Let us understand the power of incentivizing the social experience of users with our good ol’ friends Alice and Bob. Assuming Alice is a social media user of currently existing applications like Instagram and Facebook, while Bob is a TAKI user, and let us see how different their user experience is!
Alice
As a user
Alice engages with the content on the feed, yet does not get any reward for her valuable time spent on the platform.
Get to see annoying advertisements, due to the ad-revenue model of current social media platforms.
All the social engagement data is stored on private servers, which can be analyzed to build models of Alice, which can be sold to various third-party services like advertisers, governments, etc.
Alice doesn’t get a say in the decision-making process on the platform.
As a content creator
Creates valuable content on the platform, which brings traction on the platform by drawing in the audience, yet is paid only a tiny amount of the profits.
Creators depend on advertisers and sponsors to get revenue, due to which they need to compromise the quality of their brand.
Creators don’t get a say in the future progress and decision on the platform.
Bob
As a user
Due to TAKI’s Engage-to-Earn model, the more engagement Bob generates on the platform, the more Bob earns.
As TAKI uses tokens to value the users and creators, there is no need to involve third-party advertisers, hence ad-revenue model does not hinder Bob’s user experience.
TAKI is deployed on the Solana blockchain network, which is a decentralized blockchain that stores the data in such a way that the data is immutable, transparent, and not owned by any private organization.
As Bob engages more with the platform, his stake in the application rises, and he can be involved in the platform’s governance model, and vote for new changes.
As a content creator
Creators can create valuable content on the platform and can earn directly corresponding to the engagement they have with their audience.
Similar to regular users creators also get to vote on the important changes on the platform.
Well, clearly Bob’s user experience is much more transparent, valuable, and privacy protected than Alice’s. HOW DOES TAKI DOES THIS MAGIC✨?
So let’s see how TAKI provides all these features to make this awesome social network!
This deep dive is structured as follows:
Social tokens explained
Dive into TAKI platform architecture
a. Usercoins explained
b. Engage-to-Earn cycle
c. $TAKI token issuance mechanism
A beginners guide to onboard TAKI platform
Benefits and features TAKI offer to Individuals, Projects and DAO’s
TAKI’s advantage over competition
Future roadmap of the platform
My experience with TAKI
Conclusion
Before diving into how TAKI social network works, let’s understand what is a SOCIAL TOKEN.
What are social tokens?
You must have heard about cryptocurrency coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, then what are these tokens? And what is the need for these tokens?
Tokens are digital assets with value, similar to cryptocurrency coins, but the only difference is that tokens don’t have their own native blockchain backing them, they use other blockchains as an infrastructure to be built on top of them.
For example, you are travelling around the globe, do you buy a house at each place you visit, or do you rent a place for short time and move on to the next place. Renting a place would be a better choice because there is no need of maintaining the infrastructure, rather we can focus on the work.
Similarly, tokens are introduced to avoid building a separate blockchain infrastructure, rather developers can focus on the issuance mechanism of the token. $TAKI token is built on top of the Solana blockchain, which is the general-purpose social token on the TAKI application. $TAKI can be used for in-app transactions (will see what these amazing transactions are😁) on the TAKI platform and this base token can be swapped with other coins on exchanges, which can be converted to fiat currencies at any time.
Tokens are configured with rules they need to follow in the smart contracts they are built upon, there are many purposes that tokens could serve, and the major types of tokens are:
Security tokens:
Utility tokens
Governance tokens
$TAKI is the social token of the TAKI platform which plays a key role in providing the required facilities in the application. This $TAKI token integrated with another token introduced by the TAKI platform, “USER COINS“, creates the magic on this platform. In the next section, we will dive deep into the core architecture of the applications, especially tokenomics.
TAKI platform architecture
There are three main components in the TAKI architecture:
Usercoins
Engage-to-Earn cycle
$TAKI token issuance mechanism
1. What are Usercoins?
Usercoins are unique user tokens assigned to each unique user, and these usercoins represent the brand value of the user. Every user will be given his own usercoin as soon as he signs up on the TAKI platform.
Users can exchange their individual usercoins with the $TAKI tokens they own and vice versa, in the wallet section of the TAKI platform itself.
As the user starts creating content that other users, i.e., the audience like, they can buy a stake in the creator’s usercoin.
As more users buy a creators usercoin, the price of the usercoin goes up, and as users sell the usercoin the price of the usercoin goes down.
