Official “Black Mirror” tokens turn social credits into crypto games

What do you give to earn cryptocurrency? Have AI track all online movements? These questions support an interactive experience built around Black Mirror Token, the official cryptocurrency announced Wednesday, and were inspired by Netflix's hit dystopian series.

Built on the Kor protocol supported by Animoca Brands, Niantic Labs, Avalanche and others, the Black Mirror Experience features a virtual assistant named Iris. She tracks the user's behavior and assigns a reputation score. Echoes the themes of show surveillance and social control.

“Meet Iris, the virtual assistant at Black Mirror. She monitors your social and wallet activities, builds your reputation score, and determines access, power and rewards in the Black Mirror universe,” and the Black Mirror Experience account doesn't care who you are.

Black Mirror Token is the latest foray into the crypto zone of popular television series. The previous project, Smile Club, was launched last year by Crypto Startup Pixelynx, but it didn't make any tokens. Instead, it featured a digital game inspired by the season 3 episode “Nosedive.” Here, users earned social credit points in exchange for rewards and experience.

The Black Mirror has also been featured in the Ethereum Metaverse Game The Sandbox. All of these efforts come from the Banijay brand, a company that represents an array of television program IPs that includes “Peaky Blinder,” and recently acquired a license for upcoming crypto games, previously brought to the sandbox.

Several “black mirror” episodes focus on surveillance, showing how advanced technology allows for invasive surveillance and impact on individuals and society.

According to the project's LitePaper, Iris tracks how participants engage with decentralized communities, including retaining and dumping tokens, flipping or collecting NFTs, and interacting with other projects.

“The quality of posts, follow, reactions and engagement helps IRIS detect whether you are a real contributor, a troll, or a ramp-delaying con man,” reads LitePaper

Participants will sign up for a social ID card. This is an NFT that records reputation scores and tracks behavior using digital badges and “stains”. This card also serves as a portable Web3 identity and on-chain passport across the Black Mirror Web3 ecosystem. They can then earn rewarded tokens with airdrops for a higher social score, affecting storylines and smile clubs, and unlocking whitelist spots and elite drops.

A social credit score is a system used to track individual behavior, such as financial liability, legal compliance, and social behavior, and assigns a score. This score can affect a person's access to services, opportunities, or freedoms.

At LitePaper, the project argues that decentralized platforms need an on-chain reputation system to ensure rewards authentic user engagement.

“By analyzing user activity on both on-chain and social media, and leveraging integrated device assistants to track user behavior and conversation patterns, we can provide a fair, transparent, easy to portable, robust, gaming reputation scoring for the Web3 ecosystem and beyond,” reads LitePaper.

To participate, users must connect to a compatible Ethereum or Solana wallet and link their X account. However, this project has not yet disclosed the chain or chain in which the token will be minted.

According to the project's X account, over 13,000 reputation IDs have already been charged, and upcoming features include AI coaching, dynamic quests, social and on-chain betting, and egg-inspired interactive mini-games.