DAO: The Future of Social Tokens and Work
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DAO: The Future of Social Tokens and Work
Social tokens represent a complete paradigm shift in how people collaborate, and DAOs are leveraging them to return power to individuals worldwide.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
Author: Eliot Couvat
Translation: TechFlow
Guest Author: Eliot Couvat is a French writer passionate about social tokens, Web3, and the creator economy. He serves as Head of Community and Development at Coinvise, a thriving platform that enables anyone to create social tokens, where he helps hundreds of Web3 creators and communities build open economies.
For decades, individuals have collaborated by forming companies and signing legal contracts to ensure trust among parties. While this system has been successful, it also reveals its limitations—especially during a period when employees are redefining themselves and seeking new opportunities, favoring security over flexibility, centralized control over individual initiative.
As power shifts from organizations to individuals, we need new solutions that preserve personal flexibility while providing the right tools for easy collaboration and mutual trust-building.
Social tokens represent a complete paradigm shift in how people collaborate, and DAOs are leveraging them to return power to individuals worldwide. The next generation of workers might begin their careers in DAOs—starting simply by joining tokenized communities, helping grow projects they love, getting paid for fun, and ultimately no longer working for traditional companies.
As our society evolves, social tokens appear to be the right path toward this future of work and are increasingly becoming a foundational element enabling collective effort.
1 - What's Wrong with Companies?
Collaboration has always been key to innovation. As the saying goes: "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together." Yet major challenges persist in collaboration due to limited trust between unfamiliar individuals.
Overcoming trust barriers is one reason people began forming companies. By hiring someone and signing appropriate contracts, it becomes easier to ensure long-term cooperation—for instance, preventing leaks of company secrets. When companies limit risk and liability for shareholders, raising and distributing capital also becomes simpler.
Over time, the model of signing employment contracts with traditional companies has shown its limitations. Choosing to work long-term for one company means saying “no” to hundreds of other exciting projects—losing not only flexibility but also limiting incentives for salaried workers to perform at their best.
The existing model at large tech firms leaves employees unable to influence future strategic plans, lacks employee ownership, and incentivizes companies to remain closed off, discouraging external collaboration.
Today, we see traditional employment unraveling—individuals are now atomic units. People around the world crave greater flexibility and autonomy, yet companies struggle to evolve quickly enough to keep pace.
We’re moving toward a more fluid way of working, where individuals follow their interests, collaborate across multiple projects simultaneously, and aren’t bound to a single employer. At the same time, these individuals often need to cooperate with others to achieve their goals and don’t wish to work independently for the rest of their lives.
To address these issues, we need new solutions that empower individuals with flexibility while equipping them with proper tools for collaboration and mutual trust. Social tokens may be the key to the future of work.
2 - How Do Social Tokens and DAOs Solve These Problems?
2.1 - Social Tokens as a Way to Build Trust
Social tokens create trust. I don't believe they will fully replace today’s mechanisms like legal contracts or fiat payments used to establish trust in work settings—but they offer a faster way to launch projects than traditional legal structures.
One way crypto mechanisms and tokens build trust is through multi-signature wallets (multi-sig). A multisig wallet allows management of community crypto assets (tokens) and can require a set number of signatures to approve transactions. Since multiple team members must authorize each transaction, unauthorized access to funds is prevented. No single person can run away with all the money—it requires approval from most other members.
Social tokens also build trust when splitting revenue via smart contracts. Smart contracts are code that only accepts transactions when all conditions are met. Instead of trusting someone to share profits, imagine a smart contract stating: “If our collectively created item sells, proceeds will be evenly shared among the following crypto addresses.” Because smart contracts are deployed on blockchains, they cannot be altered—ensuring trust among all parties from the outset.
Some projects have successfully leveraged social tokens to build trust. For example, The Modern Billboard Collective—a project by three startups—aimed to create a tokenized version of the “Million Dollar Homepage,” a web page made up of one million pixels arranged in a 1000x1000 grid, where anyone could buy a pixel for $1 to display an ad, making the entire page worth $1 million. This collective aimed to use that idea, allowing brands to advertise on parts of their homepages by selling digital plots without intermediaries. Pursuing this vision using crypto mechanisms helped build trust among the three founding startups. By letting anyone purchase digital plots “on-chain” on any of the three websites, each company easily trusted the others because royalties would be fairly and automatically distributed across all parties. Without this technology, the three startups would have needed legal contracts—costly and time-consuming—and would have had to manually split royalties, again consuming time and creating inefficiency. Social tokens enabled trust, flexibility, and speed.
2.2 - Social Tokens Are a Better Way to Align Incentives
The whole concept behind creating social tokens is building a virtual economy where early supporters can share in its upside. This represents a complete paradigm shift in how people collaborate.
Essentially, the ultimate goal of many DAOs is to reward contributors who help grow the community by giving them equity in the form of a social token, and to build such a powerful, ambitious community that people are eager to buy tokens for exclusive access, benefits, and voting rights. Early supporters can then sell their social tokens to newcomers and get compensated for their initial contributions. Rather than being paid in existing cryptocurrencies (like salaries), contributors are incentivized to help the DAO succeed because their token value directly correlates with the project’s success—and potentially grows infinitely.
