---
slug: welcome
title: Hello World, Meet Strata
tags: [welcome, vision]
authors: [noah, bry]
---

Strata is a social token protocol that makes it possible to build and monetize tokenized economies around a person, idea, or collective. Powered by Solana, it is the fastest and least expensive way to launch a token. After months in development, the Strata protocol was officially open sourced today.
We owe a big thanks to the [Wum.bo](https://wum.bo) community and the Solana community for helping us get here. [Get started here](https://docs.strataprotocol.com/getting_started)

**Strata Social Tokens** unlock local economies around individuals while **Strata Collectives** make it possible to pool resources and structure incentive models around networks of social tokens.
The combination of these composable token mechanisms will fuel not only the Creator Economy, but will unlock a new Cooperation Economy that compounds the value of social token networks.
Strata has the potential to upend entrenched, royalty-seeking business models which have taxed creators for decades and unlock a wider design space for social tokens.

Strata’s mission is simple: make it radically easier for people to coordinate social communities.
The definition of community is up to you. Whether that means creating a community exclusively for your fans, building a membership-based record label, integrating social tokens into an existing network, or building local chapters within divisions for an international organization — the decision is yours to create.

Strata is for creators, builders, and entrepreneurs who seek to integrate tokens, and novel experiences around tokens, at the heart of their communities.
No project is too big or too small — social tokens should be, and will be, everywhere.
In addition to unlocking social tokens on Solana, Strata makes it incredibly easy and inexpensive to launch and experiment with them.

## How Does Strata Work?

Social tokens are tokens typically associated with an individual, idea, project, or community.
There are many flavors of social tokens but they typically provide access, status, and utility related to the individual they represent.
Strata takes this idea further and provides a new way to bundle social token networks into collectives, which are networks of social tokens bound by a common collective token.

In addition to simple minting, Strata natively leverages automated market makers and bonding curves to guarantee liquidity for its tokens.
If done right, there will be a long tail representing millions of social tokens powered by Strata. This ensures that there will always be a market for them.

Using Strata, creators can create, manage and build social tokens in just a few clicks. These tokens can be bound to SOL, USDC, or a collective.

**Collectives** are a new approach for like-minded creators to monetize the efforts of group cooperation. Collectives allow participants to pool resources under their collective token which is bound to their network of social tokens. They allow a community or business to structure incentive models designed to increase the value of the collective as a whole, in tandem with the efforts of individuals. Creators can join collectives by basing their tokens in the native collective token at the point of creation. Collective creators have the ability to make collectives open or closed.

Collectives allow fans and communities to take directional positions for the success of ideas, groups, or categorizes. Viewed through this lens, Collectives can be seen as an index for ideas. Imagine a group of artists forming a collective and working in partnership to create a custom marketplace for their genre. Or perhaps a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) formed by an organization of contributors with their individual tokens bound to the DAO token. Collectives are a way to form economies around ideas, and to seamlessly integrate Strata Protocol into your business model.

The first social token collective on Strata is the [Open Collective (OPEN)](https://blog.strataprotocol.com/open-collective).
The Open Collective was built to serve as the default collective for all social tokens issued on Strata, unless a creator specifically wishes to bond their tokens to SOL, USDC, or a new collective instead.
The Open Collective serves as a springboard for creators and projects to get started quickly.

An example of one such project is Wum.bo, which was also developed by the Strata community. Wum.bo is a social token platform built on Strata that makes use of the Open Collective.
It brings social tokens directly into social networks (Twitter, Twitch, Reddit, etc.) and makes it possible to see the economy surrounding an individual inline with their profile picture.
Using Wum.bo, anyone can mint a social token that represents them or a creator they love. The value and mechanics of those tokens is up to them.
For example, a creator could offer lunch with fans for the price of 100 of their native tokens; artists could offer pre-sales for limited edition works for fans who hold 1000 or more of their native tokens; brands may offer discounts for products for fans who burn 10 or more tokens, and so forth.

There are at least 5 projects currently building on Strata as we speak. Social tokens are an entirely new way for fans to engage the creators, brands, and stories they love.
By building the core infrastructure and lowering the barriers to entry we hope to spur a tsunami of experimentation and innovation with social tokens.

## Get started

The key to innovation is rapid iteration and exploration, and as such, Strata is completely open source and free for all to use. [Get started here](https://docs.strataprotocol.com/getting_started).

Strata is designed to become a standard for social tokens and bonding curves. The most innovative business models have yet to be discovered.
As such, the smart contracts take no share of the tokens exchanged and the protocol remains as non-opinionated and flexible as possible. How you implement Strata is your canvas to paint.

You can customize everything from your curve's shape to its launch-time characteristics, to the royalties you collect, and so forth. This might sound complicated, but with sane defaults you don't have to reach under the hood.

Ready to get started? Here’s how you can create a social token on devnet right now:

```jsx async name=create_social
var { targetMint } = await tokenCollectiveSdk.createSocialToken({
  ignoreIfExists: true, // If a Social Token already exists for this wallet, ignore.
  metadata: {
    name: "Learning Strata Token",
    symbol: "luvSTRAT",
    uri: "https://strataprotocol.com/luvSTRAT.json",
  },
  tokenBondingParams: {
    buyBaseRoyaltyPercentage: 0,
    buyTargetRoyaltyPercentage: 10,
    sellBaseRoyaltyPercentage: 0,
    sellTargetRoyaltyPercentage: 0,
  },
});
```

Now display it in React!

```jsx live
function TokenDisplay() {
  const { targetMint } = useVariables(); // Getting token bonding from above code;

  if (tokenBonding) {
    return <Swap id={targetMint} />;
  }

  return <div>Please run the code block above</div>;
}
```

## Next Steps

Like what you see? Let’s build together! The community is great and we’ll be there to help you along the way—office hours, hands-on assistance, and more. We want to hear what you're building.

<CTA />

Not a dev? It’s all good. [Wum.bo](https://wum.bo) will be launching a chrome extension that makes it stupid easy to create social tokens with one click natively inside Twitter. It doesn't get much easier than that!

### Join the Community

- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/StrataProtocol)
- [Discord](https://discord.gg/XQhCFg77WM)
