Partnering with Coil: Enabling the Future of Web Monetization

Ethan Beard
Xpring
Published in
3 min readAug 15, 2019

Coil launched with a mission to make it easier for content creators — like journalists, video creators, podcasters, photographers and artists — to monetize and distribute their content across the web. Current monetization models are broken, and cater to large companies that are able to collect and sell user data as well as advertise on their platforms. Unlike traditional advertising or site-by-site subscription based models, Coil’s platform enables streaming micropayments to creators in real time using the Interledger Protocol (ILP), which allows XRP or any currency to be used for sending and receiving payments.

Today, we are announcing that Xpring has partnered with Coil on a 1 billion XRP grant to bring consumers and creators alike onto Coil’s platform. The funds from the grant will be deployed over time to increase the adoption of XRP and ILP through Coil’s platform, providing utility and liquidity to the ecosystem of creators, developers, companies and nonprofits using XRP through the open Web Monetization standard.

At Xpring, our belief is that crypto presents an opportunity to realign interests and incentives of marketplaces of all types through the creation of new business models. Several of our largest partnerships to date, including Coil and gaming platform Forte, have the potential to do just that. With ILP, Coil has created an entirely new business model around micropayments which allows creators, curators and users to compensate and support one another. The funds that Xpring provides allows these companies to build platforms that deeply embed XRP and ILP, and to help drive adoption and engage users.

Xpring isn’t a VC firm — we create infrastructure and tools for developers to build with XRP and we deploy capital to drive adoption of these technologies to unlock XRP’s full potential. Because our business model isn’t about generating venture returns and profits, we have the flexibility to support companies, entrepreneurs and projects at varying lifecycles and stages and in forms different from traditional investors. Xpring’s goal is to invest in the XRP developer ecosystem with profits being reinvested into businesses and projects that we believe will drive XRP adoption. Enabling the Internet of Value requires long term bets and a long term commitment.

Partnering with Coil is a natural fit for us not only because of the team’s DNA — which includes folks like Stefan Thomas who served at Ripple’s CTO for many years and is a co-creator of ILP — but also for its natural alignment with XRP and ILP. The low cost and fast transactions of XRP makes it an ideal tool for Coil to offer an alternative monetization method, and to have a positive impact on content creators.

In less than a year since launch, Coil has processed 10 billion payments to creators on its platform, and has announced its partnership and investment in Imgur, the community-powered entertainment platform, and Cinnamon, a video streaming service.

We’re excited to partner with Coil on their journey, and believe they’re the right team to bring new content monetization models that better serves content creators to the internet. Read more about Coil.

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