Newsflash: Catch up on our token.com Community AMA session
Last month, we hosted a token.com Community AMA discussion with our co-founders Mel and David. During the hour-long session, they talked about our product launch, how we’re focusing on helping people make a choice when they enter the token economy, and why we’re thinking about social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube as we build out the app. We also revealed some of our plans for our global launch, TKN, and how we hope to fit into the future of the token economy, and you can find all of the main talking points below now. Read on to learn more and check the full session over on our YouTube channel.
Disclaimer: Investing in cryptoassets is risky. Due to the volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market, investors run the risk of losing their funds when they make an investment. Returns from cryptoasset investing are not guaranteed, therefore users should always be aware of the risks.
The launch
We’ve been very busy for the last 18 months. After a lot of work, token.com has finally launched. It’s actually our second launch as we had an initial rollout with a focus on growth, but now we’ve gone live with our main products, Collections and Cards.
It’s been a huge build. We had lots of design, product, engineering, and marketing work. We’ve been rolling out access to the products in tranches and we’ve been working towards it for a while. It feels amazing to have gone live for our first users.
Welcoming our first users
token.com lets people express their beliefs and interests through money, and we’re doing a lot of work to figure out how we should communicate to people. People like or retweet social media posts every day, but we think you can use that same behaviour to change the world around you through investing.
We’ve created a fun and captivating experience, and we’re working out how we convey the message of shaping the world to people. More work is going to go into iterating it as we go.
We’ve seen our first users exploring our first Collections, and it’s been amazing to watch. The next thing is to work out the Collections that resonate with people. We’ve launched with 10, but eventually we want experts of a particular field to make their own Collections. So we’ll have third party Collection creation, which will add a huge social element.
There are going to be many more tokens in the future, so we need experts to help us. Who knows the best about investing in space? Who can put together a Collection of the best football-related tokens? And so on.
Going global
The app has just launched, but our roadmap includes a plan to go global. It’s not global in the sense that every country is represented, but we are going to be covering many parts of the world. We’ll start with this expansion in October and roll out to more countries as time goes on.
Choosing tokens
For now, we’re limited to the tokens supported by our integrated exchanges. But we believe that the space will have millions of tokens in the future, and it shouldn’t be a nightmare to invest in the assets you want to support. token.com will expand its support for more tokens as the economy grows.
“The token economy will represent everything in society”
Collections and Cards
With Collections and Cards, we’re giving people a way to invest in specific strands in the space without getting overloaded with information. We’re initially launching with areas like DeFi, NFTs, the Metaverse, and Ethereum, but we see this growing in the future.
So you might have someone in the crypto community who knows everything about carbon neutral tokens. If they know the best three or four tokens within that niche, that can become a Collection. And just like a YouTube video or an Instagram post, it’ll have text on the Card with info on how the tokens are preventing climate change.
When you look at the social media giants of Web2, they use algorithms to expose their users to whoever knows what they’re talking about. They reward good content. Collections and Cards will do similar by educating users about investing and inviting prominent figures to create Collections. So people can lean on their knowledge and expertise.
So you could have a Collection of the 15 or so tokens that Andreessen Horowitz has backed. Or the tokens that are changing the staking game. There’s already a lot of information, and there are so many tokens that it’s hard to make sense of it. We’re hoping that Collections and Cards will change that.
Helping people choose
Today we’re helping people discover and explore different strands of existing tokens. But beyond that, the question becomes, what stands in the way of normal people using crypto? The question newer users often ask is “what do I buy?” And it’s a hard one to answer because the answer depends on who asks the question. We think it depends on what they believe in and what type of things they want to invest in. Because the token economy will eventually represent everything in society.
The products we’ve built aim to answer that question. We’re simplifying everything with Cards that explain tokens and Collections that give context to the broader token universe.
Helping people explore
Token.com helps people discover and explore tokens really easily. We’re trying to give context to tokens rather than offering them just a sterile list of assets. We hope that this will help them understand the tokens, what the underlying value is, and the area they’re investing in.
We’re trying to contextualise things in a way that helps people make a decision rather than assuming that they already know what they should do and how they should invest. It’s about establishing a relationship with our users where we offer them themes that are relevant to them as individuals, and create an experience that brings those to the surface in an easy and intuitive way.
“Crypto does for money what the Internet did for information”
The active investment thesis
With the advent of the token economy, we’ll all be active rather than passive when it comes to shaping the world around us. Tokens will allow us to have an individual impact our communities like never before.
We think we’re moving towards a more participatory environment, and token.com is aligning with that concept. We’re offering people a way to engage with their communities and the things they want to support rather than having someone else do it for them.
Even today, for most people it’s hard to find the right projects to support. There’s a huge entry barrier in understanding where growth could come from and why a token may be useful. But in the future, we think that it will become second nature for everyone to invest in tokens according to their interests. And we are going to make sure that token.com optimises for that future.
