BitClout

Is it an opportunistic play or the start of a serious move into new thinking?

I first wrote about “Empire Avenue” in 2012. Three times actually:

• March 12th, 2012 : Empire Avenue

• April 8th, 2012 : Empire Avenue - Redux

• May 2nd, 2012 : Journey or Destination

… and then again in 2015.

• December 11th, 2015 : It’s a People Exchange

Empire Avenue is a social media game where you can trade, not in corporate stocks and commodities, nor even in fruit, vegetables, baskets and flowers.

Photo by Roberto Carlos Roman

Empire Avenue is a market place where you can trade people!

So as not to repeat what I wrote in the September 2nd, 2020 edition of this newsletter, click through for more background and context.

Empire Avenue is still there (bought by Kred). You can find it here.

I met with Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana three times over the course of 2012. At the time I was a player and he was the CEO. It was clear to me then that Empire Avenue had the opportunity to move out of games and into reality. I pitched hard that they should refocus their efforts into the real world and become the first online market place for people futures. He didn’t.

He left Empire Avenue 6 years ago. Empire Avenue remains a game that in all honesty is a shadow of its former self and part of Kred - itself a shadow of its former self.

Nine Years Later : Enter BitClout.

I first read about them here, this particular paragraph catching my eye.

BitClout is a website that launched a couple of weeks ago and lets you buy ‘social tokens’ that are tied to Twitter accounts, on the theory that if
A) BitClout works, and
B) the creator rises in popularity,
then the price will rise and you’ll be able to sell the tokens at some point in the future for a profit. 

and then

Basically it’s a stock market for people that runs on blockchain technology. It’s like Klout, but publicly tradable.

Have to say, that article was published on April 1st - the same day that it was ‘rumoured that Kanye West had bought Spotify’ - so I approached with caution. But the story does seem to hold. It is after all wandering around NFTs, Twitter and the blockchain - so fully buzz word compliant.

Whether it turns into the full people exchange I have been rabbiting on about for nearly ten years remains to be seen - but it is clear that it can be done.

What do you think?

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