Socialstack: Reimagining Social Tokens for Good - Andrew Berkowitz

my name is andrew berkowitz i'm the ceo and co-founder of social stack uh we're very easy to use social token platform focused on onboarding non-crypto native communities into the space in a very easy to use way um and i'm sure everyone in this room has been fairly dow-pilled at some level at least you know if not before this conference you were over the past couple days and so i'll start kind of very high level on what a social token is um and it's really this new form of cryptocurrency that's issued by a brand an organization a non-profit a creator where the value of the token is derived from the underlying social capital of the issuer combined with the utility that they add on to the token and so it's really this interesting new asset class that we have to create new forms of mediums of exchange new forms of community-based currencies and we're focused on all those things with an impact lens at social stack which we'll get into shortly so right now there's really two pathways to become a dao the first is a from scratch crypto native community and this is really the path to become a dao right now if you want to actually you know successfully come become a dow and have a liquid token um and the second pathway is a little bit more difficult this is the pathway of basically onboarding an existing community that was built in the web 2 era or before into becoming a dao and there's a lot of challenges with that the first challenge is just the reality that 99 of the world still is not crypto native there's only one percent of the world population that even have any form of a crypto wallet and so this pathway of going from you know a podcast community a non-profit community you know a musician even if the issuer themselves have some level of crypto native uh thinking and ability to kind of navigate in the space with context their community most likely 99 aren't really there and so again at social stack we're really focused on how can we make very easy to use tools that's turn key both for the issuer of the social token as well as as their community members to really start this process of bootstrapping a network and taking a community and turning it into a micro economy and when you originally launch a token or launch a social token and start that process of onboarding a community into a dow it really looks more just like a reward point on the blockchain you basically start to incentivize behavior of the community that can be as basic as subscribe to our email newsletter follow us on twitter retweet something or more deeper activations like attend an event you know participate in some form of bounty or kind of deeper things that are going to directly advance the community kpis so here's the reality of where we're at right now about one percent of the world has a crypto wallet and according to deep dow there's 1.7 million people in the world that hold a dow token and so that's point zero two percent of the global population which is just a reflection of how insanely early we are i know everyone keeps saying that but you know the reality is that even though point zero two percent of the world population hold the dow token it's a very very tiny fraction of that that are actually actively participating in tokenized communities as opposed to you know just holding the token in the metamask wallet or on some centralized exchange and so what's really important and kind of the thesis that we're building social stack with is the fact that as we go down and get into the you know early adopter early majority life cycle this statement the majority of the world will join web 3 by earning their first crypto not by investing in their first crypto and so what that means is that the majority of the world will join web through social communities not through defy and not through investing and we're already seeing that start to play out with nfts nfts are kind of starting to bridge that gap into mainstream culture and it's happening through social communities and so this is where we're going over the next decade up and to the right in terms of the amount of assets that are held in community dial treasuries and again the social tokens and community dials they're the same exact thing as the social token starts to get distributed within a community it slowly over time starts to turn into fully fledged community-based style and that's really in in my opinion what product market fit is for a social token you're either going to distribute it and slowly become a dow over the next decade or it's probably not going to work out so this is kind of this i would say the second thesis that we have at social stack and it's that you know 2020 the the covet crisis was uh accelerant for this structure of a dow and the reason i say that is if you think back to 2008 during the financial crisis what that was was a complete breakdown in trust of the banks and that necessitated decentralized ledgers that necessitated transparency and really what you know bitcoin was the foundation for but what happened in 2020 was a complete breakdown in the ability of our hierarchies and our centralized institutions to coordinate and adapt and be agile and really mitigate the crisis which resulted in you know we we're all aware of what happened over the past couple years and you know in my opinion one of the biggest reasons for that is we've had a few decades now of um people getting into positions of power authority based on their ability to navigate politics and the social dynamics within these large institutions as opposed to the most competent and the most poised people being in positions where they can actually make decisions from a place of knowledge poise strength and so the structure of a dao really in my opinion is the solution to this this coordination problem because it's a much better way to ensure that the most talented people are in the right position for the right tasks and it's a much more pure form of meritocracy than currently exists in all the different three-letter agencies out there so this is what the typical dow treasury looks like for the token allocation of for for the dow or for the social token you'll typically going to see 50 to 70 percent of the token allocated into the community treasury you'll see some type of retroactive airdrop that's maybe five to seven five to ten percent of the token with the purpose of activating any existing community members or activating you know any new community members and we saw that with um looks rare ens wearable and all sorts of different strategic airdrops to activate the community um you'll see 15 to 20 percent allocated to team partner stakeholders and then potentially some small three to five percent allocated to liquidity mining rewards or some you know something that's unique to that specific dow and so rial paul from real vision and some others have estimated that social tokens are going to be a trillion dollar asset over the next five to ten years so our thesis at social stack is this little sliver here what if all these community dows and all these social tokens allocated around five percent of their treasury of their token towards incentivizing impact-driven behavior from their community members that's aligned with the culture the brand the values of the community according to the projections of this you know trillion dollar asset over the next five to ten years what this could do is unlock a hundred billion dollars by 2031 to incentivize grassroots impact action so this is a completely new paradigm in terms of what we're seeing now in terms of nonprofits charities is we donate five ten percent of the revenue that we make to some form of nonprofit and the the paradigm shift here is instead of money going to a charity that capital is directly incentivizing action within the community that's advancing the outcomes and that could be cleaning up the beach planting trees cleaning up the park walking your neighbor's dog really