The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article from Richard Holden on the prospects for corporate digital currencies.
Holden focuses on the potential for Amazon to release its own currency ("amazons"), leveraging its network of 167 million Prime subscribers in the United States, as well as its lock-in with enterprise customers for Amazon Web Services.
It's an intriguing article. I share Holden's suspicion that this is one direction of travel. And with the rise of monopoly power, it raises some important questions.
The rub for customers / users of a corporate currency issuer is that they can get locked into the issuer's ecosystem. At the extreme this could manifest as company scrip.
A crypto-native case study: Warps & $POINTS
This notion of corporate digital cash recently came to Warpcast — the foundational client built on top of the Farcaster protocol — with the release of warps.
On Warpcast, you can earn warps for participating in the network (e.g., inviting people, delivering popular casts), or you can purchase them with crypto or a credit card. (Current exchange rate 100 warps per 1 U.S. dollar).
Warps can be used to mint NFTs (extremely smooth flow), create channels (like /books and /puns), and tinker with apps built on Farcaster.
Ostensibly they will cover storage and subscription fees in the future. And there's potential for a nexus with e-commerce to emerge.
But as of now, warps have utility only within Warpcast. They are not fungible across Farcaster. They are Chuck E. Cheese tokens for nerds using Warpcast.
This lack of fungibility is where the first Farcaster-native meme coin, $POINTS, could have played — and may yet still play — an important role. (I'm leaving aside the legendary $POINTS lore for now).
As a token on Ethereum mainnet, $POINTS could effectively be a jailbroken warp: a community token that could be used across clients (e.g., Aburra, Supercast, Opencast), or used to fund bounties / public goods, etc.
I like warps and will continue to buy them and use them.
But my bias tilts against closed ecosystems. To paraphrase the latest dispatch from the team at Variant, $POINTS have a point.
