What makes Flame Token different?
Spoiler: Mainly, because we built the platform before we issued the token. Here is our story.
There are so many things that let Flame Tokens stand out from the majority of tokens. And we will present them all in this article. But first, let’s get one of the most significant differences to most other tokens out of the way: Flame is a porn token.
There, we said it.
But for us, this is also one of the most important unique selling points — we will get to that later.
Grab some popcorn, sit down, relax a bit and enjoy our little walk through our thinking. At the end of the article, you will understand basically what we are up to. If then still something isn't clear, we drop you a list of socials where you can reach out to us and ask anything you want. You always get answers.
Our biggest belief is that work will drastically change in the next decade to come. The combination of social media and commoditization of business infrastructure means that any (adult) content creator can now transform their audience into a scalable empire. In general, it means also that 9-to-5 work is about to die, most 9-to-5s will become a commodity.
At Flame Technologies, we believe that the future of work is driven by you being simply and unapologetically you. And we believe that we can see the future already happening in the adult industry with sex workers being full-time content creators, showing once again the innovative power of porn.
A lot of sex workers are making a living by creating content, telling their stories, and connecting with their fans while selling subscription-based services. The leading sales platform OnlyFans generated this year $2 billion in revenue.
We are here to give adult content creators everything they need to promote themselves. In the future, brands are no longer owned by companies, they will be people. The adult industry is already there: Creators are the top brands, generating most of the traffic and revenue in the industry.
It is our mission to build the Holy Grail of the creator economy: Advertising! Therefore we built Sharesome as the utility and $XFL as the medium-of-exchange token.
We envision a future where people all over the world have access to a sex-positive platform that doesn't discriminate against sex workers as Facebook, Instagram & others do. 70% of all the people in the world connected to the internet consume adult products on a regular basis — shall we say more about the need for an adult-friendly social network?
There are two parts to our solution: Sharesome (utility) and $XFL (token).
Sharesome is already built and is grown from zero to 1.6 million monthly active users in under 3 years. The Flame Token is launched as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum mainnet and has already around $1 million TVL locked in our Farming and Liquidity Pools in under 3 weeks.
By integrating $XFL into our Sharesome platform we built an ecosystem where token holders and platform users are the same. If the token grows in value, our users benefit. That is only achievable with cryptocurrencies, not with fiat, and only if you launch your own token — as we did.
But let’s dive a bit deeper into it:
We bring social media to the adult industry and crypto to social media
Why do we say, Flame is a porn token? Technically, there is nothing pornographic about it. The Flame Token (XFL) is a blockchain-based token compatible with the ERC-20 standard of the Ethereum blockchain. The initial supply when we created the token in December 2018 was 10.5 billion XFL. The current supply is 13.2125 billion XFL, with the max supply being 21 billion XFL. Yes, the number is an homage to Bitcoin with its max supply being 21 million BTC.
You can check the Flame Token (XFL) contract on Etherscan here:
0x469861bdfd02e7ebce7cdeb281e8eec53069cf5f
So what makes the token a porn token? Well, Flame Token is the native token of Sharesome, the leading social discovery network for adult content and to connect with creators and brands. It is already used as a value transfer mechanism on the platform, mainly to buy advertising.
Think of Sharesome as a mix between Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit — without the hate-speech, but with the nudes. Sharesome has already 1.6 million monthly active users and over 500 million monthly post views. You need Flame Token to buy advertising on the platform. Already, every month ~34 million paid posts are sold, generating monthly revenue of ~25 million $XFL. The project onboarded and verified over 7,000 content creators and is growing organically.
The adult industry is the perfect playground for cryptocurrencies.
So why did we choose the adult industry? Because porn has always driven innovation! And we innovate: We bring social media to the adult industry and crypto to social media. Or in other words, we create a porn token for the $100 billion adult industry.
Bandwith growth, streaming, credit card transactions, the videotape wars between VHS & Betamax, tube sites — innovation was always driven by smut. Porn has quietly led the way to the status quo that we all know and enjoy. If today Netflix can stream HD movies in every household, it’s thanks to programming pioneers who figured out how to deliver adult video to consumers in the era of dial-up modems. So, if we believe that the military was the inventor and creator of the internet, then porn was the entrepreneur who brought the internet to the masses.
Plus, the industry is big: 25% of all search engine requests are pornography-related. Google now processes an average of over 40,000 search queries every second, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day. We see 3.58 billion monthly visits on XVideos, 2.54 billion monthly visits on Pornhub, and 1.27 billion monthly visits on xHamster. And these are just the Top 3 porn sites.
Our aim is to empower hundreds of millions who are currently consuming or producing erotic content by creating the world’s first social media experience that does not discriminate against adult content creators or NSFW content. A $100 billion industry is waiting to be disrupted!
