Social Finance (SoFi)
"At the fringes of DeFi is the rise of a new sub-sector called SoFi, short for social finance. More commonly known under the umbrella of “personal tokens”, what once was criticized as a vanity play is starting to grow and adapt to rising trends. Looking at Alex Masmej and his new ALEX Yield Round, LPs will share rewards for seeding Uniswap liquidity over the course of the next month.
This notion was quickly picked up by WhaleShark.Pro, offering similar incentives to WHALE LPs for his NFT-collateralized personal token. Creators like Brian Flynn are navigating new waters through the advent of JAMM – a personal token focused on growing his crypto-adoption based newsletter JammSessions. Now, before you write these off as fringe use cases, prominent Ethereum community members like Evan Van Ness are starting to get involved too. His newly launched EVAN token offers placements in his coveted Week in Ethereum newsletter, part of his wider ambition to monetize without putting up a paywall.
This rise of personal tokens is one which I’ve been watching closely for quite some time. While the space is still extremely early, it’s clear that savvy crypto-native creators are leaning into these new experiments by fusing governance with a strong catalyst to grow their brand. I decided to double down on this trend by launching the Personal Token Agency – a management project focused on community growth over capital metrics.
In the spirit of open finance, the ability for any creator to tokenize themselves or their brand and tie it to a specific mission is a premise that has far-reaching potential beyond the crypto rabbit hole. As DeFi tooling continues to grow, it’s not impossible to envision a future in which a creator can open a Maker Vault against his or her reputation in the form of personal token collateral. With the advent of Aave’s Credit Delegation, we can even imagine a situation in which two parties open a credit line to snag a meeting with a top DeFi VC by buying some of their personal token (Cc: Jake Brukhman, Tom Schmidt)."
