Thread by @jessewldn

If you're not as deep in crypto, you might've missed that headz are minting their own personal tokens.

Redeemable for access to the creator, personal tokens are adjacent to more mainstream tech trends like #PassionEconomy memberships & ISAs

Call it #PatronageforProfit ?

Buying personal tokens is a bit like paying for a Substack newsletter, or backing a Kickstarter project.

Value accrues to the creator, and can be used to fund the production of products or services.

The key difference is access to upside (+downside), like an ISA.

As there's more demand for a creator's token, price should increase.

A patron who doesn't redeem can profit from that appreciation by selling a fraction of their tokens.

But is #PatronageforProfit a feature or bug?
For whom?

I wanted to play around, so I created my own token with help from @ourZORA (also s/o to @tryrollhq for offering to help)

Its called $WHAT, a personal token that is redeemable for...

Well, I'm not sure yet.

If you want to figure it out, read on...

A friend suggested I make $WHAT redeemable for a hot take (AMA) on Twitter.

I thought about it, but yall dont need to pay for that. I'm a VC. Plus, theres a glut of supply

This is similar to @dApp_boi, who AFAIK, got the personal token movement started by creating $BOI — a token redeemable for 1 hour of his design services (at dappboi.com)

My next idea was to make $WHAT redeemable for a custom music playlist, curated by yrs truly.

That sounded more fun, but as I thought about it, I realized my issue is I'm generally uneasy about selling time to perfect strangers on the internet

No doubt, there are big markets for on-demand creative services, e.g. Fiverr, which let creators offer preset a SOW with a price.

But for many creatives, building brand value entails:

- being selective about clients
- crafting a mutual SOW
- negotiating price (privately)

Personal tokens are the opposite. They are:

- Publicly accessible
- Terms/SOW for redemption specified in advance
- Price trades on an open market (+/-)

For artists and freelance creatives, it'd be a big behavior shift to offer public access to their time, brand, and pricing.

For others—creators producing commodity work, or those used to measuring follower counts, likes, or digital good sales in public—its not a stretch.

On the demand side, #PatronageforProfit is arguably a new consumer behavior.

But then again, the largest crowdfunding events in history were ICOs. Treated favorably, they validated demand for capital ownership in internet products and services.

People too?

Apart from time, others are tying tokens to other forms of physically scarcity:

- $SOCKS are dynamically priced, designer socks: unisocks.exchange

- $FAME is redeemable for shirts designed by a community-owned brand : saintfame.com

I'm wondering what others think about this...

- Which types of creators are suited for personal tokens?
- What should the redemption model be?
- Besides yr time, what else might you tie your token to?

What should I tie $WHAT to?

/fin

BONUS: If you propose a redemption model that I end up implementing, I will send you 1% of my tokens.

You can see my token $WHAT here:
etherscan.io/token/0x0236a7…