TL;DR

• River Protocol wants to become the Web3 version of Discord, allowing community members to earn crypto in exchange for quality contribution.

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If you contribute to an online community, what do you get in return?

In Web2? You’re going to get a warm-fuzzy feeling for being part of something larger than yourself, and maybe a cosmetic badge to put on your profile picture.

In Web3, there’s this vision that you’ll get all of the above, plus a tangible digital asset (crypto) which will encourage you to contribute further over time.

It’s a bit of a foreign concept, and one that raises some potential alarm bells…

(E.g. will financialization bastardize the underlying community, creating a bot epidemic in the process?).

That’s always a risk, but that’s not to say tokenized communities haven’t been built with some success in the past.

The FortniteBR Subreddit has been rewarding its contributors with $BRICK tokens for a while now, and it’s still going strong!

Only problem is:

FortniteBR’s reward system is duct taped together, because Reddit isn’t designed to support community tokenization.

That’s why the launch of River Protocol caught our eye.

It’s essentially a tool set that lets builders create their own tokenized community platform.

Think Discord, but with fully integrate tools that allow users to:

1. Contribute-to-earn

2. Cast votes based on their total token holdings

3. Send private encrypted messages with no middle-man

4. The ability to own their data (instead of Discord, Slack, Facebook etc.)

Is this going to dethrone the big Web2 community platforms?

Probably not.

But it doesn’t need to. The crypto space is one big network of users, itching to explore crypto-centric platforms.

Which means River Protocol builders should be able to carve out a user base pretty darn easily.

Neat!