The Community Renaissance and Crypto

Perhaps COVID encouraged further online community creation, and thus a need to find a way to organize people — if we could make it easier for people to find communities, want to participate, want to engage, and perhaps gamify engagement, we’d all be better off. Nonetheless, people have realized that we could use cryptocurrency and blockchain to capture all sorts of value related to community — status, content, identity, and value could now be represented on-chain and could play a key role in community interactions.The past few months have brought a renaissance filled with experiments around NFTs, community-created tokens, and DAse. These tools are being used to represent community, status, value, and ownership. They’re also being used as mechanisms to fuel participation and incentivize interaction engagement.Social tokens are creating ‘buy-in’ for communitiesCommunities like FWB (Friends with Benefits) have issued their own social tokens to represent “buy-in” into the group. To join, you must buy and hold a minimum amount of these tokens, which serve as gated access for members and represent shared ownership of the community. You can imagine a world where positive interactions and contributions could be rewarded with additional community tokens, directly incentivizing participation and gamifying the community experience.The caption of the Friends with Benefits WebsiteGiven that these tokens are associated with real economic value, it creates a world of shared group incentives, where all participants are incentivized to upkeep the community and participate.Such groups are also experimenting with how governance will work through decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).Trusted Community WalletsBlockchains give communities superpowers when it comes to payments as every user has a wallet with a balance, and the community itself can have its own wallet. Communities can seamlessly crowdfund, make community purchases with shared ownership, and broadcast verifiable transactions.Going forward, more ‘trusted communities’ will form and create…