meTokens Enhances Personal Tokens Utility with Tokenized Chat Powered by XMTP
“To issue money… [is] a natural right of all people who are intelligent enough to do so.” — E.C. Riegel
Personal Currencies
Alternative monetary theorist, E.C. Riegel, conceived the idea of “self-issued credit” in response to living through the Great Depression. Nearly a century ago, Riegel offered his perspective that centrally-issued fiat was fundamentally corrupt and there should forever be a separation of money and state. Moreover, he believed that all people should learn to issue their own personal currencies to achieve true economic freedom.
Reigel’s belief that people should create their own money was rooted in two key ideas. The first was that when money is centrally issued by the state, it becomes a political instrument rather than a tool for financial freedom. Thus, there should be competition in its creation.
The second was that human labor is the core raw material for all goods and services in the world. Creating a plethora of personal currencies that are backed by the labor of each and every productive person would be the most sustainable way to ground the economy to its most basic natural resource.
Reigel stated that the true value of any self-issued money would be rooted in the issuer’s ability to be productive. That is to say, an individual’s personal economy would thrive when their personal currency could be reliably redeemed for any good or service they offer:
- A baker’s personal credit could be redeemable for a loaf of bread.
- A fisherman’s could be redeemable for a filet of fish.
- A physician’s could be redeemable for one unit of medical treatment.
meTokens
Today Reigel’s vision of self-issued money is fulfilled with meTokens — a DeFi-enabled personal token protocol that allows anyone to create their very own sound money. meTokens went live on Ethereum mainnet just weeks ago leading up to ETHSanFrancisco.
The mission of meTokens is to create 8 billion new free economies. Every person on the planet can now be empowered with the ability to issue their own personal currency. While other “social tokens” are only intended for celebrities and influencers, meTokens is designed to ensure any human can achieve economic freedom, regardless of their social status or previous success.
- An artist can issue a token which can be redeemable for a commissioned piece.
- A designer can issue a token which can be redeemable for a new website UI.
- A journalist can issue a token which can be redeemable for an investigative article.
meTokens are a mechanism to capture the true value of your time, attention, and labor. They provide your patrons with the opportunity to purchase future credits to your productivity, while also offering speculators a means of contributing to your growth through capital contributions. All the while, you benefit from having a community of stakeholders who have a vested interest in your success — it’s like having a DAO that focuses entirely on coordinating to help you achieve your goals and dreams.
XMTP
XMTP is a secure messaging protocol and decentralized communication network for web3. It allows any two wallets to privately message each other without intermediaries, and it is designed so that any project can build their own, custom chat client.
meTokens Labs has proudly developed an XMTP client to unlock the most widely accessible human coordination game imaginable: tokenized-chat. Chat is the most basic primitive of online coordination. Everyone can do it, and it represents a primary gateway to your attention. To tokenize your inbox is a fundamental revolution in how you can passively begin to capture the value of your attention.
- Web3 users can token-gate inbound solicitations to check out “cool new projects”
- Newsletter writers can token-gate sponsorship requests
- Developers can token-gate new offer letters
The meTokens XMTP chat client allows users to filter their inbox by their stakeholders. Those who are invested in your future success appear at the top of your inbox. This empowers you to better measure who truly has your best interest at heart when they reach out to ask for your attention. You can, additionally, filter by those whom you are invested in, yourself.
Background
When the meTokens team began building our core protocol last summer, we strongly felt our first application ought to be tokenized-chat. We envisioned a world where every inbound message would include a payment or stake to grow your market cap.
Unfortunately, the state of decentralized chat was quite disappointing at that time. Ethereum’s Whisper Protocol had long ago been all but entirely abandoned. Its most well-maintained fork, Waku, — while functional — had become frustratingly complex and esoteric. Meanwhile, other attempts to build web3 chat were developed more so as an “add-on feature” to other projects’ core products, rather than as a standalone piece of infrastructure, themselves.
Our requirements for native web3 chat at the time were:
- The protocol had to preserve user privacy
- The communication layer had to have a clear path to full decentralization
- The client had to be simple enough to build that the probability of widespread adoption would be reasonably high
XMTP emerged later that summer and more than met our requirements. We connected with Shane, Matt, and Peter shortly after XMTP Labs closed their Series A round and concluded that they understood the problems of web3 chat better than anyone. We felt relief and excitement to know that we could finally build a future where you are actually delighted to see each and every message that appears in your inbox.
Concluding Thoughts
meTokens and the XMTP integration are now live on Ethereum mainnet at meTokens.com. Anyone in the XMTP community is now invited to issue their very own meToken for free. Just join the meTokens Discord to get the “secret code” that unlocks your gas-free transaction.
The meTokens team would like to thank everyone at XMTP Labs for their continued support and steadfast commitment to decentralization.
