Have you ever bought limited-edition sneakers or records? Did you stay up all night outside the store waiting in line? Or did you buy it from middlemen at ten times its issue price?
Yes, those middlemen conquer the market, not the creators. The price goes up because the supply is limited yet demand is huge. And the profit flows into the middlemen’s pocket while creators could only stand by.
Then why not let creators build their own market?
There are 2 platforms, Foundation and Zora trying to achieve this: a dynamic market owned by the creator, which allows them to maximize their sharing of profit.
They both describe themselves as “exchanges”, for art, for culture, for everything creative.
How does it work? By using crypto.
(From Foundation)
(From Zora)
Both platforms perfectly demonstrate this creative economy in a minimal and fancy way. So we’re giving you a text version of explantation.
As a creator:
You drop a limited-edition item in the market. Each piece is represented by an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. If anyone wants the real item, they must use the token to redeem it from you. What’s more, you charge trade fees whenever a token is sold back into the market.
As a buyer:
The token can be bought on the platforms where the product is dropped, as well as in certain exchanges. When you buy this token, you can either redeem it directly for the product or trade it freely in an open market. The token price rises when more collectors buy it, so you benefit from the trading.
In this way, creators can simply set a bottom price and let the market decide from there, capturing the value along the way. Fans can now buy and sell the goods without waiting in line for the drop for hours, as they can easily trade online. And the buyers’ money can be truly used to support the artists they admire. Sounds like a win-win ecosystem.
Then what fantastic creations had been released on Foundation or Zora so far? We all know if the goods themselves are not attractive or creative enough, the buyers and the market won’t even spare a glance.
The first creator on Zora is the Grammy-award winning artist Andre Allen Anjos a.k.a. RAC. When his latest album Boy came out, he also dropped the $TAPE token for the cassette tape. According to his interview, he has been interested in Ethereum for long. So this time, he decided “let’s do limited-edition goods on Ethereum and do it on a fixed price curve”.
The price of this limited edition Boy cassette tape is now $213.73, which goes up 968.65% from its issue price. You can buy $TAPE token on Zora or in exchanges such as Uniswap.
The same goes for Foundation. A product price could rise several times than its initial price.
Will this new creative economy powered by blockchain technology be a favorable choice for artists to issue their limited edition?
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