Also, users can “Like“ the content posted, by gifting a “GOLD TAKI“ to the creator. By gifting a GOLD TAKI, users need to send 2 or more $TAKI to the content creator.
So what is the benefit of these transactions to the stakeholders in the ecosystem, i.e., users and creators? These transactions create an content engagement cycle, which earns profit for all the stakeholders…..how exactly?
2. Engage-to-Earn cycle
a. User Incentives
Users can complete simple daily tasks of engagement to receive free $TAKI in their wallet, which can be used to buy other usercoins they find value in.
When users use the $TAKI in their wallet, to invest in a creator by buying their usercoin, they are getting a stake or ownership in the creator’s usercoin. So as quoted previously as the creator’s usercoin rises up in value, the worth of the ownership the user has in the creator’s coin shoots up.
As mentioned, users can gift “GOLD TAKI“ to creators when they like the content posted, this is analogous to conventional “LIKE“ in social media. So when a user is holding a stake in a creator’s usercoin, and if the creator is gifted with a GOLD TAKI by someone, then 50% of the gift is sent to the creator, and 50% of the gift is distributed among the stakeholders of the creator’s usercoin, i.e., other users who previously bought the creator’s usercoin.
b. Creator Incentives
As every creator has his own coin and earnings proportional to his brand value, the earnings can be withdrawn directly into a Solana wallet (like Phantom, exchange), they need not depend on intermediaries like advertisers and sponsors for ads that ruin the content, vibe and the relation with the audience.
Creators can keep all their earnings for themselves rather than share the profits as they usually do on centralized social media platforms like Twitch, Instagram, etc.
As more features roll out, creators can utilize features like token-gating which allow the creators to cater special content to interact with their followers with high stakes in their usercoin.
3. $TAKI token issuance mechanism
As $TAKI is the native social token on the TAKI platform having some $TAKI in the wallet is handy to engage with the content feed. There are many ways users can earn or get $TAKI, some of them are:
Currently, users signing up for the TAKI platform for the first time, are getting a bonus of 3 $TAKI into the wallet.
Each user has 3 invites, to invite their friends onto the platform, and for every accepted invite, the user gets 1 $TAKI as a reward.
Other than that as mentioned in the user incentives, users can complete daily tasks like commenting, sending some GOLD TAKI, buying new coins, and other forms of platform engagement, these activities reward you up to 5 $TAKI every single day.
Creators can also earn $TAKI in the form of GOLD TAKI gifted as a token of appreciation from their audience.
Along with these, the TAKI platform rewards its users corresponding to the amount of engagement and interaction they had with the platform. The users are divided into tiers based on their engagement and rewarded as follows:
TAKI App speedrun for beginners🚀
In this section, we will have a visual look into features that we are discussing till now so that new users can get a familiar and seamless experience onboarding the platform.
Signing up 🔒
The platform provides two standard methods for users to signup, either using your phone number or via your Google account. As of now as TAKI platform is in its BETA version, you need to get an invite from existing users, to get onto the platform, more than 650,000+ members are on the waiting list to get onto the application, join now at: https://taki.app/
User Profile Page 📋
As shown in the above demonstration of my profile page, there are two sections in a user’s profile page, one about the usercoin and the other about the content the user/creator has posted. In the coin section we can check out the following:
Our usercoin price, the total number of our usercoins in production, etc.
List of top stakeholders of our usercoin.
Recent transactions from our wallet.
And on the content section of the user profile page, we can see the posts the user has posted.
User wallet and transactions 👛
In the above demonstration, the wallet section of the user is shown, where the following information is available:
Total account balance.
List of usercoins the user holds a stake in.
And a breakdown of how much the usercoin is worth and the contribution of other usercoins to the total balance.
In the demonstration, buying a stake in a usercoin is also shown, where we can click on the three dots, to buy and enter the amount of $TAKI to invest in the usercoin, and confirm the transaction.
Withdrawing user balance into personal wallet 💵
TAKI platform supports Solana-based wallets like “PHANTOM“, which users can use to either deposit or withdraw $TAKI directly from the application. There is a minimum requirement that the usercoin should be at least worth 0.2 US dollars to withdraw the account balance, this check is kept to avoid abusing the system by fake users, and to give value to true content creators and users. The following demonstration shows how to deposit and withdraw from the TAKI platform.
