The crypto creator economy is really just beginning. We’ve seen NFTs for many types of content like art, music, and videos. The natural next step for these Creators is building a token-based community around their content, a Creator DAO.
What are Creator DAOs?
A Creator DAO is an artist created set of Tokens that own and govern an artist's treasury of their NFTs and its sale proceeds. The DAO Token is analogous to equity in a startup, but the companies product is the creator’s content. And the Token comes with community access and influence.
Example: Musician releases Music NFTs that are held by the DAO treasury and as the Music NFTs sell (Primary sale and secondary sale royalties), their proceeds accrue to the treasury.
Why Creator DAOs?
There are many benefits to Creator DAO Tokens.
Scale: Access with the lowest barrier to entry to their community. This lower price and common denominator to access their community allow for a focal point of community growth and a long tail of collectors.
Exposure: Asset that represents exposure to all the NFTs by the creator. The creator sets clear guidelines of what % of NFTs and which NFTs created are included in the DAO’s treasury and the DAO’s tokens represent ownership of everything in the treasury.
Earning: Growth opportunities for audiences to enter the creators community and opportunities within the community to grow ownership.
Scaling the Community
A set of tokens around the creator backed by their content based NFTs scales the community to a long tail of collectors. Ex: We saw this with Daniel Allan’s 100 edition drop with Sound. He went from 200 twitter followers to a 10 ETH, 100 edition, 1 ETH block sell out on Sound which was supported by many of his DAO Token, $OVERSTIM, holders and community contributors.
Creators usually start by creating 1/1 NFTs, then move onto edition NFTs (1/x), and then a DAO token. And by result Collectors have also tended to collect in that order. But the future of scaling audiences will look different.
All content is now free to consume because they’re all NFTs. Audiences can then join the communities of the creators by acquiring (or earning) their DAO Token. Then as a Community member and token holder they might want to level up to certain pieces of content / NFTs by purchasing editions or even 1/1 NFTs.
NFT Exposure for the Community
All of the creators content NFTs (Art, Music, Videos, etc.) are originally minted as an asset within the DAO treasury and owned by the token holders. Ex: A Musicians Music NFTs, Music Video NFTs, and related content are minted by the DAO’s treasury.
Sale proceeds from the initial primary sales of the NFT and its secondary sales accrue to the Treasury as ETH. The DAO Treasury essentially owns (or owns some percentage) of the Artist’s portion of the NFT by receiving that proportion of the sale proceeds of the NFT.
The DAO token is a percentage ownership of the Creator’s DAO Treasury made up of their content NFTs and ETH. With the acquisition or earning of the token, the holder immediately has exposure to all the NFTs of the creator.
Earning Opportunities for the Community
Audiences can earn their way into the community through contributions, earning ownership in their favorite creators. Tokens act as a path for audiences to turn into community members and instead of purchasing them like an NFT collector, they can be earned.
Contributors within the community can grow their ownership stake further by proving value. Activities within the community and performing the work necessary to push the creator’s goals and content are rewarded with increased ownership.
With earning opportunities in DAOs, everyone doesn’t need to be a whale NFT collector. Instead, it creates an opportunity for contributors that do the most work to earn ownership stake even larger than earlier backers.
Example Creator DAOs
Creators leading the way to learn from (Not fully inclusive list and there’s many more examples):
Daniel Allan - $OVERSTIM
- Danielallan.xyz - site by Bonfire
- $OVERSTIM DAO token with ~130 Holders
- 20+ Music NFTs released
- ~50ETH from the Crowdsale on Mirror
- 25ETH+ in primary Music NFT Sales on Sound, Catalog, and Arpeggi
- 18ETH+ in secondary Music NFT sales on Sound
- Over 20k $OVERSTIM tokens earned by community
- ~30 Community approved transactions using Gnosis Wallet, Discord, and Snapshot Voting
Ibn Inglor - $DANGER
Haleek Maul - $INNER
Allan Kingdom - $DUBAI
Creator DAOs are GMI
Imagine Communities:
- Full of early stage collectors looking to level up.
- With ownership across everything their favorite creator does.
- Where major contributors can earn more stake than early backers.
This is a very exciting Creator to Audience relationship!
If you’re reading this, it’s clear you’ve taken an interest in the future of Creator DAOs.
To stay connected, drop me a message on Twitter. I’ll be posting more regular content about Creator DAOs and the emerging sector as I invest out of the Palm Tree Crew Crypto fund in the coming year.
Note: As an experiment, I’m continuing to tokenize these articles as content NFTs and holding them for myself as a writer.