTs are a great way for fans to have a special connection with an artist but don't incentivize connections between community members (beyond the financial interest that binds them.)

• It's hard to retain people's attention over the long term with NFTs only.

2 - Leveraging Social Tokens to grow and engage a developing audience.

TLDR; Social tokens are suitable for up-and-coming artists wanting to engage with their first fans and need help to grow their community.

Social tokens are virtual currencies that live on a blockchain. They are usually earned by fans accomplishing missions/tasks for an artist and can be redeemed in exchange for special perks within the artist's community, such as access to premium content, merchandise, or the right to vote on future strategic decisions.

If NFTs are a one-off purchase that don't require additional work from fans, social tokens are earned over time by accomplishing missions and helping the artist succeed. NFTs could be compared to investing in an artist, while social tokens are more like getting a salary and working alongside the artist.

With a social token, creators can, for example, ask their fans to design the cover of their next album, get introduced to other artists, or ask for marketing advice. Community members would be incentivized to make the artist succeed as the value of their tokens would be directly correlated to the artist's success.

And that's the strength of Social tokens. They are an excellent way to include fans in the artist's development - starting by giving them a voice over future strategic decisions.

We recently saw Daniel Allan, a producer, artist & web3 enthusiast, putting 50% of his artist share of the master royalties into his social token ($OVERSTIM) treasury. Through this token, Daniel rewarded his fans who have supported him since the beginning and gave them voting power in future decisions related to his career.

As seen in the second part of this essay, social tokens are a great way for up-and-coming artists to engage their first fans and grow their community through well-designed incentives. Compared to NFTs, they allow artists to transfer value within and across the community.

Read further to learn how to launch a social token and engage an audience.

However, social tokens also come with trade-offs for artists.

• Social tokens are relatively unknown, and fans are more likely to buy NFTs than social tokens.

• For the tokens to have a financial value, artists have to create a Liquidity Pool and put money upfront.

• Solo creators will never use the full capabilities of the social tokens technology (ERC-20) which are particularly useful to coordinate a large group of people to work together.

3 - Building a DAO to create ambitious projects with an existing audience.

TLDR; DAOs are a great way for creators wanting to build a project beyond themselves as this new model of organization facilitates collaboration worldwide.

DAOs are virtual places (online communities) where people wanting to work toward the same goal decide to join forces to achieve high-ambition goals. A DAO can be created by a creator (or a group of creators) to leverage Web3 tools, create trust with fans, and collaborate in a decentralized way with no proper hierarchy.

DAOs, which we could compare to a new form of startups, let artists and fans work toward a joint project beyond the artists themselves, and make collaborations easy. It's a great way for creators wanting to launch an entrepreneurial project to do it with fans, leveraging the power of a whole community to grow quickly.

We've seen, for example, established institutions such as Colors, a stage for non-ordinary expression, embrace the Web3 mindset and create a DAO to better engage their global community of artists and creators in their activities. Through a DAO, Colors aims to "include their global community in their activities ranging from curation, contextualization through editorial, to ongoing support & sustenance through network access and funds." Music DAOs are already on the rise, and, according to Water & Music's ongoing music/Web3 dashboard, over 30 online music creator communities and collectives self-identify as DAOs.

In short, DAOs are great for creators wanting to launch a project beyond themselves and looking for a way to collaborate easily with people worldwide without intermediaries.

Read further to learn how to launch a DAO as a Creator.

However, DAOs also come with trade-offs for artists.

• Launching a DAO is like launching a startup. It requires a lot of work and community skills. It might be more suitable for artists with an entrepreneurial mindset wanting to launch a project beyond their art.

• A DAO is a long-term project. Artists shouldn't expect financial returns when launching a DAO.

• DAOs are still early, and this new way of collaborating is messy, chaotic, and unproven. But by creating a DAO, creators will learn quickly, have unparalleled upside, and discover more freedom and flexibility than ever.

Closing thoughts

The major music/Web3 opportunities lie over the long term. Despite what has been said in mainstream media, Web3 is not an easy way to grab cash for artists. It requires work. A lot of it. But by putting in some work and learning how to use those new tools, music creators will have the power to sustain a long-term and healthy community.

It's already obvious that the music industry will be one of the first impacted by these new technologies, the latter removing intermediaries and reinventing entirely how the music industry could operate. The music creators understanding the trade-offs of each potential solution will have an incredible advantage over competitors and will seize the opportunities when they arise.

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WHAT ARE DAOs?

Social DAOs are virtual places where people passionate about the same things decide to join forces to hang out and build cool experiences together. The vibes are…dare we say… IMMACULATE.

Let’s break down what a Social DAO is, how they operate and how you can get involved!

SLOW TF DOWN! What is a DAO?

But before we get into specifics of how to get involved (and even build) these clubs, let’s refresh on what this acronym of sorts actually means. In its simplest form, a DAO is an organization governed by a group of people where a set of rules are stored on the blockchain (basically a giant database). Members can vote on proposals related to the DAO through tokens that can be bought or earned.

The idea of a DAO was originally to have all the collective decisions be on-chain, meaning decisions enforced through crypto mechanisms (code) to remove human incompetencies and bad behaviors in decision making. Yet, despite this original vision, DAOs today look more like Discord groups experimenting with new crypto tools and ways of managing a community.

Cute. Now get into the social part!

Joining a Social DAO is like joining your university football team. You make friends, share common interests with them, belong to a group, get social status, etc. But what’s the difference between being on a football team and joining a social DAO. Look no further:

Traditional Team:

• No ownership

• Decisions made by one person

• Little/no reward for putting work into the team

Social DAO:

• Ownership

• Help make key decisions

• Rewards proportionally to work put in the community

Picture Soho House run by the community instead of some ominous CEO or club manager. The mood is curated by you, not preset.

Social DAOs focus on social networking, and they have shown their efficiency in building amazing experiences that wouldn't have been possible the traditional way through leveraging crypto mechanisms. I know, that can seem overwhelming, so let’s break it down!

Social DAOs are using what we call a “Multi-Signature Wallet.” Basically, it's a Crypto Wallet where they store the cryptocurrencies of the DAO. It’s like a Bank account, except that they have the option to require a predefined number of signatures to confirm transactions every time there are expenses.

Why? It is necessary to have multiple team members from the community to validate the transactions in order to execute them, it prevents unauthorized access to the fund in this wallet. It’s kind of a shared bank account, and it allows Social DAOs to create trust at scale.

No one can leave with all the money as it would require the authorization of all the other members.

Social DAOs are NOT about work. They are first and foremost about culture, about vibing and creating together what ones have always wanted to create. Culture comes first, products and projects come second.

But it doesn't mean these virtual groups don't produce anything tangible. Social DAOs are harnessing the power of their community to create new social experiences, bringing online to offline, sharing insights, organizing music festivals and hackathons, or crazy parties. All DAOs, even socially-focused ones, are building new experiences and working on multiple projects by leveraging this new ground-up structural model and the power of new technologies.

That’s Cool, but how does it work?

The foundation for Social DAOs is tokens– a cryptocurrency for the DAO. Tokens are the tickets to join a Social DAO. If you want to get into the club, you have to present your pass. In web3-slang, we call this “token-gating.”

The true power of Social DAOs is that attaching cryptocurrency to their online community & social club gives members an incentive to make it a fun and hype place to hang out, unlocking new levels of community interactions. Indeed, contributors are incentivized to help the organization succeed, as the value of their tokens — directly correlated to the attractiveness of the DAO — can gain an almost infinite value. In essence, the value of a social token can be directly attributed to its members. That’s pretty neat!

Social DAOs, compared to traditional social clubs, can also set up tools to boost members' sense of confidence or encourage gestures of kindness and support, two critical elements of great culture and successful social DAOs. This can, for example, be achieved by allowing members to send tips (with the native token) to each other as a display of appreciation and recognition.

I can’t believe ordinary people can do this? Do they get any help?

Spoiler alert: YES!

Social DAOs often leverage a set of tools to run smoothly, starting by creating their tokens.

There are plenty of ways to create your DAO, and one often used is:

Step 1: Create a server on Discord

Step 2: Create a social token on Coinvise, a platform that allows anyone to create a token easily in five minutes, then send tokens to multiple members at once to grant access to the community.

Step 3: Restrict the access of your Discord server with the Discord Bot Collab.land

Step 4: Allow members to vote on future strategic decisions by creating an account on Snapshot.

Tada, you have everything you need to start your Social DAO!

Ok…you’ve talked so much about contribution. What does that mean? How can I contribute?

First of all, contributing doesn’t mean dropping everything you’re doing to go all-in in one DAO. There are multiple levels of contributors.

• Regular members - are those simply using the product or service.

• Bounty Hunters - are members that may not be involved in daily DAO operations or planning but actively seek and complete interesting bounties. Anyone can become a Bounty Hunter. There's usually no need for approval before completing a bounty.

• Core contributors - are members that actively attend DAO meetings, consistently work on larger DAO priorities, and potentially lead projects with other DAO members. Staff members usually recruit them because they show their capabilities and their involvement in the DAO.

• Staff members - are responsible for the survival and vision of the DAO, treasury management, and other high-level priorities such as Seasonal community guidance. They are usually hired via a proposal that has to be accepted by the community.

Wow, I’m Sold. How do I join?

The first step is finding a community you like that shares your values. We recommend looking at the following databases:

• DAOPEDIA

• DAO Central

• DAOHQ

• Seed Club

• Backdrop

Once you find a community you like, hop into the community! You can introduce yourself and exercise your rights as a member by:

• Voting on proposals

• Attending virtual events

• Working on new ideas

• Sharing your talent with the community on a project

Final Word

As shown in this guide, social DAOs are all about culture. Culture is not an add-on. It's a core feature. It is what bonds people together and creates trust on a different layer than crypto mechanisms.

It is just the beginning when it comes to experimenting with new ways of harnessing the power of a community to build new social experiences.

Liked this essay?

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For decades, individuals have collaborated and ensured trust between parties by creating companies and signing legal contracts. While this system has been successful, it has shown its limits, favoring security over flexibility and centralized guidance over individual initiative in a period when employees are reinventing themselves and looking for new opportunities at work.

As power shifts from organizations to people, we need new solutions that enable individuals to be flexible, while having the right tools to easily collaborate and create trust with each other.

Social tokens are a complete paradigm shift in the way people collaborate, and DAOs are leveraging them to give power back to individuals worldwide. The next generation of workers might start their professional career in a DAO, starting by simply vibing into these tokenized communities, helping to grow the projects they love, getting paid for having fun, and ending up never working for traditional companies.

As our society is changing, Social Tokens seem to be the right path to reach this future of work and seem to be a growing primitive for enabling collective effort.

1 - What problems do companies have?

Collaboration has always been key in innovation. It is well known: “if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.” There have, however, always been major challenges in collaborating because there is only so much you can trust someone you don't know.

Overcoming the barrier to trust is one of the reasons people started to create companies. It was easier to collaborate with someone in the long term by hiring them and signing proper contracts, ensuring this person wouldn't reveal the company's secrets. It was also easier to raise and allocate capital when the company limited risk and liability to shareholders.

Over time, the model of signing working contracts with traditional companies has shown its limits. Deciding to work for a company in the long term means saying no to hundreds of other exciting projects, losing flexibility, and limiting incentivizes for salaried workers to do their best work.

The current model of traditional big tech companies prevents employees from making decisions over future strategic plans, lacks employee ownership, and incentivizes companies to stay in a closed environment, not encouraging partnership with others.

Today, we're seeing the unbundling of traditional employment where the individual is now the atomic unit. Individuals worldwide crave more flexibility, autonomy, and companies still struggle to evolve quickly enough to keep up with those changes.

We're leaning toward a more fluid way of working, where individuals will follow their interests, collaborate on multiple projects simultaneously, and not have the constraints of working at a single company. At the same time, these individuals often need to collaborate with others to achieve their goals and don't want to work independently for the rest of their lives.

To deal with these problems, we need new solutions that enable individuals to be flexible while having the right tools to collaborate and create trust with each other. Social Tokens might be the key to the future of work.