The adult industry is leading the shift from the gig economy to the creator economy.
The adult world is undergoing a visible metamorphosis process, from an industry dominated by intermediaries (studios, tube sites, etc.) into a more peer-to-peer, independent-producer-focused environment where performers and producers interact more closely with their fans through social platforms.
These independent adult content creators sell their content on platforms like OnlyFans. The company, founded in 2016, has 85 million users, upward of 1 million content creators, and has generated more than $2 billion in sales in 2020. This makes OnlyFans one of the biggest media businesses hiding in plain sight — most of its revenue coming from adult content.
So, instead of being a freelancer for a studio and getting paid per gig, performers become now creators themselves selling their content subscription-based on sites like OnlyFans directly to the customer. This is a real revolution and will impact the rise of other platforms that focus on the creator economy instead of the gig economy.
In the last years, we saw the rise of platforms like Uber (ride gigs) or Airbnb (rental gigs), now we see the rise of platforms like OnlyFans (creator subscriptions) or Sharesome (creator promotions) in the adult space — the trend will swap at some point into the mainstream. We are “just” leading it.
$XFL: A utility token for the adult industry
If Flame would be nothing else than just another ERC-20 token on Ethereum labeled “adult industry token”, there would be nothing innovative about Flame. Because it would be just another token without any utility or a platform like all these tokens with “a huge potential market” that are disappearing after a short period of hype.
The Flame project is different from that: We have already built the utility and the platform. Flame is the native currency of Sharesome, our social discovery network for adult content. Sharesome has already 1.6 million monthly active users. Users already spend Flame on the app mainly to buy promoted posts (advertising). More goods & services that users can purchase with Flame are already there and about to come.
The best comparison with Flame would be ETH itself. You need ETH (utility token) to pay for the transactions (utility) on the Ethereum Mainnet (platform). Or BNB (utility token) that you can use to pay for fees (utility) on the Binance Exchange (platform). In our case, you use Flame (utility token) to pay for the goods & services (utility) on Sharesome (platform).
Above mentioned tokens are same, same, but different!
$ETH: Utility = Gas fees. Platform = Ethereum. Industry: Blockchain.
$BNB: Utility = Trading fees. Platform = Binance. Industry: Crypto Exchange.
$XFL: Utility = Promoted posts. Platform = Sharesome. Industry: Porn.
The Holy Grail for OnlyFans adult content creators: Advertising!
OnlyFans creators made a whopping $2 billion this year, but they can’t advertise their content anywhere. Adult content creators spend zero on paid advertising because they can’t. Their customer acquisition funnel is completely broken and relies 100% on organic social media growth.
Sharesome and its paid Promoted Post feature solve this problem. This year Sharesome generated over 400 million Promoted Post views for its advertisers and has currently an inventory of 50 million paid views per month — and growing. Sharesome’s Promoted Posts are accessible by purchasing “Flame Credits”, with budgets as low as $5. Promoted Posts run on a demand-and-supply basis, and as Sharesome Ads are still in their very early days, CPM pricing is still way lower than on mainstream social media. While CPM’s vary between $5–10 on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, CPMs on Sharesome can be $1 or even lower.
The ad business is the main utility for Flame Token. So, let’s have a look at the market for adult content:
Overall, for April 2020, the world’s top 100 sites garnered 14.5 billion views from 3.3 billion unique visitors who spent an average of six minutes watching porn videos. Another study shows that about 75 percent of the people looked at in the study, averaged 24 minutes of viewing per week.
The above leads us to believe that Sharesome has a total addressable market of around 3bn people and the company’s goal is to penetrate 10% of this market (300 Monthly Active Users (MAU)) within 10 years, while also reaching a very conservative ARPU (average quarterly revenue per user) of $0.56 (starting at $0.45 in year 1).
Before picking this growth pattern, we have considered several other growth alternatives. However, the current was deemed as the most realistic.
Based on the chosen growth model and the 10-year target, we can estimate the company’s revenue in the horizon of the next 10 years and what % of it will be facilitated through the token (100% in our case).
Side note: With around 1.3 million transactions per day, the Ethereum chain generated around $18 billion in revenues in the year 2021. The Ethereum price at the moment of the writing of this article was $4,110.57.
As Ethereums utility is the above-mentioned transaction volume, Flame Tokens utility is Sharesome’s ad revenue that we plan to grow to 142.6 million USD per year within the next 5 years. The Flame Token price at the moment of the writing of this article was $0.000356. Do your own math.
But why not Bitcoin, why your own token?
There are many benefits of issuing your own token.
We decided to build our own token for the same reasons that Ethereum and Binance decided to launch their own tokens:
1. First, we control the tokenomics of the token. For example, we can make it happen that creators can get in early.
2. Second, we control the technical implementation. For example, we can decide on which Blockchain the token runs, even build our own in the future.
