They may seem to have the world at their feet, but like the rest of us, they are at the mercy of centralized controllers, in their case the social media that connects them to their fans.
These platforms can cut off creators from their audiences in one fell swoop, explained Andras Kristof, CEO of “unstoppable community” platform Galaxis. “If YouTube gives you three strikes because its AI gets something wrong, or for whatever reason the platform owner decides they don’t like you, you’re cut off from the community you’ve built on that platform,” he said.
Web3 offers creators the ability to “directly reach out to their community,” Christophe explained. “You can use any platform to get your message out,” he said, but if a platform turns off a creator, “you still have your community — you need to find another way to deliver your value to them, but you don’t need to start rebuilding it.”
Galaxis has worked with celebrities including Steve Aoki and Mike Tyson and brands like the NBA to help build Web3 communities around their fan bases. The firm creates the underlying infrastructure for online communities based on NFT “digital membership cards,” which offer holders benefits like redemption and access to certain private channels. “What Galaxis has created is a combination of Kickstarter and Patreon,” Christophe said. “It’s a funding and monetization structure based on digital membership cards.”
“We wanted to give them the opportunity to provide value to their community members,” he said. Decipher“That value is the value of their definition, not some universal value or attention or anything like that – it can vary greatly from community to community.”
For Tyson, for example, “one of the benefits was that if you had this particular NFT, you could actually contact them and have a physical meeting with Mike Tyson.” The lucky winner spent three days at Tyson’s ranch, “and Tyson even sparred with the guy,” Christophe said. That winner later became an early investor in Galaxis, he added.
Meanwhile, the Galaxis NBA collection included player cards that received bonuses and upgrades “dynamically based on their performance on the court,” he explained. “They were updated based on data provided to us by the NBA.”
For William Rudolf Lobkowicz, a descendant of the Czech royal family, Galaxis developed a community platform for Lobkowicz’s art collection using QR codes attached to collectible pieces. “You could pick up NFTs and put them on a digital membership card, essentially creating an experience that encourages people to visit physical spaces like art galleries and libraries,” Christoph said.
Construction of infrastructure
Galaxis is focused on building the underlying infrastructure for these communities, which is “no easy task,” Christophe said. “Yes, we can put important things on the blockchain, but you still need web servers, you still need centralized infrastructure that can be stopped.”
The company’s digital membership cards store all perks, benefits and other redeemable bonuses in a chain, he said, while the company is currently building the infrastructure that will enable the creation of fully “unstoppable communities.”
“The entire Galaxis infrastructure has already been built in such a way that when you create your community, it’s not created in a big Galaxis web server database,” he explained. “All it takes to run your own community is a set of microservices that are created for you and only you, so there’s no big Galaxis database, no big Galaxis server. Each new community runs it in its own container.”
Galaxis Monthly Digest, July
🎉Our first monthly digest is here! July brought some exciting new community launches, important updates, and steady growth in #Galaxis.
👉 If you want to stay updated, this update is for you.
All the details here:… pic.twitter.com/08KZcPoA7N
— Galaxis (@Galaxisxyz) August 7, 2024
In subsequent releases, Christoph explained, “We can give this container to you,” so users can run their communities on their own terms. Version 3 of Galaxis “will put all of this into a distributed system,” built on the decentralized data storage and distribution technology platform Swarm. “If you combine the best features of the Tor network, IPFS, and BitTorrent, you get Swarm,” he said. “It’s basically an IPFS system that’s fully encrypted and has cryptoeconomic benefits for you to run a node.
“With Swarm, you can actually deploy websites,” he said. “In short, Galaxis technology with a Swarm backend can create a truly unstoppable community as long as you have access to the internet.”
Playing the trump card
Galaxis recently took part in perhaps the company’s biggest project to date, providing the underlying Web3 infrastructure for Donald Trump’s NFT collections, which Christoph called a “massive success.”
On December 15, 2022, Trump launched his first NFT collection, featuring 45,000 digital trading cards priced at $99 each. “We had a year to sell them out, and they sold out in one day,” Trump said during an interview. Bloomberg about his first NFT launch.
Subsequent releases followed, including a commemorative “MugShot Edition” released after the arrest of a Republican presidential candidate in Georgia. It’s a shining example of how NFTs can allow media outlets to respond to breaking events in the news cycle by speaking directly to their communities.
“The natural next step would be to turn this into a long-term, self-sustaining community,” Christophe said, “with proper membership cards and potential monthly payments.”
“In many ways, I do think that times are changing, and for better or worse, cryptocurrency has become one of the hottest topics of the election,” Christophe said, with Trump’s support for NFTs becoming something of an indicator of his pro-crypto platform.
After all, other politicians and even political parties could theoretically follow Trump’s lead by launching their own “unstoppable communities,” Kristof said. “If there’s a Kamala Harris community, I don’t think there’s anything stopping them from using this kind of digital membership card to track members of the community.”
“It’s important to stress that who we work with doesn’t necessarily reflect my personal views,” Christoph said. He added that it would be “hypocritical” to refuse to work with certain parties because they don’t share those views, given that Galaxis is designed to allow people to “create communities even if others don’t like them.”
Ultimately, Galaxis is meant to function as “infrastructure,” he said. “The goal is to create a structure where I don’t have to work with them, they don’t have to work with me. They can do it themselves.”
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