As I've continued my research into NFTs and Social Tokens, I'm diving more into practical applications and how NFTs and Social Tokens work together. My goal is to help develop a blueprint for artists to gradually get involved with blockchain based technology to help grow their audience and sales of art.
CNBC posted an excellent article on 31 January; 'What are social tokens and how are they different from NFTs?'. I written my insights into this question along with some direct quotes from the CNBC article.
What are Social Tokens?
Social tokens are a type of cryptocurrency that a brand, community, or influencer can use to monetise themselves beyond the typical means. Many influencers, celebrities, and businesses these days use social media or other media streams to monetise their skills or services. Typically, in such scenarios, the medium or platform that they use, for instance, Facebook or Instagram, shares the revenue and exerts artistic control on their content.
With social tokens, the content creators can eliminate this barrier and bring forward a new principle of ownership in the digital economy.
How are Social Tokens different from NFTs?
NFTs are a part of the broad category of social tokens. The basic difference between social tokens and NFTs is the fungibility factor. NFT, as the name suggests is non-fungible and each of its unit is unique. Social tokens, on the other hand, are fungible. Each unit of a social token has the same value as another, just like a currency or cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or ether. So, each bitcoin will be the same in value as the other and so it is easily interchangeable. In case of NFTs, however, one painting, for example, will not have the same value as another and it is not easily tradable. This makes them unique.
Put simply, social tokens provide the same benefits, privileges, rights to the piece of artwork or music to all investors invested in them. NFT owners, on the other hand, have unique rights to a particular piece of a creator's work.
This last paragraph is at the core of my post. With this basic understanding of what Social Tokens and NFTs are, and how they are different, let's think about how a visual artist can 'put their metaphorical big toe into the these new 'blockchain waters'.
I've decided to start my personal journey into the blockchain waters with setting up my brand currency, social tokens. I'm starting here because I'm looking a social tokens as a marketing strategy that can artists can relatively easily implement.
The first question to be addressed is if I should setup my currency as personal or creator tokens or as community.
Personal/creator tokens are created by individuals to exchange forms of labour. These individuals are usually public personalities like entrepreneurs or artists.
Community tokens are created as a means to gain access to a community. These are similar to membership cards but based on the blockchain.
This is where I am facing a bit of a conundrum from the start. As an aspiring artist, I would lean toward a creator-based currency, but as a possibly creative marketing service provider, the community token makes more sense. Since I've decided to produce a minimum of 100 pieces of art that I will sign, I'll hold off on the creator currency and start with the community token.
Continue to visit www.beyondthehedge.co/blog for more articles as I continue my 'blockchain adventure'.
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