We’ve brought a quick summary of a recent episode from the Blockcrunch podcast featuring Bradley Miles, the founder of Roll — “a blockchain infrastructure for social money.”

Roll is currently building blockchain infrastructure, mainly in the form of social and digital tokens, to help streamers, podcasters, influencers, and other creators better control their online presence and value creation. With the last 12 months seeing a drastic rise in tokenization, the episode dives deeper into the current landscape for social tokens and the stack creators would have to adopt for creating tokenized communities.

So what are social tokens?

“A social token is a digital asset that is backed by a brand, an individual, or even the reputation of a brand.”

Anatomy of social tokens: Infrastructure + Rails + APIs + Application

Social tokens innovate around the concepts of ownership and fungibility. Unlike NFTs, which are unique parts of a whole, social tokens are built around the concept of the sameness. They are a unit of value in a community. With centralized platforms such as YouTube, creators don’t have complete control on how their content is monetized, and are under the constant threat of being demonetized. The rise of web3 has now made it easier for creators to leverage decentralization to their benefit.

Any social token consists of the aforementioned four parts. While infrastructure is the fundamental need for tokens to exist, rails facilitate the transfer and movement of tokens from one point to another. APIs help in integration and applications help users interact with their tokens.

The topic of tokenization brings us to the very important question of how centralized platforms such as YouTube respond to creators’ adoption of tokenization and decentralization at large. For now, it looks like these web2 platforms are trying to evolve. TikTok, for instance, is creating its own NFTs on Immutable. All things said and done, be it NFTs or tokenization, both require products and platforms to be built from a web3 perspective from the get-go.

One of the main reasons social tokens garner much hype and attention is because of the fact that they represent unbounded markets. While no creator on YouTube is worth more than YouTube, some NFTs on platforms such as Roll can be worth higher than the platform itself.

Getting started with social tokens on Roll

Creators simply need to sign up on the platform to create their social token. Currently, the process of creating a token is a permission process, which is executed through a governing body and not any single/central entity. Once a social token is approved by the said body, it will come with its own ticker and can interact with the Roll app, which in many ways is similar to PayPal. People can send and receive these social tokens effortlessly.

Evolution of social tokens

Initially, the folks at Roll perceived social tokens as a transactional element for loyalty. For example, when creators want to up their earnings and reward the top contributors, they can simply issue a social token, making them a deeper part of their community. As time passed by, creators started using social tokens to migrate their communities from one platform to another. While Twitch points or Twitter following can’t be migrated to another platform, social tokens bridge that gap for creators.

The ongoing trend and possible future of social tokens, however, is centered around the idea of self-expression. The use of these tokens moreover may have nothing to do with the creator/owner of the token in the first place. With social tokens, everyone benefits — the creator and the people who buy and hold the token. So ultimately, social tokens aid in community building more than anything.

That’s all we have to share from the latest episode of the Blockcrunch podcast with Bradley Miles from Roll. Check out the full episode here: 6OrNhAe2mVNk3e9JB4sQwW

About Arcana Network

Built for Ethereum and EVM-based chains, Arcana is the web3 infrastructure to easily onboard dApp users and enable user data privacy and ownership. Web3 developers use Arcana’s SDKs for a seamless, familiar user onboarding experience via social authentication and passwordless login. All user data is encrypted, secured with data access fully controlled by the users, and powered by blockchain.

Arcana has raised 2.7Mn USD from some of the leading investors and founders in the ecosystem such as Balaji Srinivasan, Founders of Polygon, Woodstock, Republic Crypto, and Digital Currency Group.

Want to know more about our latest testnet features? Book a demo.

Book a Demo

Official Links: Website | Twitter | Discord| Telegram | TG Announcement | Medium | GitHub