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We launched Roll in July 2019, with the first token we minted via our contracts, TING (Tingles). By November 2019, we reached a milestone of 1000 users on the app, one of the fastest growth in users for a crypto app. We were one of the only crypto apps on the Apple app store in 2019 after dozens of hours of calls with the Apple team about the app and the concept. By December 2019, we launched a social token exchange integrated with Uniswap, the largest DEX on Ethereum at that time and helped teams bootstrap liquidity. The vision was always to build open communities via social tokens.

Social tokens didn't catch a wave in 2020s unlike NFTs. Why I think that was the case is for another post. However, by 2024 the idea of social tokens morphed into primitives combined with DApps that executed well - first friend.tech and then pump.fun on Solana.

The idea of liquid communities in addition to open communities is a powerful, and one that we underestimated in hindsight. People want to enter and exit these communities with ease aka there should be enough liquidity at all times. Issues tokens on a bonding curve solved this issue, but also killed a bunch of other fun use cases we enabled with Roll such as giving away tokens for fun tasks the community does (everything from treasure hunts to plane rides).

But we need to build for our users, and not our highbrow ideas. SocialFi is the natural successor of social tokens at least in this market. I remain optimistic about some specific use cases of the original social token design space especially around DAOs and with better penetration of onchain social among the normies. But that will take time and the current zeitgeist is with SocialFi, not social tokens (yes, they are joined at the hip but have evolved along different paths).

By launching Form as an L2 with super low fees, we enable a lot of uses we envisioned in 2019. With curves as a suite of smart contracts, we enable a lot more innovation in the bonding curve design space than what we see today. In addition, with curves, we bring the best of both social tokens and bonding curves together, but we need to prove this out in the marketplace of ideas.

2024 is going to be an exciting time for SocialFi but also social tokens in their new form.

We have launched the Curves App on the Form Testnet. The Form Testnet is built on Sepolia and uses the OP stack.

Warning: The contracts are still being updated based on the final audit. If we upgrade the contracts on testnet, you'll need to start over.

Step-1: Signup to the Curves App via your Twitter account.

Step-2: Copy the address under "Send to Form" - this is your Form address (created via privy).

Step-3: Get some funds on Form via the faucet by entering your Form address from the above step and click "Request Tokens".

Step-4: Click 'Buy your token for $0' to mint your token. You'll need to pay for gas fees.

Step-5: You'll enter the "Mint your ERC20 screen". You can convert your Curves Token into a standard ERC20 token for interoperability across the entire Ethereum network. You'll need to do this if you want to start a liquidity pool for instance. You can skip this step (we'll automatically generate your symbol and name in that case).

Step-6: That's it! You can start using Curves. Go to the Explore section and find people you can chat with after buying their token.

Roll was the first protocol minting social tokens at scale for creators on Ethereum. To date, we created over 500 social token communities. This taught us how to design tokens well. As a result, we take many "micro-decisions" that might not be obvious to people on the outside.

One of the early decisions that the first version of the Roll smart contracts (v1) enforced was the uniqueness of token symbol. This made sense - 

• we wanted each community to be uniquely identifiable by their symbol
• prevent spammers or scammers
• claim valuable namespace on our platform

There are precedents - think of ENS (Ethereum name system) - vitalik.eth cannot be registered by someone else.

However, over time we learned this was the wrong approach, and ultimately hurt the protocol's network effects. You should not be able to squat (hoard) token symbols.

On each blockchain, the contract address alone should identify your token. There can be app-level designs that are helpful to guide users to the right token (think of the original Twitter-style blue checkmark to identify "real" accounts vetted by a human), but this should not be enforced at the protocol layer.

People want to own their brand and a social token symbol is a powerful way to express this. The relationship creators and their communities feel towards their token is more intimate than a username on a social platform, which also runs into the same problem.

Real story - we had minted a BEN token for Ben, and then we lost out on being able to create a social token for the Blockchain Education Network (BEN) because of this constraint.

As we build newer protocols for social tokens, we don't enforce token symbol constraints at the smart contract level. Instead, higher level abstractions of the contracts, including our DApps, will include features to steer users in the right direction.