NOTE: As my demonstrating usercoin is still a recent one, it is currently at 0.01 USD, currently posting some scenic natural snaps🌲🌲🌲 (more about it at the end😉)
Personalized Feed 🤳
The Feed section in the application contains the content posted by users, the user feed is divided into the following three sections:
Top feed: most popular and happening content on the platform
My feed: content from the creators you follow or hold a stake in their usercoin.
All feed: this is a global live feed, where we can see all the latest posts on the platform.
And we can also directly buy usercoins of creators directly from the feed, who produces content we like, as shown in the demonstration below.
Exploring users on the platform 🔍
Another interesting feature on the TAKI platform, is the explore section where we can search for users individually, also top users in categories like:
Users with the highest usercoin price.
Users with the highest GOLD TAKI received a reward.
Users with the highest growth in their usercoin.
Users with the highest volume of usercoin are actively exchanged.
Users with the highest number of followers, or usercoin which has the largest number of stakeholders.
These categories help users to follow creators with quality content and get an early stake in a creator’s usercoin that is consistently growing. This section is demonstrated in the figure below.
New post ➕ Engaging with content 💬
So in this final part of this section, let’s demonstrate how can users post content and how can they engage with others’ content. The following will be demonstrated:
Creating a new post:
Buying a usercoin of a creator from the feed
Sending some GOLD TAKI, to the posts we like:
TAKI for creators and DAOs
This section focuses on how TAKI impacts creators, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). We cover this section by discussing two topics in detail:
The raise of the creator economy
Transforming creators into communities that evolve into supercharged DAOs
The raise of the creator economy 🚀
Traditionally social media has been a single-way source of value exchange, where users were exploited by the platform using the content by the creators. This had three major outcomes:
Zero value to users
Creators are rewarded for their content, but only very few creators grow to be powerful enough on the platform. Most of them never get rewards corresponding to their time and hard work invested in the platform.
Platforms take advantage of both users and creators by introducing an ad-revenue model and selling user data to the advertisers, also taking away major stakes in revenue from the content creators.
This creates PLATFORM CENTRIC ECONOMIES like Instagram, Twitter, etc. Where all the talk is about the platform and very few top creators. But what about the users? what about other creators?
These questions lead to the CREATOR ECONOMY, which promises to bring back the power into the hands of creators and users, who bring value to the community.
And with the core concept of TOKENIZE EVERYTHING, anything which has value on-chain can be tokenized into an asset. When we tokenize the value between the creator and his/her users, it creates a dual-way source of value exchange.
TAKI as a platform allows creators to onboard easily and create their own token, without worrying about all the blockchain and code stuff.
They can straight away start posting content and as a set of audience crops for the content, they invest in the token in return for a stake in a potentially prosperous talent.
This also avoids users to take up the ad-revenue model, and instead embracing the dual-way source of value exchange between creators and users.
As the creator grows, the stakes of the early users grow, leading to more users, thus creating a positive feedback cycle for all the stakeholders. This creates massive individual creator economies which operate withing the community to bring profits to all the involved stakeholders.
Evolution of creator communities into DAOs
A decentralized Autonomous Organisation or DAO is a community with participants having a common goal, so if the DAO is progressing towards its goal, the stakes of the participants in the DAO reap incentives to them.
When an individual’s creator economy grows, it becomes a supercharged community, in which all the community members are invested in their community’s social token, and one another prospect added to this community can evolve this into a DECENTRALISED AUTONOMOUS ORGANISATION, and that is GOVERNANCE AND VOTING.
The TAKI app itself is on its way to form a Governance DAO, which uses the $TAKI as the base token in the DAO, to give users power to vote on decisions which pave the path for the future of the platform. These decisions can be polled by giving all the users a chance to vote, where 1 $TAKI is equal to 1 Vote.
Similarly, any DAO requires a social token for governance and value exchange within the DAO, and they can use the TAKI platform in the following ways:
Outsourcing the work required to create a standard token to TAKI, i.e., in terms of the TAKI platform, a creating a USERCOIN. Once the standard token is set up on TAKI, the polling can be done on the platform once more social network functions are introduced.
The DAO can use its handle on the TAKI platform to interact with the audience and engage more participants in its usercoin.
For example, let us see how a DAO like the Superteam DAO can be created from scratch on the TAKI platform. Superteam DAO finds interesting projects in the Solana ecosystem, helping them launch and grow. At the same time, it has many roles like lurkers, who engage for opportunities on the DAO like bounties, projects, etc.
