Setting the Course for Rally Post-Decentralization Vote and Beyond

This year the entire $RLY community and the Rally team have worked to scale Rally.io to become the preeminent creator monetization and community engagement platform that connects crypto to creative communities. Rally has launched social tokens for 180 creators and rewarded 40M in $RLY ($28M USD) to creators and their communities. But this is just the beginning.

Last week, the $RLY community passed a proposal that will create five separate and independent entities built on the $RLY network protocol. As part of the proposal, the community approved a substantial budget to sustain the growth of the flagship application, Rally, for years to come.

This year, I have had the honor of serving as the community-appointed CMO / CRO for the $RLY project and I am now excited to have the opportunity to serve as CEO for Rally to guide an amazing leadership team with decades of experience in the creator economy. Rally believes that creators and their communities deserve more of what they create and our mission is to partner with creative communities to help them launch and grow their independent economies. We believe that the blockchain and cryptocurrencies put more power back in the hands of creators and creative communities and we are excited to take Rally into the next phases of creator economy adoption.

As we go forward, Rally remains committed to continuing to operate in an open, transparent and collaborative fashion with the community and will continue to engage creators and developers as partners in this journey.

Today, we’re excited to share some of our progress and preview our priorities for the coming years.

Expanded Leadership Team:

Having a leadership team with passion and expertise in the creator and crypto economies is of paramount importance as the project continues to grow. Over the past few months, we have prioritized adding a number of seasoned leaders to drive Rally forward.

Rally co-founder Mike Li continues as CTO to guide our new product and engineering leaders while Chris Fortier (Twitch) joins us to lead the product organization. Carol Chen just joined us from Pandora to head engineering and is partnering with Jeremy Tan to oversee our engineering efforts and drive further scalability and stability for the Rally product. Stephanie Pereira (Kickstarter) is leading creator success and building out a team to foster a vibrant Rally ecosystem, expand our partnerships with creator platforms and develop the tools and education to help creators grow their economies. Nick Millman (Twitter) is overseeing the Creator Partnerships team and working to expand creator adoption across a wide variety of creative categories and creator backgrounds. Kurt Patat (YouTube/MTV) is leading our communications efforts and expanding awareness for Rally and the innovative ways in which creators and their communities are building their economies. Michelle Vautier (Facebook/Patreon) is managing Payments and driving an robust payments infrastructure for creative communities. Johnny Tong (Peets) joins us to lead finance and people operations.

One-stop shop for creative communities to launch their crypto economies:

From a product standpoint, yesterday, we unveiled the first phase of Rally’s NFT platform that will focus on utility over scarcity and provide another way for creators and fans to transact directly, enabling a new shared economy where creators and fans can grow together. By the end of the year, we will integrate NFTs directly into creator coin pages.

While most present NFT use cases have focused on digital collectibles, our vision re-casts NFTs as experiential and personal. The system will allow creators to not only offer limited edition artwork and digital collectibles, but will also encompass:

• One-on-one interactions via a video call or AMA
• Access to private communities
• Physical and digital goods like merch or tickets
• Countless other experiences.

And as a critical benefit, NFTs minted with Rally do not require expensive gas fees or large expenditures of energy, making them even more flexible and ready for experimentation. Additionally, they can be distributed without Rally taking a fee making it a more rewarding option for creators and their fans.

We cannot wait to unlock the creativity of our creator and developer community as we develop a system that ties both fungible and non-fungible tokens into one cohesive economy.

Connecting Creators and Developers to Drive Deeper Community Engagement and Commerce:

We’ve been fortunate to work with a vibrant developer ecosystem and are prioritizing ongoing expansion with the goal of creating new and exciting products and use-cases built by third-parties.

Recently, we hosted our inaugural developer day demo where the Rally developer community presented several new products they are building for Rally creators. Several of the developers have also received $RLY grants to fuel their innovation. We’ve been excited to see certain developers receive outside venture-funding to build on top of Rally.

We’ll soon share our plans to level up our support for the dev ecosystem with mentorship, resources and a significant financial commitment to reward contributions to the ecosystem.

Rich Pipeline of New Creators and Fan Communities:

Over the course the year, the Rally team has prioritized building deep relationships with creators and the overall talent industry. There are now 180 creators on Rally with recent launches including gamer and streamer Mang0, TikTok superstars Michael Le, Joe Bartollozi and Isabella Avila, AEW wrestler Maxwell Jacob Friedman, and tech influencer Chris Messina, to name a few. Just this week alone with launched heavy metal royalty Megadeth, Tik Tok super star Anthony Reeves and more. These new creators join an impressive roster that includes Grammy-award winners Portugal the Man and !llmind, Clubhouse innovators Bomani X and Christina Holder, international soccer star Keisuke Honda, and global esports organization Gen G.

Last week, we announced a groundbreaking alliance with UTA, a leading global talent and literary agency, to educate and inspire creators, artists, celebrities, athletes, to launch their own social tokens with Rally. We are currently in the process of forging more of these alliances so that we can shine a light on the value of decentralized, independent economies across the entire talent industry.

While we are having conversations with some of the most influential creators in the world, our ambition is that Rally supports creators of all types and within all moments of their creative careers. We are in the process of building out new mechanisms for more scalable onboarding to unlock our ability to work with all creators and are excited to expand the number and type of creators that we launch significantly in the coming months.

Developing a brand identity to partner with creators:

Last, but not least, yesterday, we unveiled a new website and brand identity. We set out to create a brand that gives voice to the chorus of the creative community, and an identity that has the flexibility to change in any creator’s hands and be shared across the entire spectrum of participants.

The brand identity is flexible — allowing creators to take the guidelines and apply it wherever and however they engage with their fans. It provides structure and consistency while allowing for the community to take the brand and adapt it in a decentralized fashion. We took inspiration from the early MTV logo and are excited to see all of the creative ways the community adopts and adapts the brand identity.

The new brand features heavily on our recently launched website. The website includes a number of new features including a more clear path for creators and fans to educate themselves on the value of social tokens and the opportunities for community engagement enabled via crypto. With the new website we:

• Created a quick educational video on the homepage that highlights how to launch a social token economy.
• Updated the creator coin pages to more clearly feature the value propositions for fans when adopting their favorite creator’s coin.
• Developed a new article hub that includes inspirational and educational case studies of creators on the platform to help guide creators as they launch and grow their economies and to help fans to better understand how to engage.
• Launched a new landing page for featured 3rd-Party developers that allows creators to explore the vibrant ecosystem of developers that are creating businesses on and around Rally.

This is the first step in a continuing, iterative evolution of Rally’s product offering and we’re continuing to receive feedback from the creators and the $RLY community on further improvements. We’re looking forward to reflecting this feedback in releases to come!

We’ve recently relaunched on Twitter and later today, we will officially launch on Instagram. Additionally, we will shortly be working with creators within the Rally community to commission inspirational and educational content to help other creators and fans better understand the opportunities offered by social tokens and NFTs.

Later this year, we are looking forward to initiating a brand campaign that highlights the exciting ways in which creators are leveraging the Rally platform to engage their communities.

Shifting the paradigm together:

During my time at Patreon as the head of GTM, I saw the impact that a direct-to-fan monetization model can have on creator empowerment and independence. This empowerment and independence leads to a deeper relationship between fans and creators and allows for a more vibrant creative community. I am so excited for the opportunity to take this a step further by bringing crypto, and the benefits offered via social tokens and NFTs, to creative communities.

We are in the middle of a paradigm shift and I am so excited to be partnering with a great team at Rally and an exciting and engaged community of creators and developers to build the future of creative community engagement.