While studying for his Bachelor’s degree in computer software engineering at San Jose State University, Jenil Thakker made plans to pursue a Master’s and a PhD. But these courses required him to acquire some research experience.
In 2016, while everybody else on campus was interested in AI/ML research, Jenil ended up working on a research topic nobody else wanted to work on: Ethereum.
His research on Ethereum token locking, secure data management, consensus protocol algorithms, and subsequent work experience in Ethereum integration set him on the entrepreneurial journey to launching his own Web3 project – – in 2020.
“I saw creators were building full-time careers on the Internet, and so there was potential for building tooling for them and helping them monetise directly, without any extractive fees, and to build an ownership-driven community. When my visa expired in 2020, I decided not to renew it, moved back to India, and began working on this problem statement,” he says.
What is Coinvise?
With Coinvise, Jenil has built a no-code tooling platform for creators to build, launch and operate tokenised, Web3 communities. The project aims to simplify high-risk Web3 operations for communities and enable stronger engagement.
At present, Coinvise, which is on Ethereum and Polygon, claims to have over 15,000 community members, with 500+ creators building a community on the platform.
Communities on Coinvise utilise tokens as a store of value, and the most common use-cases for social tokens include rewards for achieving community goals, community governance, and unlocking community interactions.
Coinvise has so far raised $2.65M from investors such as Volt Capital, IDEO CoLab Ventures, ACapital, Scalar Capital, Galaxy Digital, and The LAO among others.
“Creators use the platform for airdrops – create customised claim pages or send tokens in bulk; quests – reward contributions for atomic tasks and vesting – for core members of the community,” Jenil says, adding:
“Every creator on Coinvise has a profile for their wallet address, and our tooling can be used as widgets to customise the profile. Essentially, a creator’s profile is their landing page, which can be custom branded, and used for hosting airdrops, campaigns, bounties, membership campaigns, etc.”
Building communities in a meaningful way
The trend of social tokens and launching tokenised, community-building platforms in Web3 has picked up over the last few months, and Jenil argues there are more DAO/community tooling platforms than mature communities.
The likes of Mirror, DAOHaus, Collab.Land, jokedao, Guild.xyz and more are also exploring community tooling, and in fact, Coinvise works with some of them on innovative projects in the same space.
While it is not difficult to build a tooling platform, Jenil says that creating trust, offering validated features and helping creators grow their audience into robust communities have helped Coinvise emerge as a proven product.
“It is important to build social experiences and stickiness, and enable tooling to capture it. Not only have we done this, but also built a deep repository of over 500 tokens – each having a substantial use case or utility and representing a community using the platform,” he says.
“Consequently, with the community-based tokens, there is deep liquidity being provided, and this is possible only with the right set of creators and communities onboard. Thus, we are creating a network effect where communities can interact efficiently,” he adds.
Coinvise also recently enabled creators to design custom vesting schedules, which can be useful for compensating founding members, treasury diversification events and more. These forms of distributing ownership enable stronger alignment, engagement and drive collective effort.
While Jenil’s and Coinvise’s current focus is shaped around distributing ownership in meaningful ways, the broad goal is to build a social network for discovering and engaging with sovereign communities.
Going forward, the team plans to launch Coinvise v4 with built-in composable blocks for profiles and ways to monetise for communities. By 2025, it aims to be the homepage for Web3 communities, where communities can become their own digital economies operating on Coinvise.
