Lightworkers, system changers and new paradigm entrepreneurs are embracing and tokenization. It has proven to be a vehicle for fundraising and even more as a means to accelerate the change needed in this world. Why not build your sustainable, green and efficient innovations on a decentralized platform? The promise of neutrality, in general, is turning around pyramids, and the conscious community embraces tokenization as a means to financial empowerment, redistribution of wealth and financial inclusion. A too idealistic approach, however, might undermine the development towards real use-cases. A step by step strategy with one leg firmly in the old world and the other in the decentralized structure might be the right path. What are the logical steps to take when you consider building your tokenized tribe? What are conditions for possible success and what are the pitfalls?
Do I really need a token and a blockchain?
Before you begin, this is a very fundamental question. Yes, a offering has proven in 2017 and 2018 to be a great new way for funding your startup. Sadly more than 70% of the raised capital has evaporated and are seen by the majority of serious hedge funds and investors, and lately the rest of the world, as a scam. You don’t want to find your floating around eternally in the virtual graveyard of like Sexycam or RPI coin (almost RIP coin already). The Initial Coin offering, after raising more than 25 billion in total, soon became an Initial Hype, alike the DOT.COM bubble. In the post Casino Coin wave and Get Rich Quick scheme era the crypto spere is making its first steps to adulthood. 2019 is about getting products ready, living up to the promises and use cases beyond E-gaming or the next crypto exchange with yet another funky name.
You DO need a and possibly a when you are going fully and completely for decentralization and when this is part of your core value and long term vision.
But does this movement really fits your innovation? Because when it doesn’t, you might get in trouble later. Because introducing a means that you are intending to create a new mini-economy. Lets say a new borderless country with your core value as the national flag and your as a currency. This will take a lot of time, regardless of the amount of energy, ambition and desire for change in your heart you might have.
You don’t need a and a when a clever database can solve your validation or centralized reward and accountant system. Or when you don’t understand truly what decentralization means. Just remember that the father of Crypto, , is already 10 years on its way and ‘only’ has 22 million users, of which 1000 people own 40%. A country like the United Kingdom has three times more inhabitants, and its currency, the pound, is 1200 years Old. The point here, you won’t be able to build your tokenecomony overnight. Apart from this, many successful ICO’s struggle with issues on infrastructure, scalability, security and legal issues.
O yes, legal issues. Changes are high you will be flagged as a security in the US and only accredited investors are your clients now. This is not what you probably had in mind when you opened the gates for ordinary people to empower them financially and invite them to your borderless country. This means serious value inflation, and crypto projects are all about value and trust. Maybe skip the US for a while? Malta has a nice climate and invites you wholeheartedly with a glass of traditional Maltese Kafè, a Mediterranean smile and a very supportive regulatory framework. Or what about women with flowers in their hoola-hooping you a warm welcome on white sandy beaches when your crypto ship hits the shores of Bermuda?
What is your core offering?
OK, now that you are sure you need a and you trust that your project brings seriously needed innovation, go for it. Or maybe you already did!
That’s great, I am not here to discourage you, just trying to be realistic and implement the lessons learned from 2017 and ’18.
Can you explain your core offering to any person in your local pub in 3 sentences without them losing attention? If not, ask yourself, for who are you making your invention?
Technology and innovation is only that good as for it changes the daily lives of ordinary people
You don’t want to become a hip Niche embraced by the spiritual elite but gone unnoticed by the people that need change the most. Or do you?
So focus on your core offering, choose if necessary. It is better to simplify than to diversify. Create one real innovation or offering, with an appealing message that speaks straight to the heart. Choosing one product helps to make your messaging direct, clear and transparent, and enhances the team coherence. Everybody is starting to learn and speak the same language in your borderless nation. You are together now creating a new story, the new paradigm. It is the world you envision when the system changes happen.
Become a good storyteller, they will be as important as developers.
Building trust
Avoid promising too much, and try to live up to the one promise you make, the small drop of innovation in the ocean of constant change that happens anyway, whether you live in this timeframe or the next. This will harness the trust, strengthen your tribe and eventually will lead to faster .
Making the product or service ready is now your main goal. Why is finishing your product, finding validating trusted partners and living up to your whitepaper promise so important?
First of all, your team will probably work its ass off, and there is nothing more motivational than celebrating a result. How big or small, when you stay stagnant in community calls, adapted roadmaps and delayed launches, you are testing your community and eating up slowly the trust that glues your tribe together. Product is King, Organization is Queen.
