Author: defioasis
Editor: Colin Wu
Recently, Binance founder CZ expressed his idea of time-based assetization, that is, KOLs assetize their time. The basic idea is that anyone can prepay a KOL to send a message, which allows KOLs to exist as consultants and get paid for their expertise and popularity. CZ's main idea advocates the use of BNB as a payment currency without issuing new assets. Before CZ's idea, attempts to assetize KOLs were made from friend tech to Clout and Tribe Run invested by AllianceDAO, but they all ended in failure. Another platform invested by AllianceDAO and Solana core members, time fun, is still exploring time assetization with the continued forwarding support of Solana co-founder toly.
Unlike CZ who is considering using BNB as a means of payment and does not need to issue new time assets, the core of time fun includes creators (celebrities/KOLs) issuing time assets and using time assets as a means of payment. Simply put, after the creator launches time fun, users purchase it on the internal disk of time fun, and when the internal market value reaches 100,000 US dollars, it will be launched to the external disk DEX; users can hold a certain amount of time assets to join the creator's chat group or pay the required time assets in exchange for opportunities for interaction, including DM, voice conferences and video conferences. This means that before practicality, creators need to issue their own time assets first, which can actually be regarded as a variant of celebrity coin issuance, because only the time of celebrities is valuable. [Note: Celebrities are used to replace creators later, and KOLs are also part of celebrities]
Since Trump launched his own Trump Memecoin, Trump's wife, Argentine President Milley and some small country leaders have successively launched their own Memecoins. Among them, there are endless cases of fake CA links being posted by celebrities or government officials due to hacking. How to verify the authenticity of celebrity posts has become one of the problems; celebrities' failure to manage their assets after posting is another problem. Time Fun provides solutions to these two problems to some extent.
First, celebrities need to go through at least two levels of verification to issue assets on time fun, namely binding a Twitter account on time fun and manual verification by the platform. After the manual verification is completed, a Time Market Code will be given to the celebrity to set the amount to be paid to join the group chat or DM/voice conference/video conference. The former is priced in currency, and the latter is priced in U standard, but both are paid in time assets. After completing the settings, celebrities can launch their own time assets.
After the celebrity is launched, users can prepay a certain amount of time assets according to the amount set by the celebrity to get the opportunity to interact. Of course, the celebrity can refuse DM/meeting, and the prepaid time assets will be returned, but time fun sets up a response rate and user scoring mechanism as a supervision. If the celebrity has a low response rate or the user is dissatisfied with the celebrity's performance in the private chat and gives a low score, these will theoretically affect the function of the celebrity's time assets at the practical level, and further affect the price.
At present, the investors behind time fun are the most active on the platform, such as Solana co-founders Toly and Raj, AllianceDAO co-founder QwQiao, etc. These people with backgrounds in investors and ecosystems can give Web3 entrepreneurs an opportunity to face the top directly, but if the platform wants to go beyond the circle, it cannot be limited to celebrities in the Crypto circle. How to introduce non-Crypto or Crypto-weakly related celebrities or even national presidents is actually a great test of the resources and influence of the team and investors in the real world. Time fun CMO Pedro recently stated in the community that some OnlyFans creators will be introduced. Friend tech, which was once very popular, set off a wave of KOL assetization by relying on a large number of OnlyFans creators to settle in.
From the perspective of product trading, Time Fun’s celebrity coin transactions can be divided into three situations: limited to internal trading on the platform, external trading on the platform, and external trading directly on DEX without using the platform. It is worth noting that whether it is in the internal market or has been launched to the DEX external market, as long as the user recharges USDC into the Time Fun platform to trade time assets, he can enjoy the non-custodial wallet without paying Gas fees.
Limited to internal trading on the platform
Although the above has been talking about "celebrity issuing coins", in the actual link of time fun's launch, the platform assumes the role of the Token Creator of any celebrity, which may to some extent help celebrities avoid certain legal risks when issuing coins.
In internal transactions, users need to pay 0.5 USDC to the platform as the Token Creator. After deducting this 0.5 USDC, 2.15% of the total amount of USDC redeemed by the user will be distributed to multiple entities, of which 0.87% will be distributed to time fun as fee income, 0.15% will be distributed to the time fun reserve address (withdrawn from circulation), 1% will be distributed to the celebrity address, and 0.13% will be distributed to Bonding Curve (which may flow into the dividend pool).