2 - How do Social tokens and DAOs solve these problems?

2.1 - Social tokens as a way to create trust

Social Tokens create trust. I don't think they will completely replace what we use today to create trust at work, such as legal contracts or fiat payments, but they are a way to start projects more quickly than with traditional legal status.

One way to create trust through tokens and crypto mechanisms is to create a multi-signature wallet (multi-sig). A multi-sig is a crypto wallet that allows you to manage your community crypto assets (tokens), with the option to require a predefined number of signatures to confirm transactions. As it is necessary to have multiple team members to execute every transaction, it prevents unauthorized access to the funds in this wallet. No one can leave with all the money as it would require the authorization of the majority of other members.

Social Tokens also create trust when splitting the benefits through smart contracts. A smart contract is code that only accepts the transaction when all the conditions have been met. Instead of having to trust that someone will share the benefits with you, we could imagine a smart contract that would say, "if the item we've collectively created has been sold, then the benefits of the sale will be shared equally between the following crypto addresses." As the smart contract is deployed on the blockchain, it is impossible to make changes to it, ensuring trust between parties from the beginning.

Some projects have successfully leveraged the power of social tokens to create trust. For example, The Modern Billboard Collective is a project between three startups that aims to create a tokenized equivalent of the Million Dollar Homepage, a web page consisting of a million pixels arranged in a 1000x1000 pixel grid where anyone could buy a pixel for $1 and place an ad, making the entire page worth $1 million. The collective aims to take this idea and using tokens allows brands to advertise without using an intermediary on their respective websites by selling part of their homepage's pixels. In pursuing leveraging crypto-mechanisms for the whole project, they created trust between the three founding startups. Indeed, by letting anyone buy a digital "lot" on one of the three websites "on-chain," it is easy for each company involved in this collective to trust each other, as the royalties will be shared fairly and automatically between all parties. Without this technology, the three startups would have needed legal contracts, costing money and time, and required royalties to be shared manually, again costing time and creating an inefficient process. Social tokens enable trust, flexibility, and speed.

2.2 - Social Tokens as a better way to align incentives

The whole concept of creating a Social Token is to build a virtual economy where early believers can share the upsides. It's a complete paradigm shift in the way people collaborate.

Basically, the end-goal of DAOs is often to reward contributors helping the community grow by giving them shares (Social Tokens) of the community and creating such an ambitious and robust community that people are keen to buy the token to have access to the special accesses, perks, and voting power in this community. Early supporters can then sell their Social Tokens to those newcomers and get compensated for the work they've put in at the beginning. Instead of simply getting paid with an existing cryptocurrency (similar to a salary), contributors are incentivized to help the DAO succeed, as the value of their tokens is directly correlated to the project's success, and can gain an almost infinite value.

In a sense, we could compare Social Tokens with equities. In the beginning, they hold no value, but people truly believing in the project will be keen to work in exchange for those equities, hoping that it will be worth much more later. This system allows community leaders to fairly reward anyone contributing. With aligned incentives, collective effort is much easier to foster.

2.3 - Social Tokens give ownership over future key decisions

Social tokens also come with voting power. Contributors can use their tokens daily to vote on proposals and have ownership over future strategic decisions within the DAO. Efficient tools have been created to facilitate the voting process.

One of these tools is Snapshot, which allows anyone to vote on-chain for proposals with their token, making it easy for individuals worldwide to vote on important decisions. The fundamental difference between DAOs and traditional companies is that these individuals team up around joint missions and values that vote for strategic decisions.

In theory, the more tokens someone has, the more voting power they have. This "token" voting system allows a genuinely flat culture and removes all hierarchy. Everyone can vote on future decisions in a truly equal way.

In reality, the voting system through tokens is still not perfect and there is still a lot of inequality in terms of voting power. The core contributors being paid in tokens each month and the early believers in the project that might have received an Airdrop at the beginning are often considered whales, and usually have much more voting power than the average member of the DAO. There are still problems with token voting, but people are hard at work trying to solve them.

To solve this problem, lots of people are working on new solutions. New tools should soon implement an option to allow quadratic voting, a system that gives the same weight to each voter, no matter the number of tokens they hold.

DAOs are like employee-owned cooperatives, and everyone involved in this ecosystem tries to make them as fair and decentralized as possible. Social tokens are like stocks with voting rights. They are not perfect yet, but in traditional companies, employees often receive stock options that do not grant voting power, and no one in the traditional corporate environment is trying to change this.

2.4 - Social Tokens tools to give power back to the people

More than the token in itself, it's the ecosystem and all the tools around it that are valuable. Indeed, new solutions are created every day to power this revolution and to make life easier for those Web3 communities and individuals wanting to start a new project.

Coinvise is one of the most thriving Web3 platforms today that has created a complete set of tools to help DAO leaders create and manage their Token. Their Airdrop tool, for example, allows DAO leaders to send tokens in bulk to Ethereum addresses, making it easy to reward contributors for their work, bringing awareness to a project by sending tokens to people in the leader's network, or sending tokens to grant access to token-gated content. Coinvise also creates quests at scale, creates a vesting schedule to disincentivize speculation, and bridges tokens to a Layer 2 to avoid gas fees in minutes. This set of tools allows anyone to create a tokenized community and easily take actions at scale and in a trustless way.

2.5 - Social tokens foster culture and retain contributors

Traditional companies have, for a long time, tried to create a strong culture and foster belonging, but the primary purpose of a company is to make a profit. Culture is often a secondary layer serving to make a profit and acquire new market shares.

On the other end, DAOs are virtual communities where people with shared values decide to join forces to hang out and achieve their goals. It's not about work. It's first and foremost about culture, about vibing together and creating with others, building what you've always wished to create. In DAOs, culture comes first, products and projects come second. Not the other way around.

To build a robust culture, DAO leaders can set up tools to boost members sense of confidence or to encourage gestures of kindness and support, two critical elements of a great culture. In many DAOs, this can be achieved by sending tips to other contributors as a display of appreciation, recognition, and connection. By focusing on culture first, DAOs can overcome the barrier of trust that traditional companies struggle with.

Effective DAO leaders put a lot of attention and effort into creating a strong culture. Culture is not an add-on, it's a core feature. It is what bonds people together and creates trust on a different layer than crypto mechanisms.

Closing thoughts

Of course, Social Tokens haven't solved all of the traditional companies problems. They are not perfect, and the perfect solution may never exist.

DAOs seek to solve many of the most pressing problems that traditional companies face today thanks to cryptographic mechanisms and Social Tokens. By leveraging new technologies, they give freedom and power back to the person, and give back assets that individuals seek today and that traditional companies took away a long time ago.

Incentives will never be fully aligned in Web2 companies. The more companies pay their employees, the less profit they will make. With this outdated model, employees will never work as hard as they can as they know the hard work they are putting into the company will never be fully rewarded.

On the other hand, we're seeing tokenized communities thriving today and leveraging all the advantages of social tokens to create projects that would have been impossible without them. Constitution DAO is a perfect example. This tokenized community was created to buy one of the original copies of the United States Constitution at an auction held by the high-end auction house Sotheby's, which ended up raising $40M in seven days. They convinced thousands of people worldwide to send them funds, leveraging smart contracts to create trust between parties.

We still have a long way to go to see these DAOs be completely efficient and genuinely decentralized. Most tools being created today won't be around in a few years, but that's the normal cycle of true innovation. We are experimenting at lighting speed.

I'm convinced we'll see more ambitious people build DAOs instead of companies because of all the advantages this new collaboration model allows. We'll also see more DAO-to-DAO collaboration, as DAOs need to capitalize on their strengths and can't do it by relying on products and tools made for Web2 companies.

DAOs are the new startups. We're still very early, and this new way of collaborating is messy, chaotic, and unproven. But by joining a DAO, you will learn quickly, have unparalleled upside, and discover more freedom and flexibility than ever.

Get rid of Web2 companies. Come work for a DAO.

Liked this essay?

Make sure to follow Coinvise on Twitter as we continue to document our journey and post daily about Social tokens.

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Web3 communities are unlike traditional companies—they enable fluid collaboration and provide flexibility. Yet, the fluid nature of these communities makes it more challenging to onboard new talent and incentivize active participation.

To solve this, we’ve been hard at work building a toolkit with the essentials that enable creators to build impactful web3 communities. With this update, we want to cover three core objectives:

• Composability - Tools on Coinvise (Token creation, airdrops, quests, vests) are now embeddable as widgets in profiles. This enables creators to build a customized home that’s unique to their community.

• Participation - Profiles now feature active airdrop campaigns, quests & more. This creates powerful ways for creators to incentivize continued participation & retain members by distributing ownership.

• Communication - Make information open and easily accessible for community builders and members to collaborate.

Going forward, we aim to introduce monetization for communities and continue to offer rich functionality for community tokens with our toolkit. In this update, we’ve revamped our platform where community building will feel like a game.

Introducing a New Dashboard for Web3 Communities

The Dashboard on Coinvise is the central console for dozens of tokenized communities builders. This is where they make decisions and take action.

Widgets — No-code tooling to build & operate a tokenized community

With the "Widgets" tab, community builders have easy access to our wide range of tools and can take action in seconds.

Because we believe our platform should be easily accessible to all, not just crypto-native people, we've added a '"Getting Started" section, helping anyone use our tools through easy-to-understand guides.

Better education & easy onboarding flow will help onboard the next millions of Web3 users.

Token — Tokenomics Overview, Coinvise Bridge & Pause

With the “Token” tab, community builders have easy access to relevant information regarding their tokens. Whether to know their number of token holders or their community’s top backers, this new tab will help them make strategic decisions on the future of their project.

With access to key metrics, like the number of unique token holders, we’re making it easier for creators to quickly access the information they need to make informed decisions on the future of their community.

Manage — Airdrops, Quests & Vests

Creators can now manage Airdrops (Withdraw, Claim, Stop), Quests (Deactivate), or Vests (Access Details) all from one place with easy access to every detail they need about current or past initiatives.

We’ve also added support for controlling visibility on active airdrops, quests or vests suitable for gated communities.

Revamped Community Profiles

On Coinvise, your profile is the homepage for your community.

Profiles showcase useful information about your community, tokenomics, active airdrops or quests to incentivize participation from community members or exclusive updates for community members with the activity feed.

These new features are built to ensure members can meaningfully participate in seconds.

Community Overview

The community tab showcases relevant token information, mutual ownership between people you already follow and useful links to the project. We’ve also added recommendations to communities that you might like, based on the ones you’re already a part of.

But that’s not all…

Through Coinvise profiles, you can view token reputation to better understand the community. This is calculated based on average token holding time by community members. 

Participate — Get involved in 1-click

The participate tab lets community members quickly get involved in projects they want to join through easy access to the current Airdrops, Quests, and Vest from their favorite communities through widgets.

Participation Widgets are a new way for creators to bootstrap their community and incentivize members to get involved easily.

Feed — View Exclusive Updates & Activity on Coinvise

The feed tab is where you can discover and explore all the exciting things happening within the community.

We’ve made it simple to access all the latest on-chain activity. If you want to check whether a new bounty has been set up, or if the monthly payouts have been sent, you'll be able to access all the information you need in a well-designed, and beautiful feed.

We’re building the homepage for web3, and the feed continues laying the foundation for how we get there.

Closing thoughts

With Coinvise V3.1, we think we’ve built the most advanced, and beautifully designed, web3 Coordination Console. We’ve designed every feature to make it simple for creators to manage their tokens and community.

With these new coordination tools, we’re aiming to help web3 communities scale through better onboarding and retention.

For Coinvise to succeed, we need everyone else to succeed. The growth, scaling, and mass adoption of web3 communities will follow only if DAOs solve the current issues around contributor engagement.

With V3.1, we’re taking a big step forward in making life easier for creators and members on Coinvise through seamless community management and easier participation.

Try it out → https://www.coinvise.co/

Want to be the first to be aware of our latest updates?