Secondly, you are building your tokeneconomy remember. When nothing happens with your for a long while, your TokenApp will become rusty, you might not even be able to find it back on your iPhone. The momentum will slowly disappear at the horizon while you are struggling with a lifeboat, watching your ship of dreams slowly sink to the bottom of the exchange flatline of your .
Find the right organizational structure
that 100% supports your people & product development
This is another bottleneck.
How to organize yourself with one leg in the old ‘more for me, is less for you’ structured world, and one leg in the neutral consensus model?
One possibility: Use authorized circle leaders that are chosen by consensus by the team or maybe even the complete community in the building stages. Try human design to fit the right talent to the right task, and the right persons being part of the smaller teams. This might solve the dilemma of coming from old world organizational hierarchical imprints while your head is already in the decentralized cloud. Respect that from this perspective a lot of people still love to be told what do to and will thrive when their status is clear and has boundaries.
Or what about a ? This is a similar structure with 3 main principles of governance
(1) That the interests of all members must be considered and the individual must respect the interests of the whole. (2) No action could be taken without a solution that everyone could accept, and (3) all members must accept these decisions when unanimously made. If a group could not make a decision, the decision would be made by a “higher level” of representatives chosen by each group. That higher level is chosen by consensus in the abovementioned way.
Tip: more than 50 team members in a startup won’t work.
Design your tokenecomony carefully
Remember, you are creating a borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant and peer to peer nation with a new language that tells a new story. This language is the new way of making transactions by the inhabitants, it’s your ! Digital money and all money for that matter is a language. is the free speech of the Internet! A language exchanges values, but how is that value attributed to your language? In other words, why would people like to start learning and speaking your language?
Lets use a utility to make things easy. A utility , or App coin is backed by ‘real’ value. Aside Utility you have 2 major groups: Security and Payment or Digital Money (Like ).
When your country creates green storage and compute capacity, your buys this capacity. BANG: you just created demand for your . Your value is to contribute to greener and cheaper distributed data.
When your buys and sells attention on a new web browser that blocks ads and trackers. BANG: you just created demand for your ! Your value is to reward attention, something becoming more and more of value in our attention economy.
When your capitalizes your private medical records? BANG: you just created demand for your . You are now free to decide to sell this very personal data on the Saturday E-market to the highest bidder because your value is to contribute to medical research.
What is the size of your tribe, what is the potency of your ambition
You need to be with more than 150 active participants or users. According to the Dunbar law: when your tribe is up to 150 connected active people, you don’t need a to validate transactions. You will remember all the members, faces and trust is within the community. Your language will be a small dialect understood by all and your word will be trusted. In case of a conflict over value, the clan elders will solve the issue.
A critical mass of inhabitants is needed that speak your language, to create a strong voice in the coming expanding digital era, grounded in a real and vibrant community. In the future, we might see thousands of these borderless countries. At the end of that development, we all might become a country, why not? People will learn different new languages, and according to their values will choose which country to visit and when. Your country probably also overlaps other countries. In this overlapping space, smart apps will automatically exchange your to the other.
When you are not able to create enough demand for your , this essentially means not enough people want to live in your country. It might not embody the change that is really needed, maybe you are too early, maybe your values are not clear enough to be attractive and for people to feel aligned with and to feel home in. Or maybe you scare people away when you assign yourself as president overriding the constitution of neutrality written down in your genesis block. A Genesis block is the first block in a . It is a blueprint protocol and in that way, a true constitution translated in coding.
Nakamoto, the founding father of the constitution of the neutral nation of , wrote down a secret core value in the first Block. His dream is that never again big banks will be bailed out by governments. His value offering is itself, the strongest language so far and a strong alternative to FIAT.
Nakamoto is not the president, not even a tribe member. He disappeared mysteriously to become a mythological block & bank buster.
The transition
The central challenge is how to make the transition from the old story to the new one. In fact, we live in a timeframe characterized as a story in between stories. And that is confusing for many.
Thousands of problems that need fixing, pyramids that need to be turned around. The result will be innovative and efficient ways to deal with carbon emission tax, pollution, too many cars on this planet, big data centres, data analytics abused in elections, sky-high remittance fees for Africans sending money home, farmers earning less than 5% in commodity chains like coffee, and the list goes on. Choose the solution you want to work on and choose decentralized or not. In the next 2 decades, this might not be a choice anymore.
Published at Thu, 28 Mar 2019 09:16:33 +0000