External transactions on the platform
Time Fun's external trading means that when the market value of celebrity time assets reaches 100,000 US dollars, the liquidity will be migrated to DEX - Raydium, with USDC as the trading pair. The total amount of any celebrity time asset is fixed at 100,000, that is, when the price reaches 1 US dollar, the liquidity will be migrated. After successfully launching to the external market, it can still be traded through the platform.
In the platform's external transactions, the platform, as the Token Creator, collects 1.5% of the USDC from users when redeeming time assets for distribution to multiple entities, of which 0.575% is allocated to celebrity addresses, 0.7% is allocated to time fun as fee income, 0.15% is allocated to the dividend pool, and 0.075% is allocated to the time fun reserve address (withdrawn from circulation).
Direct external trading on DEX without using a platform
Without using the time fun platform, trading celebrity time assets directly on DEX or DEX aggregator does not require paying any USDC fees to the platform and celebrities.
For users, in addition to trading and spending time assets, holding time assets and staying active in the time fun platform can earn rewards from the dividend pool in the future. However, the dividend pool is still in the accumulation stage and formal dividends have not yet been opened.
For celebrities, the way to earn income is to collect taxes from transactions of platform users, and users pay time through DM/conferences. After the assets are sold in DEX, 94% of USDC is returned to the celebrities. Of course, according to the donation ratio set by the celebrity, 0-100% of the USDC income received is donated to charity, and the rest is the net income of the celebrity.
For the platform, the way to earn income mainly comes from collecting taxes on the transactions of platform users. However, whether it is the platform or the celebrity, when traders directly trade on the external Raydium, they cannot earn income, so the actual income will be limited by the platform's deposit scale and the platform's user base. On-chain data shows that in the two weeks since its birth, as of March 12, the time fun platform has captured about 422,000 USDC in user transactions and collected about 2,130 USDC in total income as a Token Creator on the internal disk. More importantly, to increase the platform's popularity and income, the platform needs to work hard to get more non-Web3 traffic celebrities to settle in.
From the overall design of the product, time fun still has some areas that need improvement. First of all, the platform needs to support direct connection to external wallets. Currently, the platform only supports email registration and login. After the email registration is completed, a non-custodial wallet will be generated and bound to the platform. This design may be intended to provide a more convenient way for Web2 celebrities to settle in and provide an experience without gas fees on the platform, but the problem is that the platform is limited by the scale of deposits and depositors, and users who purchase directly on DEX cannot log in through the wallet connection and cannot play the practicality of the assets. In the end, it is more of a tool for speculation. The most significant phenomenon is that addresses that meet the minimum number of currency holdings can join the celebrity group chat, but the number of people who actually join the chat group is far less than the number of qualified currency holding addresses.
Another significant problem is that the time assets paid to celebrities by DM/conference are used in DEX to be sold directly and then returned to the celebrities, which means that the action of users conducting DM/conference with celebrities is essentially selling. The demand for interaction with celebrities will exist for a long time, but when the transaction is not so active, the price will continue to be under pressure. The newly introduced reserve mechanism hedges this problem to a certain extent, by extracting a part of the transaction as a reserve to reduce the actual circulation.
Finally, the platform still lacks a user sharing mechanism. Spontaneous sharing by users is a boost to help the platform expand its user base. Most users are pursuing sharing at the profit level of celebrity time assets, but apart from the transaction level, the platform can introduce a "pay to unlock content" sharing model. After sending a DM to a celebrity and getting an answer, the user can choose to set the celebrity's reply to "hidden" or "semi-hidden" status and share the DM question, such as Twitter. If other users are interested in these contents, they can unlock and view them by paying a certain amount of time assets, part of which can be distributed to the celebrity as income, and the questioner can also receive a certain amount of asset rewards. Interesting questions plus celebrity replies can enhance user engagement and the attractiveness of the platform.
This article does not constitute any financial advice. Readers are advised to strictly abide by local laws and regulations.
