TCR Party: The #CryptoTwitter Popularity Contest Everyone's Talking About

An experiment is playing out on Twitter that seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of token-curated registries through a Crypto Twitter popularity contest.

The TCR Party, as its dubbed, is being run by ConsenSys project Alpine, which is populated by the former token design team from Token Foundry, which has seen its fortunes shift with the winds of the token space writ-large.

Rocco, Alpine's head of strategy, says the TCR Party experiment is a way for mainstream audiences to engage with a technology that incentivizes authoritative list-making.

There are several projects working on TCRs of their own, including mapping startup FOAM and advertising startup MetaX. However, both Rocco and Gattuso are skeptical about TCRs, concerned that they inevitably become plutocratic popularity contests where people amass disproportionate control through token holdings.

TCR Party participants can earn staked testnet tokens simply by interacting with the program.

The first testnet implementation promptly failed because an influential miner stopped contributing to the network, forcing TCR Party to migrate to another blockchain.

Clearly, a TCR is only as reliable as the infrastructure it lives on.

Plus, Rocco pointed out that Alpine's goal is not to merely "Jockey tokens," but to discover where and how blockchain solutions can offer tangible value.

"Token modeling is just one small component of what the entire team is working on," he said, adding that more experiments with technology beyond ethereum, such as bitcoin's lightning network, could be in Alpine's future.

Alpine isn't the only team experimenting with TCRs, and others are taking note.