whatever impact behavior is aligned with that specific community on our platform on social stack and the culture that we want to help seed within this ecosystem is really incentivizing the grassroots action that at scale action by action can be the solution to all of the problems we face across climate change global inequality mental health and it's really just a whole new way to think about impact and behavior change so again here's the current paradigm mr beast is a really popular youtuber a couple months ago he basically activated his community and he used his social capital to raise financial capital from his community which was able to remove 30 million pounds of trash from the ocean and so this new paradigm that we're talking about of essentially impact to earn really looks like mr beast's issuing a social token which what that does is unlocks all the forms of capital within his community financial social human creative capital and directs it towards the same goal but in this paradigm what mr beast is doing is issuing the token using it to incentivize and prompt measurable action from his community members in this case it would be removing plastic the community members take action earn the token and what that does is it creates this flywheel of earning and redeeming that can create a completely sustainable microeconomy that has monetary incentives built within it to advance these behaviors in a way that's like sustainable and can actually drive cultural change at a global scale towards solving all of our big impact problems so one thing i do want to touch on this impact to earn stuff like this is not some like hippie dippy airy fairy this is you know this is really a way that a dow can first off curate culture aligned members because at the end of the day the way dials are operating outside of the core team is you have bounty hunters you have speculators and you have people that are not fully aligned with the incentives of the dow over the long run and so the ability to actually earn your way into a dow by taking impact actions aligned with that dallas culture like that curates a vibe vibes are moats in the space and so the ability to really do that and bring people that are aligned with your ethos and your values that's going to seed true like true culture within daos and it's really gonna kind of get the speculators and the bounty hunters and the missionaries on the sidelines um the second thing is it's just pure optics um you know like imagine how how valuable a social token would be if it was like the thing that kind of tipped the scale on climate change and incentivize enough behavior globally like it could it would be a trillion dollar asset you know um and so all of the marketing all of the optics that comes from implementing this in the dow i think there's there's a ton of value from that um and then the final thing is creating social change like there's a lot of lip service in the space there's a lot of we're gonna change the world blah blah blah but at the end of the day the the fact that it's decentralized that's not the only issue the main issue is wealth and the fact that one percent of the world has a crypto wallet right now and 90 95 of the bitcoin is already in circulation it's not necessarily a better distribution of wealth and so this is a way to really provide meaningful ways for people to earn their way into crypto and drive social change that we're all paying lip service too that you know let's let's get it done so social stack has a couple plug-and-play functionality uh components that enable you know again any non-crypto native user community member leader to start this process of issuing a token incentivizing behavior within the community that on our platform is in parallel this impact to earn action but also it's important to be incentivizing your key your key community kpis with the token and so if your podcast if you're a podcaster that means incentivizing people to listen to the podcast if you're a musician that means incentivizing people to buy tickets to buy merch to attend your concerts and so on for all the different use cases and so we have logging in a login with email functionality which creates a custodial experience for non-crypto native users we have a login with metamask option to go into non-custodial mode and any user that is in custodial mode can turn that on at any moment but what we're seeing right now is like people don't really want the responsibility of managing their private key like it's a lot of responsibility to really like manage that and then the fact that you have to change your rpc network add a custom contract code like do all this stuff that i'm sure most of the people in this room can do but 99.9 of the world cannot do that did i yep and then beyond that just very simple to use earning and redeeming functionality within the community of delegating tasks redeeming into storefronts having a token referral program um and using qr codes to prompt earning it's kind of really inclusive functionality for anyone be able to participate and this is kind of what the interface looks like you log in it's a very kind of web 2 friendly interface you can complete tasks to earn tokens your token balance is at the top right and then on the flip side we have shop functionality where community leaders can then list physical products nft coupon codes that people can redeem the tokens for and so it's kind of like a base value to add on to your token in the early days of its development so we have a bunch of real world use cases that are actually implementing some of this impact to earn stuff we're talking about um at the top right anthony azequo is one of africa's leading crypto artists he put out the redman nft which certainly made the rounds on twitter but he uses his token to primarily incentivize youth in africa to read books and he uses the monetary component of his token to actually purchase those books for for for the young people the project zero is a really big non-profit at the intersection of ocean and climate they incentivize a lot of plastic cleanup ocean cleanup beach cleanup likewise the blue tiki token is one of the biggest surfing companies in the world that we're working with and they also incentivize mangrove planning and cleaning up the beach and so we have 20 of these communities on the platform across all sorts of different use cases and we're really trying to see this culture of impact to earn and incentivizing impact behavior with tokens so who knows what this is i know you all know what this is so someday you say it thank you so it's the black mirror episode where you get rated based on your social interactions and then it creates your like socio-economic score um very dystopian and i am definitely motivated in what we're doing at social stack to ensure that the social token space does not go in the wrong direction where what happens is all of what we all in our professional pursuits and our passion pursuits just get turned into a commodity a commoditized stock that allows anybody to just speculate on our worth and i think there's there's elements of what can be done for new monetization models for creators but really at the forefront of the conversation needs to be how can we activate all the forms of capital inherent within our communities and that's financial capital social capital creative capital and human capital and direct that to really meaningful impact goals and our mission at social stack is to curate this culture within the social token and community dow sector and then make it a norm across the entire crypto space and if we're successful in doing that and we're building the tools to do that we will unlock trillions of dollars in incentives towards incentivizing frontline impact actions and by doing that we'll be able to action by action by action create the exact and very in an intentional way create the exact feature that we all want to see in this room thank you um i'm not sure what time yeah that was awesome let's hear it