Rally

A social token platform powering digital creator communities

May 02, 2022

👋 Welcome to the fifteenth issue of The Syllabus from Invisible College – a weekly newsletter that helps you navigate the fast-moving world of web3. To get this newsletter delivered to your inbox, subscribe here:

Invisible College Updates

Token Gating – We’ve started token-gating our Discord server and event archive. If you don’t have a Decentralien NFT and want to retain access to the community, events, and our upcoming courses, you can pick one up on Magic Eden.
Our First Course – This week we kicked off filming for our very first paid course on Tokenomics. All Decentralien holders will get free access to the course once we’ve finished production.
Upcoming Events – We’ve got a packed schedule of web3 learning events coming up. You can check them all out here.
Advisory Councils – Applications for our first three advisory councils (Merch, Corporate Education, and Ecosystem Partnerships) close at the end of the week. If you’d like to apply, you’ve got until Friday!

Now onto this week’s post…

Most creators depend on a small number of engaged fans to earn a living. These connections have traditionally been mediated by centralized platforms that extract value by serving ads. Web3 gives creators the opportunity to cut out these extractive platforms using social tokens.

Social tokens let creators capture revenue directly from their audiences while allowing fans to benefit by making early bets on their favorite creators.

Unfortunately, launching a token or NFT collection is not a competency most creators possess. That’s where Rally comes in.

What is Rally?

Rally is a platform that allows creators to build digital economies for their fans powered by social tokens and NFTs.

The platform is built on the RLY Protocol, a web3 software suite for developers to tokenize consumer apps and unlock economic benefits.

Rally is built for musicians, athletes, gamers, artists, podcasters, and many other types of creators. Their target user is typically non-crypto native and may have trouble navigating web3. By designing an intuitive interface, Rally makes it easy for creators to launch their own token economy without previous crypto experience.

The Features

The Rally platform offers several tools that help creators drive community engagement.

Social Tokens

Social tokens are ideal for allowing creators to capture more of the value they create, instead of relinquishing profits to middlemen and centralized platforms.

Through tokens, creators can offer a number of benefits to fans including exclusive content, private chats, merchandise, or event tickets.

Social tokens on Rally’s platform are backed by an ERC-20 governance token called $RLY. These token can be traded outside of Rally on exchanges like Uniswap, Coinbase, and KuCoin. Since $RLY is the underlying base pair across all social tokens on Rally, it creates liquidity and improves the price stability for each creator’s token.

Independent of outside influences, the value of a creator’s token is a function of a token-bonding curve designed by the Rally team in partnership with Delphi Digital.

Based on feedback from creators, Rally now uses a linear token-bonding curve (shown above). As the demand for a creator’s token increases, additional supply is added. Once the coin supply reaches the maximum level of 21 million tokens, only the price of $RLY can impact the price of the token. As a result, token prices become more stable as a creator’s community grows.

Creator NFTs

NFTs give creators another way to earn revenue and provide value to fans, with an additional layer of exclusivity and scarcity.

As an added bonus NFTs give fans direct ownership of a creator’s work. For example, a creator could give fans ownership of specific songs or works of art. When fans trade these NFTs creators get a nice kickback of royalties.

Community Activity Rewards

To stimulate activity within creator communities, Rally issues weekly Rally Rewards.

The more active a creator’s community is each week, the more their fans are rewarded with $RLY tokens. The amount of $RLY distributed is proportional to each fan’s holdings of that community’s social token.

Rally defines activity through metrics like economic activity and community growth. The rewards work like the staking rewards found in some DeFi protocols that incentivize buying and holding social tokens.

Portugal The Man

One of Rally’s best case studies comes from the band, Portugal The Man.

Since 2004, Portugal The Man has been touring the world, selling out shows, and building an impressive fan base, but they have always resisted monetizing via fan clubs and other paid engagement.

Rally showed them how they could engage their fans on a deeper level while allowing early supporters to financially benefit. Thus began a new chapter for Portugal The Man: the inception of their creator coin, $PTM.

Holders of $PTM get a number of unique benefits, including access to a private Discord where the band posts unreleased songs, acoustic sets after live shows, backstage passes, and exclusive vinyl of new albums only available to $PTM holders.

Recently, they rewarded token-holders who pre-saved their new single on Spotify by airdropping them additional $PTM tokens.

By utilizing the Rally platform, Portugal The Man has seen higher fan interaction and engagement and their fans were rewarded for their loyalty.

A New Way to Connect

As more people become creators, it will be critical to build infrastructure that enables creators to make a living from their fans.

By democratizing access to web3 tools, Rally is paving the way for creators to leverage the benefits of web3 and build loyal and engaged audiences.

Other projects we’re exploring

AiMedis - A healthcare NFT marketplace that is allowing users to tokenize and sell their medical data.
Barracuda – A web3 community directory.
CityDAO - A DAO focused on putting physical land on-chain and managing it via collective ownership
Rain - Corporate credit cards built for web3 teams.

The Syllabus