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Whitepaper: Tokenized creator service credits

Explains the need for and vision to tokenizing credits for creators and service providers.

📄️ Why Web3

Service tokens are Ethereum based semi-fungible tokens (SFT) that are asset-backed and redeemable for service. They are minted from service smart contracts creators deploy on the Polygon blockchain. Like traditional gift cards/certificates, which are backed by money paid to acquire the certificate, service tokens are backed by monetary assets, paid in a primary-sale, to purchase the token. This value is held in the smart contract. As the token holder redeems credit in the token, the underlying asset is drawn from the smart contract and deposited to the creator’s revenue account. Credits issued via smart contracts that run on decentralized public blockchain infrastructure offer two distinct advantages to traditional methods.

📄️ The Service token

Credit is semi-fungible. To see why, consider a Fitness trainer. Credits she grants to access her virtual class may not necessarily transfer to her in-studio sessions. So two credits issued by this creator are not fungible. On the other hand if two of her tokens each hold $30 worth of credits that can be applied to her virtual session, then those credits are functionally equivalent - and therefore fungible. Web3 projects have historically relied on Ethereum’s ERC-20 fungible token standard, ERC-721 non-fungible standard, and more recently - the ERC-1155 multi-asset token standard. Of these three standards, only ERC-1155 can represent fungibility and non-fungibility alike, but it does so by binding fungible value to wallet address rather than to token IDs. This binding makes ERC-1155 an unsuitable standard for smart contracts that mint credits tokens.

📄️ Redemptions

Redemption is the process the token-holder exchanges the value in his token for service. Many creators host their service on their own websites. In order to accept their service tokens as payment they must enable their sites to connect to a user’s in-browser or mobile wallets. A second requirement is to augment their payment processing module to accept service tokens as payment for services. We will be providing documentation to help creators update their websites to support service tokens.