Follow Coinvise on Twitter and activate the notifications - thanks for being here 🔥

In the physical world, we can use our driver's license as a way to prove our identity, but it doesn't really tell us much about a person or its reputation. To get to know a person in the physical world and see what they have done in the past, you might ask shared acquaintances or have a conversation about their favorite things. But the process is time-consuming and inefficient to know someone deeply.

Knowing someone and seeing clearly their social reputation is easier on the Web. Looking at Facebook and searching on google takes only a few minutes, and you can get a good sense of someone's reputation by looking at their photos, ideas, articles they shared, etc. The problems with the current Web is that first, everyone struggles to keep control over their online reputation, and second, it's hard to prove what's true and what's not.

And that's when the decentralized Web (aka Web3) comes in. With (most) of our data now on-chain, meaning open, easily accessible, interoperable, and can be used across many different types of decentralized applications, getting to know a person and seeing Social reputation has never been that easy.

Indeed, our online identity and social reputation are more than just the core vital stats (name, serial number, rank), they are constantly evolving, and there are many sides to our identity, which we employ depending on the context (at work, on Twitter, with friends, etc.) The more work we do to put these pieces of information on-chain, the closer we are getting to quantifying a human's worth. Leveraging Web3 technologies to well-assessed Social reputation will enable people to see each other's profiles (competency, worth, status, etc.) from the lens of verification instead of the lens of trust & unlock new levels of interactions.

However, while we're slowly getting more and more of our data on-chain, we still lack an efficient system to assess them well and efficiently quantify our Social reputation. Different methods exist today, but no solution is perfect, and they all come with trade-offs.

Solution 1 - Quantifying Reputation via Social Tokens

Social tokens are virtual currencies that live on the blockchain. They are earned by accomplishing specific missions and can be redeemed in exchange for other cryptocurrencies or special perks within the community the token is associated with, such as access to token-gated content or the right to vote on future strategic decisions.

These virtual currencies are essential in making Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) run efficiently, as they serve as salaries and allow to create trust better, align incentives and retain contributors.

In the context of work, by serving as a virtual currency in DAO (that we could compare to Web3 startups), social tokens represent a great way to measure skin-in-the-game and involvement in a community and are a great way to quantify social reputation. They offer a lot of granularity in how we quantify and measure experience, reputation, and achievements online.

The more tokens someone has, the more they have participated and helped a DAO grow. Some platforms, such as Coinvise, have already implemented such features focusing on social tokens to better reflect the quality of work and implications in communities.

Social tokens could serve as verifiable credentials when applying to DAOs. These decentralized communities would, in exchange, have the capabilities to assess the candidate value upfront and make them work in projects accordingly.

Social Tokens offer a great system to discover, analyze and use data that a user has created on another application, platform, network, or DAO.

However, there are a few issues with social tokens that still need to be addressed:

• Anyone can buy tokens - Today, one can buy tokens and increase their reputation and voting powers, which is unfair for those who worked hard to earn tokens. We would need a system to differentiate the 'Purchased Tokens' and the 'Earned Tokens.'

• Web3 Wallets don't optimize for Social Tokens - With current wallets, users cannot easily show their tokens to others. Web3 wallets should optimize for social tokens by creating a dedicated space for them and allowing users to manage them easily (hide, showcase, etc.)

• Social Tokens are still in the pilot phase of development - As of today, there is no real network effect, and we'll need more DAO to adopt this way of quantifying social reputation to see social tokens thrive in this context.

• On-Chain makes things expensive - With network members having to pay Gas fees to send social tokens, it's today expensive to get a social reputation only based on social tokens (note that Layer 2 blockchains are coming quickly to solve this problem).

In short, Social Tokens have a great potential to measure social reputation and are already used today to get a sense of community involvement. However, they are still too early to be widely used, and major problems still need to be fixed.

Solution 2 - Quantifying Reputation via NFTs

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are tokens that (often) provide a way to access a community. They come with status, scarcity, and belonging within this community. Collections of NFTs represent membership in different communities and provide special perks in these communities.

They're a great way to quantify reputation as, thanks to the hype around NFTs in 2020, they already have a massive network effect. It's today one of the Web3 techs the most widely adopted, with people already creating their online identity around their NFTs (e.g. @punk6529 or @BAYC2745), making NFTs easy to adopt, use and integrate. Furthermore, dozens of projects build Web 3 social/identity tools for NFTs. This tech's network effect is the strongest factor in favor of using NFTs as a basis for identity.

NFTs are also a great way to showcase which communities one belongs to, with Web3 wallets' interfaces optimized for showcasing them. Buy a rare NFT and increase your Social Reputation right away. It's that easy.

Finally, as NFTs don't need liquidity to exist and have value, there's no cost for upkeep liquidity, making NFTs a promising and cost-efficient way to quantify social reputation.

But several problems persist for NFTs to become efficient at well quantifying reputation:

• Can only be issued once at a particular point in time. Serve more as a "badge" than a live-view of someone's reputation.

• Transferrable and represent wealth and status more than reputation (e.g. Crypto Punks, BAYC etc..)

• Good for communities but not really focused on an individual (FWB, WHALE, etc)

• They are, by default, public by virtue of being on public blockchains. However, since they are chain specific, the reputation is siloed due to to the lack of cross-chain support for NFTs

Solution 3 - Quantifying Reputation via Scores

As we all know, the famous saying, "it takes years to build a reputation and a day to ruin it." The nature of reputation implies that it exists as a spectrum rather than a binary yes or no answer. Not only is it a spectrum, but it also changes based on the person who perceives that reputation. For example, how you are with your friends could be different from how you are with your family or co-workers.

Scores are a new perspective of quantifying on-chain reputation. They can be viewed as context-specific numbers that continually update and assess an address based on their on-chain and off-chain behavior (provided they're tied to the same address). This mimics how reputation works in the real world by enabling a wider spectrum of expression about how someone is "trusted" and the sources. Through combining on-chain data, snapshot voting data, and/or DAO contribution metrics, a score can be as narrow or as broad as the score creator chooses to be. Examples of scores could include:

• Token specific HODL score that measures how long you've held a token

• Airdrop specific Airdrop score that measures how much of your airdrop you've retained relative to other participants

• Protocol specific Credit score that measures your creditworthiness to offer dynamic load conditions

Relative to other forms of reputation, scores are still very new and have lots to be discovered about them. One of the biggest concerns of scores is that they become dystopic in nature, similar to China's social scoring system. The crucial difference here is that behavior is only judged at a wallet level and the user can completely start all over again from fresh if they don't want their past actions to follow them.

The other major component of scores is that they're purely computed off-chain and uploaded on-chain – given the large amount of data sets to process and traverse through. This means they can allow reputation on one chain to be available on all other chains. The downside is that there is implicit trust in the off-chain computing engine and ensuring the scores are published with integrity back on-chain. Platforms such as ARCx are working on creating scores that can power reputation-enabled web3 apps.

Closing Thoughts

The world of on-chain reputation and identity is the next major frontier of crypto that enables a whole new class of applications. We're currently at a point where we're all trying to understand how the various architectural approaches can accomplish the end goal of creating real end-user value. As we stand today, the current outstanding trade-offs come down to the following dimensions:

1. Does the reputation element need to be dynamic or static?

2. Should it be all on-chain, or can certain elements be off-chain?

3. Is non-transferability a hard requirement, or should it be optional?

4. Do they need to be tied to a real-world identity (social tokens), or is a pseudonymous identity okay?

5. How on-chain should the reputation element be? Should it be uploaded as an NFT, an oracle, or even a Merkle root that keeps updating?

As you can see from the above, these are all fundamental questions to answering how we quantify reputation, but we're revealing the answers to all these questions as more products get launched in the market.

Like this essay?

Make sure to follow Coinvise and Kerman Kohli on Twitter. You can also join Coinvise’s Discord to continue the discussion about Reputation Systems.

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We're finally unveiling Airdrop 2.0, a more beautiful and seamless way to send tokens to your community.

We're building a "Creator first" platform from day one, and the first step towards that is listening to you, our creators, and building Coinvise alongside you. With Airdrop being the most used tool on Coinvise, it was time for us to revamp it and implement the new features you've asked us for throughout the past months.

We gave our Airdrop tool a new look to allow a new audience to use our products and improve our existing creators' experience by allowing airdrop history, token imports & token incentives.

Without further ado, let's see what's new on Coinvise with Airdrop 2.0 🔥

Feature # 1 - Get access to “Airdrop history”

On Coinvise, creators no longer need to fill-out all the info to make an Airdrop. With this new feature, Coinvise’s creators can now repeat previous airdrop in one-click by accessing their Airdrop history - we take care of filling out all the info for you.

With creators doing Airdrops almost everyday to reward contributors, this is an enormous gain of time.

Feature # 2 - Make Airdrops with imported tokens from other platforms

Creators with a token minted on other platforms can now make Airdrops through Coinvise by importing their token in one click.

Feature # 3 - More seamless onboarding flow

To onboard the next millions of Web3's users, we've always advocated for better education & easy onboarding flow.

Coinvise's users can now follow a tutorial to claim their tokens, resulting in better engagement for creators.

Feature # 4 - Add conditions to airdrops

Creators can now allow whitelist members and allow only members holding specific NFTs or Social tokens to claim the Airdrop.

This feature will help DAO2DAO collaborations and ensure rewarding true fans & active community members.

Feature #5 - Customizable claimable pages

It’s now easy for creators to build customizable claimable pages and make them theirs.

From the Airdrop title to the color of the cover image, almost everything is customizable.

Feature # 6 - Gas Fees optimization

Because we know that one of the most annoying + trivial things within the Ethereum ecosystem is paying for GAS fees, we're releasing all these new features while keeping the cost of our Airdrops 25% less expensive than anywhere else on the Ethereum Network.

To go even further in reducing the friction Gas fees can create for creators on Coinvise, and because the future is multi-chain, we're also incredibly excited to partner with Polygon studios and allow our creators to make Airdrops on @Polygon for almost no cost.

Closing thoughts

We're building a "Creator first" platform from day one, and the first step towards that is listening to the needs of those using our platform daily. With Airdrop being the most used tool on Coinvise, it was time for us to revamp it and implement the new features you've been asking us for throughout the past months.

We're proud of what we've built and believe these tools will truly make the life of creators easier. If you think about new features we should implement in the future, make sure to drop them in the comments or send us a DM on Twitter👇

Try it out → https://www.coinvise.co/token/distribute

Want more?

Follow Coinvise on Twitter,  Instagram and join us on Discord 🔥

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With a multi-signature wallet, no one can leave with all the money as it would require the authorization of all the other members.

With this feature, that we launched in partnership with Polygon Studio, a whole new world is opening for Coinvise's creators that will leverage our tools to build ambitious projects with team members worldwide.

Here are some interesting use cases we envisioned creators and DAOs would use this feature:

• Collaborate with trust with other DAOs - We're true believers that the future will be shaped through DAO-to-DAO collaborations, and we think letting coinvise creators leverage our tools while creating trust with other DAO will serve the creation of resilient, accountable, and mutualistic institutions leading into the twenty-first century.

• Create trust within team worldwide - Our goal at Coinvise has always been to help the creators and the ambitious to build projects, and this goes by providing them the best tools while keeping trust at scale with team worldwide.

From today, every Coinvise member can create a Vesting, Airdrop, Quest, and Token via a multi-signature wallet.

Note: Before starting this tutorial on how to connect a multi-signature wallet on Coinvise, make sure to have a Crypto Wallet and a multi-signature Wallet set up first.

Step 1 - Go on Coinvise.co and click the Sign in button. Select then your favorite option to sign in. We’ll go with MetaMask in this tutorial.

Step 2 - Click on the Connect button from the pop-up.

Step 3 - Sign in to Coinvise by signing the transaction you received.

Step 4 - Once connected to Coinvise with a Crypto Wallet, head over to the Gnosis Safe button at the upper right corner of your screen and click on Connect.

Step 5 - Select your favorite option to connect your Multi-Signature wallet to Coinvise (QR Code or Direct Link).

Step 6 - Once connected, you should see a message appear letting you know you’ve connected your Multi-Signature wallet successfully. Congrats 🚀

Want more?

