Whether they acknowledge it or not, tokenized communities are so focused on token price that they lose sight of why they were created to begin with--the shared values and interests, the intrinsic motivators, the glue that is left when all other bindings are stripped away.

NFT collections, and especially the latest wave of ‘avatar communities’ aka PFP collections, have the potential to mirror this healthy dynamic. When we own a SupDuck or Cryptoad, we have a motivation to engage in behavior that makes everyone’s ownership more significant. As ‘residents’ of that virtual neighborhood, we all have an interest in broade... See more

Some communities at least take the first step to have some sort of access dependent on your token activities, usually a Discord server or channel. But access is only the first step to membership. Permissions are too closely tied to access right now, and status is left as too abstract a concept.

The problem here — in what I call the Social Token Paradox — is that with this mental model, tokenized communities are incentivized to uphold exclusivity. Let’s work backwards: if you want your community to be valuable, you need your community’s token to go up in price. This makes sense, sure. But to make the token go up in price, you have two choi... See more