Navigating the crypto-economy for creators
The story of $JAMM & why the everything bundle works in crypto
JammSession is a newsletter & community that tracks the story of how the mainstream will enter crypto. Each week, I tell the tales and analyze the trends from the creator and crypto worlds and how the two will converge.
Promotion: Last week's promotion was sold out to current subscribers, but I wanted to give new readers a chance to participate as well. If you subscribe to Jamm Session for $10/mo, you'll receive 1000 JAMM tokens every month to access the tokenized version of the newsletter when it launches in September, and try out the weird and whacky crypto experiments that we do as a community (details to redeem is on the paid version). You'll also get exclusive content on this Substack during the week. Think of $JAMM as the StitchFix for crypto.
The back story on $JAMM
I've always found interest in being at the forefront of new things. There's an intellectual stimulating feeling of navigating something new, learning it, and becoming an expert before anyone else. When I was younger, I played new MMO games to rush to the highest level. Then when a new game came out, I quit and repeated the same process.
This loop is addicting in crypto because the possibilities are truly endless. When NFTs first launched, it was the first sign that there was a new playful paradigm. Digital art can now be ascribed to creators so they can earn from their work forever. But through working at the leading company working on the edge of NFTs, I saw their design vulnerabilities.
This led me spiraling back into the idea maze, trying to predict what's next. I've explored ideas like crypto social networks, identity, "on-chain skilled work". It feels like the future, but the infrastructure like Ceramic and TheGraph network needed to be built out before any meaningful applications came out of it.
But then there was another shift in the playful paradigm, this time driven by AMMs and social tokens. While social tokens have been tried in the past, AMMs gave the long-tail tokens like $JAMM an opportunity. A way to make these tokens feel "real" to many. At first, it wasn't apparent to many, myself included. The Roll team kept urging me to create a social token, but I didn't see the benefit. Eventually, I gave in, keen to experiment but not yet excited about the opportunity. So they created a token "Flynnjamm" and put my face on it. I didn't think I would ever do anything with it, so it didn't matter much to me.
But then suddenly the experiments became more interesting. Collab.Land built a simple telegram bot to tokenize access to Telegram groups with an ERC20. While this doesn't seem like anything revolutionary, it changed the way groups and communities can coordinate. There came an "alignment of incentives" between individuals and the community they were a part of. These groups like $KARMA evolved into a new type of community, a grassroots community that took on a life of its own with aligned financial incentives.
And when I saw that opportunity, it became clear to me that I needed to experiment with my Roll token.
Back in 2018 when I first started my newsletter, I paid digital artists to create “digital art covers” for my newsletter using SuperRare.
Here’s my favorite.
The idea would be that if the newsletter became popular one day, the newsletter covers like this one would be worth something. And I would earn on every trade of those tokens. Eventually, the experiment died out because I couldn’t pay the artists any more money to create the magazine covers.
I told the Roll guys that I would announce it in my newsletter on Sunday because I wanted to be at the forefront of experimentation once again. They told me to put some liquidity in the Uniswap pool and set up a Telegram channel. And so I put whatever Ether had in a liquidity pool for $JAMM on that Thursday. When I did, I received several DMs asking if it was my token. I was confused. Several people were using Uniswap token trackers. I didn't think much of it at the time and posted my newsletter on that Sunday. The $JAMM token was trading around $0.02 or so when I posted my newsletter.
I went to the grocery store to get my groceries for the week, leaving my phone behind. And then I returned and saw my Telegram and Twitter DMs blown up. I thought the newsletter had a wrong link or something. Nope. The price of the $JAMM token was $.40, in about an hour after I put out my newsletter. It wasn't my intended effect. I was a little bit perplexed.
And then the day got weirder:
While things calmed down a bit later in the day, I was stuck with another dilemma. I had 2 million tokens in my wallet (the issuer of Roll tokens receives 20% of the supply), and it was too expensive to supply these tokens to the liquidity pool.
I needed to figure out how to get liquidity into the pool. I spent a day or so thinking about how to get more liquidity into the pool with my stash of tokens. Liquidity mining felt like a short-term solution, but too short-sighted.
The other problem that I ran into was that I wanted my token to be a "community token" and not a personal token.
Quick rant on personal tokens
Personal tokens are like a swiss army knife but you could only use one part of it. The superpower of tokens is the programmable nature of them. Personal tokens shouldn’t rely on a single individual for life. They can be done with ISAs.
To create a community token, you start with an individual. It can be a Substack writer, an EDM artist, or even a digital art creator. But the token should take on a community of its own. If Taylor Swift created a token, the Swifties would manage it. If David Portnoy created a token, his stream would be cutting sponsorship deals for Davey Daytrader Global.
I already had my name inscribed on the blockchain. At least my Twitter handle. "Flynnjamm." Can't change it. This creates some confusion: should it be a personal token or a social token? If I transferred all my ownership to someone else, would they want to give it value if I had no involvement? These are the types of questions that were going through my head day after day.
These problems were too much of a headache for me to handle. I didn't want to deal with all of this hassle. I was telling Cooper Turley about this and said to him that he should start a personal token agency to manage this for creators. Four days later, he launched one.
Without a template for this, creators are flying blind. If we want the adoption of a new collaborative economy, we need to start sharing stories of our mistakes and lessons learned. The path forward for $JAMM is to be at the forefront of new crypto-native experiments and lay the foundation for new creators to enter the new participation economy.
If you want to support me and be a part of this journey while we discover these new templates, you can subscribe to Jamm Session for $10/mo. You'll get access to all of my future newsletters about the intersection of crypto and the creator economy while receiving 1000 $JAMM at the end of each month to participate in crypto experiments and get priority access to drops & applications.
Crypto works as a “Everything Bundle”. Here’s how: