Entrepreneurs tokenise themselves on Waves Platform
Boris Akimov from organic food startup LavkaLavka is one of the first to explore a new application for the blockchain.
From the earliest days of blockchain, it has been clear that the new suite of technologies has the potential to change finance and business dramatically. Blockchain tokens can represent a wide range of forms of value. Now, entrepreneurs are starting to use Waves Platform to tokenise another intriguing asset class: themselves.
One of the first people to explore this new trend of self-tokenisation is Boris Akimov, a farmer and the founder of LavkaLavka, a farming co-operative supported by its own blockchain token designed to benefit everyone in the ‘farm-to-table’ supply chain. No stranger to blockchain technology and ICOs, Boris has now decided to take his interest a step further by tokenising his own time and skills.
“In fact this is a simple idea in principle. I have certain skills, knowledge and experience, as well as my time in which I apply them, which is what will be tokenised. Token owners can receive the benefits of this experience for a period of time, depending on how many tokens they have. The more competent my work, the higher the demand for my skills and knowledge, and the higher the value of the tokens on Waves’ built-in decentralised exchange. Conversely, the lower the quality of my work, the lower the value of the token. This “free market” approach to my own abilities is very appealing and to me, represents one of the great strengths of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.” – Boris Akimov, Founder of LavkaLavka and BioCoin.
In some ways, Akimov’s idea is nothing new. Money was first developed in Ancient Sumer as a means of tokenising time, with a certain weight of silver representing a given amount of labour. The token that will be hosted on the Waves platform, however, is an uncharacteristically granular approach to this idea, tokenising the unique skills and time of one person — in this instance, down to the second.
Akimov explains, “Let’s take a conservative estimate in which I tokenise two days a week of my time. That’s 16 hours per week, or 832 hours a year. Let’s say that the token will expire after 4 years, just to reduce risk all round! So that’s 3,328 hours, or 12 million seconds. So the plan is to create 12 million tokens, each of which can be redeemed for a second of my time and skills!”
“This is a really interesting and innovative application of Waves and blockchain technology. You can tokenise just about anything you are prepared to redeem, and this is no different to the diverse forms of value tokenisation used by currencies, businesses and other applications — it’s just a highly individual approach! In the future, no doubt we’ll see a lot more of this kind of thing, and some even more imaginative use cases for blockchain.” – Sasha Ivanov, CEO and founder of Waves.
The token can be found on Waves DEX: B3XuGipDviHtp2xnjyEC4zLsHqRknGVJuRBfnHyxcPEe
