Over the course of the past year, we’ve seen a vast amount of experimentation regarding personal tokens – or tokens which represent the creator’s time or services. Most notably highlighted by Matthew Vernon and his sale of $BOI tokens, Saint Fame redeemed his personal tokens for the design of the $FAME Gensis shirt.
We’ve also seen prominent community members like Pet3rpan ($MAGIC) and Ameen Solamani ($PEW) create their own respective token – both of which could be purchased and sold on secondary markets like Unsiwap.
🌙 The spell has been cast, the initial time offering is live.
🐐 Buy my time and order me at your wish.
🕯 $MAGIC now controls me.https://t.co/ZER4rglbAW pic.twitter.com/WtFItLNTmc
— pet3rpan (@pet3rpan_) January 12, 2020
While all these personal tokens were quite interesting, we’ve yet to see any experiment garner more than 5 figures in relative market cap. That is until today.
Back in February, a prominent community member Alex Masmej announced that he will be selling $20k worth of his personal $ALEX tokens to fund his trip to San Fransisco in order to better position himself for his next crypto startup. Just a few hours ago, that raise is now live.
A month after my @EthCC_ announcement (& a global crisis), I’m introducing the Initial $ALEX Offering.
👨🏼💻 $20,000 sale as a founder safety net. @tryrollhq is in.
💰 Get up to $100,000 in the next 3 years
🚀 I’m soon launching a consumer DeFi startup— Alex Masmej ☄️ (@AlexMasmej) April 7, 2020
Who is Alex?
For those who haven’t’ seen Alex’s endless social media presence, you may know him from Rocket – an NFT-based lending DAO which offers users loans in stablecoins like Dai in exchange for valuable NFT’s like Decentraland LAND.
Announcing Loan #4: 20,000 DAI against $100,000 of virtual estate 🏡
👉 421 LAND parcels @decentraland
👉 12% APR, 6 months long
👉 Our estimate is conservative. Highest: $500,000.
👉 Link https://t.co/KGFdqeO0WQ
👉 Mysterious owner: @metakovanBest cryptonative collateral. 🚀 pic.twitter.com/OzM4InKCyf
— Rocket (@RocketNFT) March 2, 2020
He’s deeply involved in MetaCartel and MarketingDAO – largely organizing meetups and virtual conferences like RESET Everything.
Now this is not to try and gas him up more than he deserves – but what it does go to show is that he is no rookie when it comes to testing out the fringe use-cases of the rapidly evolving DeFi landscape.
$ALEX Offering
For anyone who has kept up with Alex, you may be aware of his strong relationship with Roll – a social money platform focused on the issuance and management of personal tokens. This is important to note as they are playing a crucial role (no pun intended) in the offering. Here’s what you should know:
- The offering is set to raise $20k in exchange for 1M $ALEX or 10% of the total supply.
- All purchases are OTC rather than on Uniswap in order to avoid slippage
- Alex will take 15% of all income from the next 3 years and distribute it to shareholders in the form of quarterly DAI dividends.
- Minimum Contribution is 2ETH.
Leading the round is Roll themselves. Bradley Miles, CEO and cofounder of Roll commented on the $ALEX tokensale saying:
“The concept of personal tokens is boundless and something we’re deeply excited about at Roll. Allowing people to have a stake in your network unlocks a new feature set that can strengthen communities both online and offline. What Alex is doing right now with $ALEX will seem commonplace in the coming years.”
It would seem that the larger community has taken a liking to the experiment, with over 1/4 of the round already being sold at the time of writing (less than two hours after the announcement article was posted).
How is This DeFi?
As with many other aspects of DeFi, the ability to create, distribute and dictate the usage of personal tokens is entirely permissionless. While this particular experiment is highly experimental, we’re seeing DEXs like Uniswap playing a crucial role in the underlying liquidity and future longevity of assets like $ALEX.
What’s more is that the composable nature of ERC20 tokens allows for future use-cases surrounding staking and burning to be tied into both $ALEX and the wider DeFi landscape, possibly allowing derivatives to be created on something like Synthetix or UMA.
Coming back to reality, it’s fascinating to see the ways in which crowdsourcing continues to evolve in the rapidly creative crypto ecosystem.
It’s telling to discuss with YC alumni or Silicon Valley people criticizing crypto “for not solving any real problem”
If even smart people don’t get it yet, imagine consumers
Prediction: 2020 will see a breakout DeFi app that will be a wakeup call for opportunistic founders
— Alex Masmej ☄️ (@AlexMasmej) April 6, 2020
For more news on the offering and all things $ALEX, follow the Pepo-famous man himself on Twitter.
Cooper is the Editor of DeFi Rate and an active contributor to leading DeFi media outlets like The Defiant, DeFi Pulse, and Bankless. He works with early-stage teams through Fire Eyes DAO to incubate governance models and grassroots community development. He is an ambassador to Set Protocol and an author of a weekly publication called Token Tuesdays. To stay up with Cooper, follow him on Twitter.