Why

They say you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. I tend to think it is even deeper than that. The longer I live, the more I view myself as a composite of the different people I have had interactions with. A sum of experiences and reflections.

To continue on the adage train, they say it takes a village to raise a child. I think this connects deeply with the previous message on two levels: the literal idea that people are shaped by communities, and that people also belong to communities.

We talk about the first one in the opening paragraph, but the second point is worth diving into a little bit deeper. In the small, tight-knit communities that dominated most of human history, not only did the community shape who you were, but also the degree to which they helped you grow was reflected in the health of the community as a whole. With a tight economic and geographic bond with your neighbors, you became part of the communal ecosystem and your success was often theirs.

In an increasingly mobile world with megacities and online networks, we gain a lot, but we lose this reciprocal, biospheric relationship with the individuals that shape us. Economics is useful in replicating that relationship and Web3 will be a critical tool in increasing the resolution that economics has to do so.

Thus far, tokens function quite similarly to stocks, but the design space is much bigger and just beginning to be explored. One big difference we already see in Web3 is that by carefully giving away the tokens in your project, you can actually increase the value the project is able to accrue. This is new.

I want to explore how this incredibly positive-sum relationship can be extended to myself. How a carefully selected token design and distribution can increase the resolution to which economics help me help people that made me.

How

I will be launching $PUNIA - a personal token that is not to be sold to raise money but given away.

Because I am 25 years old, I will be giving away up to 25% of the total supply.  I reserve the right to mint more whenever. Such tokens are absolutely worthless.

I plan on doing a lot of experiments with the token to explore what it can be, some more immediate:

1. Giving some of my tokens to my landlord through Holon.
   1. Housing as an investment in the person!
2. Giving tokens to people that teach me stuff.
3. Testing the waters on more cringe stuff like friendship or dating bounties.
4. Trying to use $PUNIA to get discounts on social clubs like Launch House.
   1. Tried this when I got accepted into the winter cohort, never heard back lol.

and some much further-off:

1. Whenever I have more capital than I know what to do with, I may distribute it to my token network as a plant will distribute extra resources to the ecosystem through its mycelium.
2. When I die, I may distribute some % of my deed to my token holders.

I make no promises if I will actually do these things. I am also not sure if this is the right structure. It may be the case that fungible tokens are actually pretty bad at representing personal human relationships. Many people may view this as morally bankrupt capitalism. We’ll have to see.

No matter the outcome, I will experiment with other token models, NFTs, or whatever permutation of the two that make sense.

What

There is no fundraise like previous personal token experiments. If you have interacted with me at all, please fill out this form with your Polygon address [Whatever address you own on Ethereum, you own on Polygon and vice-versa], give me some recognizable name, and an optional description. If we haven’t interacted together, but you want some exposure to this experiment, DM me.

At a soon-to-come date, I will be minting and airdropping tokens to everyone, along with a Discord or something for people to keep in touch with me.

I would be shocked if someone was crazy enough to create a liquidity pool, but please do remember that this is nothing more than an early experiment so I would strongly caution against buying it off a secondary market.

Future

$PUNIA and tokenizing my lease with Holon both represent my foray into gaining a deeper understanding of my economic self. If they aren’t things that I [for Holon, we] can make successful, I hope at the least they are experiments that provide some insight for other people who can.

Personal tokens are incredibly important as they may take us forward in internalizing externalities. In a world in which everyone had a personal token, perhaps a private entity would be incentivized to build a library in a neighborhood because it had a long-term payoff in the appreciation of the tokens that comprise kids in that neighborhood.

Like libraries, one can imagine this for health insurance or home equity. We can disentangle such public goods funding power from governments into private markets. One can even imagine retroactive public good funding models, as described by Vitalik, that use personal token distributions to reward actors that helped shaped somebody’s life. The design space is fun!

I struggle with how inherently financial this all seems. It is a deep dissonance that is likely present throughout this post that I haven’t totally resolved. My best guess is the financial may always be there and that making the implicit, explicit would be a net gain to us all.

Personal Token Fund

Something that I am toying around with is raising $100k and using it to buy laptops/internet for people with an ask that they create a personal token and allocate some of it back to the fund. No specific amount, unless requested.

The hope is to raise a little bit of money and experiment with disproportionately beneficial investments. Like access to the internet! Potentially enabling us to do some good and test out the limits of this technology at the same time. I hope such experiments, if proven successful, can help us escape institutional decay in a manner that is non-violent.

Conclusion

Here is the link again to get the $PUNIA airdrop: https://forms.gle/yeMyqm3woqG4SWKZ8.

If you’d like to collaborate with me and my friends on things like this or Holon, please feel free to DM me on Twitter @puniaviision.