In a sense, we can compare social tokens to stocks. Initially, they hold no value, but those who truly believe in the project will enthusiastically contribute in exchange for equity, hoping it gains significant value later. This system allows community leaders to fairly reward every contributor. With aligned incentives, fostering collective effort becomes much easier.
2.3 - Social Tokens Grant Ownership Over Key Future Decisions
Social tokens also carry voting rights. Contributors can use their tokens daily to vote on proposals and have ownership over future strategic decisions within the DAO. Efficient tools to facilitate the voting process have already been developed.
One such tool is Snapshot, which allows anyone to cast on-chain votes with their tokens, enabling individuals worldwide to easily participate in important decisions. The fundamental difference between DAOs and traditional companies is that people unite around a shared mission and values, voting collectively on strategic choices.
Theoretically, the more tokens someone holds, the greater their voting power. This “token-based” voting system enables a genuinely flat culture and eliminates hierarchical structures. Everyone can vote on future decisions in a truly equal manner.
In practice, token-based voting systems are still imperfect and suffer from significant inequalities in voting power. Core contributors paid monthly in tokens, or early supporters who received airdrops, are often considered whales and usually wield more voting influence than average DAO members. Issues remain in token-based voting, but efforts are underway to fix them.
Many are researching new solutions. New tools should soon enable quadratic voting—a system that gives every voter equal weight regardless of how many tokens they hold.
DAOs resemble employee-owned cooperatives, where everyone in the ecosystem strives to make it as fair and decentralized as possible. Social tokens are like shares with voting rights. They’re not perfect—but in traditional companies, employees typically receive stock options that don’t grant voting rights, and there’s little effort to change that dynamic.
2.4 - Tools That Return Power to the People Through Social Tokens
More valuable than the token itself are its ecosystem and surrounding tools. Indeed, new solutions emerge daily to fuel this revolution and make life easier for Web3 communities and individuals launching new projects.
Coinvise is one of today’s most vibrant Web3 platforms, offering a full suite of tools to help DAO leaders create and manage their tokens. For example, their Airdrop tool enables DAO leaders to mass-send tokens to Ethereum addresses—making it easy to reward contributors, boost visibility by sending tokens to influencers in their network, or distribute tokens to grant access to gated content. Coinvise can also scale task creation, set vesting schedules to deter speculation, and connect tokens to Layer 2 networks in minutes to avoid gas fees. This toolkit empowers anyone to create a tokenized community and act at scale in a trustless way.
2.5 - Social Tokens Foster Culture and Retain Contributors
Traditional companies have long tried to cultivate strong cultures and foster belonging, but their primary purpose remains profit. Culture often serves as a secondary objective, subordinate to profitability and market expansion.
In contrast, DAOs are virtual communities where people with shared values come together—not just to work, but to play and achieve goals. It’s not about work. It’s first about culture—about connecting and creating with others, building what you’ve always wanted. In DAOs, culture comes first; products and projects come second. Not the other way around.
To build strong culture, DAO leaders can implement tools that boost member confidence or encourage kindness and support—two critical elements of great culture. In many DAOs, this is done by tipping other contributors to express appreciation, recognition, and connection. By prioritizing culture, DAOs overcome the trust barriers traditional companies face.
Effective DAO leaders devote immense attention and energy to cultivating strong culture. Culture isn’t an add-on—it’s a core function. It’s what binds people together and creates trust on a level beyond crypto mechanisms.
Closing Thoughts
Of course, social tokens don’t solve all problems of traditional companies. They aren’t perfect—and perhaps no perfect solution ever will exist.
Based on cryptographic mechanisms and the existence of social tokens, DAOs aim to address many of the most pressing issues facing traditional companies today. By leveraging new technologies, they return freedom and power to individuals—restoring assets that traditional companies took away long ago.
In Web2 companies, incentives are never fully aligned. The more a company pays its employees, the lower its profits. Under this outdated model, employees will never give their all—they know their efforts will never be fully rewarded.
On the other hand, we see today’s tokenized communities flourishing, harnessing all the advantages of social tokens to launch projects that would otherwise be impossible. Constitution DAO is a perfect example. This tokenized community was formed to bid on an original copy of the U.S. Constitution at a high-profile Sotheby’s auction, ultimately raising $40 million in seven days. They convinced thousands globally to send funds, using smart contracts to build trust among participants.
We still have a long way to go before DAOs become fully efficient and truly decentralized. Most tools being built today won’t mature for years—but this is the normal cycle of real innovation. We’re experimenting at light speed.
I believe we’ll see more aspiring individuals building DAOs instead of companies, as this new collaboration model offers all the advantages. We’ll also see more collaborations between DAOs, since DAOs need to leverage their strengths and can’t rely on products and tools built for Web2 companies.
DAOs are the new startups. We’re still early. This new way of working is messy, chaotic, unproven. But by joining a DAO, you’ll learn fast, gain unparalleled upward mobility, and discover more freedom and flexibility than ever before.
Leave Web2 companies behind. Come work for a DAO.
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