Title: Authentik
Description
An NFT marketplace designed for social media creators, specifically Youtubers and TikTokers.
Vision
A platform for social media creators to sell digital assets. Not limited to just an NFT marketplace, but also supporting a Shopify-esque experience for creators to plug and play digital asset stores into their personally branded sites.
Problem
Social media creators put enormous effort into developing content for their personal brands, but they have limited control over how they monetize this content. Some can post on platforms which will pay them ad revenue (Youtube) but the creators have no control over their ad-rates, and are susceptible to the platform’s monetization decisions. Others (TikTokers) have no direct revenue streams for their digital content, they rely on their following and stature to funnel other streams of revenue (merch, brand deals). Moreover, Virality is under-monetized, especially so for smaller creators who struggle to monetize their organically viral content.
Solution
A platform that enables social media creators to seamlessly convert their content into digital assets on the blockchain that they can sell to their following. This product is best-suited to be a dapp because it is critical that the digital assets are “authentik”-ly produced by their true creators to give them value.
Product
Features Intended for an Initial Release:
- Youtubers create accounts that are verified
- We have methods of doing this automatically that we would be happy to chat about
- Creators can produce NFT/SFTs of their videos and auction it off on our platform
- Users can purchase digital assets from their favourite creators and re-sell on OpenSea, Nifty Gateway etc.
Long Term Product Targets:
- Plug and play Shopify-esque experience for creators to embed their digital asset stores into their own websites
- Support for other social media platforms: Snapchat, Instagram
- Stock-like experiences
- Enabling creators to have their posts held “publicly” much like companies can be held “publicly”’
- Making NFTs more tangible
- Giving NFT owners some control over the social media posting (i.e. control over description)
Validation
Proof of Industry (we’ll keep this short):
- 2.3B MAUs on Youtube
- 5.5x user growth on TikTok from 2018-2020
Proof of Market:
- 40% increase in the number of channels earning > 10k USD on Youtube in 2020
- This is key. There is significant growth in the number of people converting their online presence into businesses. These people are looking for additional streams of revenue from their online content.
- TikTok has early-stage, highly limited ad campaigns. There are TikTokers with > 100M users primarily monetizing their content indirectly (merch, brand deals). There is massive potential here for individuals looking to directly capitalize on the content they would be making anyways.
Progress
Our team is working hard to develop this idea. We estimate that we are about two weeks out from a beta-launch that would fully support the Youtube platform. To date we have implemented:
- Account management and creator verification
- NFT creation
- Core UI
At the moment we are iterating on our design, fixing bugs and getting our code audited for security.
Differentiation
- Competing NFT marketplaces do not adequately support the social media space
- They are too generic (OpenSea, Rarible etc.)
- Social Media users are attached to the communities within their platforms, so it makes sense for those platforms to have corresponding NFT marketplaces
- Competing marketplaces present all content in the same way. A TikTok should match the feel of a TikTok, a Youtube video should match the feel of a Youtube video. Our platform is true to these qualitative, social media specific, details.
- Identity Verification is Key
- We provide a unique and seamless way for creators to verify themselves on our platform, and we visualize this to the user in a way that makes sense for that platform
- Only verified creators can mint on Authentik, this ensures value security for buyers
- Verification is automated -> We don’t have barriers to validation
- Our platform is built for the social community (we won’t hand pick the creators we want to verify like NiftyGateway, because this unfairly diminishes the value that smaller creators can produce).
- In this case, NFTs are only valuable if they are authentically produced by the actual creator, and we have tailored that to social creators
- We provide a unique and seamless way for creators to verify themselves on our platform, and we visualize this to the user in a way that makes sense for that platform
Team
Jasraj Bedi - Founder, Security Engineer
Four years of experience developing ETH dapps, and two years of professional blockchain security auditing experience. Blockchain Developer for: Minebusker (ETH Waterloo) and Pr!ce (ETH Denver). Ex. Security Engineer at Google. Perfect Blue hacker.
Ishan Ghimire - Founder, Solidity & Web3 Developer
Two years of experience developing ETH dapps including award winning projects: Minebusker (ETH Waterloo) and Pr!ce (ETH Denver). SWE Roles @ Shopify, Canadian Department of Defence and TAMVOES.
Sam Orend - Founder, Fullstack Web3 Developer
Two years of experience developing ETH dapps including award winning projects: Minebusker (ETH Waterloo) and Pr!ce (ETH Denver). SWE Roles @ Vidyard and Ford.
Anweshi Anavadya - Founder, Solidity Developer
Two years of experience developing ETH dapps including award winning projects: Minebusker (ETH Waterloo) and Pr!ce (ETH Denver). SWE Roles @ University of Waterloo.
Grant Request
We would like 2000 DAI to help us get this to the community! We have plans on how to use this money strategically in order to bring this Dapp to the social community! These mainly involve covering deployment costs, and specific marketing techniques that we are happy to discuss.
Help/Additional Resources
Slide Deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jV0sSc2anxBzTaQOm9cx9O2sf94dXmcZQdtpbcALxM0/edit?usp=sharing