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram  and join us on Discord.

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Music DAOs are on the rise, with thriving communities such as Songcamp or Water & Music gathering thousands of members. We're seeing more and more projects trying to help musicians and institutions such as Colors (a stage for non-ordinary expression) embrace the Web3 mindset and create DAOs to better their global community of artists and creators in their activities.

It's already obvious that Music DAOs will disrupt how the music industry is working and how artists will collaborate and distribute their work. This new organizational model allows artists to be closer with their fans, building projects together and sharing the upsides. This is now a matter of time, and it might happen sooner than most people (even artists) thought.

Because Music DAOs can help millions of musicians to make a living, it's essential to create the ultimate guide to show easily how anyone can jump into this revolution and leverage the new tools at their disposal to build empires.

So what are the steps for artists to build a DAO? Let's find out 🔥

Step 1 - Think about a flow and a digital space to host your community.

Before even thinking about building a DAO, creating a space to host your community is essential. The goal at this stage is to create a space for your most engaged fans to start chatting together and collaborate on potential projects.

Telegram, Geneva, Discord, and Slack are all reasonable solutions. Personally, I would encourage any artist to choose Discord over the other solutions as it has proven its efficiency and provides many features that other platforms don't.

Once the space is created, it's essential to design it the right way, creating different channels that suit your audience (the most famous being #introduce-yourself - #Announcement - #General etc..). You can also implement different Discord Bots to track engagement (e.g., SourceCred) better or to token-gate some channels (e.g., Collab.land).

Finally, it's essential to think thoroughly about your onboarding process, ensuring your audience understands the steps to join Discord and start interacting in the community. To make sure to create a safe space and a healthy community, for example, certain DAOs have implemented a form during their onboarding process for anyone wanting to join the community or simply have put a paywall.

Step 2 - Build forth values for early community members and have a clear mission.

When considering launching a Music DAO with Coinvise, you should ensure you've already gathered a strong community for your project. You can, of course, create a DAO without an existing audience, but the main goal of Tokenized communities is to make your fans work together and collaborate to achieve great things.

With a digital space for your community and a part of your audience onboarded, it's now time to share with them the core missions and values of the DAO. What do you want this DAO (that we could compare to a decentralized startup) to do? What are the core missions? Creating music together? Working on a future album?

If you're unsure what you want to achieve, you can create working groups and brainstorm sessions with community members to define better what they think is possible considering your work and career.

Remember that people will work with you only in exchange for points (tokens) in your economy. They'll help you because they want to do it, not because they need it. To make sure they continue to help you over the long term, you'll have to create a strong culture. You can create a strong culture in your community by giving contributors ownership and responsibilities over specific projects, making sure to create a group they can identify with, giving them a social status within a group etc…

You shouldn't underestimate the power of a strong culture in the success of a tokenized community.

Step 3 - Start incentivizing your community to work toward an ambitious project.

Culture might not be enough to motivate your community to work over the long term. That's why well-designed incentives are more than crucial, as they can make your project tremendously grow. Incentives are ideal when it's mutually beneficial to you and your community. This will create positive-sum games, where everyone has an aligned economic interest.

There are three main types of incentives:

• Social incentives - It's more of a social, collectible value that people are proud to own. Social Tokens create status within a community. Think of Airline miles that generate status within a specific sphere (Airline lounge, first to enter the plane, etc..) or special perks in Discord servers

• Vision Incentives - Members aren't participating "for-profit" (aka economic incentives) but are driven by a specific ideology. Community members will exchange your Token without a monetary value because they sincerely believe in the vision.

• Economic Incentives - It doesn't require a particular strategy, and you can simply ask community members to achieve a mission in exchange for economic value. Creating a "pay-for-performance incentive scheme" (a program where you pay contributors depending on how hard they work) allows anyone to participate and help grow the project.

If you're interested in digging more into creating great incentives, we've created a complete Framework on how to do it.

Once you know the three types of incentives, you can start creating Quests. Creating quests is a great way to manifest positive behaviors and create a positive feedback loop for achieving communal goals and showing gratitude.

You can reward members in tokens for their initiatives, soft contributions, loyalty, and other added value forms. This creates strong value alignment and reinforces a culture of giving.

Step 4 - Create a community token on Coinvise and start sharing the upsides.

A great way to reward members who accomplished Quests is through tokens. The Token will primarily serve as social recognition as it won't have financial value at this point.

To help you create your Token from start to finish, we have created The Ultimate Guide to Designing Effective Token Launches and a series of videos showing a creator going through all the process steps.

More than simply rewarding contributors who accomplished quests, A Token will also allow you to make Airdrops and reward your early contributors (those who bought your NFTs or Merch early, for example) or attract new potential community members.

With a Token, more of your fans will be incentivized to make the overall project and DAO succeed as the value of their tokens will be directly correlated to the project's success.

Conclusion

Launching a Music DAO is one small step toward building a whole new economy around your art. It's an excellent way to create a special experience with your listeners, gather a strong community around your music, better monetize your audience and share the upsides.

We're still at the beginning of Music DAOs, and there is still so much to discover and build. Some communities such as Water & Music are dedicated to researching the current landscape and future possibilities for music DAOs and identifying critical needs in the landscape that are still going unaddressed.

Launching a Music DAO is a great way to explore new horizons and build at the forefront of the Web3 space. Many artists have already leveraged tokens to create communities (e.g., RAC ($RAC) - Daniel Allan ($OVERSTIM) etc..), and it's only a matter of time before others follow this path.

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Creating a vesting schedule is an efficient way to protect investors, founders, and contributors. It’s a win-win mechanism. Indeed, locking a certain amount of Token allows to disincentivize founders and early investors to sell all their tokens with early traction, and can also disincentivize contributors to come only for speculation purposes.

The "Vesting" tool on Coinvise allows DAO leaders to compensate core community members and set up recurring payments for contributors easily. When the vesting period has been completed, the smart contract created by Coinvise, enforced on a blockchain, will allow holders to withdraw their tokens.

Let’s see how, as a contributor or investor, you can claim your tokens on Coinvise today.

Note: Before starting, make sure to have a Crypto Wallet and enough Ethereum ($ETH) to pay for the transactions (we don't charge any fees for claiming a vesting, but there are some network fees that you’ll have to pay).

Step 1 - Go on Coinvise.co and click the Create Token button

Step 2 - Click the "Connect Wallet" button and choose your favorite option to connect

Note: Again, if you don't have a Wallet or don't know how to connect it, here's a complete tutorial.

Step 3 - Once on your Dashboard, scroll down and Click the “Withdraw” button as shown below

Note: If you don’t see the withdraw button, it’s because some time remain until your vest end. In this case, come back at the end of the period you see on your screen.

Step 4 - Once you’ve clicked on the “Withdraw” button, simply accept the transaction on your Wallet

Note: You should receive a notification letting you know you’ve successfully withdrawn the funds. Congrats 🔥

Yes, it’s that easy to claim a vest on Coinvise. If you want to create a Vesting Schedule for your community members, you can use our Vesting tool and follow our tutorials on how to create one. See you soon on Coinvise 🚀

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In DAOs, as in every business, KPIs are crucial to lead any project to success. They allow keeping track of the growth and the evolution of a project, ensuring it goes in the right direction.

As Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have shown their efficiency in Startups and traditional companies to provide teams a North Star, some promising Web3 tools are emerging, aiming at measuring better and rewarding more fairly members' contributions. These new tools are revolutionizing how DAOs are evolving, letting leaders measure performance indicators better and incentivize contributors to achieve them.

1 - A myriad of tools have emerged to better measure KPIs…

Web3 is an attention economy. Every DAOs compete to attract the best talents, and the limited number of people keen to jump into this revolution makes many DAO leaders focus on quality instead of quantity to determine success.

This shift on measuring success is not the only paradigm shift that teams building KPI-oriented tools face. For these teams to succeed, it's essential to consider the genuinely flat structure of DAOs. Simply taking a Web2 product and rebranding it for Web3 wouldn't work because DAOs have a different structural model than traditional companies. Second, as most interactions today are happening on Discord, it's crucial to build a tool that can be easily integrated and leverage the data available on the platform.

While intimidating at first glance, these elements can make any Web3 tool outperform Web2 KPI-product if well integrated into the final solution.

And when thinking about a tool that perfectly applied those new components, the first that comes to mind is Sourcecred. Sourcecred is helping measure the quality of interaction in a DAO thanks to its technology that makes the labor of individuals more visible and rewardable as they work together in a project or community. Basically, Sourcecred measures the participation of contributors in projects by analyzing the number and length of messages sent in Discord, the use of bad words, or the number of useful links sent. By gathering these data, anyone can better understand who is actively bringing value to the community. It also allows for easily tracking the quality of interactions happening daily and ensures a "Good Vibe" in every DAO - by following the number of messages sent daily, the % of link clicked, the number of emoji a message receive etc.. Once implemented, everything is automatized and at scale.

Collab.land is also a great example of Web3 KPI-oriented tool. This Discord bot helps DAO leaders manage their contributors and has an automatic tipping system.

The JUMP community, a tokenized community for agency professionals and brand marketers passionate about web3, has implemented Collab.land and has leveraged their tipping feature where any member can reward another by sending them Social Tokens. With the Bot connected and knowing members' wallets, anyone can send tips to others by simply typing the command "!tip @name" - and the Bot will take care of withdrawing the tokens from the sender to send them to the receiver. This is fast, automatic, and provides ownership to every member. Not only does this allow leaders to track the number of tips send (and once again measure the "Good Vibes" KPI), but it also incentivizes members to collaborate actively and be gentle to each other, hoping for receiving a tip.

And this is why, in my opinion, Web3 tools are so powerful.

Because they're creating experiences that do not only allow to better measure the quality of the work done but also incentivize any members to do their best work by providing ownership and financial reward.

The relation is not in one way as in traditional companies, where only a few leaders can reward good work. In DAO, everyone is responsible for the future of the community. It means that each member will do its best work, not because they are obliged, but because the reward system is much fairer and because the value of their tokens is directly correlated with the community's attractiveness. These new tools, along with the DAO mentality, allow more contributors to achieve goals much quicker than traditional companies.

2 - … And incentivize contributors to reach these KPIs

In Web3, incentives are everything. The power of DAOs is that, by leveraging thousands of members worldwide, without a centralized power, they can work on much more projects simultaneously than any Web2 company will ever can. With this in mind, and for those new models of organization to be successful, they need to incentivize their contributors to do their best work and reach their KPIs, not manually, but by leveraging new types of tools, ones that are adapted and secure.

Coordinape is one of those. Coordinape is a tool already widely used in DAOs that lets DAO contributors create "Gift Circles," permitting contributors to collectively reward each other depending on the value they perceived from each other's work. It motivates contributors to do their best work and achieve the goals set by rewarding the best workers. Because, by nature, DAOs are organizations without hierarchy, such tools ensure good work will be recompensated even without a leader giving promotion or bonus. Furthermore, plenty of research supports the positive outcomes that autonomy and ownership inspire, and Coordinape provides more power and autonomy to contributors than in traditional companies.

Decentralized mechanisms are also emerging. KPI options, for example, are synthetic tokens that will pay out more rewards if the KPI meets preset goals before the predetermined expiry date. Put simply, the better the contributors work, the more tokens they receive. Instead of simply setting KPIs and hoping contributors will work hard to achieve them, this tool incentivizes and reward them fairly for their hard work.

Again, Web3 KPI tools are revolutionizing how projects are reaching their goals by letting leaders and contributors better measure the quality of interactions and work in a DAO and incentivizing these good behaviors.

Closing thoughts

Many people are still doubting the usefulness of DAOs, not understanding the core advantages of this new structural model of organization. I think DAOs will succeed because of the ecosystem of tools around and the hundreds of teams building tools daily to revolutionize easy Web2 actions.

There are some very performing Web2 tools to track KPIs, but none of them also incentivize contributors to achieve these goals, and none of them allow the creation of mechanisms at scale without the need for centralized power. The strength of Web3 is the ownership it gives to community members.

