I’ve been thinking quite a bit about social tokens and the role they can play in creating economies to serve local communities.
Online social clubs like Friends with Benefits, Bored Ape Yacht Club & other platforms that leverage “social capital” have provided value to their members by creating communities layered with financial incentives.
As excited as I am for this space to mature into something much more mainstream, I’ve been wondering how to leverage some of these tools today to serve community building on a smaller scale.
An example that would solve a real world problem for my business could look something like this:
Problem: How do we use social tokens as a way to empower our community to supercharge the SNAP benefits program we run at our pop-up markets?
Solution:
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Create a digital utility token to replace the ‘wooden nickels’ we use to manage and distribute SNAP benefits at the farmers market. Let’s call this token $WOODEN.
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Additionally, let’s assume that $1 WOODEN will always equal $1 USD. When a customer swipes their SNAP benefits card they receive a fixed amount of $WOODEN that they can spend at the market on fresh produce and other food items.
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Now, let’s layer on a social token that can be purchased and owned by anyone in the community. We can call this token $MARKET.
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$MARKET tokens can be bought and traded freely, the price fluctuates, and it can be “burned”, or converted, into $WOODEN tokens. Owner of $MARKET tokens are incentivized to “burn” them for perks.
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These new $WOODEN tokens can then be put into a community pool where SNAP benefit recipients now receive leveraged spending power for using their benefits. For example, $1 USD of benefits may pay out $3 WOODEN if it is deemed that the community pool has the funds to support this payout structure.
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This simple economic framework allows individual who purchase and “burn” their $MARKET tokens to directly support underserved members of their local community in exchange for any number of rewards such as private access to events such as dinners or tastings, free product or swag, custom artwork NFT drops, etc.
Over the next months and years we are going to see niche economies form around community endeavors and social tokens can provide a means to create and distributing capital within them.
I realize this is a lot to digest so if there is 1 takeaway, spend an hour and familiarize yourself with the social tokens and ask yourself where you can connect the web3 hype with something tangible in your day to day.
Looking to get started? Check out this article.