Creaton is a decentralized, subscription-based content sharing platform, enabling Creators to distribute their content to Fans directly using existing standards. In order to be fully decentralized, we had to replace each commonly used building block of a subscription platform with a decentralized protocol. In this post, we will describe how we have solved multiple aspects of this problem, working to empower the next generation of Creators!
The Backend
Any Web 2.0 content sharing platform — think of Twitter, Facebook, and Patreon — needs thousands of high powered computers to store, process, and retrieve user data. This means that the platform’s computers and data contained in them are the source of truth, and anybody with access to the database can change the truth anytime it desires to. Administrators with appropriate access can block accounts, delete posts, or download all the contents freely. Those contents can include your personal photos and videos, even if they’re not supposed to be seen by anyone you don’t know. Fortunately, by relying on the Ethereum smart contracts, many of these problems are avoided inherently. All interactions are transparent, the single source of truth is the blockchain, and no one can change it. Only new data can be written, while the old data is simply no longer read or used, rather than being deleted.
Under normal circumstances, looking up data on the Ethereum blockchain can take hours, sometimes even days. Clearly this is unacceptable for this era of web-powered applications and frictionless experiences! For fast retrieval of blockchain data, we rely on The Graph protocol for efficient transaction indexing and querying. The Graph protocol is capable of indexing the data generated by many blockchains including Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and others. Creaton’s subgraph defines which data should be indexed and stored for retrieval by anyone who is looking for it; that data would be specific to Creaton’s native token, the content uploaded and distributed by Creators, Fans’ payments to Creators, and so on.
A decentralized group of Indexers operate Graph Nodes that index the data defined in Creaton’s subgraph, allowing us to query the data and retrieve it in milliseconds, and then display it in Creaton’s decentralized app (dApp).
For user interaction on the platform, Creaton has chosen to deploy its smart contract on the Polygon network. Polygon describes itself as, “a protocol and a framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks. Aggregating scalable solutions on Ethereum supporting a multi-chain Ethereum ecosystem.” Polygon’s approach to building these Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks, and incorporation of other upcoming solutions like zero-knowledge rollups, Optimism Rollups and others has resulted in almost zero gas fees and faster confirmations while allowing users to use the same wallet apps they are already accustomed to.
Content Storage and Ownership
When a Creator uploads content to a Web 2.0 platform, the platform becomes the owner of the content for almost all practical use cases. In fact, the Terms of Service for most platforms grants the platform a non-exclusive right to use, reproduce and redistribute the content as it sees fit with zero acknowledgement of who created the material, and without any payment. In addition to that the platform can read or modify your data, use it as training data for arbitrary machine learning models, or assign it to individuals, typically low-paid contractors, to annotate it for even more data extraction. And if the platform decides to change its business model, pivot, or suspend its activity, the contents can be deleted altogether.
In Creaton, the Creators are the owners of their content from day one. Each Creator owns a non-fungible token (NFT) contract, and all of their content are minted as NFTs. Since NFTs can not hold the actual image or video of the NFT due to the file size of the content versus the blocksize for the blockchain, Creaton has chosen Arweave as the content storage solution of choice, guaranteeing your content will be stored forever! So, even if Creaton were to disable its platform or go out of business, your content will be there on Arweave still able to be accessed. Additionally, Creators get to decide which people can see their content. It might seem like dark magic 🧙🏻♀️🧙🏼🧙🏽♂️, but even the Creaton team cannot see the content if that’s what the Creator opts for.
This is all possible thanks to re-encryption protocols provided by NuCypher, specifically the Umbral PRE scheme. NuCypher’s technology allows Creators to conditionally grant and revoke access to the content they produce and distribute to Fans subscribing and paying for the content. Creators encrypt their content before uploading it, and grant access to their subscribers to view their content. Subscribers can see the content as long as they are subscribed to the Creator. It looks simple on the outside, but NuCypher’s technology was needed in order to ensure restrictions Creators want to put in place can actually be enforced using Web 3.0 technology.
Subscriptions
In Creaton, Creators can earn money from the very first moment a Fan subscribes to them. There is no centralized payment system like Visa or PayPal, and subscription revenue is transferred directly to a Creator’s account. This results in complete robustness on the Creator side, and anonymity on the subscribers side. Creaton is deploying Superfluid for transferring cryptocurrency in a streaming fashion. As described by Superfluid, “flows are programmable, composable and modular.”
Creaton has taken advantage of Superfluid’s capabilities to resolve multiple points of friction in today’s Creator Economy.
Let’s say a Creator sets a subscription price of USD $10 per month. When a Fan subscribes to this Creator, the Fan’s account sends $0.000003 to the Creator every second! This process and stream is managed automatically by the Superfluid protocol and benefits both parties! Creators don’t have to wait for a monthly revenue distribution, and Fans do not spend their money all at once.
In the end, what you have is the culmination of multiple pieces of novel technology, all running on decentralized systems that anyone in the world can utilize, that will help enable a new generation of Creators that won’t be held down by traditional companies, payment processing fees, cancel culture, and other issues that have plagued them. A decentralized world is a free world!