How crypto and the Internet enable choice
We’re building an end to end product. We’ll be learning the individual tastes of our users, because all of us are different. So we’ll have different Collections, similar to how the YouTube homepage looks different for everyone.
This represents the fundamental vision of what crypto enables. It’s similar to the transition that happened with information before and after the Internet. We used to consume information as passive consumers via broadcasters and publishers. Now, we’re much more active because of the Internet.
Crypto does for money what the Internet did for information. Where we previously held assets with institutions who made decisions for us, now we get to choose how we can influence the world around us. Crypto is really a collective experience of how wealth and our economic holdings are distributed, and token.com enables that same choice that the Internet offers.
Answering the big questions
We’re really answering two big questions for users. 1) What do I invest in? And 2) How much do I invest?
We want to answer by removing the question altogether. When you go onto any exchange today, you see a list of all the coins, lots of numbers, and you have to pick how much you want to buy. So someone may spend hours deciding and researching what to buy, and then they still have to work out how much to put in.
We’re answering it with a simplified button that makes the decision for the user. We want to keep it simple by letting them ask “does this token resonate with me enough that it’s worth my $5?” and they can change the increment according to their budget.
token.com and Monolith
Our mission has always been to build an app that helps people reach the token economy. The first way we did that was with Monolith. It was pioneering, but we realised that the industry was evolving, and there was a need for bigger products that made this world accessible to everyone.
With Monolith, we gave people a way to live off crypto. They could hold it and we gave them a card, and it was how the vision started. token.com shares that vision, but it’s implemented in a way that we think will scale to hundreds of millions of people. So this is why we made the transition.
We really care about changing the culture, and we think we’ve improved things. Today, very few crypto products have broken out of the cryptosphere. So we’re building apps for normal people so that they can experience the magic of tokens too. It’s built differently to Monolith; we’re going in at a more foundational level to help people commence and maintain a journey with tokens.
“There will be virtually infinite tokens”
token.com and TKN
TKN is going to be a product token, so it’s going to be directly embedded into the experience. If you hold more of it, you’ll get more features and upgrades. So if you’re with us and you want more out of the experience, you’ll be incentivised to hold TKN.
We think TKN will almost have a halo over other tokens. It should feel special compared to the other tokens, and that’s one of the main things we’re working on right now. We think that token.com has everything set up to be a big success, and TKN is very much going to be central to that.
We hope to integrate it as soon as possible, but the product has to be working very well too as we’ve only just launched. It’s one of the key milestones: integrating and creating demand for TKN. The real focus is on using TKN to maximise the token experience.
Launching with growth
Though we’ve just launched, we actually went live with a yield feature earlier this year. Tracing this launch back dates back to the beginning of the pandemic when all of the most amazing DeFi protocols were emerging. We thought it made sense to make it easy for people to access yield. Along the way, we made the fateful decision of using Anchor Protocol on Terra. After Terra’s collapse, we paused for a little while, but we had only just launched, and our customers were unaffected.
That period allowed us to reconsider our approach and we’ve since switched to supporting USDC. We’ve decided that right now is not the time to find a new yield protocol. What could happen is that we launch Collections focused specifically on growth tokens.
Looking back, now that we’ve gone live, the yield feature was really more of a stop gap as the products we’ve created now are much more complex. We also have plans to expand much further — Cards and Collections is just the beginning.
Social media for tokens
When you think of the token economy, you can draw parallels with the Internet. You can’t keep up with everything that’s happening on there.
There will be virtually infinite tokens, and there needs to be an experience. There needs to be an app that lets people find the tokens that are right for them. It’s like the social media content machine. Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram focus on making sure the average user spends 10 minutes in the best way possible. We want to make sure that token.com users see tokens that are the most compelling to them, and it will only be a fraction of a fraction of all the content that exists.
The app should show people what they like, and serve the tokens that are interesting to them. That’s the core vision.
“We’re heading towards a tokenized world”
The scrolling experience
We’re almost tapping into the typical social media behaviour of scrolling down a feed, watching content, and liking or retweeting something if you like it. We’re offering that for tokens where people can browse and continuously discover tokens, and tap it if they like it a lot.
Of course, more development needs to go into realising that experience. But that’s what we’re doing. We have just two product decisions that are simple but very bold: what do I invest? And how much do I invest? We don’t see anyone else approaching things this way, and we’re really excited about it.
Helping people love tokens
We’re trying to change the relationship people have with tokens. The current meta has taken us far, but for tokens to truly permeate society, everyone needs to have a valuable relationship with them. And that needs a different experience. This is the opportunity we recognised, and that’s why we shifted our focus to token.com.
The future of the token economy
Many of us have noticed that the number of tokens is increasing at a rapid rate. First there was Bitcoin, then at some point Ethereum launched, and then all these projects — including our own — got funded on Ethereum. We then saw another huge wave with DeFi summer, followed by NFT summer a year later. The trajectory is plain to see: we’re on an exponential curve towards a world where there are thousands if not millions of tokens. We’re heading towards a tokenized world.
Learn more about token.com here
