Social tokens are tokens issued by individual creators or communities that enable community members to collaborate and share ownership in the value created together. Social tokens can be earned as rewards for contributing to the group and can be used for purposes such as granting access to a chat group or voting on community decisions.

Strong communities can form around both NFTs and social tokens.

a single community can make use of both social tokens and NFTs such as using social tokens to make governance decisions and NFTs to reward contributors.

Social tokens can be used for governance over a DAO, but they do not have to be. There can be cases where a social token is only used for non-governance purposes like rewarding supporters with early access to merchandise or exclusive opportunities.

Some of the earliest social token experiments involved “personal tokens” where an individual with a unique skill set tokenized blocks of their time.

There were also personal tokens designed to behave like tokenized Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs), where individuals tokenized the rights to a percentage of their future income.

There are a number of social token issuers that make it easy for creators and communities to mint their own tokens such as Coinvise, Rally, and Roll.

It’s important to think through how having a freely traded token can affect community morale and cohesion. There are ways to alleviate this issue such as making tokens non-transferable in the early stages, as the community is forming, as well as introducing long vesting schedules to ensure that community members are long-term aligned.

Social graphs can be created based on the tokens that individuals hold to help people discover new communities and meet others who share the same interests.