We’ve been thinking a lot about how to help writers earn money in new and meaningful ways. Not just to support individual writers, but to grow the entire ecosystem — bringing more writers (and readers) onchain and building a thriving creative economy around ideas.

As part of that, we’ve been considering how we could use coins to help writers make more money. We’re not committed to launching anything yet, but we wanted to share a few early thoughts — partly to clarify our thinking, mostly to hear what you think.

Today, the most common monetization on Paragraph is open edition collecting: writers publish a post, readers mint it as an NFT, and the writer receives a small payment per mint.

While it’s certainly unique, there haven’t been a lot of examples of writers, artists, musicians, or any type of creator that’s turned this into a consistent, durable income stream. On Paragraph, the only use case we’ve really seen work is leaning into speculation, allowing readers to collect with the hope of an airdrop, token allocation, or some future financial gain. Here are a couple recent examples: Apiology DAO (over 31,000 collects over the past few months) and Ink the future (one post with over 46,000 collects).

There’s nothing wrong with this use case. But we feel there’s more we can do to radically expand the amount of writing and creative work on the internet, well beyond company’s sharing updates and announcements.

Other platforms like Zora and Rodeo have experimented with adding secondary markets after open editions, aiming to spark more speculative activity. These have been worthy experiments and show promise, but don’t seem to have generated too much growth in sustainable commerce. Switching from an open edition to a secondary market for each post, and all that comes with it, is a tricky product experience to get right.

Speculation, whether we like it or not, is one of crypto’s strongest features. Removing speculation or only making it accessible in convoluted ways makes it much harder for onchain apps to gain traction.

So how could coins (ERC-20 tokens) offer a better alternative to open edition NFTs (ERC-721)?

• Compared to open edition NFTs, coins give readers the opportunity to sell or trade, introducing the potential for financial upside.

• Compared to limited edition NFTs, coins offer much better liquidity and are far easier to buy, sell, and exchange over time.

• Writers get paid from every transaction — not just an initial mint.

• Writers can hold their own coins, benefitting as their work gains value.

• Readers can participate in upside when they support a writer early.

• Coins can reward other valuable behaviors, like sharing, editing, or remixing a post.

Further, coins are a little more flexible and interoperable. There’s a good shot the core benefits above open up new opportunities and lead to a lot of compelling second-order effects that are unimaginable right now.

Compared to open edition mints, coins feel like they have a better shot at growing the economy around creative work.

But there are certainly still big risks to consider.

First, coins introduce more mental overhead and complexity around the purchase behavior. You have to decide how many coins to buy and when to buy them. After buying coins, there’s an ongoing decision burden of whether to hold or sell. Easy purchase decisions are part of the reason bundles outperform a-la-carte products, and why subscriptions outperform micro- and one-off payments. With coins, decisions are more abstract and unintuitive, all of which are amplified by this being a totally new type of purchase behavior.

Going viral should be incentivized and rewarded. BUT, if it’s the only way to make money with coins, we’re right back to the internet of today. Ideally, we have an ecosystem that helps you go viral to get discovered and find new audience. But then for some of that audience to be loyal and stick around, providing foundational support for any ongoing creative work.

Another risk is the requirement to sell to profit from a rising coin price. This is no problem for speculators, but hard for readers that care about the writer. There's quite a bit of psychological risk here for writers — having readers unsubscribe is one thing, canceling a paid subscription hurts a little more... but selling a coin associated with your work? That might sting even more. Even more problematic is requiring the writer to sell their own coins to profit, which may signal loss of faith in their work (or, worse, evoke scar tissue of past rug pulls).

Finally, speculation. Coins may be better at tapping into speculation, but if that’s the only reason people (or bots) are buying coins, we may end up in another short-term cash grab. Speculation needs to play a supporting role, not the primary motivator, for coins to be a durable monetization feature.

I’m hopeful some of the risks above can be chipped away through product design, marketing, fine-tuning incentives, and broadly trying to guide the overall experience toward valuable, durable behavior.

But sitting above all of this is the central question: will people actually buy coins for creative work?

We’ll explore that in Part 2.