Because they are decentralized and implement new tools, DAOs allow anyone to feel responsible for the project's growth. After all, that's what KPIs serve; they are Indicators and smaller goals that encourage any employee to achieve broader goals and make the overall project grow.

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So you've done some research, discovered the power of Social Tokens, and now want to launch your own. The thing is, you have no idea how to actually do it, and you haven't found any playbook to help you with this.

Good for you. You're in the right place.

At Coinvise, we've helped dozens of creators launch their tokens and learned a lot throughout our journey. We've identified the pitfalls to avoid and learned the best tips.

This guide proposes a hand-glove design process for any creator or community leader who wants to create a social token. This document showcases the best practices to launch a token with concrete use-cases.

Note: If the main purpose of the token you want to create is to grant access to token-gated content or crowdfund a project, an NFT will be more suitable. A Social Token is mainly helpful for incentivizing collaboration, sharing governance power, or unlocking community interactions.

PART 1: It's all about Community

1.1 - Think about a flow and a digital space to host your community

Before even thinking about launching a token, it's essential to have a clear goal and create a space to host your community, the people that will help you achieve your project. The goal at this stage is to gather a small community (it can be as small as ~10 members) that genuinely believes in the project, and that is ready to help accomplish this vision without monetary rewards. You can start by inviting your friends interested in the same niche that you are, post on forums, share your vision on socials or talk directly to your community if you already have one from previous projects.

You'll have to create a space to host your community. At this stage, Telegram, Geneva, Discord, and Slack are all reasonable solutions. Think thoroughly about all the onboarding steps to make sure anyone wanting to contribute can do it easily, as it will help you attract high-quality talents. As an example, Protein's leaders have decided to host their community on Discord and ask people to fill out a form to access their community. This onboarding flow ensures they maintain the vibes in these early stages by limiting the number of new members, providing a high-level contribution to their community. On the other end, if your goal is to onboard as many people as possible, make sure to share the link to your Discord server or Telegram group everywhere you can, and start spreading the word by writing essays or posting on Twitter.

Important note: Be proactive in onboarding community members. Splitting the onboarding responsibilities with other key members of the DAO will be essential here.

1.2 - Build forth values for early community members and have a clear mission

When considering launching a token, you should make sure you've gathered a strong community toward your project first. A strong community means strong values and missions.

Creating a community in the Web3 space is first and foremost about culture, about vibing together and creating what you've always wanted to create. In DAOs, culture comes first, products and projects come second.

You can create a strong culture in your community by giving contributors ownership responsibilities over specific projects, making sure to create a group they can identify with, giving them a long-term goal in life, giving them a social status within a group etc…

You shouldn't underestimate the power of a strong culture in the success of a tokenized community.

Note: Taking the time to understand in depth what makes a good culture will be key here.

1.3 - Understand what value is stored in a token

For an efficient token launch, it's essential to understand what values are stored in a token and what you can actually do with it. This way, you'll be able to use the full power of tokens when launching yours.

A social token:

• Comes with social value - The token has a social value, and people are proud to own it as it creates status within the community. People with more tokens will have access to more content and will be admired by others in the community. The token's social value will incentivize them always to have more tokens and always put more work into your community.

• Can serve as an access pass - The token can give access to the community itself. Actually, it's one of the first utilities a token can have. By token-gating the access to your community, you'll be able to airdrop tokens to only users you want in your community.

• Is a way to incentivize people to become contributors - Users will be keen to put in some work even if they don't receive real money as they know they will share the upsides if the community succeeds. Indeed, the goal of creating a social token is to build a virtual economy where early believers and contributors can share the upsides. Contributors who help the community grow by contributing to the different projects the DAO is building are given shares, or social tokens, intending to create such an ambitious and robust community and projects that people are, later, keen to buy the token to gain access to membership-only content, perks, and voting power in the community. Instead of simply getting paid with an existing cryptocurrency (similar to a salary), contributors are incentivized to help the organization succeed, as the value of their tokens — directly correlated to the success of the project — can gain an almost infinite value.

• Facilitate coordination - By leveraging the ecosystem of tools available, you can build a robust project and community much more easily than Web2 tools. Indeed, as everything is on-chain and social tokens create trust, you can reward fairly the work with Coordinape, ensure the long-term commitment of contributors with a vesting schedule, or let anyone vote on future decisions using Snapshot.

1.4 - Figure out what value is created for co-owners

When launching a token, you always have to think about what your contributors will gain from helping you grow your community and if it's worth it for them to contribute.

For example, $GCR (Global Coin Research) token holders have access to special investment deals and premium content. $FF (Forefront) token holders have voting powers, allowing them to vote on future strategic decisions, and have access to special events and experimentations run by the DAO etc…

It is essential to create value other than financial value for token holders and implement well-designed incentives. There is only so much you can motivate someone with financial reward. A strong culture and vision can be much more useful to convince members to hold their token.

1.5 - Communicate about it and get an early interest

Finally, with a space to host people wanting to help you achieve your project, actual use-cases for your token, and strong culture, you can now start communicating about the launch of your token. A huge part of a successful token launch will come from the interest you succeed in gathering in your project's early stages.

A good practice is to tell your community first that you're going to launch a token. You can also do a snapshot of the people in the Discord before announcing it officially. This way, you'll be able to know who was there since the beginning and reward them fairly instead of rewarding people joining the Discord after the announcement just to get the airdrop.

To create awareness, a great strategy is to do an initial airdrop. Jenil Thakker successfully did it with his $JENIL token. To do so, he simply asked people to drop their ENS address in comments, then gathered them all using Anish Agnihotri'stweetdrop script and did an Airdrop using the Coinvise Airdrop tool.

A lot of people from your audience won't have a crypto wallet. We recommend you create an Airdrop and select the "Create a unique link" option directly on our platform to overcome this. This way, non-crypto native users will easily create a wallet by following a tutorial and claiming their tokens once it's done.

Other great strategies are creating special deals, doing fun experiments, or creating content to help individuals claim tokens.

It's essential to keep in mind that in the end, token represents trust, and it should be distributed to "True fans." You can be creative here and add extra-step that proves people claiming the token are actually true fans if needed.

PART 2: Technical aspects

2.1 - Minting your Tokens - Tokenomics and treasury setup

To create a Token, anyone can head over Coinvise and mint a token in less than five minutes. You'll be the sole owner of your tokens, and we don't take any cut in the process. You can create your token on a Layer 1 (Ethereum) or on a Layer 2 (Polygon). We suggest reading more about the differences between Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains before minting a token. If you decide to create your token on a Layer 1 and figure out later you need to do transactions on a Layer 2, you can always bridge some tokens to make transactions at negligible costs.

I would encourage you not to put too much pressure on Tokenomics. What's most important is building a strong culture and community. Similarly than 99% of startups are failing, most DAOs won't be there long enough to have problems with their Tokenomics. I'm not saying Tokenomics isn't necessary. They are, but what's most important is having your project built.

Unfortunately, there isn't any playbook today for good Tokenomics. There are some great resources out there and good practices, but it depends on each project. For some questions such as "what's a great Total Supply" - 10M is great for most projects and has become the industry standard. For questions such as "Should I create my token on a Bonding Curve or Fixed supply" - Fixed supply is best because new DAOs rarely have a community strong enough to have many people buy the token on a Bonding Curve. Coinvise helps you create your token on a Fixed supply in less than five minutes.

Here are the Tokenomics of Forefront, Global Coin Research, and Index coop, some of today's most thriving communities.

If you're building a project with co-founders, you can mint a token from a Multi-signature wallet. This wallet is a crypto wallet that allows you to manage your community crypto assets with the option to require a pre-defined number of signatures to confirm transactions. That way, no one can abandon a project with all the money that has been contributed since it would require the authorization of all the other members. Simply create an account on Coinvise by using the multi-sig wallet. The tokens, once created, will be directly transferred to this account.

2.2 - Bringing value to your token

Adding value to your token is not the first thing you should do when creating one. Indeed, you should first focus on making actual use cases for your Token and gather a strong community around your project. Without a strong community, you won't increase your token's value as no one will be keen to buy it. Creating a liquidity pool is more a later stage action when you'll want to accomplish new (and maybe more significant) projects than part of the initial tasks you should make when creating a token.

You have to create a Liquidity Pool to bring value to your token. A $50k-100k is usually considered a small LP. Make sure you know what you're doing before creating one, as you can lose it all.

2.3 - Creating Quests

To incentivize community members, you can create quests. Creating quests and rewarding users with tokens is a great way to manifest positive behaviors and create a positive feedback loop for achieving communal goals and showing gratitude.

You can reward members in tokens for their initiatives, soft contributions, loyalty, and other added value forms. This creates strong value alignment and reinforces a culture of giving.

2.4 - Disincentivizing bad behaviors

When launching a token, it is essential to disincentivize bad behaviors. Bad behaviors can be negative vibes, hate messages, or speculation-focus users. To disincentivize the latter, you can create a Vesting Schedule and avoid too many members joining your community to gain and sell their tokens right away.

You can also hire moderators from your community and ban/block users with bad behaviors.

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Christmas holidays have been "Airdrop season" this year. For the past months, we've seen multiple major Airdrops ($SOS, $ENS, $GAS, $CLUB…) that caught all the attention on crypto Twitter.

ENS launched their $ENS Token to give their community power over future strategic decisions, Open DAO created the $SOS token and distributed it "to pay tribute, protect, and promote" the NFT community,  GAS DAO airdropped some $GAS to reward those using the Ethereum network, and Seedclub released $CLUB to open up and involve more their community.

There's much to learn and lessons to draw from those experiments. This essay aims to analyze what worked and what didn't to build a useful playbook and help future DAO leaders leverage this token distribution strategy.

0 - Before starting

Before jumping right into it, I feel it's essential to explain a few things further.

First, what exactly is an Airdrop? An airdrop is a token distribution, usually for free, to multiple wallet addresses. Because the blockchain is a public database, any new project can track your online activity and reward you for your previous actions. The most you participate in communities, the most you get rewarded. Because your data are interoperable, every Web3 user brings its reputation and past activity to new projects.

Second, It is essential to note that there are two types of Airdrop. The "Exit to the community" type that comes at a later stage when a community wants to open even more its community and decentralize its power (what $ENS and $CLUB did), and the "Bringing awareness" type that usually comes at the very inception of a community ($SOS and $GAS). We'll focus on the second type in this essay.

Finally, based on the previous experiments made by multiple tokenized communities, it is obvious that Airdrops are a valuable strategy to drive awareness and get new users. The crypto space to date is, first and foremost, an attention economy, and giving free money is the best way to bring attention to new projects.

But beyond the few first days of hype, the real question is, are airdrops useful for building a sustainable project and attracting new high-quality contributors?

1 - You said Airdrop?

1.1 - Airdrops are a valuable tool to involve people in your project

Getting attention and bringing new users to the project is great, but what's more important for DAOs is getting active contributors. More than a method for user acquisition, Airdrops should be seen as a method for recruiting contributors. Airdropping a token is the fastest way to hit the masses and rally new people to your cause. Through its $SOS drop, the Open DAO reached ~213k individuals (token holders), from which they successfully convinced ~57k members to join their Discord. It means roughly 1/3 of the people that got airdropped tokens got interested enough in the project to join their Discord and see what's happening there. What's even more impressive is that, from those ~57k members, they convinced ~2.1k to be actively involved in the DAO and help the project grow (data from the average vote on their proposals). Such numbers would be impossible to reach for traditional Web2 projects.

When letting people claim tokens and get "free" money, the community leaders behind the project ensure they align incentives with their community and ensure members will evangelize their community, put in some work, and forever rave about their project. To see the value of the token they received going up, directly correlated to the project's success, new individuals will start working to make the project grow. A token that then goes up in value creates more incentives for new developers and various teams to build for the project, creating a positive feedback loop.

Ultimately, it's the community that will help the project rise from all the noise in the market. Aligning incentives is everything.

