Many of the influencers within the crypto twitter space have followings ranging from the thousands to hundreds of thousands. Some are day traders sharing signals, some create content, and some just shitpost for laughs. Regardless of how their following was acquired, at one point or another they’ve probably all considered how to best capitalize on this attention economy and mobilize their followers towards aligned goals.

There are a handful of well known methods that are usually employed. From paid promotions to NFT collections to meme coins, more often than not they all end up with followers and communities feeling misled or just out right scammed. Granted some might have been malicious, but many were just poorly planned and executed, earning influencers and their projects the titles of ‘grifter’ and ‘rugged’.

Silo Squad is here to propose a better solution.

Kinetic Energy

To start, let’s say you’re an influencer with a lot of momentum. Your someone who is steadily gaining followers, making a real name for yourself. You’re at the point where you’re wondering how to use this energy that’s quickly building. You feel as though there should be a solution readily available to harness this energy and direct it into profitable and sustainable outputs for all involved.

You understand the potential of NFTs, social tokens, and DAOs but maybe you’ve only ever witnessed disasters come from any attempt to use them. To avoid falling into the same patterns, you carefully contemplate your best move forward.

Thinking to yourself, “let’s not add another paid shill or ponzi economist to CT. Let’s not mislead another community. Let’s not promote more zero-sum games. How can I change the pattern? How do I build something that won’t screw over majority of my supporters?”

Then you start to breakdown what you’ll probably need:

• completely on-brand initiative.

• a group of your most highly engaged supporters identified.

• funding to back the initiative while maintaining self-sovereignty for contributors.

• security for the funds while not being solely responsible for managing them.

• a mechanism to harnesses energy and direct value flows.

• a system that promotes positive-sum games for your supporters, while creating stability and providing constant opportunities for growth.

Feel free to think deeper on what else you may need, what positive outcomes you can imagine, and how you can create long term sustainability for yourself and supporters. Then be ready to plug these thoughts into the solution we’re going to discuss below.

From Community to Co-Op

It’s time to stop thinking about followers as your “community”, and instead start thinking of them as potential energy for powering a fully fledged cooperative. Let’s move from the stigma of “NFT communities” to the emergent idea of crypto co-ops.

When most projects start, they try to preach about community values and like to put responsibility onto others, but always fail to provide the necessary tools to truly align everyone behind common goals. Those same projects also fail to put safeguards in place to protect its members from volatility, and almost never have a real strategy laid out to create any sort of sustainability.

It’s time to end the era of ‘moonshot or rug’. It’s time to stop the zero-sum downward spirals. It’s time for there finally to be a solution that provides influencers and leaders alike the ability to promote positive-sum games for their supporters. It’s time for Silo.

The following section will highlight one structure that can be useful for setting up a social token cooperative on Silo. If you find it interesting, feel free to reach out to join our pilot program.

Social Token Cooperative - Structure 001

Silo is an intuitive platform that can make it easy to launch an NFT membership DAO and create an ERC20 social token. NFT holders could then coordinate around a shared treasury to manage the social token by voting on proposals.

Branded NFT Collections

Sell NFT memberships to onboard your followers and crowdfund your social token co-op. Create a collection yourself or collab with Silo’s in-haus artists to capture your vibez and brand. Collections are fully customizable in regards to name, total supply, and designs. They can range from a simple design, to importing your own custom ERC721 contract.

Identity

From brand recognition to unique generative PFPs, NFT memberships provide multiple layers of identity. Empower and unite your social collectives to stand strong together, while sending a message that can reverberate through a multitude networks.

Social token

When creating your social token, you can choose a name, ticker, and total supply. The social token is the life blood of the cooperative. Keep it light with a fun meme token or ramp it up with high stakes DeFi strategies. Ultimately, it’ll be up to the NFT holders to align on token and treasury strategies in order to maintain a sustainable ecosystem.

Under the hood

Built on DAOhaus Protocol and Moloch v3, Silo can provide highly composable governance and economic structures by leveraging a dual token model consisting of ‘Shares’ and ‘Loot’.

Collaborating with TokenBound, Silo uses ERC6551 as a core component of the launchpad. ERC6551 enables NFTs to own smart wallets, or Token Bound Accounts (TBAs), meaning your NFTs can store assets. The NFTs hold nontransferable Shares to provide holders with governance and economic rights within the co-op.

Social tokens are Loot. Economic rights mean that both Shares and Loot can be ‘RageQuit’ (burned) at any time for a proportional amount of the treasury, technically making both deflationary.

Taking all of this into consideration, there are now many interesting patterns that can emerge from a technical, economic, social and governance perspective.

Zaps

Silo has zap capabilities, where a portion of the funding (ETH) from the NFT sales and social tokens can be automatically zapped into an LP. Zaps should be configured before starting the NFT sale. Majority of the social token supply could be zapped directly into the LP in order to host a fair launch of the token.

Vesting

A vesting schedule can be set for the NFTs before the sale to have an allocation of social tokens unlocked and claimable within the TBAs on a linear scale of your choosing.

Whitelist

Lastly, there is an optional whitelist to enforce a more exclusive NFT sale.

Start sale

Once everything is set, just configure your NFT price and length of sale and then let it rip!

Bootstrapping

As the NFTs sell, a portion of the ETH from the sale is paired with the social token and zapped into an LP. The remaining portion of ETH and social tokens are secured in the DAO’s side vault to provide the necessary resources for the co-op’s continued operations. Royalties from NFT secondary sales and yield from the LP go into the DAO treasury.

NFT Markets

All NFTs from your collection have inherent value from the underlying governance power and assets in the treasury. From this value, a more stable floor price can be maintained.

Multiplayer

With majority of your social token supply in an LP managed by the DAO, a strong foundation for your co-op is established. Now your followers have turned into fellow members who have to coordinate so everyone in the co-op can win, together. You’ve turned a typical zero-sum scenario into a positive-sum, multiplayer coordination game.

What happens from this point on is entirely up to you and your cooperative.

For a deeper dive into some of the core features mentioned above, check out our intro article: Sustainable Strategies for the Future

Silo social token co-op summary

As an influencer you successfully:

• created and sold a branded NFT collection

• funded a cooperative DAO

• created a social token

• fair launched the social token

• bootstrapped LP for the social token

• established stability and sustainability for the co-op

• enabled a more positive-sum game for your followers

Co-Op sustainability is achieved via:

• NFT sales (ETH) treasury allocation

• social token treasury allocation

• NFT royalties from secondary sales

• LP yield from social token DeFi strategies

The ETH/social token treasury allocation can be used for:

• LP incentives

• marketing

• partnerships

• contributors

• product development

Stay tuned for a continuation of the ‘Silo Series’, where deeper insights into other structures will be provided, along with how to manage LP, optimize DeFi strategies, and maximize yield as a DAO.

Conclusion

If your influence is considerable or has seen a lot of growth recently, you may be looking for ways to better engage and monetize your followers. Just remember, “with great power, comes great responsibility”. We’re not trying to be prescriptive with our structures, instead we hope that we can provide just enough tools and inspiration to get your creative juices flowing. Our incubator pilot program will be rolling out soon. We’re looking to bring a select group of individuals and projects into our silos to help foster a new wave of positive-sum cooperatives within the Ethereum ecosystem.

If you’re interested in the opportunity, feel free to reach out in our Discord.