Peoplecoin

Problem

A side project rarely yields the same results as full-time, unobstructed work. How much art, music, knowledge & innovation is never created because people don’t make the critical jump to full time? Many opportunities are never taken because of a lack of initial money to make the jump. Many creators can’t go full-time because they can’t generate enough revenue to make the jump early enough. Many startups are never founded because people are afraid to quit their jobs.

Solution

We want to help people go full-time on their side projects faster. How? By creating a personal creator token in which early backers can invest. I built a little mockup with a friend: peoplecoin.xyz

Thoughts

What does a Peoplecoin represent?

• I don't mean in abstract terms but in real terms.
• Personal discounted cash flow
• It seems some share prices are already quite correlated to a single person - can’t think of any specific examples here ;)
• The market belief in the amount (loosely defined on purpose) of a person's future public success i.e. financial or societal impact until the end of career/relevance. I want to keep this definition broad to not exclude cases like investing in Obama in 2006 or investing in journalists.
• As indicators of future success become public knowledge, the confidence in the person's future success rises and people buy the personal token which leads to a price increase.
• When the person does something that decreases their likelihood of future success, people lose confidence & sell which causes the personal token price to decrease.
• One could also create a time-backed token, but that seems overly complicated and unnecessary. The belief that a sufficiently large group of people agree that a specific token represents a specific person should be enough. The belief that we all agree bitcoin is valuable is enough as well...

General thoughts

• There are some products similar or close to this out there already: Bitclout, DeSo. It seems that these are all quite hard to trade, on and offramp is hard and thus likely don’t seem trustworthy enough for a non-crypto-native user. Apple pay + Polygon + Custodial wallets seem like a good choice. PS: LensProtocol seems interesting.
• Keeping such a coin stable is tricky: Creating your own token will seem shady. Providing liquidity to millions of AMMs is unrealistic. Low liquidity AMMs can be very costly for liquidity providers. Sharing liquidity between pools might be a good idea but would still require a lot of capital, or at least lots of people going long on creator tokens. You could go into the directions of subscriptions but then you’re basically crypto Patreon.
• Also, since the creator should own most of his own token - what’s stopping them from rug-pulling. Reputation is not important to everyone. Yes, you could couple it to some specific purpose but then you’re almost a crypto-powered VC or Kickstarter.

I’d love for someone to try this just to see how it plays out! 🤭