2. Social Capital

In a traditional Web2 model, on-line communities support Creators through following on social media. They are providing a form of capital, since there is economic benefit to the recipient, yet they receive nothing back economically, other than mainly intangible benefits. Rather, all the economic benefit accrues to the Creator, the hosting platform and external brands leveraging the attention economy.

In the AImagine model, we capitalise the act of following with the αIMG token. Here, rather than simply follow Creator (or not) as a binary decision, users are able to allocate varying quantities of their Social Capital across as many or as few Creators as they like by staking αIMG to specific Creator pools.

2.1 Economic Value

At this stage it is too early to prescribe the economic relationship between Creators and users. It is quite clear there is a symbiotic relationship where users wish to engage with Creators and, vice versa, Creators want users to create bigger brand value, higher player activity and larger revenue.

For example, Creators may offer free or discounted merchandise to their staking pools, early access sales priority, or other Creator-specific benefits.

Any Creator can make an economically rational decision on how much they may or need to spend on incentives for user staking. This will differ between Creators depending on their existing brand value, maturity and their current user base. Therefore, those types of incentives will appear as a result of efficient markets and, in any event, cannot be hard-coded into a token model.

Whilst the αIMG token has its own set of internal incentives along the adoption curve, it has no intrinsic value without the expectation of this true economic relationship forming some point hence, based on the value contribution from users as assets, that cannot be observed simply in the Web2 environment.

2.2 Capital Arbitrage

For every user, and every Creator, there will be a different cost or benefit to social capital. However, the act of creating physical capital, through tokenisation, leads us to arbitrage boundaries.

The αIMG capital value will represent the mixture of token holder utility functions derived from the associated yield, whether tangible (money), in-kind (merchandise) or intangible (social status).

It naturally follows that irrational returns on this capital should be arbitraged like any other market. Whilst this may start between users looking to get the best deals, more professional capital will spot this opportunity, and as such, the αIMG markets become efficient and liquid which itself brings catalytic value.