Seed Club calls itself the Internet Native Incubator.
They are focused on helping people build online communities that thrive through the use of social tokens.
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The First Creator-Meets-Crypto Summit Is Days Away
Seed Club
This may sound like a niche space at the moment, but a lot is pointing to the fact that tokenized communities are about to explode.
Over the last 10 years, building and participating in communities online has become the focus of millions. These communities live on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook.
The “tokenization” of said communities — that is, the measurement and extraction of their value — is primarily in the hands of those companies. The social graphs that tie these like-minded people together, as well as the valuable data that comes from those strong ties, are owned by the platforms and not by the communities themselves.
Simply put, this is broken.
Tokenizing your community — be it in the form of fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens, or a mix of both — is the fix to this problem.
It is not about turning every little thing into some monstrous hyper-financialized stock market. It is about restoring value to its rightful place.
Seed Club knows this, and that’s why they are devoting themselves to enabling the realization of this new world.
They’ve begun this work through a cohort-based program. Now on their second cohort consisting of 11 projects, they mentor and nurture creators and communities in the development of thriving social token projects.
As Seed Club’s founder Jess Sloss put it to me, one of the most successful ways they’re doing this is to “just have smart people smash into each other”. Which brings us quite naturally to their upcoming event…
A first of its kind, the Seed Club Summit is designed to build bridges between the creator and crypto worlds. What these two spaces can do together is just beginning to show up in early stage projects. This event is meant to bring those projects and ideas to the forefront, and push at the edges of how we can use these new technologies to empower artists and communities alike.
The 3-day event is jam packed with an incredible range of speakers covering topics in the worlds of social tokens, community building, cryptoeconomics, NFTs, DAOs and more. Some of the top thinkers, designers and artists speaking at the summit include Grammy award-winning musician RAC, Startupy founder and VC Sari Azout, co-founder of the community-first product studio Late Checkout Greg Isenberg, and crypto wunderkind at Audius and Variant Fund Cooper Turley.
For a full list of the speakers and events, check out the Creator x Crypto Summit website. There you can also register for free to attend.
Sponsorship NFTs
The way that Seed Club has decided to pay for the event is interesting, and points to the creative ways that crypto can bring together creators and communities.
Instead of charging attendees for access, Seed Club has instead minted 3 Summit Sponsorship NFTs and put them up for bid on Zora. Each NFT represents one of the summit’s three days. By purchasing one you are effectively unlocking that day’s content for everyone else to enjoy and learn from.
Seed Club put up this article walking through the details of these Sponsorship NFTs. The auctions close on Friday March 26 at 6pm PT, and the 3 winners will get some pretty awesome perks:
- Be the named sponsor of the Summit for that day across all event platforms (website, Discord, livestream, etc)
- The opportunity to host a 30-minute session as a capstone for each day
- A bunch of attention and thanks from the various Seed Club social media channels (Twitter, Discord, email)
- Recognition as an early Seed Club supporter (“and all that entails … which is mostly just bragging rights for now, but we plan to make it be something in the future”)
That last one points to the long term relationship that Seed Club wants to build with its sponsors. Seed Club’s Jess Sloss told me that this is the reason for the 99% creator fee attached to the three Sponsorship NFTs:
“We want to discourage secondary market speculation. We’ll be discerning on who we partner with as a sponsor and have bigger plans with these NFTs in the future. So we want the incentives to lead sponsors to hold these things long term.” — Jess Sloss
In doing so, Seed Club is practicing what they preach and putting these new ideas into action. These sponsorship NFTs show us how we can build strong bridges of trust and support online, and how we can use them to forge communities that are working together for the long term.
Speaking The Future Into Existence
NFTs have clearly swept across popular culture very quickly. And like most new technologies and ideas, they are stirring up all sorts of controversy and debate. A great deal of that debate, however, lies at the surface use-case of NFTs —which all seems to be about money. But people are starting to look deeper than the surface of things, and seeing that there is a whole lot more potential to this stuff than making a quick buck.
Social tokens act as strong ties of patronage between people, and as levers to align people’s incentives towards a shared future. The power this gives creators and their communities is huge. I like to think of it less like infusing creativity with money, and more like infusing money with creativity. We now have these limitless lego blocks to play with, and we can take them as far as our imaginations allow.
These ideas and more will be explored at length during the Creator x Crypto Summit — both from a 30,000 foot view all the way down to the practical level.
If you’re interested in attending the summit, you can register for free here.
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