Big Changes at RCRDSHP
A pause to secondary sales and NFT integration
This post serves as an announcement that we have deployed a large and significant change to RCRDSHP. We disabled the secondary market and Flow blockchain integration, which marks the end of an era for the site. Users can no longer “flip” collectibles to other users, pending significant changes to our business model and implementation.
RCRDSHP will continue to facilitate direct (aka “primary”) transactions between fans and artists via their storefronts. By doing so, we hope to preserve the essence of the platform. We see RCRDSHP primarily as a mechanism for artists to provide fans with unique, limited edition collectibles, some which unlock unique multimedia content and even real-life experiences such as guestlist access.
The primary drivers of this change are twofold. First we are trying to significantly reduce the complexity of the implementation, which until recently numbered in the hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Second, we are trying to slash hosting costs, which remain grossly out of proportion to the site’s traffic. Reducing complexity will allow me (Obie) to maintain the platform’s code by myself, since I’m the only remaining member of the technical staff. Slashing server costs will help us to preserve our remaining capital. We are hoping that by taking these admittedly drastic steps we can keep your RCRDSHP collectibles online for a long time to come.
Looking ahead to the future
Our remaining hope and the main reason that we’re not simply pulling the plug yet is to evolve RCRDSHP into a kind of Bandcamp crossed with Patreon, but focused on the electronic music genre in authentic and useful ways, like Beatport.
Those of you that have followed our journey from the start know that we’ve always been deeply suspicious of the speculators prevalent in the NFT community. Changing direction lays the groundwork for a new community that values the creative work of our artists purely on merits, without hoping to someday flip that work for a profit.
Please understand that it will take some time to complete this pivot and modify the platform accordingly. New drops and new artist signups are on hold until further notice. I have a long punch list of technical challenges to overcome, starting with migrations off incredibly expensive hosting at Heroku and incredibly expensive high-risk payments processing with Authorize.net. I’m sure that will take me months, plus it will also take time for me and Paula to make a business case for the new direction to our artist partners. For most of them, their latest revenue share payments wouldn’t cover a typical Starbucks visit.
Regarding platform features
Users should be able to access and enjoy their collection as long as we continue operating, however as mentioned above we have disabled the secondary market and blockchain integration (including Dapper Wallet) and we do not anticipate restoring this functionality, which means that we are essentially no longer an NFT platform.
Many other unique features are currently disabled, ranging from new artist signup, to coin balances, to burning and mixing, and holding cards in your “hand.” It is unclear which of these features will return and when. I still dream of using our many different kinds of artifact cards to build some sort of music-industry role playing game, but realistically that’s not going to happen.
Because of the outrageous minimum contract levels of our verification partner, we will lose our ability to do identity verifications at the end of October. If you’re not currently a verified user and want to be able withdraw your balance instead of only using it as store credit, please start that process as soon as possible.
Missed opportunities?
If you’re feeling like you missed your opportunity to sell some of your collection, I can assure you that chance passed a long time ago. Daily active users (DAU) has been in the low dozens for months, and secondary sales cratered to less than $20 average per week. To call the situation unsustainable is to put it mildly. I spent months working on plans for being able to move secondary sales of collectibles to a decentralized, pure-crypto model, but the complexity of such an undertaking was overwhelming.
Is RCRDSHP pointless without NFT backing? We launched way back in September 2021 with the ability to click through to Flowscan on each collectibles unique webpage. A short time later, that link disappeared due to a bug, and it took weeks for anyone to notice that it was gone. That was so shocking to me, that after restoring it I made sure that clicking that link was tracked as an event in our analytics system. According to our stats, it was subsequently clicked a total of 15 times in the last 2 years, including RCRDSHP staff. Draw your own conclusions.
A heartfelt thank you
We must add a heartfelt thank you to everyone that has been on the roller-coaster ride with us for the last two years. We want to express gratitude to all of you, from our small but dedicated band of hardcore fans (OGAF!), to our talented artists and content partners, gracious investors, and last but not least: the 100+ amazing people that worked on building RCRDSHP since we launched a couple years ago.