1.2 - Airdrops embrace the ethos of DAOs

Airdrops reward people for being users in Web3. Playing around and testing new decentralized applications is now a full-time job. If you were an early user of Instagram and have brought millions of people to the platform, the only thing you gained is free access to the platform. No free money. And that's the promise of Web3 compared to Web2. Being fairer by sharing the upsides with the users that actually created value to the platform will incentivize more people to work on promising projects and join DAOs. By bringing these new contributors, Airdrops also play a major role in making DAOs more Decentralized and Autonomous.

While the term DAO is broadly used across communities, we're still in the early stage of this type of organization, and there isn't much decentralization and autonomy in today's tokenized communities.

For a DAO to be truly autonomous, it needs its members to create proposals and start working on projects to make the project grow by themselves, without a leader paving the way for each initiative. As mentioned before, when receiving tokens, each holder is then incentivized to put in some work without waiting for an order or asking for permission to make the project grow as the more the project wins, the more the users win, meaning The power is now with the users, another promise of Web3.

With this new power also come great responsibilities. When airdropping a token, DAO leaders are, in reality, airdropping voting powers and the right to governance in their community. It starts a path to community ownership and ensures a greater decentralization. New holders become community owners officially and govern the community's network.

We saw, after the recent drops, new contributors joining these projects. But where Open DAO attracted ~2k individuals to vote on their proposals, Gas DAO attracted "only" on average 150 to vote on theirs…

2 - The pitfalls to avoid

Airdrop is a means, not an end. With weak projects, the new holders dump their tokens and leave as soon as the Airdrop is done. That's exactly what happened with Gas DAO. With no solid roadmap, product, and team behind the project, Gas DAO didn't retain their new users and convert them into active contributors.

The small value they have created will soon evaporate, and the DAO will disappear. It's inevitable. Because what early Airdrops are good at is bringing awareness, not creating the value of the project. What usually happens is that with more attention created with the Airdrop, more people decide to buy the token and drive the price up. With higher prices, more people decide they're happy with their earnings and decide to sell. As the price stagnates and the overall attention drops, fewer new people buy the native token, and the value plummets.

To be successful and actually bring new active contributors, the Airdrop should be done only when a clear roadmap is defined and with the premise of a product. One could argue this is against the DAO mentality and that every decision, particularly the roadmap, should be taken fairly between all DAO's members. Even though decentralization is essential, DAO will always need some form of centralized power and a core team to kick-off initiatives, at least for DAOs in the current form we know them. It will be much easier to convince people to join the project with a clear roadmap.

3 - A Web3 Playbook to efficient Airdrops

With a strong project and a well-designed airdrop, chances are the token's value won't drop completely. With a token that goes up in value, it creates more incentives for developers and various teams to build for your project that, in return for their efforts, will get paid in compensation with the project's native token.

Let's find out together how to create a well-designed Airdrop.

• Make sure to create a Liquidity Pool big enough - The value of the token comes from what we call a Liquidity Pool. Creating a liquidity pool (LP) for a project allows anyone to buy the native token in exchange for other cryptocurrencies with value in USD, giving, therefore, a financial value to the native token. For the $SOS airdrop, for example, the initial liquidity came from 9x9x9eth and their cohort's own pockets. The risk when creating a Liquidity Pool (SOS/ETH, for example) not big enough is that too many people withdraw their token, exchanging all their $SOS for the $ETH that comes from the team's pocket, letting the pool empty in ETH and full in SOS with no value.

• Gather data from your community - An Airdrop should gather attention from new people and reward the core team and early believers in the project that has helped since its inception. Find data on who helped the most on Discord, shared on Twitter, or supported the crowdfunding. A great method is then to do what Water & Music did - devised a custom-blended weighting system to determine their most engaged Discord members, accounting for multiple types/dimensions of engagement: - message count (weight 0.3) - message length (0.4) - reacts given to others (0.1) - reacts received from others (0.2). These holders will be the first to spread the word about the Airdrop.

• Write a solid whitepaper - Each Airdrop needs to come with a solid whitepaper that explains the token's purpose and future. For example, to do so, you can take a look at the distribution of past airdrops, which should give you insights into what's happening with these tokens. You can, for example, look at the number of tokens allocated to the founding team compared to the tokens allocated to the treasury (that can serve to build tools for the community, help grow the ecosystem and allow Staking (high % APR), which incentivizes holding.

Closing thoughts

Coming back to the thesis of this essay, yes, airdrops are an excellent strategy to build a sustainable project and seem promising to attract high-quality contributors if done the right way.

I'm convinced we'll see more airdrops shortly, and I bet the ones we're seeing today are peanuts compared to what's to come, as it will become more and more complicated to drive attention to its project.

Sure, there will be lots of scams and fake airdrops, which will tarnish Airdrop's image, but I'm convinced this token distribution method will be more used and used healthily to become one of the most effective marketing strategies for new projects.

There's a huge hype in every innovation, followed by a huge down, before coming back slowly in a more sustainable way. And that's exactly what's happening with Airdrops.

When attention is directed to a new project, crypto people ask themselves, “how do I make the most out of this new thing?”. If you succeed in providing them a hope to find a tribe, a long-term goal, social status within this community, and credibility in the space, they might choose to stay for the long-term and keep simply a quick bag of cash. While a good way to capture attention, the real deal begins after the Airdrop, when the DAO team needs to transform this attention (that could be seen as a currency) into active believers and contributors in the project.

While this essay is a great start to help projects better leverage Airdrops, many questions remain. How should Web2-native brands airdrop tokens to their historical followers? What would be a good step-by-step strategy to use with an airdrop to recruit contributors instead of acquiring users? How to provide more room for contributors to have a say in assessing their value?

We expect more playbooks around Airdrops coming soon from the crypto community, and we would be happy to collaborate and explore this subject further.

If you’re a creator and want to do an Airdrop, we’ve created a comprehensible guide on how to do it through Coinvise, with step-by-step tutorials and videos.

Want more?

Follow Coinvise on Twitter and join us on Discord. You can also find everything you need to know about Social Tokens in “The Social Token Revolution”.

Thanks for being here! 🔥

Because we've always understood onboarding the next million individuals in crypto will only be possible through education and seamless user experience, we're building daily new easy-to-use tools and creating content on how to use them.

Through a series of episodes, the "Onboarding Series" will guide you in your journey to create a tokenized community, teaching you how to leverage the Web3 tools at your disposal through concrete use cases.

In this fifth episode of the "Onboarding Series," we're going to deep-dive into how to bridge a token - meaning sending a token to a Layer 2 Blockchain to avoid Gas Fees.

1 - Filmmaker DAO - Token and Use-cases

Filmmaker is a community-owned storytelling production + distribution on a mission to empower every human in the Universe to tell stories. The Filmmaker’s leaders quickly realized that centralized platforms and gatekeepers had controlled film ownership, distribution, monetization and that this model is now outdated.

To overcome this problem, they have created their social token, $REEL, to make it possible for anyone to tell their story and for everyone to receive their fair share of the reward. They have structured their roadmap from the very beginning to give back to their community by finding creative ways to empower people with the resources to tell their own stories.

With the core value to reward as many people as possible, Filmmaker DAO knew since the beginning they would need to make a lot of transactions and, therefore, pay a lot of Gas Fees.

Gas Fees could be compared to a tip that we have to give to people securing the transactions on the blockchain. But with more people wanting to make transactions, more people are keen to give a high tip to see their transaction approved first, and the gas fees are increasing.

To overcome this problem, Layer 2 blockchains have been created. These other Blockchains (Layer 2) help increase Layer 1 by handling transactions off-chain and increasing the number of transactions that can happen simultaneously. These blockchains allow between 2k and 4k transactions per second (compared to 15/s on the Ethereum Blockchain) - removing the competition and lowering the gas fees.

To make transactions on a Layer 2 blockchain, DAO leaders have to “bridge,” meaning transferring a part of their token to this Layer 2 blockchain.

2 - Leveraging Coinvise to bridge $REEL and pay less on every transaction

With the need to make a lot of transactions and bridge a portion of their token on a Layer 2 Blockchain, the Filmmaker DAO’s leaders created an account on Coinvise and started to use the “Bridge” tool.

While the process of bridging tokens is fairly complicated for anyone, Coinvise created an easy-to-use tool that allows creators to bridge a token in one click.

With this tool, you only have to enter the number of tokens you want to transfer to the layer 2 blockchain and click on the “Approve tokens” button.

But making it easier for anyone to bridge a token is not the only thing we’ve improved. With the “Bridge” tool, we’ve also reduced the time it takes to bridge the token. While it would take ~2 weeks to transfer tokens on a Layer 2 without using Coinvise, we’ve developed a partnership with Polygon, a Layer 2 Blockchain, to ensure our users have their tokens bridged in 5 minutes maximum. This is an x4032 improvement.

Finally, creators can see directly from their dashboard the number of tokens they have bridged, making it easy to know if they have to bridge some more soon and track previous transactions.

3 - Understanding in-depth how to bridge a token

It’s now your time to bridge a portion of your token to polygon and enjoy (almost) gas-less transactions.

To help you understand better how to bridge your token to a Layer 2, we’ve created a complete guide with images, videos, and FAQs, that you can access below.

→ ACCESS THE BRIDGE STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL HERE

If you still have further questions about Airdrop, please join Coinvise’s Discord and ask for some help from Eliot | Coinvise | PST#2942.

You should now be good to go! We hope this fifth episode of the “Onboarding Series” helped you understand better the interest of bridging a token. Make sure to read the other episodes on our Mirror publication.

Want more?

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram  and join us on Discord 🔥

Thanks for being here!

Because we've always understood onboarding the next million individuals in crypto will only be possible through education and seamless user experience, we're building daily new easy-to-use tools and creating content on how to use them. 

Through a series of episodes, the "Onboarding Series" will guide you in your journey to create a tokenized community, teaching you how to leverage the Web3 tools at your disposal through concrete use cases.

In this fourth episode of the "Onboarding Series," we're going to deep-dive into the process of creating quests on Coinvise - or how to incentivize community members to help you grow the community .

Creating bounties & rewards is an essential step when building a tokenized community as a this will align incentives with community members, allow to reward them and facilitate collaboration.

1 - Shiny Objects Social Club - Token and Use-cases

The Shiny Objects Social Club is a DAO that aims to discover, share and help others learn about the most exciting technologies and trends (Web3, social tokens, Metaverse etc..) that are reshaping the world we live in. They are (and help others) building useful and exciting things with these technologies, empowering people along the way.

More concretely, the Shiny Objects Social Club is a Service DAO, offering services such as helping companies create Token Gated Discord, NFTs, Notion Design and Consulting (DAO Specific), Treasury Creation (DAO Specific), or Social Token Design.

The community is constantly experimenting with new tools and technologies, creating missions that give their members hands-on experience. Indeed, they quickly understood the new internet native, fully distributed organizations are what the internet was designed for, and they are here to help more people navigate these technologies.

They’ve created $SHINY on Coinvise and have recently created a new experiment leveraging the “Quest” tool on the Web3 platform.

2 - Leveraging Coinvise to create Quests, and reward active members with $SHINY

The whole concept of a DAO is to leverage the power of a community through social tokens to grow and achieve high-ambition goals.

But onboarding high-quality contributors in DAOs is an ever-going problem. From our experience working with dozens of DAOs, the simplest way to do it is to let anyone contribute to small tasks and let them learn by doing. To do so, DAO leaders need tools to create "Quests" (and not jobs) at scale easily.

At Coinvise, we believe that by creating quests boards instead of Job boards, most DAOs will onboard new talent. Indeed, we believe the "Quests model" is more relevant than proper "Jobs" in DAOs because, by design, DAOs enable fluidity of contribution. They are much more agile than traditional companies, and hiring someone full-time rarely makes sense.

Therefore, we've built a Quest board that allows anyone to come on Coinvise, discover new communities needing help, and contribute meaningfully. The Quest board is the place that finally matches the Supply and Demand in the Web3 space.