We’ve been thinking a lot about how to help writers earn money in new and meaningful ways. Not just to support individual writers, but to grow the entire ecosystem — bringing more writers (and readers) onchain and building a thriving creative economy around ideas.

As part of that, we’ve been considering how we could use coins to help writers make more money. We’re not committed to launching anything yet, but we wanted to share a few early thoughts — partly to clarify our thinking, mostly to hear what you think.

Today, the most common monetization on Paragraph is open edition collecting: writers publish a post, readers mint it as an NFT, and the writer receives a small payment per mint.

While it’s certainly unique, there haven’t been a lot of examples of writers, artists, musicians, or any type of creator that’s turned this into a consistent, durable income stream. On Paragraph, the only use case we’ve really seen work is leaning into speculation, allowing readers to collect with the hope of an airdrop, token allocation, or some future financial gain. Here are a couple recent examples: Apiology DAO (over 31,000 collects over the past few months) and Ink the future (one post with over 46,000 collects).

There’s nothing wrong with this use case. But we feel there’s more we can do to radically expand the amount of writing and creative work on the internet, well beyond company’s sharing updates and announcements.

Other platforms like Zora and Rodeo have experimented with adding secondary markets after open editions, aiming to spark more speculative activity. These have been worthy experiments and show promise, but don’t seem to have generated too much growth in sustainable commerce. Switching from an open edition to a secondary market for each post, and all that comes with it, is a tricky product experience to get right.

Speculation, whether we like it or not, is one of crypto’s strongest features. Removing speculation or only making it accessible in convoluted ways makes it much harder for onchain apps to gain traction.

So how could coins (ERC-20 tokens) offer a better alternative to open edition NFTs (ERC-721)?

• Compared to open edition NFTs, coins give readers the opportunity to sell or trade, introducing the potential for financial upside.

• Compared to limited edition NFTs, coins offer much better liquidity and are far easier to buy, sell, and exchange over time.

• Writers get paid from every transaction — not just an initial mint.

• Writers can hold their own coins, benefitting as their work gains value.

• Readers can participate in upside when they support a writer early.

• Coins can reward other valuable behaviors, like sharing, editing, or remixing a post.

Further, coins are a little more flexible and interoperable. There’s a good shot the core benefits above open up new opportunities and lead to a lot of compelling second-order effects that are unimaginable right now.

Compared to open edition mints, coins feel like they have a better shot at growing the economy around creative work.

But there are certainly still big risks to consider.

First, coins introduce more mental overhead and complexity around the purchase behavior. You have to decide how many coins to buy and when to buy them. After buying coins, there’s an ongoing decision burden of whether to hold or sell. Easy purchase decisions are part of the reason bundles outperform a-la-carte products, and why subscriptions outperform micro- and one-off payments. With coins, decisions are more abstract and unintuitive, all of which are amplified by this being a totally new type of purchase behavior.

Going viral should be incentivized and rewarded. BUT, if it’s the only way to make money with coins, we’re right back to the internet of today. Ideally, we have an ecosystem that helps you go viral to get discovered and find new audience. But then for some of that audience to be loyal and stick around, providing foundational support for any ongoing creative work.

Another risk is the requirement to sell to profit from a rising coin price. This is no problem for speculators, but hard for readers that care about the writer. There's quite a bit of psychological risk here for writers — having readers unsubscribe is one thing, canceling a paid subscription hurts a little more... but selling a coin associated with your work? That might sting even more. Even more problematic is requiring the writer to sell their own coins to profit, which may signal loss of faith in their work (or, worse, evoke scar tissue of past rug pulls).

Finally, speculation. Coins may be better at tapping into speculation, but if that’s the only reason people (or bots) are buying coins, we may end up in another short-term cash grab. Speculation needs to play a supporting role, not the primary motivator, for coins to be a durable monetization feature.

I’m hopeful some of the risks above can be chipped away through product design, marketing, fine-tuning incentives, and broadly trying to guide the overall experience toward valuable, durable behavior.

But sitting above all of this is the central question: will people actually buy coins for creative work?

We’ll explore that in Part 2.