Context: Adoption of cryptocurrencies has picked up significantly in the last 2 years. There are now an estimated 200M people globally who own some amount of cryptocurrencies. The adoption of non-custodial wallets (eg: Metamask, Rainbow on ETH, Phantom on Solana) has not reached those levels yet but is growing rapidly- Metamask has 10M Monthly Active Users & Phantom has 2M Monthly Active Users (growing 100% MoM). With the adoption curve going up, we could see a real majority of the population in crypto-friendly nations owning some exposure to crypto assets.
The developer activity building decentralized applications has also been at an all time high, with new developers joining the ecosystem and building every single day. With mainstream culture and users being driven to crypto, we will see hundreds of new applications and products being created and others building infrastructure to power those. When it comes to digital assets and NFTs, OpenSea has successfully built a massive presence to let users search, buy and sell NFTs across ETH and Polygon with over 1M users having transacted on platform.
Problem: The publishing and content industry has never been able to successfully launch micro-payments because of infrastructure problems around the fiat payments industry:
There cannot be a fat application layer on top of the existing publication/application where you consume content. eg: There is too much friction if a user has to sign up for a separate service, add money to it and then do micro-payments.
Existing payment providers cannot handle micro-payments / It is too expensive to power micro-payments. eg: Stripe takes a fixed fee of 29c + 2.9%- processing a payment of $1 means the publisher/content creator loses 30% just on the transaction.
Difficult to get adoption as an interoperable service. eg: If a third party company is building an inter-operable service for all content publishers, they run into the issue of building demand on one side before the other which is capital intensive
Solution: With scalable L2s like Polygon or L1s like Solana, it is now possible to process micro-transactions which cost <$0.01. There are significant other benefits for both publishers & consumers to adopt crypto at the transaction layer:
Publishers can start accepting payments from consumers globally without having to implement region or country-specific payment processors.
Consumers don’t have to memorize several credit cards or payment methods and transactions happen instantaneously.
On top of this, wallets and NFTs can serve as an authentication mechanism to prove a user (or wallet) has access to a piece of content. eg:
User navigates to a website to read an article.
User pays $0.10 + (negligible tx fee) to the publisher to read the article.
As part of the transaction, the user receives an NFT that gives them access to that particular article. (Publishers can choose if these NFTs can be transferred or not)
The website checks if the connected user (wallet) has the NFT required to consume that content and then displays the content if the user has access
This solves both the transaction problem that publishers face as well as the friction to sign up/in that users face trying to remember password for hundreds of websites where they have accounts
Product/Service: A platform that lets publishers create and publish pieces; lets consumers mint NFTs + pay to consume content on an article by article level; and let users “log” in and consume content they have access to. Building a simple Substack like interface to publish and consume content along with a lightweight wrapper around ThirdWeb’s APIs to create + mint NFTs.
Things to figure out:
Subscriptions- could be done as NFTs as well?
Notifications when new articles come out- EPNS for ETH/Polygon. N/A for Solana yet
NFT spam/too many NFTs in a wallet- rewards for sending NFTs to a burn address?
Demo:
Go to this website and connect your wallet