Celebrities may seem like they have the world at their feet, but like the rest of us, they’re at the mercy of centralized gatekeepers, in their case the social media platforms that connect them to their fans.
These platforms can cut creators off from their audience in one fell swoop, explains Andras Kristof, CEO of the ‘unstoppable communities’ platform Galaxis. “If YouTube gives you three strikes because their AI does something wrong, or for whatever reason the owner of a platform decides he doesn’t like you, you’re cut off from the community you’ve built on that platform,” said he.
Web3 offers creators the ability to “contact your community directly,” Kristof explains. “You can use all platforms to actually get your message across,” he said, but if a platform cuts off a creator, “then you still have your community. You have to find another way to convey your value to them, but you don’t have to start rebuilding.”
Galaxis has worked with celebrities like Steve Aoki and Mike Tyson, and brands like the NBA, to help create Web3 communities based on their fan bases. The company is building the underlying infrastructure for online communities, based on NFT ‘digital membership cards’, which offer holders benefits such as redeemable amounts and access to specific private channels. “What Galaxis has built is a combination of Kickstarter and Patreon,” Kristof said. “It’s a financing and monetization framework based on digital membership cards.”
“What we wanted to give them is a way for them to add value to their community members,” he said Declutter. “That value is the value of their definition, not some universal value or attention or anything like that – it can be very different from community to community.”
For Tyson, for example, “one of the benefits was that if you had that specific NFT, you could actually contact them and get a physical meeting with Mike Tyson.” The lucky owner spent three days at Tyson’s ranch, “and Tyson even sparred with the guy,” Kristof said. That holder became one of Galaxis’s first investors, he added.
Galaxis’ collection for the NBA, meanwhile, featured player cards that were ‘dynamically’ given perks and upgrades based on their performance on the basketball court,” he explained. “They were upgraded based on the data provided to us by the NBA.”
For William Rudolf Lobkowicz, a scion of the Czech royal family, Galaxis developed a community platform for Lobkowicz’s art collection, using QR codes linked to the artworks that could be collected. “You could pick up NFTs and put them on the digital membership card, essentially creating an experience that encourages people to visit physical spaces like art galleries and libraries,” Kristof said.
Building infrastructure
Galaxis’ focus is on building the underlying infrastructure for these communities, which “is not an easy task,” Kristof said. “Yes, we can put the important things on blockchain, but you still have to have web servers, you still have to have a centralized infrastructure that can actually be stopped.”
The company’s digital membership cards store all benefits, perks and other redeemables, he said, as it currently builds out the infrastructure that will enable the creation of completely “unstoppable communities.”
“The entire infrastructure behind Galaxis was already built in such a way that when you create your own community, it is not created in the large database of the Galaxis web server,” he explained. “All it takes to run your own community is a set of microservices built for you and only you. So there is no big Galaxy database, there is no big Galaxy server. Each new community runs it in its own container.”
Galaxy Monthly Digest July
🎉Our first monthly recap is live! July brought some cool new community launches, major updates, and steady growth for #Galaxis.
👉 If you want to stay informed about what’s happening, this is your favorite update.
Check out all the details here:… pic.twitter.com/08KZcPoA7N
— Galaxis (@Galaxxyz) August 7, 2024
In subsequent releases, Kristof 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 top of the Swarm decentralized data storage and distribution technology platform. “If you put together the best features of the Tor network, of IPFS and of BitTorrent, you get Swarm,” he said. “It is essentially an IPFS system that is fully encrypted and offers crypto-economic benefits if you want to run a node.
“With Swarm you can actually deploy websites,” he said. “Long story 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
The Trump Collection NFTs. Image: Galaxy
Galaxis has recently been involved in what may be its largest project yet: providing the underlying Web3 infrastructure for Donald Trump’s NFT collections, which Kristof called “a huge success.”
On December 15, 2022, Trump launched his first NFT collection, offering 45,000 digital trading cards for $99 each. “We had a year to sell it out, and it sold out in one day,” Trump said during an interview with Bloomberg at its first NFT launch.
Subsequent releases followed, including – memorably – a “MugShot Edition” collection, released after the arrest of the Republican presidential candidate in Georgia. It’s a striking illustration of how NFTs can enable media personalities to respond to key events in the news cycle by speaking directly to their communities.
“The logical next step would be to turn that into a sustainable and self-sustaining community,” Kristof said, “with the right membership cards and possible monthly payments.”
“In many ways, I think times are changing, and for better or worse, crypto has become one of the hottest topics of the election,” Kristof said, with Trump’s embrace of NFTs serving as a bellwether for his pro-crypto platform.
Ultimately, other political figures and even political parties could theoretically follow Trump’s lead and launch their own “unstoppable communities,” Kristof said. “If there is a Kamala Harris community, I don’t think anything will stop them from using these types of digital membership cards to keep track of community members.”
“It is important to emphasize that who we work with does not necessarily reflect my personal views,” said Kristof. He added that it would be “hypocritical” to refuse to work with certain parties because they do not share these views, as Galaxis aims to let people “create communities even if others don’t like them.”
Ultimately, Galaxy is intended to function as “infrastructure,” he said. “The goal is to create a framework 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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