Long Tail Social Token

Alright. GM, GA, GE everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for members of the DAO to showcase something they are passionate about or have been working on. This can be an awesome project, demonstrating unit testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the community. And today I am happy to introduce to you Dusty, who will be demoing to us the Long Tail Social Token. Take it away, Dusty.

Hey everyone. Yeah, so I'll just get right into it. I've been kind of a game developer for a while that I kind of stopped because I could make more money investing in cryptocurrency than I could developing games. And so I tried investing in all kinds of different projects but found out that a lot of them just don't fit my standards. And so this Long Tail Social Token is an effort to create something which will fit my standards as an investor, something I would actually want to invest in. The reason why they don't fit my standards is because, in my opinion, cryptocurrencies either have utility, which is great, or they're a mechanism to transfer money from one group of people to another. Most project creators really are primarily interested in being the group that gets money transferred to them as much as possible. I just don't think that that is really healthy for the space. In order for cryptocurrency to advance in general, we need better engagement with projects that aren't just primarily there to make the project creator rich.

So the idea that I had was to create an actual stable economy. In my opinion, a stable economy is something that has a currency and it also has a product that you can buy with that currency. It's both of those things. Also, in the digital world, everything that has value is focused around community. If you think of anything that you've really enjoyed that's purely digital, it's almost always the community around that thing. I wanted to create this social token idea that is a cryptocurrency focused on community. How I do that is there is a token paired with an NFT. Both of those things are upgraded with gaming mechanics because I used to be a game developer. It's not just me working on this; there's a small team behind it too. The coin has staking rewards and the longer you stake it, the more rewards it'll give out, with higher APR.

You can mine the coin. Mining is basically, once a stake ends, mining just in a batch transaction sends all of those ended stakes back to the people that staked them. That allows you to use much less gas because one big batch transaction is much cheaper than a whole bunch of individual transactions. The token prints some rewards for what it does, and then to counter that and balance out that economy, you can also buy an NFT set with it. That NFT set burns some of the token, creating a more stable system. I call it a social NFT because it's not like the PFP NFTs that are on the market, like Bored Ape Yacht Club. It has tiers. You mint the NFT using the token; with 10 Long Tail Social Tokens, you can mint one tier one NFT. In order to get higher-tier NFTs, you forge them together. You burn one, forge one into a higher tier.

The interesting thing about the set is that it is not fixed; it is constantly growing in cooperation with the community. We're building a council of people that are interested in advancing the story of the NFT set and also a community of artists. The council releases bounties for something they want an artist to draw to advance the story. When the bounty is fulfilled, some of the token is given to the artist and the council member. They get a tangible reward, and then that piece of art gets put into the set. Then it gets minted for new stuff so people can enjoy and interact with it. The idea is that everyone is rewarded for interacting with the community. Long Tail Social Token is themed around furries or animal-human hybrid kind of characters because that community doesn't have a real good online place to gather and it is also strongly focused on art creation. We start out this way and then we issue different ones with different themes, like maybe some sci-fi related one. Everything is community-focused and decentralized.

Yeah man, this is really interesting. Could you speak a little bit more on the forging? So is it like you use the tokens that you have to forge an NFT, or can you use NFTs to forge further NFTs of higher levels?

Yeah, okay. So there are two functions in the contract: mint and forge. Mint is creating a tier one NFT from scratch, and that uses 10 Long Tail Social Tokens. You buy the tokens on Uniswap or get them from a friend. You mint a tier one, and then you can forge to upgrade. Tier ones are really basic. Tier twos are like your typical PFP NFTs. We have ten characters created right now, so every time you go up to a tier two, it will assign that NFT a character, and it stays with that character for the entire progression. Tier three is more like a hero image, like a scene that is in that character's life and tells a story. Tier four is a page in a comic book about that character. That kind of tells some aspects of the story that just can't be told purely visually. Each character kind of has their own story based around their personality and growth. The set isn't completely finished; we have a lot of content that we've been creating for the past year, but the idea is that the set will grow over time with this council and bounties process. The community will decide how the story develops and how the world develops. It's a community-based storytelling effort. All the art is licensed under a Creative Commons license, so you can create fan art and expand it.

Dope. And do you foresee these NFTs kind of expanding utility in this community you're looking to build as they are leveled up, or are they just for basically progressing the story like you mentioned?

So my main focus is on community development. Utility, I mean, I have this thought that utility is not as important as community. Bringing people together is the extent of the utility that I am planning on working on for this set. People online only engage as much as they are rewarded to. You go on Twitter if you feel you have a reason to, like you want to communicate with people. Having tangible rewards for interaction is positive for the community. A stake is a promise. It is designed so that you have your own goals and can decide when you want to withdraw or sell, reacting based on what you actually want to do in advance and behaving in a more predictable manner than in response to the market. You don't sell if there's a dump because you've got everything staked. If a bunch of people don't sell, then the dump doesn't really go very far. It helps the whole economy of the system to have people willingly choose to lock their stuff in and get a reward for it. If you withdraw early, you get a penalty that starts out as twice as much as the reward you would have gotten and linearly decreases.

Got it. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, you need community to push your project forward and everything else is kind of like an afterthought, so to speak. But what chain have you built this on, or is it your own custom chain?

Yeah, this is built on Ethereum. I'm not interested in reinventing the wheel in that respect. I think there's enough interesting mechanics that I don't need to push the envelope and try to build a whole validation system. Your own chain is your own silo, and this is all about community coming together and advancing the space. I think there's a real need for developers to use, to integrate more tech, not to try to make everything on an individual thing.

Yeah, it totally makes sense. I mean, we've all seen the very ambitious roadmaps of many projects and all that really happened was like a token sale or NFT sale and then silence. But final question for me is, is this open source and/or if not, are there any ways for people to follow the progress and help you out?

Absolutely. So is it open source is kind of a nuanced question. The contracts, of course, will be published and they've been audited. The code will be readable and copyable under an MIT license. The website is not really open source, but it's just kind of an interface really. The best way to get involved, and we love involvement especially if someone would want to contribute in terms of art or council or direction. We have a launch plan to start in two weeks and deploy the contracts. For the first 21 days, we have an anti-bot system which is an invite system. No one can trade the token unless they are invited. All you have to do to be invited is get an invite code and enter it on the website. The token is going to be on an invite list for 21 days and then after that, the NFT is going to be able to be minted. We have a Discord group and we'll be building the community. Also, we have this system that's not going to be implemented right at the beginning, but it's a system for what I call a true proof of stake system. There's a voting system that is tied in with the staking system. If you have a stake and if it's not near the beginning or the end of the stake, because there are reasons why you might not be voting in the interest of the economy as a whole if you're near the beginning or the end. The closer you are to the middle of your stake, the more votes you have. People can vote that have staked because they're invested in the economy. We haven't implemented what the votes do yet, but major decision making will be conducted in that manner.

Excellent. And great way to end things off here. Thank you so much again Dusty for coming on and sharing Long Tail Social Token with us. Very interesting project and we'll be keeping an eye on it for sure. And with that, I want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend, and be on the look out in the general chat in the server for the POAP drop.

And I'll post a link to the Discord and like I said, if people want to message me, I'll give them an invite link for the token too.

Excellent, looking forward to it. And I guess with that, want to wish everyone a really great one and we'll catch you back here next week. See you again. Thank you.