Along with this Quest board, we've created the tools to help Creators and community leaders to publish new quests in minutes. DAOs have the capabilities to find talent keen to help on one-off missions and bring their very-specific skill to make the DAO grow, but they hadn't the tools to reach those talents and create quests at scale and automatize the process. Indeed, creators today are mainly using "Sheets" to showcase their bounties, making it hard for contributors to find new bounties across DAO (no centralized place) and claim them (everything's done manually).

By allowing creators and DAO leaders to create quests in seconds, we'll help them achieve milestones via collective effort and help contributors earn their way into ownership within a DAO.

If you're interested in learning more about how to create well-designed bounties, meaning bounties that people will want to accomplish and that will really serve your community, we've written a complete framework to help community leaders encourage collaboration through social tokens.

3 - Understanding in-depth how to create Rewards & Bounties on Coinvise

It’s now your time to create your first Quest and unlock different experiences with your community.

To help you understand better how to create a Quest for your community with your Token, we’ve created a complete guide with images, videos, and FAQs, that you can access below.

→ ACCESS THE QUEST STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL HERE

If you still have further questions about Airdrop, please join Coinvise’s Discord and ask for some help from Eliot | Coinvise | PST#2942.

You should now be good to go! We hope this fourth episode of the “Onboarding Series” helped you understand better the possibilities of the “Quest” tool on Coinvise. Make sure to read the other episode on our Mirror publication.

Want more?

Follow us on Twitter,  **Instagram **and join us on Discord 🔥

Thanks for being here!

Because we've always understood onboarding the next million individuals in crypto will only be possible through education and seamless user experience, we're building daily new easy-to-use tools and creating content on how to use them.

Through a series of episodes, the "Onboarding Series" will guide you in your journey to create a tokenized community, teaching you how to leverage the Web3 tools at your disposal through concrete use cases.

In this third episode of the "Onboarding Series," we're going to deep-dive into Vesting Schedule.

Vesting Schedule is an essential feature that allows community leaders to pay their contributors while disincentivizing speculation. By vesting (meaning blocking for a certain time) their token, community leaders also prove their commitment for the long-term to members. Let’s dig deeper into how CulturDAO leveraged the Vesting feature on Coinvise to create a thriving community.

1 - CulturDAO - Token and Use-cases

CulturDAO is a collective of AI engineers, storytellers, game designers building a Web3 Pixar, powered by $CULTUR.

The CulturDAO wants to incentivize people to innovate and to be creative in Web3. The Crypto community is still small. Thousands of creatives working at Pixar, at DreamWorks, and at different game studios feel the lack of innovation. The CulturDAO understood that having a Token that incentivized these creatives to share information and learn from each other without the structures they are used to is a big step forward, and the aim of this community is to educate and onboard these creative to the world of Web3.

So far, CulturDAO is composed of seven committees and has successfully gathered a strong community of active members.

The $CULTUR today grants access to the discord server of the community and offers utilities such as discounts on softwares, access to a learning committee, access to one-on-ones to learn more about how to create avatars, build virtual beings, build AIs, etc...

$CULTUR also powers the guild of artists, technicians and metaverse evangelists. The shared financial incentives driving innovation within the Avatar and Virtual Being space; and creating new opportunities for more people to participate in the emerging metaverse and web3 economy.

To accomplish these high-ambition goals and ensure an healthy and sustainable community over the long term, the DAO’s leaders have decided to vest a portion of their token.

Let's find out together how they successfully did that leveraging the “Vesting” feature on Coinvise.

2 - Leveraging Coinvise to vest a portion of $CULTUR

CulturDAO is playing a long-term game. Indeed, while all community members are working hard to push the space forward, people outside of crypto might not be ready (yet) to live in a completely digitalized world, in a Metaverse with a virtual self.

Actually, they are playing on two timelines.

In the first phase, CulturDAO aims to onboard as many Creatives as possible in the Web3 space to form the future expert in the field. This is mostly about sharing knowledge, creating content, and experimenting together.

The second phase will start later when the questions of virtual selves start interesting a more generic audience. Indeed, even though we might never live completely in a Metaverse, in the future, when brands will want to break into the space and talk to their audience that will be more interested (or even already fully immersed) in a new world, they will need already-expert creatives.

CulturDAO might then become a ServiceDAO, allowing Fortune500 brands taping into its pool of talent to build thriving projects in the metaverse.

With the Fortune500’s advertising budget worth millions, the CulturDAO has the potential to become a billion-dollar community in the following years, and the current community members will be greatly rewarded for their contributions throughout the years.

But while an extremely exciting goal to achieve, it might take years before it becomes true, and, besides sharing their enthusiasm and vision, CulturDAO leaders have to find solutions to ensure the long-term commitment of their members.

For this specific use-case, we’ve created the “Vesting” tool on Coinvise, a tool that allows any DAO leader and creator to lock a certain amount of tokens over a certain period as a commitment to hold the Token.

In other words, it means that, when paying rewards, bounties, and salary to core contributors or team members, community leaders can lock a portion of the amount, making it impossible for the person receiving the tokens to withdraw for a certain period of time. By doing so, community leaders ensure members maintain a long-term vision and are incentivized to continue working on the project development.

With a portion of the token locked, fewer people will be incentivized to speculate (buy and sell the token quickly) and will ensure price stability for contributors (no one wants to work for a token that can plummet overnight). Locking a token disincentives speculation and ensure a healthy community in the long-term driven by active members instead of speculators.

CulturDAO is paying over 15 contributors today by using the '"Vesting" tool on Coinvise, incentivizing them to work on the DAO over the long term. It also allows the leaders to set up recurring payments at scale for their contributors, sending a certain amount of tokens in once and unlocking them gradually (a small portion each month, for example).

3 - Understanding in-depth how to do a Vesting Schedule

If you’re a Creator that has built a successful community, you might now need to pay contributors using the Vesting tool.

To help you understand better how to create a Vesting schedule for your Token, we’ve created a complete guide with images, videos, and FAQs, that you can access below.

→ ACCESS THE VESTING STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL HERE

If you still have further questions about Airdrop, please join Coinvise’s Discord and ask for some help from Eliot | Coinvise | PST#2942.

You should now be good to go! We hope this third episode of the “Onboarding Series” helped you understand better the possibilities of a vesting schedule. Make sure to read the other episodes on our Mirror publication.

Want more?

Follow us on Twitter,  **Instagram **and join us on Discord 🔥

Thanks for being here!

Because we've always understood onboarding the next million individuals in crypto will only be possible through education and seamless user experience, we're building daily new easy-to-use tools and creating content on how to use them. 

Through a series of episodes, the "Onboarding Series" will guide you in your journey to create a tokenized community, teaching you how to leverage the Web3 tools at your disposal through concrete use cases.

In this second episode of the "Onboarding Series," we're going to deep-dive into Airdrop.

At Coinvise, we've first developed the most needed tools to grow a community, and developing the "Airdrop" feature has been a no-brainer for us.

Indeed, Airdrop is an essential feature that allows community leaders to create awareness around a new project, grant access to token-gated content or channel, reward early believers of a project, among many other things.

1 - Protein - Token and Use-cases

Protein has been one of the first communities to leverage the Airdrop tool on Coinvise to grant community members access to their Discord and is a perfect example of what's possible to accomplish by using the Coinvise platform.

Protein is a community and incubator of ideas with the mission to re-imagine growth by offering education, expertise, and funding. Protein seeks to create a place that encourages and nurtures a new definition of growth, based on mutual collaboration, conversation, and community needs.

To achieve their high-ambition goals, the community leaders actually minted their $PRTN token on Coinvise using the Mint tool.

The $PRTN tokens symbolize one of the easiest yet efficient utilities for people to adopt with social tokens, which is access. The Token serves as proof of stake and an ability to be part of a community by holding a digital asset.

As of today, there's no way to buy the Token, and the only way to receive $PRTN is to receive an Airdrop from the community leaders. Indeed, they're trying to be thoughtful around making the token accessible to anyone and bringing in a financial incentive too early. Airdropping their tokens only to people who went through a screening process is good for avoiding speculation and ensuring a healthy community over the long term.

So how are the Protein leaders are actually doing to Airdrop their tokens? Let's find out together 🔥

2 - Leveraging Coinvise to Airdrop $PRTN

As mentioned above, today, you can join the Protein community only through a screening process. Anyone wanting to join the community will have to go on Protein’s website and apply by filling in a form.

Through the form, they are collecting the ETH address of the potential new users, allowing Protein’s leaders to send them later tokens and grant access to the new users.

This form serves as a whitelist and allows them to learn more about potential new community members, ensuring the high quality of the overall community.

Protein leaders can then go onto Coinvise and Send an Airdrop to a Wallet List with the collected ETH addresses, as shown in the image above.

When sending an Airdrop to community members, community leaders have to pay Gas Fees. Gas Fees could be compared to a tip they have to give to the people securing the transaction on the blockchain. With a lot of demand, these gas fees can increase significantly. 

While you can’t avoid gas fees on Layer 1, we worked hard at Coinvise to reduce the cost of these by 25%. Meaning if you plan to do an Airdrop, we recommend you use Coinvise to pay less as compared to doing it anywhere else.

And because we understand that some creators prefer not paying any Gas Fees, we’ve also created an easy “Bridge tool” that allows anyone to bridge a part of their tokens to a Layer 2 Blockchain on Polygon, allowing anyone to do airdrop with almost no gas fees.

Finally, creators have the option to enable gas less transaction for end-users. By leveraging Coinvise, creators can build a simple onboarding flow for their community, allowing members to claim the token easily without having to pay any gas fees. Here’s what it looks like.

Finally, from the Dashboard on Coinvise, any community can track transactions & airdrops, making it easy for community leaders to find the previous airdrop transactions and the people who received the tokens.

3 - Understanding in-depth how to do an Airdrop

It’s now your time to create your first Airdrop and experiment with one of the many use-cases Airdrop provides. 

To help you understand better how to do an Airdrop for your community with your Token, we’ve created a complete guide with images, videos, and FAQs, that you can access below.

→ ACCESS THE AIRDROP STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL HERE

If you still have further questions about Airdrop, please join Coinvise’s Discord and ask for some help from Eliot | Coinvise | PST#2942.

You should now be good to go! We hope this second episode of the “Onboarding Series” helped you understand better the possibilities of an Airdrop. Make sure to read the other episode here available on our Mirror publication.

Want more?

Follow us on **Twitter **and join us on Discord 🔥

Thanks for being here!

Because we've always understood onboarding the next million individuals in crypto will only be possible through education and seamless user experience, we're building daily new easy-to-use tools and creating content on how to use them. 

Through a series of episodes, the "Onboarding Series" will guide you in your journey to create a tokenized community, teaching you how to leverage the Web3 tools at your disposal through concrete use cases.

In this first episode of the "Onboarding Series," we're going to deep-dive into the process of minting - creating a token.

Creating a token is an essential step when building a tokenized community as a token will align incentives with community members, allow to reward them, facilitate collaboration, create trust and more.

1 - The $GCR Token and Use-cases

Global Coin Research is a tokenized, decentralized DAO of learners and investors in Web3.

Joyce Yang, the founder of Global Coin Research (GCR), has created this community as a media platform and a crypto community. At GCR, there are kind of two separate entities with a very close and tied approach, anywhere in the media and publishing platforms. Joyce, along with the other team members have created a novel platform where it makes sense for the writers to earn value and earn a living from day one. 

GCR allows anyone to contribute to creating quality content around crypto topics, has a robust community and a Discord server where they host weekly workshops, AMAs for founders, and showcase projects that are about to launch or that has just launched in the crypto space. They also make crypto investments as syndicates inside the groups.

To run this thriving community, community leaders have decided to launch a token, the $GCR token, that serves as a way to access token-gated content (special investment deals for example), vote on key decisions regarding the future of the community, and be rewarded for the work someone has put in the community (by writing essay, helping on growth, source deals etc..).

Today, there are two principal ways to get $GCR. Anyone can either purchase $GCR directly on Uniswap or contribute directly to their Media Mining program.

There is currently three tiers in the community: Pionner - Alpha - Gold. Each tier allow a different access to the GCR content. With their token, GCR’s leaders have been able to token-gate content at scale and align incentives with their community.

