[Thursday Thoughties] Crypto Habits & Social Speculation

Stupidly simple. Surprisingly sticky. That’s StreakPoints in a nutshell.

It’s been a month since I started streaking on StreakPoints, a new crypto-powered site built on Polygon where users check-in daily to earn a portion of the one million $SP tokens distributed every day.

What’s $SP you ask? According to Cameron, founder of Cent and the developer behind StreakPoints, it’s a token without a product. And that’s accurate, at least for now.

So, why am I writing about StreakPoints? Like I said, I’ve been checking in on StreakPoints for about a month, BUT a couple of weeks back after starting out strong with an initial 14 day check-in streak, I messed up and missed a check-in window. Then a day later I missed it again. The 14 points I accrued those first two weeks were slashed by 50% for each miss (the more points you accrue the larger your daily $SP allocation).

Despite $SP literally being worthless and having zero utility, I was legit gutted. But now I have a calendar alarm set at 4 pm PT to remind me to check in.

And it’s not just me checking in regularly either. On average around 15 folks have been checking in every day. There is zero ability to interact with others on StreakPoints. If you visit the site you’ll see a simple running ledger of daily check-ins with a streakers current streak and accrued points. That’s it. But when you see a familiar name who has been streaking with you miss a day, the frustration is palpable and you can clearly see their new resolve when they start streaking again.

Even Cameron missed a few days. When I asked him about it his response was just like mine - he was surprisingly bummed.

Without any public marketing or promo or any real word of mouth anything, every day multiple hand fulls of folks are connecting their crypto wallets and paying a little bit of $MATIC to sign a transaction to keep their streaks alive and receive a bunch of worthless, useless tokens.

While others may be scratching their heads at this point wondering wtf I’m on about, my mind has been racing with ideas for simple ways to update StreakPoints.

Anyone that’s been in crypto more than a short while knows that even truly worthless and useless tokens can act as an uncannily powerful incentive . And when that incentive is tied to a simple and straightforward habit, a stickiness is created that’s surprisingly hard to break. With a growing number of streakers returning every single day to keep their streak alive it isn’t hard - at least to me - to see the potential in something like StreakPoints.

Updates are coming soon too. Word on the street is an incentivized referral system, gasless (i.e. free) check-ins, and a box that $SP holders will be able to update are coming soon.

Beyond that, I’m super keen to see if subtle tweaks and additions can be made to StreakPoints such that it becomes a digital destination more conducive to social interactions.

I’d personally love to see more focused check-in windows that increase the likelihood of multiple folks being on the site checking in concurrently. If StreakPoints becomes a place where groups of folks regularly come together at the same time, a lot of things become possible. Moreover, if the crypto token they’re earning accrues any sort of value and/or utility, I’d be really keen to see if any sort of social speculation dynamics emerge.

But for today, I’m just stoked to increase my daily check-in streak to 18 and amass 20 points.

Cover image: Fragments .03 <{the cønver$ation}> by Max Osiris & Keenan Perren

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