Foresight News
Author: Karen, Foresight News
This article was originally published on June 20, 2024
Update on February 25: Today, Solana co-founder toly "joined" the time-tokenization SocialFi application time.fun. The token toly (toly's minutes) on time.fun reached a market capitalization of over $18 million within an hour and a half, with the token price reaching $187. Toly also replied to a tweet from time.fun about the Meme token "toly's minutes", saying "Business communication is my favorite crypto application case."
The following is the original content:
The SocialFi application time.fun on Base has emerged, attracting the attention of industry Builders and KOLs such as @tier10k, wallstreetbets, Helius CEO @0xMert_, icebergy, and The Block CEO Larry Cermak since its launch.
So, how does this application that tokenizes time in minutes, time.fun, work? Does it plan to issue a token? What are its future development prospects? This article will introduce and discuss these questions.
What is time.fun?
time.fun was initially launched as circle.tech, and in April of this year, it received the favor of the Crypto accelerator Alliance. From the beginning, circle.tech's goal was to allow users to tokenize time, enabling creators to earn income, while fans can also interact with creators through paid means such as consultations, group chats, or live streams.
At the end of last month, circle.tech rebranded to time.fun, on the one hand to eliminate the liability risk brought by the similar name to Circle (the issuer of USDC), and on the other hand to be more in line with its "time tokenization" concept, and set the value of time according to the bonding curve, which not only brings time delivery income to creators, but also provides a small portion of transaction fees to incentivize creators, and to some extent empowers time holders.
@0xKawz, the builder of time.fun, said that time.fun not only allows the tokenization of time, but also supports deeper connections between creators and loyal fans, such as booking meetings and private messaging.
How does time.fun work?
time.fun supports the creation of accounts using Google, Discord, Apple, and Twitter, but ultimately all need to connect and verify Twitter. This means that time.fun ensures that the platform's traffic comes from an active social media ecosystem.
Then Web3Auth will automatically generate a wallet for the user. If interaction is needed, it is necessary to top up on Base to pay for Gas or the cost of time purchase and redemption.
The value of time on time.fun is dynamically adjusted according to market demand, using a bonding curve pricing mechanism. Fans can redeem or deliver (redeem) time after purchasing it to schedule meetings with creators, with a minimum redemption time of 15 minutes. In addition, fans can also send private messages to creators, which costs 1 minute per message, and the creator needs to reply within 5 days.
To further enrich the interaction between creators and fans, time.fun also provides an exclusive group function supported by a Telegram bot. Creators can authorize the bot to manage group members, realizing automated member invitation and removal.
Regarding the original circle.tech fee model, 1% of the referral fee is allocated to the user who referred the creator, circle.tech charges a 5% consultation application fee, and the remaining 94% is distributed to the creators who received the consultation or chat.
After the rebranding, time.fun has also updated the fee model, focusing more on the time delivery of creators and the empowerment of time holders, and also drives the speculation of time value by allocating a small portion of time transaction fees to creators, thereby better improving platform activity.
There are three ways for creators to earn ETH: when fans trade your time, when fans redeem time (i.e. chat, meetings, etc.), and through referrals. Among them, trading earns the most at 2.1%, referrals earn 0.5%, while the income from time redemption accounts for as high as 95%, thereby incentivizing creators to create more value for their fans.
In addition, a portion of the transaction and redemption fees is used for the time holder (timeholder) fund. According to time.fun, time holders can also benefit from the time holder fund, which can receive up to 2% of the transaction and redemption turnover. Creators can choose appropriate ways to use this fund, such as gifting to fans.
Will time.fun issue a token?
The original circle.tech documentation shows that the circle.tech application can earn points, which will be considered for future airdrops and giveaways. Rewards points can be earned for creating an account, asking questions, answering questions, and participating in one-on-one chat rooms.
@0xKawz, the builder of time.fun, said on Discord, "A snapshot has been taken for the circle.tech points activity. However, now is not a good time to conduct an airdrop. Circle.tech has performed poorly in terms of fees and attracting truly stable users, and hopes to bring more usage through time.fun, and still plans to conduct an airdrop in the summer, with a fixed proportion of tokens airdropped to users (old and new product users)."
In time.fun's planning, the time.fun contract will be scalable, and more products using minutes as the base currency will be launched soon. Other projects can build on top of time.fun after being added to the whitelist. Additionally, TIME airdrops can also be earned in the first quarter.
What are the prospects for time.fun?
In fact, the concept of time tokenization is not new. In 2022, Aave's experimental department Newt delivered the first time tokenization project Aika, which can mint and sell time as NFTs on Polygon. At the time, Newt saw Aika as a standardized way for guilds, service DAOs, and other crypto-native organizations to pay for services. But Aika only allowed creators to be paid after delivering time, making it difficult to attract creators. The project then faded away.
Recently, orb.land, which was praised as "very cool" by Vitalik Buterin, limits a creator to only issue one Orb NFT, and introduces a Harberger tax system to constrain the holding and resale of the promised NFT, encouraging high-quality interaction between creators and holders, and promoting efficient resource allocation. The idea is good, but the demand is not high for creators and ordinary players, as no transaction means no income for the creator.
In comparison, time.fun has a better incentive mechanism, where creators not only can share in the time redemption, but also can get a small portion of the secondary time speculation trading, thereby driving them to expand their influence, attract more fans, and improve platform activity. At the same time, ordinary users or fans can also benefit from the time holder fund.
Whether time.fun can start the flywheel of creator fees remains to be observed. After all, at this stage, users are more concerned about speculation rather than real value, and the current time value of creators seems to be just users guessing the popularity of the creators.
