By Karen, Foresight News
This week, another SocialFi app time.fun emerged on Base. Since its release, it has attracted the attention of industry builders and KOLs such as @tier10k, wallstreetbets, Helius CEO @0xMert_, icebergy, and The Block CEO Larry Cermak.
So how does time.fun, an app that tokenizes time in minutes, work? Are there plans to release a token? What are its future prospects? This article will introduce and explore these questions.
What is time.fun?
time.fun was originally launched as circle.tech and was favored by Crypto Accelerator Alliance in April this year. The goal of circle.tech from the beginning was to allow users to tokenize time, allowing creators to earn income, while fans can also interact with creators in paid ways, such as consulting, group chatting or watching live broadcasts.
At the end of last month, circle.tech rebranded itself as time.fun. On the one hand, it was to eliminate the liability risks brought by a similar name to Circle (the issuer of USDC), and on the other hand, it was to be closer to its concept of "time tokenization" and set the time value according to the joint curve. While bringing time delivery income to creators, it also provides a small part of the transaction fees to incentivize creators, while also empowering time holders to a certain extent.
time.fun builder @0xKawz said that time.fun not only allows tokenization of time, but also supports creators to connect with loyal fans at a deeper level, such as booking meetings, private messages, etc.
How does time.fun work?
On time.fun, you can create an account using Google, Discord, Apple, and Twitter, but you need to connect to Twitter to verify it in the end. 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 required, you need to top up on Base to pay for Gas or time purchase and redemption fees.
The time value of time.fun is dynamically adjusted according to market demand, using a joint curve pricing mechanism. After purchasing time, fans can redeem or deliver (redeem) time to book a meeting with the creator, with a minimum redemption time of 15 minutes. In addition, fans can also send private messages to creators, which takes 1 minute each time, 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 Telegram robots. Creators can authorize robots to manage group members and realize automated member invitation and removal.
Regarding the original circle.tech fee model, a 1% referral fee is allocated to users who recommend creators, circle.tech charges a 5% consultation application fee, and the remaining 94% is distributed to creators who receive consultations or chats.
After the reshaping, time.fun also updated its fee model, focusing more on creators' time delivery and empowering time holders. It also drives time value speculation 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, namely, when fans trade your time, when fans redeem time (i.e. chats, meetings, etc.), and when they invite. Among them, trading earns up to 2.1%, and referring users earns 0.5%. In contrast, the income from redeeming time accounts for up to 95%, thus incentivizing creators to create more value for their fans.
In addition, a portion of the transaction and redemption fees go to the timeholder fund. According to time.fun, timeholders can also benefit from the timeholder fund, which can receive up to 2% of the transaction and redemption turnover. Creators can choose to use the fund in a suitable way, such as giving it to fans.
Will time.fun issue tokens?
The original circle.tech document shows that the circle.tech application can earn points, which will be considered for future airdrops and giveaways. Creating an account, asking questions, answering questions, participating in one-on-one chat rooms, etc. will earn bonus points.
@0xKawz, the builder of time.fun, said in Discord, “A snapshot has been taken for the circle.tech points activity. However, now is not a good time to do an airdrop. Circle.tech has performed poorly in terms of fees and attracting truly stable users. We hope to bring more usage through time.fun. We still plan to do an airdrop this summer and will airdrop a fixed proportion of tokens to users (old product and new product users).”
In time.fun's plan, 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 included in the permission list. In addition, TIME airdrops can also be earned in Season 1.
What is the future of 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 NFT on Polygon. At that time, Newt regarded Aika as a standardized way to pay for services that guilds, service DAOs, and other crypto-native organizations could use. However, Aika can only pay creators after delivering time, which makes it difficult to attract creators. After that, the project was abandoned.
Some time ago, orb.land, which was praised by Vitalik Buterin as cool, restricted a creator to only issue one Orb NFT, and introduced a Harberger tax system to constrain the holding and resale of the promised NFT, encouraging high-quality interactions between creators and holders, and promoting efficient allocation of resources. The idea is good, but the demand is not high for creators and ordinary players. After all, no transactions mean no income for creators.
In contrast, time.fun has a better incentive mechanism. Creators can not only share in the time exchange, but also get a small part of the profit from the secondary time speculation transaction, thereby driving them to expand their influence, attract more fans and improve the 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 seen. After all, at this stage, users are more concerned with speculation than real value, and the value of creators’ time currently seems to be just users’ guesses about the popularity of creators.
