Author: Yue Xiaoyu
No investment advice, pay attention to project risks
More than a month ago, friend.tech came out of nowhere, triggering a wave of Web3 social craze. I also experienced friend.tech for the first time and wrote an analysis article.
A brief discussion on the decentralized social product friend.tech: a glimpse into the present and future of SocialFi
Originally, it was thought that this product might be a flash in the pan, because it is a typical Ponzi model and is not sustainable. However, friend.tech continued to be popular and its popularity remained high. More and more people began to try friend.tech, and a series of innovative Web3 social products emerged.
Today I would like to share with you an interesting similar product that I have seen recently: Time Store, a KOL time trading platform.
01 Basic Introduction
What Web3 social products do is to monetize social value, making the intangible asset of "social value" liquid.
The time trading platform TimeStore allows each user to issue his or her own social currency. The unit of the token is seconds, which represents each person's time.
Time is everyone's most scarce resource and also the most quantifiable resource.
Among them, the unit time value of KOL (Key Opinion Leader, i.e. Big V) is obviously higher than that of ordinary people.
In TimeStore, fans can purchase KOL tokens, which means purchasing their time. By paying with tokens, they can communicate with KOLs online or offline or view paid content. At the same time, fans can also trade KOLs’ time.
The token price is actually the quantification of the KOL's social value. When the KOL damages his or her social value, such as deceiving fans or generating negative influence, fans can sell their tokens, which will reduce the KOL's token price. When the KOL becomes more and more influential, more fans will buy their tokens, and the token price will rise.
At the same time, fans can expand the influence of KOLs by purchasing KOL tokens or promoting KOLs. As the influence of KOLs grows, their tokens become more valuable, and fans can share in the appreciation of KOLs.
Therefore, this is a revenue-sharing model, where fans and KOLs form a community of interests and a growth flywheel. Fans and KOLs themselves have a strong motivation to drive up the price of their own tokens.
This model is actually a typical way of playing Web3, and it is also the biggest difference from traditional Web2 products: using tokens to achieve value circulation and profit sharing.
Growth Flywheel
Specific gameplay:
The total amount of tokens per issuer is fixed at 1 billion SECONDS.
The issuance of tokens goes through two stages: initial issuance and subsequent unlocking.
Initial issuance: The initial issuance is fixed at 1 million seconds, and pre-sale subscription is required at a price of $0.0015/second (similar to new stock issuance). If the pre-sale exceeds the quota, at the opening, each fan will randomly obtain the subscription right for the initial issuance according to the proportion of the subscription amount to the total subscription amount.
Late unlocking: After the opening, when the price rises to more than $0.0015, 10,000 seconds will be unlocked for every hour, of which 8,000 seconds will be given to the issuer and 2,000 seconds will be awarded to community members. When the token price rises from $0.0015/second to $149.85/second (a 99,900-fold increase), all 1 billion seconds will be unlocked, that is, all will be circulated. (This is basically impossible to achieve, so it is unlocked linearly according to time)
Product Logic
02 Project Background
Time Store is a domestic project and the product only supports Chinese. The predecessor of this product is actually "Miao Ah" which was popular in 2017. The founder also claimed on Twitter that he was a member of the original "Miao Ah" team.
MiaoA claims to be the world's first time trading platform. MiaoA will sign contracts with some Internet celebrities, stars, entrepreneurs, start-ups, school celebrities and other celebrities with monetization potential, buy out part of their time at a relatively low price, and then split the time into seconds, allowing investors to subscribe and trade on its trading platform. The whole process is similar to the "new stock" of public offerings and subsequent secondary market transactions.
When a user holds a certain amount of celebrity time, he or she can redeem it for exercise services, such as online chatting, offline dining, etc. Online exercise starts at 1 second, and offline exercise starts at 2 hours.
In fact, you will find that the gameplay of Time Store is basically the same as that of MiaoAh.
At the time, the MiaoA project was called the Nasdaq of personal time. Later, the MiaoA team was placed under border control, and the China Securities Regulatory Commission determined that this was a quasi-securities project in China, requiring them to clear out users and targets, and the project eventually came to nothing.
However, in recent times, the Web3 social product friend.tech has become extremely popular, and many Twitter KOLs are using friend.tech. It is actually very appropriate for Time Store to be launched at this time.
Time Store claims that all its employees are overseas and no members are in the country, thus avoiding previous policy risks.
03 Comparison with friend.tech
For an introduction to friend.tech, you can read the previous article:
A brief discussion on the decentralized social product friend.tech: a glimpse into the present and future of SocialFi
1. Token Model
FT (friend.tech) is essentially NFT, a certificate with rights and interests. There is no upper limit on the total amount, but as the number of buyers increases, the price of the next key will also rise exponentially. When the circulation volume reaches about 100, the unit price will reach US$1,000, and the invisible price ceiling is relatively low;
TS (Time Store) directly tokenizes the value of KOLs and has an initial issuance and linear unlocking over time. Users can trade directly, and it can carry a larger number of users and funds, with better liquidity.
2. Incentive Mechanism
FT’s KOLs can only earn transaction fees, which is 5% of the unit price; while TS’s KOLs gain income through initial issuance and token unlocking, which allows KOLs to make money first.
3. Token usage scenarios
The FT key can only be used by fans to initiate private chats with KOLs, while the TS key has more usage scenarios, such as online and offline communication, viewing paid content, etc.
4. Decentralization
FT is a decentralized product. Each user has his or her own wallet and can control his or her own assets. All transactions take place on the chain, which is very transparent.
TS is a centralized product. Each user transfers money to the TS platform and then trades off-chain. TS is actually similar to a centralized exchange. Transactions are opaque and fund security is difficult to guarantee.
5. Product experience
FT's products are difficult to use and can be said to be very simple; but TS's product experience is very smooth and has a variety of functions, including initial issuance subscription, transaction price curve chart, posting and other functions.
This also shows that in the Web3 industry, domestic teams actually have great advantages at the application layer.
04 Conclusion
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of this product.
First, let’s look at the advantages of this project:
1. Taking advantage of the popularity of the Web3 social product friend.tech, the timing is very good to launch Time Store.
2. The business model and product logic have been verified by the original product Miaoa, and the fans, KOL and platform all benefit from it. This ecological co-prosperity model can form a growth flywheel.
3. The product experience is far superior to many Web3 products. At the same time, the project has added new gameplay, such as airdrop expectations and paid content.
Let’s look at the disadvantages of this project:
1. As a domestic team, the product currently only supports Chinese and is played by the Chinese community. It is still unknown whether it can successfully enter the overseas market.
2. The biggest problem is that this product is a centralized application, similar to MiaoAh, and similar to the centralized exchange model, asset security is the biggest risk. If the product wants to develop in the long run, it needs to be transformed from the architecture to a decentralized product, similar to friend.tech, with an embedded decentralized wallet, so that users can control their assets and transactions are transparent. Only in this way can more users and funds participate.
at last
There are new and interesting things appearing in the Web3 industry every day. We must continue to participate in new concepts and new things, not only to find profit opportunities, but also to enhance our understanding of this industry.