At Staxe, we are building a permission-less, censorship-resistant and decentralized ecosystem to allow artists, independent labels and event promoters to connect with their fans and align everybody’s interests by tokenizing productions.
Problems with the current state of the music industry
The music industry is broken. Artists face many challenges when creating music. High quality recordings are expensive, profits are cut when distributing music to audiences via streaming services, and middlemen take a percentage of the money earned from a song’s royalties. It takes musicians on average around 300,000 streams to earn $1,000, therefore, many artists rely on live performances.
However, concerts and festivals have been plagued by outright scams, incompetence, and difficult market conditions which weighs in on the certainty the artists can have on touring revenue. Thus, musicians tend to seek out support for financing, promoting, and distributing their songs.
Our Solution
The connection between artists and their most loyal fans is not optimized in web2 platforms which represent fans as ‘listeners’ or ‘followers’. By enabling web3’s approach for verifiable digital ownership of music, tickets, and merchandise, tokenized music assets allow a more accessible and liquid representation of music and art. These liquid fragments of ownership are sold to fans, funding their art while allowing fans to own a share of creators’ digital economy.
We envision an ecosystem fully on-chain that allows for a transparent, fluid, and immutable flow of value without delays of payouts.
Staxe will concentrate on providing the following solutions:
Provide artists and independent labels opportunities to seek new forms of financing through our platform
Offer community building tools for artists to improve the connection with their most loyal fans
Enable fans to be much closer to their favorite artists through unique digital channels and content
At its most basic level, any creator can come to the Staxe platform and create tokens or NFTs for their upcoming production. The creator will define all parameters before tokens are generated; this includes the amount they wish to raise, as well as what fans will get in return. Artists can choose to grant users and collectors holding these unique items exclusive access (e.g., AMAs with artists, IRL meetings, exclusive content). In addition, creators can offer a share of their success to their fans through royalties stemming from the copyright of the creation. Instead of being consumers, fans are now a community of stakeholders whose incentives are aligned with their favorite creators. The creator, via the Staxe platform, can then tap into their fan base to connect with fans and to promote the production.
Why Web3?
From its early days, Staxe envisioned the use of web3 as the means to coordinate a large number of individuals who can organize themselves without the need for a third party which guarantees fair play. Web3’s capabilities for orchestrating such coordination through transparent incentive systems (tokens) was the second main reason why we chose web3. Staxe utilizes this technology to tokenize music rights, royalties, and virtual events while also focusing on lowering the adoption barrier for web3 music.
Why Celo Camp?
Staxe identifies with the principles of Regenerative Capitalism (John Fullerton, 2015) that Celo has adopted, with a particular focus on generating a shared prosperity for both creatives and artists as well as their communities and fans. We applied to Batch 7 of Celo Camp because it was the perfect fast-track plan to get involved in the Celo ecosystem.
The camp helped us refresh and update the base layers for building our project, such as user research, value props, user journey, revalidating our UX, amongst other elements. Additionally, we learned about monitoring, measuring, and recording carbon footprint data in order to campaign and track impact progress. These insights led us to developing an idea for a creator lending pool with regenerative incentives.
This lending pool will allow holders of any NFT or token, which the pool accepts as collateral, to deposit it and unlock access to borrow a liquid token such as cUSD. This would allow both creators and collectors to have access to additional funds in exchange for depositing/collateralizing their tokens in the pool.
What's Next?
Staxe is upgrading our product from a consumer dApp (NFTs) to an NFTfi open protocol for creatives, where we can enable creators not only to sell NFTs, but to allow their creator assets to generate opportunities for them, and their audiences, in ReFi. We aim to onboard our first 100k users onto web3 to build the Staxe community, which will include artists, labels, promoters, music professionals and of course… fans and collectors!
Meet the Team
We are a group of experienced professionals and entrepreneurs with a shared love for music, building, and tech, which quickly converged alongside blockchain's early days for creators.
Luis Martinez (co-founder & CEO) brings financial design and network effects his past experience in producing film and music events.
Martin Leibrich (co-founder & CTO) sets the stage for frictionless designing and developing in Staxe.
Thomas Hug (co-founder & lead engineer) brings speed and efficiency to building.
Join the Journey
Are you an artist, label, promoter or a creative interested in launching music or events on Staxe and get your web3 community started? We want to hear from you!
Are you a fan or collector looking for new ways to discover music and artists, unlock unique content and access and share their success? Join the Staxe community!
Are you a ReFi, DeFi project or simply interested in the financialization of NFTs? Let’s talk collabs! Send us a message to our twitter account or DM us via Discord.
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