I'm Now a Millionaire... In CAMI COINS

Hello defiers! This is what’s going on in decentralized finance

A platform for social money is now in beta
Sablier, which wants to enable streaming payments, released its v1
First tokenized RealT property is sold out

Abundance Without Money

Dear defiers, I completed a long-time ambition of mine over the weekend: I minted my own CAMI COINS.

Yes, we live in a time when anyone can have their own coins, and trade them over the internet, for other digital coins, money, or in exchange for other things one may value, for example, when readers recommend this newsletter, or pre-order my book :)

It’s not exactly true that these are the first CAMI tokens in existence. Last year I created my own CAMI ERC20 token, but never figured out what to do with them. I hope things will be different this time for CAMI, thanks to the guys at Roll, who developed a platform for social money, which makes it easy for anyone to 1) mint their own token 2) create ways to earn them 3) create ways to spend them. The app is currently being tested in beta.

I have been wanting to do this since back in 2017/2018 when I was reporting on ICOs for Bloomberg News, and thought it would be amazing to issue my own ICO for a story. In the end, legal risks prevailed over a good story.

At first glance, some may look at this platform as a token-minting machine which will flood the world with more useless sh*tcoins, like the ones we saw in the boom. But unlike with ICOs, Roll is encouraging an exchange of mutually beneficial actions, not investors mindlessly throwing ETH into the next pump and dump scheme.

It would work like this:

I have a finite number of CAMI tokens, with a pre-defined monetary policy. In Roll’s design initial supply of coins is 2.2 million, and about 200k coins get issued into the owners’ wallet every month for the next three years until a total of 10 million are issued.
I decide what actions get CAMI as a reward. The first action I created was reading The Defiant, which gets 100 CAMI.
I can also decide ways CAMI holders can spend their coins. I could include anything from The Defiant subscriptions, to swag, to a shoutout on Twitter.
Meanwhile, I’ll get rewarded by other users with their own coins, and be able to redeem other stuff in exchange.

The remarkable part is, all of this can happen within a small, self-contained economy, without the need to exchange actual money. These coins act as a kind of social fuel, a way to incentivize behaviors we usually wouldn’t spend money on, even if they’re things we really appreciate.

The next step can be to add actual money to the equation by listing these social coins on a DEX like Uniswap so they can be exchanged for ETH, Dai, or other tokens (something Roll does have on its pipeline).

The concept of community currencies isn’t new –it’s actually similar to how society was structured pre-money– but hasn’t really caught on in modern times . The closest to it has been confined within the boundaries of corporations as loyalty points.

Roll is betting that digital currencies and DeFi will be the key for social money to work this time, as they’ll enable a more fluid exchange and the ability for social money holders to close the circle by simply cashing out on a decentralized exchange, which simply could never be done before.

You Stream Movies, So Stream Your Payments Too

You work every day of the month, so why should you have to wait for payday to get your salary? Would’t it make sense to get paid every day? That’s what Sablier is trying to do.

But unlike traditional fintech platforms, like Earnin, this isn’t just a payday advance. It’s even further from a payday loan. Sablier, which unveiled its version 1 on Friday, wants people to be able to stream their salary. Earn money as you’re working.

The employer selects the amount in Dai, Sai, cDai or USDC, their employee’s ENS address, which is a human readable name like camirusso.eth (no bank account number, etc.), selects the time over which the money should be sent, and makes a one-time deposit into a smart contract. The employee starts receiving their money and can withdrawing it as soon as they get it.

The only times Ethereum gas fees are paid is when the employer makes the deposit, and when the employee makes a withdrawal.

This isn’t possible to do in traditional finance at the same costs. Fiat money is not programmable, so it’s harder for employers and businesses to manage multiple recurring payments, and fees can also make it prohibitive.

There are other use-cases that could use streaming payments; subscriptions, freelancing, taxes, rent, to name a few. Payroll though will be a key one though to strengthen a crypto-native economy, where an increasing number of people can start ditching traditional banks.

First Tokenized Home on Ethereum is Now Sold Out

The first tokenized home tradeable in DeFi is now sold out and token holders should now start receiving their share of rent. The three-bedroom home in Detroit, was listed by RealT, a firm that specializes in selling tokenized real estate, las month on decentralized exchange Uniswap.

{Read more details here: Now You Can IPO Your House and Have it Trade on DeFi}