Decentralized creator economy manifesto
Why are we building a creator economy protocol?
Like many important and long-lasting creations, our protocol started with our own personal pain. We are creators, building a protocol for creators, which should be governed by creators.
Before we began building the protocol, every member of our team was looking for ways to monetize their passion and produce various “products” for the creator economy. Some of us were creating distributed system architectures, performing and publishing scientific research, writing stories and articles, organizing events and communities, drawing illustrations and designing user interfaces.
We were looking to get the most out of our passion because we believe that only when you are doing something you are passionate about will you have a chance to realize your full potential.
We witnessed how hard it is for any creator to focus on what they want, not what others want from them. Even some of the most “independent” professions were still restricted by boundaries, conditions, and set ways of things being done.
Interestingly, the closer we are to doing what we want, the harder it is to get resources for it and the less chance there is to be rewarded with what you deserve for your contribution.
At some point, we came up with ideas about changing the world and its economic model, in a way that those who are working on things they are passionate about are rewarded most. After sharing these ideas with some of our friends and colleagues, we got so occupied by this idea that we couldn’t help ourselves but start a company to realize this vision.
What is the Creator Economy Protocol?
Imagine a wormhole in space. It’s huge and everything around it gravitates to the very center of it. Some objects make it to the center, some objects dizzy and carousel around its center, then are thrown away into space. Some of them will never be back and will never make it to the center of the wormhole.
But what is in the center of this wormhole? Why are objects so striving to get there?
At the center of the wormhole is capital.
We see this wormhole as a great representation of the current global economic model. In the center of this model is capital. Both the people and projects they create are striving to get access to it in order to realize their dreams or just make a living.
Most of them don’t make it to the center. But when they do: they significantly increase the chances of realizing their dreams. To make it to the center, people are forced to do anything they can to get there. They are forced not by other people — who are just intermediaries — they are forced by the whole system.
Intermediaries exist because the system rewards and prioritizes “value capturing” not “value creation.” Those who capture the value, and have already captured some, make things gravitate to them and they decide what cut to give to those who create value. Those who create value are usually left with just a fraction of the total reward for this value they have created.
Of course, those who capture the value also do important jobs… in the current economic model…
But imagine an alternative: another economic model, where the creator, a human, is at the center. In this case, the whole system would by its very nature become human centric.
If in the center of the model you place humans, then all the design principles and incentive models pivot to what humans need. And one of the things we need and dream for is to realize our potential.
We are all creators, and we want to create beautiful things which make our lives and lives of other people better. And the more positive impact our creations make on people’s lives, the happier we are. If we are also rewarded for this: even better. Especially if we are rewarded fairly.
We believe the future is one of multiple stakeholders and the creator economy should not belong to a single person, single group of people, single company or even a blockchain. This is why we are developing the Creator Economy Protocol: the core infrastructure for a decentralized creator economy, which is interoperable and inclusive.
Decentralized infrastructure not only ensures availability and scalability to make the global creator economy function without any interruption, but it also makes it possible to distribute ownership of this infrastructure between all the participants and make it be governed by its own community.
Creating and launching a decentralized creator economy
At first glance it might seem like an impossible task. How can we change the global economic model? And, even if we create such a protocol, how can we make it used by creators? How will we incentivize them to join?
In order to solve this problem, we did what we always do to make an extremely ambitious goal more feasible: we split it into parts. In the case of launching a decentralized creator economy, we split it into phases or epochs.
1. Development phase
Development of all the necessary tools and protocols, templates, and examples for every entity which is present in this new decentralized creator economy we are aiming to launch. It includes building the blockchain network and domain-specific protocol, integrating them with other chains, building a couple of example applications, launching funds for the investment into these applications, in addition to accelerators and incubators to scale the processes.
2. Experimentation phase
Experimentation with the tools we developed to see how the economic model behaves. In order to do so, we need to launch the internal currency of the network because we can’t motivate agents in this economy if the incentives are not real. A canary network (special network for experiments before main-net deployment) is also launched in this phase.
3. Launch phase
Launch of the main network is to take place after a series of experiments in the canary network, where we find the optimal parameters for the main network launch and also the optimal genesis state of the network for the highest probability of “success”.
4. Gathering phase
Gathering network participants and the assets they bring to the network. This includes launching multiple Web 3.0 creator economy portals in every industry. These portals have only one aim: to bring the creators and assets from their industry to Web 3.0 space.
5. Completion phase
Completing the transition from the “value capturing” to value creation paradigm. It includes the introduction of a new system of metrics, which show a multidimensional index of creator contribution for each work. This phase will detach the value creators make from the money they’ve earned.
