The Culture DAO launches the $CULTUR social token at the Virtual Beings Summit

The Virtual Beings Summit online event is a place where real people talk about fake people. That is, they’re part of a society that is trying to create virtual beings — characters with AI brains that behave as if they were real.

And this year, blockchain culture has invaded the event. The Culture DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is launching its social token, dubbed $CULTUR, at the event. And that may stir as much talk as the Virtual Beings Summit itself (the event takes place today and tomorrow). Social tokens take advantage of the blockchain, the transparent and secure digital ledger behind cryptocurrency and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). I should pause and explain a few things. DAOs are like companies without leaders. They’re a bunch of people who come together on a project and take ownership of it through control of tokens. The creators get so many tokens. But so do fans and investors and other who acquire tokens. And everybody gets to influence the fate of the project. Edward Saatchi, organizer of the Virtual Beings Summit, believes that these kinds of blockchain-inspired concepts will be intertwined with the success of virtual beings. A DAO, for instance, might create a character as complex as Hamlet and run that virtual being’s life, or it might collectively figure out how to create the next Pixar.