Paperchain = content 🤝 money.

How do I think about Paperchain’s opportunity in two exploding sectors?

Let’s unpack these cultural and technological trends below.

Internet of Goods

Creator Economy

Independent creator =

Streaming music. Streaming video. Social creators. Podcasting. Newsletters. Makers. Influencers.

creator economy growth Source: Gumroad

Digital media is on its way to being a $400B industry. Much has been made of the creator economy, its rapid capture of digital media, the explosion in creator tooling and its relationship to the gig economy.

creator economy tools

It’s important to understand:

CreatorEconomy ≠ GigEconomy

There’s an emerging crisis in the creator economy that does parallel the gig economy. That is a consolidation of distribution and discovery through a handful of social media and streaming platforms.

The Internet of Goods, as seen in direct creator monetization tools and NFTs, can set an entirely new foundation for creator discovery, community building and monetization.

NFTs

NFTs have seen exception growth in 2021. Not only in terms of pure sales volume but in its public awareness. Digital assets in the crypto economy, NFTs are art, collectibles, music, gaming assets, access tokens, fashion and social media. Their usage across most of these industries has been around for many years, it’s only now that they’ve reached mainstream adoption.

In March 2021, the NFT/Collectibles marketplace had a market cap of $20B.

nft market cap

Source: Forbes

OpenSea has already passed $600M in sales volume in August (as of August 11, 2021).

opensea volume

Source: Dune Analytics

Internet of Money

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) arrived in the collective conscious on the back of Ethereum’s smart contract system and it’s ability to replicate or disrupt existing financial systems in a self-executing and self-governing way.

$80B is now locked in DeFi protocols on the Ethereum blockchain ($40B increase from Mar 2021).

defi tvl

Source: DeFi Pulse

DeFi is reaching an inflection point as it grows beyond crypto-native assets. MakerDAO just passed four new proposals to increase their debt ceiling for real world assets (RWAs) to $40M.

Paperchain is one of the first RWAs to be accepted in the MakerDAO debt pools.

This move continues the connection of DeFi to trillions of dollars in assets in the real world.

The creator economy stands as one of the benefits of this connection.

Paperchain = content 🤝 money

We talk a lot about what Paperchain is.

An instant payments card for creators. Invested in by Brent Faiyaz. Used by Dibyo, LoQuacious, EmmoLei Sankofa, and many more.

We don’t always talk about how it works.

Paperchain unlocks NFTs and DeFi by turning creator streams into NFTs - digital assets that can be fractionalized and monetized by protocols and communities alike.

NFTs in our stack are not collectibles or art or access gates. NFTs are programmable collateral that creates an interdependent creator economy.

paperchain product map

This means instant payments for online content. We’ve already turned this on for Spotify creators.

Payments are now every day.

Content payments operating 24/7 like content creation is.

But we see Paperchain as so much more:

“Paperchain is web3 finance”
A simple creator product (instant payments card) that is making content & IP interoperable with web3 finance.

“Paperchain is growing the GDP of content”
Access to funds to invest in production and marketing is critical to audience building. Paperchain helps in aggregating and accelerating income. Paperchain also has a role to play in wealth accumulation by connecting creator wallets to yield-generating protocols.

“Paperchain is creator identity”
A creator-owned finance layer. A money ID that remains true regardless of content platform or distribution channel.

Paperchain’s opportunity is to unlock the creator economy with a web3 layer that makes content interoperable with digital assets and community monetization models.

The internet of goods meets the internet of money.