So Superteam can create a usercoin on the TAKI platform and attract a community with the same ambitions. And when the community finds interesting projects on the ecosystem, they can do various activities using the “superteam usercoin“ like:
Create a poll on which project to launch, and every stakeholder in the DAO can vote on this to help launch their favorite project.
The DAO can also create a fund pool together to launch a project and receive its early tokens.
The possibilities are endless when a social token and DAOs merge together, and using TAKI gives the DAO a lot of benefits like Outsourcing the work of creating a token, rather than focusing on the smart contracts dealing the governance, a huge open audience on the platform with a potential interest in the DAOs ambitions.
Why TAKI over others?
In this section, we will discuss what are the advantages of using the TAKI app over other applications. Let us see how TAKI overcomes its competitors in:
Conventional Social Networks: Twitter, Instagram, etc.
New-age social token-based applications: Chingari ($GARI token), Crowdpad, Wordcel.
Conventional Social Networks
All the previous sections clearly show why Tokenzied Creator Economies are better than Centralised Social Media. The whole of it can summarise as:
Centralised social media creates single-way source of value exchange, which reaps profits to the platform from advertisers, user data and creators content, making this a PLATFORM CENTRIC ECONOMIES.
The following table summarises the comparison between Tokenzied Creator Economies and Centralised Social Media.
New-age social token-based applications
Chingari
Chingari is a video-sharing platform where users share their video content to engage with the audience. Recently Chingari embraced tokenization by launching its own social token $GARI token. It is used for on-app incentives to users and creators, with more engagement users can earn their corresponding stake in the $GARI token.
TAKI advantages:
Extensibility: Chingari as a creator economy lacks extensibility and flexibility for creators to launch their own usercoin, which TAKI offers on-app. This allows creators to create their own micro economies which could grow into communities and further into DAOs. This opens a vast range of possibilities like token-gating, local governance in communities, etc.
Crowdpad
Crowdpad is an individual social token provider, which helps creators in creating a community with a unique social token, and users can join this community and perform in-community transactions by engaging with the community feed. This does solve the problem of extensibility by creating social tokens, much like TAKI does. This helps creators to grow their own community of like-minded users.
TAKI advantages:
Interoperability: TAKI provides extensive interoperability between communities, by providing sections like Feed and Explore where users can interact with other communities, and search for various categories and their top users, so that users can grab a stake in creators with rapid growth. Crowdpad also has a feature to search the communities, but it is in a limited sense, and has a scope of development. As TAKI and Crowdpad has many features working on towards the same goal of creator economies with social tokens, a healthy competition indeed!
The future roadmap of the TAKI platform
TAKI has some very exciting updates coming up in the next quarter of this year. The main features going to be rolled out are:
On-chain usercoins⛓️
With this feature, usercoins can be onboarded onto the live Solana blockchain as a token. This opens endless possibilities regarding the extensibility of the TAKI platform, once a token is available on the Solana blockchain, every transaction with the usercoin community can be publicly traced on the Solana explorers like “Solscan“, using which DAOs can create their own Dapps, to interact with the transactions and implement a governance model.
New social economy functions 🆕
TAKI being a social network platform at its core, need more social functions like polls, extensive media format support, etc. These bring the users a conventional social media feel along with all features that TAKI offers.
My experience with TAKI
It’s been a few weeks now since I joined the TAKI platform. And personally, it’s been the most exciting social media platform I’ve seen in a while.
I have been posting some nature snaps from my neighborhood, and watching my audience reward me with actual value is just heart-warming. And I really want to continue with this platform to explore the exciting feature lying ahead.
You can check my nature snaps🏕️ over here @rohit8686 .
Conclusion
This journey of exploring ins and outs of an amazing platform like TAKI has been inspiring and exciting for what the future holds for us in the form of creator economies.
As mentioned previously TAKI platform has a massive waiting list of over 650,000+ users, to be one of the first folks out there to onboard this futuristic journey, join the waitlist at, TAKI APP . To explore more about the platform visit, TAKI WIKI .
I can’t wait for you all to share your amazing experience on this platform🎉🎉
By,
Rohit Kumar Varma
(Excited to connect with you folks at, twitter ❤️)
References:
Taki wiki: https://wiki.taki.app/
SuperteamDAO: https://superteam.fun/
https://medium.com/bankless-dao/daos-will-change-everything-b955588eeedc
Crowdpad (for competitor analysis): https://www.crowdpad.io/
Gari whitepaper: https://gari.network/gari-whitepaper/