So how the Global Coin Research leaders have made to create their token? Let's find out together 🔥

2 - Leveraging Coinvise to Mint $GCR

First of all, Global Coin Research have created an account on Coinvise to leverage the many tools that the Web3 platform has developed in the past months.

From the platform, the team at GCR can simply follow the instructions on the Coinvise’s dashboard and have been able to mint their token and receive it in their wallet in less than 10 minutes.

Important Notes: There are no cuts or fees on minting a token on Coinvise. The creator has full ownership over the contract deployed from the form below and is independently deployed every time a new token is minted.

With the token in their wallet, they then started to implement all the tokenomics of their token, meaning all the things that enable participants to earn more tokens by contributing positively. They’ve created a Discord server and token-gated some channels with Collab.land, started to send tokens to active contributors and started rewarding contributors for creating exclusive content for their media platform.

3 - Understanding in-depth how to mint a token

It’s now your time to create your token and leverage this technology to make your community thrive. 

To help you understand better how to mint a token for your community, we’ve created a complete guide with images, videos, and FAQs, that you can access below.

→ ACCESS THE MINTING STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL HERE

You should now be good to go! If you still have further questions about how to mint a token, please join Coinvise’s Discord and ask for some help from Eliot | Coinvise | PST#2942. We hope this first episode of the “Onboarding Series” helped you understand better the possibilities and use-cases of creating a token. Make sure to read the other episode here available on our Mirror publication.

Want more?

Follow us on Twitter,  **Instagram **and join us on Discord 🔥

Thanks for being here!

Monetization has always been a top priority for Creators.

After they discovered from 00' to 10's they could monetize their audience through Web2 platforms and that it was possible to earn a living from their passion, Creators then realized from 10' to 20 they could actually BE the brand, BE the product, and could do for them what they were doing for others.

Indeed, the emergence of new technologies cumulated to a paradigm shift in how GenZs see the Work has led us to a new era for creators.

Crypto, and tokens specifically, seem to be the path to help these creators achieve financial freedom and live from their passion, creating content online. Even major Creator-focused Web2 companies already understood. Tokens can revolutionize how creators make money online. Patreon is already looking into crypto tokens as another way for creators to monetize communities.

So how and why tokens, through Ownership and direct value creation, will replace the old ads/brand sponsorship monetization framework? And how will creators leverage this technology and monetize their audience compared to the traditional way? That's what we're going to find out in this essay. Let's get into it. 🔥

1- The current Monetization model in Web2

The Creator Economy results from a complete paradigm shift in the way more people, and GenZs specifically, are seeing the Work. It's indeed more and more common to post on the internet, share photos, join forums, curate articles and make money out of it. The internet levels the playing field, and anyone can use their hustle and savvy to amass a following and monetize that following.

However, there are still two major problems for creators today: Ownership and Monetization.

Creators don't have Ownership because of the ads-driven business model most Web2 social platforms, where creators build their audience, are using. Indeed, in Web2, the process of monetization for platform usually goes something like this:

1. Company launches an app

2. It onboards as many users as possible

3. Then it monetizes its user base

But this outdated business model forces current social networks to keep a walled garden around their content. Indeed, opening their data would mean killing their business model. Their main way to monetize is to sell those data to for-profit companies to target specific audiences. This business model gives users and creators no choice but to continue using these apps as they have already created an audience on these platforms. On top of that, this business model creates a situation where creators who actually produce the content are underpaid, under-monetized, and don't fully capture the value they are making.

With this broken ads-driven Business Model, creators don't have much choice but to rent the audience they don't really own to brands keen to pay a lot of money to access it. As you can imagine, this model is unsustainable for creators, and we need to give them back Ownership over their content and ways to monetize it more efficiently.

2 - The first era of monetization in Web3.

There's a famous essay written by Kevin Kelly called "1,000 True Fans," predicting that the internet would allow more people to make a living off their creations. Rather than pursuing widespread celebrity, he argued, creators only needed to engage a modest base of "true fans"—those who will "buy anything you produce"—to the tune of $100 per fan per year (for a total annual income of $100,000). Li Jin later argued creators would eventually need only 100 true fans to make a living off their passion.

I believe Li Jin is right. New crypto technologies allow creators to monetize their content more efficiently. In recent months, and with creators becoming increasingly aware of Web3's capabilities, we saw more of them experimenting with new monetization models and earning life-changing money.

While there are many ways for creators to leverage the crypto technology , it seems there are two main ways for them to monetize more efficiently their content:

• Creating a Token that gives access to premium content - Fans (or community members) can buy a token and get access to content in advance, access token-gated content such as private channels in a Discord or the "Close Friends" on Instagram. The Token allows to limit access at scale and provide recognition and status for the biggest fans within the community.

• Allowing fans to invest in the Creator through a Token - With the Creator becoming more famous, more people want to buy the Token to get access to exclusive content, and the token increases in value. Fans can redeem coins, treating them as an investment, and creators can eventually use the liquidity to buy new materials, create better quality content and augment its distribution. In this case, the Token serves as a way to crowdfund the creator.

Mainstream creators are today mostly using Non-fungible Tokens (aka NFTs) to monetize their content as they are allowing many new use-cases (explained just above). NFTs also come with status, scarcity, and belonging within the community.

With these new tokens (NFTs) that creators can now create easily, comes the concept of Ownership for fans and creators. As Jesse Walden says in his essay The Ownership Economy: Crypto & The Next Frontier of Consumer Software: "Rather than a platform's inner circle of founders and investors taking home the value, users can earn the majority of value generated from their collective contributions." It allows creators to monetize their content while involving their community and aligning incentives. Fans can purchase tokens which allow creators to don’t rely exclusively on the revenue generated by Web2 platforms (Youtube ads for example), and creators, through the token, give ownership to fans by sharing with them the upsides of their content. That's the magic of Ownership. When creators give real Ownership to their community, community members start to take care of it, and engagement often follows. Aligning incentives is everything.

By creating a token and leveraging Web3 tools, creators can more easily foster a sustainable community (less spam), ensures members have skin in the game (not only passive members or commenters), and incentivizes community members to make the overall community desirable to join over the long-term (the more desirable the community, the more value the Token will gain).

Putting these new technologies in the hands of creators is a great step forward over Ownership. Indeed, while in Web2, creators needed engagement to attract ad revenue, in Web3, monetization and engagement happen at the same time. Users engage in Web3 with their capital by buying an NFT for example. Since day one, it allows creators to get revenue, allowing them to monetize their content more easily even without a large audience and to bring their audience out of Web2 platforms.

By purchasing the Creator's Token, fans further commit to their favorite creators and build a positive feedback loop that nurtures healthy fan communities built around a shared passion. In the end, tokens provide a way for super fans to show their loyalty and provide initial liquidity for creators.

While mainstream creators minting NFTs for their community is insanely exciting, I feel like creators can go even further and completely reinvent how they see monetization. Instead of adapting old models to fit the Web3 space, creators could try completely new monetization models that Web3 allows.

By leveraging fungible tokens (aka Social tokens or Community tokens) and reinventing what it means to be a Creator, I think there is a possible future where anyone could live from their passion, owning 100% of their content and making what they love.

3 - The second era of monetization in Web3.

While, until now, the term "Creator" (or before that "influencers") was mostly tied to people creating content online, it seems like Web3 allows a whole new class of Creators to emerge. These new creators are people who share their vision through content online rather than creating content as an end goal. A Web3 creator's definition could be:

"Anyone pushing ideas, and a vision, through content on the internet and leveraging the new Web3 tools at their disposal."

This broader definition includes more people under the term "creator" and reflects more on these individuals' actions. These "Creators 2.0" might be the one that benefits the most from the Web3 revolution. A great example of a Creator 2.0 is Jeff Kauffman Jr. Jeff, which might not be considered as a creator in a traditional sense, has created a thriving community around advertising and marketing in Web3. He's pushing his ideas and vision through essays and podcasts, gathering a strong community keen to help him achieve his high ambition goals. Creating content is not its end goal. Its end goal is to share its vision and gather a community around it.

These Creators 2.0 are not trying to move their already existing audience into Web3 to monetize it better. They are creating new communities using Web3 tools and leveraging their previous following. And there's a huge difference between an audience and a community.

In 2021, we've already seen many thriving communities led by Creators 2.0. For example, I can think of Carlos Gomes that has created Forefront, a community that recently raised $2.1M to Build the "Port of Entry" to Web3 Social Clubs & Digital Cities. Another great example is Friends With Benefits, led by the Creator Trevor McFedries, which recently finalized its $10M fundraise at a $100M valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.

These creators are not monetizing their audience in a Web2 way. They are building tokenized communities to create projects that bring real value and then monetize this project. To do so, they are leveraging Web3 tools such as Coinvise, a platform that allow them to create and manage their Tokens by providing features such as Airdrops, Quests or Vesting Schedule.

Today, to build a startup, someone needs money in order to hire people and support themselves. They usually raise this money from VC firms and give away a percentage of the company. This investment introduces misaligned incentives, and even if the company succeeds, it will take a long time for anyone involved to realize any real return on investment.

A contrario, with Social tokens, these Creators 2.0 can build solid projects and incentivize their audience to participate in investing money or time in it from day one, avoiding raising money from investors. With Social Tokens as equities, fans will put in some work and get rewarded with Tokens, letting them redeem perks in the project's virtual economy or by selling them for USD later if the project succeeds.

Even if the project needs to raise proper money, it can do it through the community. Stakeholders can then use their tokens to vote on future strategic decisions, and the people who helped build the project can sell some of their holdings to make money after the tokens have been released. People who believe in the project can buy and hold Ownership, and people who think the project is headed in the wrong direction can signal this by selling their stakes. Anyway, purchasers have complete transparency over what is happening as everything is on-chain.

In Web3, community members own a part of the Creator's content and success through tokens. As they benefit directly from the growth of the Creator, they are incentivized to provide help.

Social Tokens, in the end, allow to align interests, get workforce from day one, facilitate collaboration with community members, and monetize more efficiently.

4 - The problems we still have to overcome.

But no solution is perfect, and there are still a lot of improvements that can be made to improve monetization in Web3 through Tokens.

When monetizing through tokens, creators have to make their content appealing to fans, not brands. They have to produce much better quality content to delight the fans, as they are the ones spending the money. Monetizing via attention, which is what creators in Web2 are doing, means producing a lot of lower-quality content, prioritizing quantity over quality (more videos > more ads> more revenues). On the other end, monetizing from super fans is a much higher barrier to entry to starting earning as creators always have to be innovative and create better quality content. Marketing for money, not attention, completely changes how creators are producing content.

The second problem is the Discoverability Dilemma. Do creators want to be discovered by a larger audience and let their content for free, or do they prefer to token-gate their content, driving revenue but losing visibility? Web2 platforms, which have a large user-base and control discoverability, will always be the place for casual creators (the mass majority) who are simply looking to monetize the attention they generate. To make the tokens a long-term viable way to monetize content, we have to introduce a new way to drive attention for creators without relying on centralized platforms. Building decentralized Social Networks might be a solution to explore. Incentivizing the biggest fans to share the content by rewarding them with Token could be another way to tackle the discoverability dilemma, while it doesn't have the scale of millions of users' platforms for now.

Lastly, how do Creators get liquidity from their Tokens? Currently, there is nothing in place for them to "take salary" without selling their coin, which seems not aligned with long-term community interests. Likewise for contributors, which have to trash the coin to get their salary when contributing to the community, lose voting power in the process. To improve monetization through tokens, we need to implement new tools or mechanisms to help the creators and community members' get paid' without selling their coins. One potential solution could be to create two tokens, one for paying salaries and rewarding community members, the other for governance power and perks within the community.

Conclusion

Through this essay, we saw that Web3 could help Creators 1.0 and Creators 2.0 monetize their content more efficiently. While there is no perfect solution yet, more and more creators are leveraging crypto mechanisms and are building thriving communities. To allow the next million creators to live from their passion, we’ll have to think together about creating efficient monetization models. Building Web3 tools seem to be the more promising path for now.

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