3. Third, we can influence all legal aspects of our token. For example, we can design the token in a way that requires higher or lower KYC/AML implementations.
Or in other words: If we would have decided to implement Bitcoin, we must hope that the Bitcoin Core developers aim for low fees, high transaction volumes, a fair token distribution amongst content creators, an easy-to-access browser wallet, and so on. Do you see? We think that we are better off, being the master of our own fate.
That said, if you think of Flame, think of it as the whole ecosystem that we build with Sharesome. You also can not think about ETH without the Ethereum Blockchain being there.
Another important aspect of having your own token is mentioned by CZ from Binance in his latest blog post:
First, let’s look at how companies work. You have your users, who pay, then you have the company who builds the products and pays its colleagues, then gives the profits to their shareholders. In this model, money flows one way only. From users to company to shareholders.
It’s different with a token, you do an initial sale (ICO or IEO), and assuming the token offers some utility or benefits in your platform or ecosystem, the people buying and holding your token are typically your users.
When the price goes up, the token holders, your users, benefit. Thus, they are incentivized to use your platform more and get more friends onto your platform. They become your best salespeople. (Your users typically have more friends in your typical demographic.) And they get rewarded through token economics. It creates a positive virtuous cycle, a very sticky ecosystem.
You can’t do the above with fiat currencies. It just doesn’t work. You can’t do this even with bitcoin. You have to create a new token for your platform or ecosystem, otherwise, you can’t create a symbiotic growth environment with your users.
And he ends with:
I advise you to not create a token until you have product-market-fit. Tokens should be an acceleration mechanism, AFTER you have built a product that people want.
Check.
This might be the biggest difference between us and a typical shitcoin: We have already built the platform and the utility and proven by organic growth that we have a product-market-fit.
It is important to point out that most tokens in the area start with the concept of:
- Create a token
- Raise money in exchange for a promise of future utility
- Try to build said utility
The Flame Token on the other hand:
- Is already usable on the Sharesome platform
- Will not be raising money
Sustainable token allocation
In order to bootstrap the early days of the system and ensure that there is plenty of XFL liquidity, we already dedicated 20% of the total XFL supply to rewards for liquidity providers for the USDC/XFL pair on SushiSwap that will be locked in a smart contract. And we have locked another 6% of the total supply in our Yield Farming Pool, and another 4% in our XFL HODL Pool.
From the 21 billion XFL tokens that will ever exist, only 50% were minted on December 14th, 2018. The other 50% are held by a smart contract that is vesting 87,500,000 XFL per month, but only if we call the contract and request a payout. This is designed as a 10 year vesting period.
The percentage of XFL allocated to founders and team is 12%, the tokens allocated for early investors & advisors is 9%.
The token allocation in December 2021 will look like this:
Locked:
Smart Vesting Contract: 7,350,000,000 XFL (35%), will vest over the next 7 years
Founders and team: 1,855,000,004 XFL (8.83%), will vest over 12 month
Early investors & advisors: 1,496,250,000 XFL (7.13%), will vest over 12 month
Yield Farming Pool: 1,260,000,000 (6%), will be distributed over 25 weeks
Liquidity Provider Subsidy Program Pool: 4,200,000,000 (20%), will be distributed over 100 weeks
HODL Pool: 840,000,000 XFL (4%), will be distributed over 50 weeks
Liquidity Pools: 167,719,353 XFL (0.8%), locked in LP
= 81.76% of the total supply will be locked
Unlocked:
Treasury: 833,259,147 XFL (3.97%), already vested
Founders and Team: 559,999,996 XFL (2.67%), already vested
Early investors & advisors: 505,351,500 XFL (2.41%), already vested
Airdrop: 2,420,000 XFL (0.00%), already distributed
SushiSwap Harmony Sale: 250,000,000 XFL (1.19%), to be sold
SushiSwap Mainnet Sale: 1,680,000,000 XFL (8%), to be sold
= 18.24 % of the total supply is unlocked
With this token distribution and lockup model, we want to provide the best possible structure for Flame.
Further research
The best way to start your journey into Flame Token is our website: www.flametoken.io
Especially these parts:
Flame Token Whitepaper: https://flametoken.io/whitepaper/
Flame Token Economy Paper: https://flametoken.io/token-economy/
Join the conversation here:
Discord: https://discord.gg/xNh67NQSVf
Sharesome: https://sharesome.com/FlameToken/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FlameToken
Telegram: https://t.me/flametoken
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/flametoken
Best regards
Ralf Kappe, Flame CEO & Founder
https://sharesome.com/RalfKappe/ (NSFW)
https://twitter.com/RalfKappe
