Catalyst Protocol and why it matters
It’s so simple really. A way for people to buy and sell digital content like games, movies, music and eBooks. From the creators, and then to and from each other. Millions of marketplaces.
Free of Amazon, Netflix, Steam, Spotify, Facebook, Google, or whoever is out there now exploiting you, your data, their employees, their tax obligations.
Away from their walled gardens of curated content and obsession with grabbing and keeping our attentions with AI and addictive UX/UI design.
No, a simple world where you consume content via links, hosted peer-to-peer (the hosts get paid), and once you’re done with the material you can sell it on, effortlessly, to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Catalyst is an open and distributed protocol for games, movies, music and books. With hundreds of developers and producers on-boarded and a team with decades of experience within the games and marketplace industries, Catalyst (CAT) tokens will be the new native currency for the digital content distribution economy — one that ensures trust without middle-men, and incentivizes promotion.
The problem
A $200bn content market, yet the economy is broken.
Half the people on the planet enjoy digital content, but the global ecosystem presents three major challenges to all but the largest creators.
1. The gatekeepers are too powerful. The dominant shopfronts like Steam or Google Play take 30% of revenues.
2. Only a few products ever get promoted. Yet there are millions all vying for prominence on the front pages.
3. Incentives to share don’t exist. Consumers and influencers are not motivated to share and market content as there are no benefits in doing so.
The solution
Flip the building blocks of the entertainment industry on its head, creating millions of individual marketplaces, each showcasing dozens of products.
For Creators
They get content featured in more places, cut out the middleman, and unlock revenue through onward resale of content.
For Promotors
They now also earn a 27% commission for all the paid content they promote. This rewards millions of influencers, significantly increasing the amountthey’re paid to review, stream and promote content.
For consumers
They get paid to host, and can purchase, rent, stream or rent digital content in thousands more places online.
The Catalyst System
Link-Based Distribution
All content is hosted via the P2P network and therefore none of the products in the ecosystem are dependent on ‘closed’ cloud platform networks as delivery platforms.
Content is discovered and downloaded via shared links created by individual ‘Clients’ installed on PCs and mobiles.
It is a very simple system which has enormous potential.
Yet whilst it is simple in principle, it is an ecosystem that has proved harder than we might originally have liked to summarise. One of the founders, the brilliant Barn Cleave came up with a good analogy:
Imagine if PayPal managed digital content.
Well if they did, and it was a decentralised open P2P ecosystem — than that would be us.
The Blockchain PayPal of digital content — not a bad ring to it.
Anyway, to see if we’ve improved the pitch you can catch the whole Catalyst team at Blockchain Live on September 26th at London’s Olympia in the Investor Zone.
