Rally Turns 1: A Look Back and Ahead
Rally Celebrates Birthday With Commemorative NFT from James Sommerville and Forthcoming Launch of R Coin
Today marks the 1 year anniversary of the launch of the $RLY token, and in essence, the entire Rally.io project. As a thank you, we’re celebrating by minting a commemorative birthday NFT from KnownUnknown artist James Sommerville that all creators, creator coin holders and top developers will receive in the coming days. In addition, we’re announcing our own creator coin ($R) to celebrate and recognize the Rally.io community.
Our mission to become the preeminent platform for powering independent, community-driven economies is well under way and we have an exciting roadmap in place.
It’s been an incredible year of innovation and collaboration as we’ve partnered with creators, and their communities, as well as the $RLY community more broadly, to introduce and evangelize social tokens and NFTs by inspiring and educating on the benefits of building token economies.
Early Creator Experimentation and Success:
We’ve grown from a handful of streamers like Alliestrasza and DownToQuest to more than 200 — an eclectic mix of creators, gamers, musicians, artists, athletes and brands.
This year, they all partnered with their communities to offer a myriad of benefits ranging from an in-person hang at a music festival (Wax Motif), exclusive access to hear an artist’s new album before anyone else (BT), the opportunity to collaborate with a Grammy-winning producer (!llmind), virtual studio visits with a world-renowned artist (Jen Stark), exclusive access to weekly audio hangouts (Felicia Day), and endless more.
Out of 212 creators, more than 74% have built six-figure token economies with their communities and 5 have built token economies worth more than $1M USD. Through community activity rewards, Rally has disseminated more than $58M USD in $RLY to date to creators and their communities, an average of $2.2M USD each week in $RLY in Q3 alone.
It was a year of firsts. Portugal The Man became the first Grammy-winning artist to use crypto to distribute unreleased material and more recently gave holders presale access codes for forthcoming concerts. UCLA sophomore and basketball star, Jaylen Clark became the first college athlete to launch their own cryptocurrency quickly followed by University of Oregon defensive end Kayvon Thibodeaux. Rally also became the first crypto project to team up with a major talent agency, announcing our alliance with UTA in August.
Building a Strong and Vibrant Community:
From the beginning, we have prioritized building with our community and have been fortunate to develop such a strong and vibrant one. We established a series of community, creator, and developer calls, built an active Discord community and hired 4 people (Phelpsgg, Soul of Jacobeh, Vajresh Balaji, and djnuggets) from the community to be Rally Ambassadors. We built our first community council, the Creator Review Council (CRC), to review new creator applications. The CRC introduced the Innovative Use Reward pilot program to reward creators for innovative uses of their coins. We distributed 125,000 $RLY to 50+ creators during this pilot and will be launching a new version of this program very soon.
We also worked closely with our creator community to create tools, including Rally Discord Bot, Streamlabs and Stream Elements integrations, and Rallybase, a live alerts and Twitter tool. The Rally Discord Bot has been installed in over 90 creator servers and has over 8500 registered users.
Working Together to Improve and Expand Rally.io:
The last year has brought significant updates and improvements to Rally.io. We’ve worked to make all participants in the Rally ecosystem safer with improved Know Your Customer (KYC) capabilities, better onboarding and streamlined payments flows.
We have also added a major new creator tool to our toolbox with Rally NFTs. We believe social tokens and NFTs paired together complete a crypto economy. In August, we definitively entered this world with our creators with the launch of nft.rally.io, with a focus on utility over scarcity. We’re also able to mint social tokens and NFTs in an eco-friendly manner thanks to our sidechain.
NFTs are just the beginning of our journey into creator tools. We’re creating a robust developer ecosystem to build hundreds more use-cases. Our developers also experienced an incredible year with 1.79M $RLY in grants leading to creator solutions for token distribution, content gating and even merch marketplaces.
Introducing $R as the Source for Rally Recognition:
As part of the anniversary celebration, we are excited to announce Rally.io’s forthcoming official Creator Coin: $R. We are launching $R for a number of reasons. First and foremost, we want a platform that we can use to recognize you, our community. NFTs minted from the $R Coin give us an opportunity to reward you, recognize you and celebrate you. The $R Coin also gives the Rally.io team a chance to “eat our own cooking” or “dance to our own music” — we will feel everything our creators feel and understand the strengths and limitations of Rally much more clearly. Mostly, we just want to have fun experimenting and building alongside all of you.
What the $R Coin is NOT designed for is earning money. This is a tool to help us support our community, not a tool to compete with you. This means that the $R Coin will not be eligible for Weekly Rewards and that any Royalties on NFT sales will pass either to our partner artists and organizations or be set to 0%. We’re excited at working with all of you to come up with new and interesting ways to use $R to build Rally.io together. We’ll share more details, including a launch date, soon.
Commemorative Birthday NFT:
And while it’s Rally’s birthday, the real gift this year has been all of you. Your support, dedication and feedback has been invaluable. As a token of our appreciation, next week, all creators, creator coin holders and our top developers will receive a commemorative birthday NFT from KnownUnknown artist James Sommerville.
On behalf of the entire Rally team, thank you for an amazing start. We look forward to celebrating October 15 for years to come!
