Decentralized Creating

🔓 Crypto Communities

Following on from last week's email about creator badges, I claimed my Bankless (substack newsletter) member badge, using the crypto Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP).

Communities such as investing.io (which has an awesome newsletter by Juliet) can issue POAP tokens that are minted in xDAI (an Ethereum sidechain) so there is no transaction cost for claiming the badges.

Here is proof of my membership:

My badge gives me the ability to vote on polls at poap.vote, such as what token project the Bankless Newsletter should cover next, and enter raffles.

To claim additional benefits, I had to migrate my badge from xDAI to the Ethereum mainnet. This has a transaction cost and in fact for me at the time was $38.90 (gas on the ETH network is expensive!).

I then went to poap.chat to claim the private chat channel in the Bankless Discord, by signing a random character string with my Metamask wallet. This functionality uses Buidlhub which is like Zapier but for crypto, and has a range of templates.

Inside this private channel is talk about creating a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) where token holders become incentivized to move from being content consumers to contributors.

This would be a new type of governance, where the original creator(s) become one of many voices, where consensus dictates what shape the community will take.

I'll be looking into what this could mean for creators going forward.

🎙️ Spotify becomes the choice for creators

Following on from the newsletter two week's ago on Apple's podcast subscription service, Spotify has one-upped them in their announcement last Tuesday.

Through Anchor, Spotify is offering a paid podcast service that will be free for creators for the first two years, meaning that participating creators receive 100% of their subscriber revenues! After that they will only be charging a 5% fee vs Apple's 30%.

But the truly innovative part of the announcement is the new Spotify Open Access Platform (OAP), where your existing subscribers will be able to listen to your premium podcasts using the existing login system of whatever platform you are using.

For example, if you have a community hub on circle.so, you should be able to integrate accessing paid podcasts on Spotify into your existing Single Sign-On (SSO) via OAuth 2.0. At least that's my non-technical understanding!

This enables creators to retain direct control over the relationship - something I would not give up in return for distribution, i.e. the Apple model.

That's it for this week

Cheers!

Richard