update: There was a key point I failed to tell in this essay. It was added and attached to the bottom.
I released an erc-20 via Clanker today called $CCARELLA. It’s OK to call it a memecoin. Just before launching, I announced it with the following cast and I included this cast in my discussion with Clanker so others who found the clanker post could see it.
“I'm about to release a token. You probably shouldn't buy it. It probably won't make you generational wealth. I'm not "dev". I'm not "still working on it bro". So why am I doing it?
Provenance. I want to tokenize my likeness before someone else does. I dread waking up to a scam that used my name.
Tokenization. If you believe everything is going to be tokenized, then why not start with your likeness and learn first hand.
This will be an experiment and I will not completely abandon the token but instead explore different ways to weave it into my onchain persona.”
I genuinely didn’t expect anyone to buy it. My experience with memecoins is that if you state an intention like this or distance yourself from it, it tanks. I was perfectly happy with no one buying it, I really was doing it for the Provence. Turns out that telling people not to buy something is actually good marketing. It had a small run up to $1.2M and was the top token on DexScreener for awhile before it crashed back to earth.
I first told a small group of friends about my intention that really sums up why I wanted to do it.
This was the post. I then saw someone use Ted’s likeness, anonymously (gross). Then 2 products, Anonfun and AIAnon were tokenized but not by the creators. After I launched someone created $bankr but it was not its creator. Finally someone created another token in my likeness, and then tried to use it to create a bounty to make people say bad things about me. Weird but OK.
I’ve been thinking about this tweet by Jacob:
192
and this cast by BenBodhi
and even this video segment by Black Rock CEO Larry Fink.
BlackRock just filed with the SEC to launch tokenisation fund.BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: ‘…the next step is the tokenisation of financial assets, and that means every stock, every bond…’
If everything is going to be tokenized, that will include your likeness and if anyone can tokenize anything, you should tokenize it first. This is the main point of this post; everything will be tokenized but maybe not by you.
The second point in my initial cast is just that I’m going to use this as an opportunity for learning about what it means to tokenize your likeness. I’ve learned a ton today. I launched my token and the price went up so quickly (bots), that I couldn’t even grab my own token until much later. I never intended to sell my own token but only after deployment realized the reward you can get from clankers LP pool (40% of 1% of your total volume) can be very significant. This is totally a way to do a creator coin or to fund ideas. It gave people ideas [1] [2] which in turn gave me new ideas about the future of tokenization.
Not everything about it is great. It sets people’s expectation even if you state your intentions upfront. You get a good number of “let’s pump this bro” guys in your DMs. There was a tweet about it in Chinese that I translated which said people should buy it because Vitalik follows me on Warpcast, which makes me extremely uncomfortable. I’ll write more about the pros and cons, my experiences and experiments in the future.
I'll continue to weave this token into my activities online. I’m terminally onchain as an artist, organizer and practitioner. The only way I know how to learn things is to try them first hand. If in the future everything will be tokenized, I took my first step into finding out what it’s about.
update: 12.2.24
I failed to convey the real WHY behind my reasoning behind Provenance and maybe using the term Provenance confused matters even more.
Of course anything you do has the real provenance and legitimacy. If someone launches a token in you or your projects name first, that doesn't make it legitimate or give it any real Provenance. So in that way I think I just used the wrong term.
My motivation to launch this first was to protect others from Scams and illicit tokens. If enough people know that I officially launched my own token, people will pause when they see another token in my name. In the memecoin space you get a lot of messages like this:
"OMG chris just lauched a coin: 0x20276f1e2D2Efe672A4861e2f69dA6bF8C775340"
And I hope having publicly launched my token, it will make people pause and think "wait he already launched a token" before mindlessly apeing into it.
