What is time.fun, which was launched by Solana co-founder toly, and how does it operate?

Original Title: "Time is Wealth: A Quick Read on the Time Tokenization Application time.fun on Base"

Author: Karen, Foresight News

This article was originally published on June 20, 2024

Update on February 25: Today, Solana co-founder toly "joined" the time tokenization SocialFi application time.fun. The market value of the token toly (toly's minutes) on time.fun briefly rose above $18 million within an hour and a half, with the token price reaching $187. Toly also replied on Twitter to time.fun's tweet about the meme token "toly's minutes," stating, "Business communication is my favorite crypto use case."

The following is the original content:

Another SocialFi application on Base, time.fun, has emerged, attracting the attention of industry builders and KOLs such as @tier10k, wallstreetbets, Helius CEO @0xMert_, icebergy, and The Block CEO Larry Cermak since its launch.

So, how does this application time.fun, which tokenizes time in minutes, operate? Is there a plan to release tokens? What are its future development prospects? This article will introduce and discuss these questions.

What is time.fun?

time.fun was initially launched as circle.tech and gained favor from the Crypto accelerator Alliance in April this year. The goal of circle.tech from the beginning was to allow users to tokenize time, enabling creators to earn income while fans could interact with creators through paid means, such as consultations, group chats, or watching live streams.

At the end of last month, circle.tech rebranded to time.fun, partly to eliminate liability risks associated with a similar name to Circle (the issuer of USDC), and partly to align more closely with its concept of "time tokenization." It sets the value of time according to a joint curve, bringing time delivery revenue to creators while also providing a small portion of transaction fees to incentivize creators, thereby empowering time holders to some extent.

Builder @0xKawz of time.fun stated that time.fun not only allows for the tokenization of time but also supports deeper connections between creators and loyal fans, such as booking meetings and private messaging.

How does time.fun operate?

On time.fun, users can create accounts using Google, Discord, Apple, or Twitter, but ultimately need to connect and verify their Twitter accounts. This means that time.fun ensures the platform's traffic comes from an active social media ecosystem.

Web3Auth will automatically generate a wallet for users. If interaction is needed, users must recharge on Base to pay for gas or the costs of purchasing and redeeming time.

The value of time on time.fun is dynamically adjusted based on market demand, using a joint curve pricing mechanism. After purchasing time, fans can redeem or deliver (redeem) time to book meetings with creators, with a minimum redemption time of 15 minutes. Additionally, fans can privately message creators, with each message costing 1 minute, and creators are required to respond within 5 days.

To further enrich interactions between creators and fans, time.fun also offers a group feature supported by a Telegram bot. Creators can authorize the bot to manage group members, enabling automated member invitations and removals.

Regarding the original circle.tech fee model, users who refer creators receive a 1% referral fee, circle.tech charges a 5% consultation application fee, and the remaining 94% is distributed to creators who receive consultations or chats.

After rebranding, time.fun updated its fee model to focus more on creators' time delivery and empowering time holders, driving time value speculation by allocating a small portion of time transaction fees to creators, thereby enhancing platform activity.

Creators can earn ETH in three ways: when fans trade their time, when fans redeem time (i.e., for chats, meetings, etc.), and through referrals. Among these, trading earns up to 2.1%, referral users earn 0.5%, while the revenue from redeeming time accounts for as much as 95%, incentivizing creators to create more value for their fans.

Additionally, a portion of the transaction and redemption fees is allocated to the time holder (timeholder) fund. According to time.fun, time holders can also benefit from the time holder fund, which can receive up to 2% of transaction and redemption volumes. Creators can choose suitable ways to use this fund, such as gifting it to fans.

Will time.fun issue tokens?

The original document from circle.tech indicated that the circle.tech application could earn points, which would be considered for future airdrops and giveaways. Creating an account, asking questions, answering questions, participating in one-on-one chat rooms, etc., would earn reward points.

Builder @0xKawz of time.fun stated in Discord, "A snapshot has been taken for the circle.tech points activity. However, now is not a good time for an airdrop. Circle.tech has performed poorly in terms of fees and attracting truly stable users, and we hope to bring more usage through time.fun. We still plan to conduct an airdrop this summer, distributing a fixed proportion of tokens to users (both old and new product users)."

In the planning of time.fun, the time.fun contract will be scalable, with more products using minutes as the base currency to be launched soon. Other projects can build on time.fun after being whitelisted. Additionally, TIME airdrops can also be earned in Q1.

What are the prospects for 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 allowed time to be minted and sold as NFTs on Polygon. At that time, Newt viewed Aika as a standardized method for guilds, service DAOs, and other crypto-native organizations to pay for services. However, Aika only allowed creators to earn rewards after delivering time, making it difficult to attract creators. The project eventually fizzled out.

Recently, orb.land, which was praised as cool by Vitalik Buterin, restricted a creator to issuing only one Orb NFT and introduced a Haberger tax system to constrain the holding and resale of commitment NFTs, encouraging high-quality interactions between creators and holders, as well as promoting efficient resource allocation. The idea is good, but there is not much demand for it among creators and ordinary players, as no transactions mean no earnings for creators.

In contrast, time.fun has a better incentive mechanism, allowing creators to not only share in the time redemption but also earn a small portion of revenue from secondary time speculation trades, thereby driving them to expand their influence, attract more fans, and enhance platform activity. At the same time, ordinary users or fans can also benefit from the time holder fund.

Whether time.fun can kickstart the creator fee flywheel remains to be seen. After all, at this stage, users are more focused on speculation rather than real value, and the time value of creators currently seems to be just users guessing the popularity of creators.