New Crypto Platform Seeks to ‘Tokenize’ Time Itself

The crypto industry has largely turned on its ability to “tokenize” (which is really a fancy rebranding of the word “monetize”) all sorts of stuff. Indeed, the NFT market notably managed to turn what was little more than digital receipts for web files into an industry (temporarily) worth hundreds of billions of dollars. There’s truly no end to the amount of wealth that can be generated when morons are willing to waste their money! Now, however, a new crypto platform claims to be monetizing our very experience of temporality itself.

The Block reports on a company dubbed Time.fun, which is described as a “tokenized time platform.” What the hell does that mean? It’s a lot simpler and dopier than you might initially think.

Traveling to the platform’s website reveals a searchable interface where users can surf for “creators” and influencers and pay them to interact with you for an allotted (often quite short) period. “Time Is Money” the site reads.

In essence, Time.fun is a little bit like Cameo or OnlyFans or Fiverr, with some crypto thrown into the mix. Content creators can charge platform users their own rates for their services. The kinds of services and content you can buy access to on Time.fun is fairly diverse, and includes access to influencers, musicians, visual artists, as well as access to technical expertise, like feedback on UX and website design. The site says that you can interface with “creators through direct messages, group chats, and voice or video calls.”

“I think tokenized time is really the best way to ‘long someone’, regardless of what project they’re working on. If they’re early in their career, you just buy their time,” Time.fun’s founder, a guy named Kawz, told The Block. “And then if the company becomes successful or they’re just successful in their career profession, the value of their time should naturally just increase because a lot more people now want to reach out to them and get their advice on things. So that’s sort of what I’m trying to build.”

Kawz continued: “Time.fun is just the first platform and we have to make it successful before we think about other use cases. The really long-term goal here is to create somewhat of a new asset class, where people can own other people’s time, trade it, and use it on various products and services.”

Like other crypto platforms, Kawz’s site is basically just rebranding services and systems of exchange that already exist, and subsuming those services/forms of exchange into the deregulated economic forum that is DeFi. All labor requires time to produce and, in that sense, all labor involves monetized time. So this is just another gig-services directory site, albeit one you can pay for with goofy internet money.