After 2 years working on my personal token project Cryptoraves, I see some common barriers to advancing the popularity and greater adoption and use of personal tokens. Here are the things I think are holding back personal token uptake by large numbers of users:

• People don’t really know what to do with them (for our project, they were more of a passing fad where the novelty is authentically enjoyed but soon wears off)
• Current use-case are too experimental and or controversial. E.g. A critique of the “1 token for 1 hour of time” use case is that too much trust is required for the token buyer, and that only a few high profile community members would have enough clout faithful followers for this to be economical. Even then nothing is guaranteed.
• There is unlimited potential for personal token use cases, but people aren’t used to thinking in terms of tokens. Initially, while adoption is gaining popularity, most people will need some guidance or step-by-step instructions on how to effectively create a use case for their token.
• There is no clear path to monetization of personal tokens. While it’s great people are experimenting with different use cases and creative ideas for how to create utility and value, it would be helpful to have a clearly defined path to monetization for users.

I believe a successful way to address these barriers and speed up adoption would be to introduce a framework for how users can monetize their personal tokens. This is an optional function that people could enable for their personal tokens that creates an asset pool. Personal token owners can add assets to the pool (which are locked in place), and hodlers’ of those personal tokens are entitled to the corresponding “slice of pie” of those assets.

This gives the owners of personal tokens a way to instantly increase their token’s value by:

• “Sweetening the pot” for their hodlers. Hodlers are always guaranteed the portion of the current pooled assets.
• Incentivizing hodling for the long term. In this case, being a hodler of someone’s personal token is like investing in their future value without risking your relative slice of the pie.
• Forming an ecosystem of locked value. Hodlers can pool these tokens themselves to increase their own personal token’s value. Thereby a game of hodling a vast and diverse set of these types of tokens is desired.

I call it “The Ravepool”.

A pool of tokens. More awesome symbolism.

Here’s how it works! Enabling a Ravepool contract launches a smart contract that:

1. Launches or designates a specific fungible token — the Slice-Of-Pie Token
2. Can lock any other tokens (ETH, DAI, etc) at any time into it. This creates an asset pool dubbed the Ravepool.
3. The Ravepool smart contract contains a Redeem Function that can be executed by any holder of Slice-Of-Pie Tokens. They then receive the proportion of assets locked in the Ravepool for the proportional amount of tokens sent, which would subsequently be burned. Thus reducing total supply.

Your personalized tokens are each a slice of the pie, when Ravepool is enabled.

Token Owner Scenario:

Alice launches a personal token $ALICE with a fixed total supply of 100,000.

1. Alice gives $ALICE to friends, fans, gurus, customers, funders of her projects, etc.
2. As Alice crushes it, and stays true to her brand and her word, she decides to reward her community of $ALICE holders by depositing a portion (or all) of revenue she has earned into the Ravepool contract for her $ALICE token.
3. Her token now has an underlying value in which any holder can burn their “share” of $ALICE tokens to redeem the equivalent per-share amount in deposited revenue.

Who wouldn’t hold that sweet locked value this tightly?

Token Hodler Scenario:

Bob knows Alice is awesome and is excited about her endeavors. He constantly compliments her efforts and re-Tweets / spreads the word of her message.

1. Alice rewards Bob by giving him 1,000 $ALICE tokens.
2. Alice hits it big because her following knew she would and even helped her get there along the way.
3. Alice earns tons of ETH through her venture and decides to put it all into her $ALICE Ravepool contract. Let’s say 1,000 ETH.
4. Bob of course has the option now to execute the Ravepool contract’s redemption function by sending his 1,000 $ALICE tokens — which would be burned by the contract and which then sends back 1% of the ETH Alice had previously deposited (1% since total supply of $ALICE is 100,000, therefore Bob’s share of 1,000 = 1%).

So Bob is faced with a choice: Give up his $ALICE tokens now for the guaranteed return of 10 ETH, or continue to hold $ALICE as he knows she will continue to be awesome and share her success for years to come.

Bob decides to hold. The decision to hold is easy because:

1. His portion $ALICE token value can never drop below 10 ETH. Regardless of how many other $ALICE holders burn for their portion. Or how many sell their $ALICE token on the secondary market. The Ravepool guarantees that Bob’s ETH are forever available to him.
2. As Alice continues to reward her holders (read: her tokenized social network), by depositing more future revenue into the Ravepool, Bob’s 1% share continues to increase in value. This assumes no other $ALICE holders have redeemed, because if they do, Bob’s share increases as total supply is reduced with every one of their burns.
3. If Alice maintains good standing with her holders and her future valuation remains positive, the $ALICE token secondary market price should increase because it now includes a premium on top of the underlying asset value, given the market believes $ALICE growth will continue.

Bob of course could also simply sell his $ALICE tokens on the open market.

We’re all valuable, so let’s connect & hodl each other.

Ravepool as the cure for shitcoin-itis.

We all know that far too many tokens are based solely on the promise of their utility + network growth — at best. And absolutely nothing at worst. Well there’s probably even worse ones out there… But this is all moot for any token with the Ravepool feature built in. Ravepool tokens guarantee each holder a slice of its pooled assets. Those tokens can never be zero as long as any amount of asset has been deposited at any time in the token’s history.

Ravepool is volatility protection.

If a Ravepool token is traded on exchanges and thus becomes susceptible to wild market swings:

1. The assets in the Ravepool form an underlying asset price equal to the total amount of assets deposited, divided by the Ravepool token’s total supply.
2. If the market price of the Ravepool token drops below its underlying asset price, savvy traders will spot this and purchase the token for immediate burn to obtain the underlying assets at a profit. Thus price crash protection is built-in. And any remaining holders are still guaranteed their share of existing Ravepool balance + now increased share of future Ravepool deposits.
3. This is especially true if the underlying asset in the Ravepool is (in part or whole) made up of stablecoins. Which would protect the Ravepool token from broader Crypto market swings.

The Ravepool as a tool for continuous fundraising.

Now that some fruits of labor have been harvested by Alice (and her holders), she gets more ambitious. She has a plan to grow. She can present clear success by citing her current underlying token’s asset value as well as her market value. Make a plan and forecast how much her token can be worth over time. So she now has very useful metrics pointing to her token’s value and can raise funds simply by selling some of her share of $ALICE tokens.

The Ravepool as social cohesion.

Now imagine multiple people within a group or community — including the community itself — have each created their own Ravepool token. Since they’re all socially connected and aligned with their community’s goals and values it would stand that they would all share a non marginal amount of tokens with each other. It’s inevitable that our closest friends & family, allies, partners, causes, most loyal customers, biggest fans, etc, would be on the upper end of the distribution curve of our tokens. Now in this scenario of reciprocation, the success of any and every member of the group would benefit all others. It stands that a group or community that is well connected through their personal Ravepool tokens are now ships who sit on a tide that rises with each of their efforts. We can also include DAO governance capabilities with this token for further boosting cohesion.

The Ravepool Conclusion:

Any individual, project, or company that is willing to share a portion of their earned or future success for the goal of community ownership would gain tremendously from the holder’s loyalty and commitment, not to mention the marketing that comes with it. The Ravepool is a perfect solution to enable this through a token design that has built-in multifaceted protections against exit scams, pump-and-dumps, and market volatility. Cryptoraves is committed to making this a democratized reality.