Written interviews with DeFi projects on the Cardano blockchain.
Link to post on my Medium
This week’s Cardano DeFi project is an open-source membership platform that helps Kreators get paid fairly and kreate with their devoted fans: Kreate.
The previous guest was a project that proposes a stablecoin-as-a-service framework to create fiat-independent tracercoins.
This initiative is a point of reference for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on Cardano and every week or two we will invite someone to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.
Kreate is an open-source membership platform
Hey, glad to have you here. Please introduce your team, where are you from, what are your backgrounds?
Hi! We’re Kreate, and we’ve team members in Hanoi and California. The bulk of our team are veterans of the Cardano Community, having worked full-time for 2+ years on this chain. Our Founder, Tori, actually has 5+ years of Cardano experience.
Some of us are former indie game developers; musicians; writers and illustrators. On the AI side — because we are using AI to empower the Kreators on our platform — we have three AI engineers, plus Tori. Tori himself has 6+ years experience in AI, including in the UK defence industry.
What is Kreate? How will the platform work and why have you chosen Cardano?
Kreate is an open-source membership platform that helps Kreators get paid fairly and kreate with their devoted fans. We’re leveraging Web3 and AI to help Kreators maximise their productivity and creative potential, own the relations they have with their fans, and innovate engagement. Fans subscribe to their favourite Kreators in return for Members-exclusive content, communication, and benefits.
We’re a trustless intermediary, all interactions on our protocol are peer-to-peer — and we take only 4.9% of transactions on the network. In addition to the subscription services, we’re developing AI tools to: free Kreators from side-labour that eats into their creative time; and improve themselves as Kreators, e.g. by gathering and collating valuable feedback from fans.
Heads-up — we’re also developing a VR Metaverse for Kreators and Fans to connect and engage in.
We chose Cardano for a number of reasons. Its liquid staking is the first payment method we’re leveraging for Kreators — stake to subscribe, and Kreators get paid every Epoch (5 days). Cardano also still has a relatively nascent dApp ecosystem relative to other chains, so it’s easier to offer something new and useful to the users here without worrying too much about “competition”. And speaking of competition — building on Cardano is (or at least, has been) relatively difficult, so our team’s +2 years of full-time work on Cardano give us a great head start.
We also love our Single SPOs, so there’s that.
To make an analogy with Web2, what existing platforms are you taking inspiration from and how will Kreate be an improvement? What are the pros for creators and users?
Our closest comparisons would be Patreon, FANBOX, SubscribeStar, and OnlyFans.
Web2 social media and membership platforms, first, take a huge cut from Kreators. They charge +8–20% — we charge 4.9% to sustain the network. So we’re 2–4 times cheaper. They also own the relations you have with your fans, and can silence and deplatform you at any time — demonetisation on YouTube, shadowbans on Twitter, zuccing your Group on Facebook. And the algorithms? How they work isn’t made available to the public. You’re reliant on either guesswork or someone drawing up a spreadsheet testing out every word in the English language and then some just to see what’ll get you in “hot water”. Did you know that includes the words “Brazil” and “restaurant”? A couple years ago, having those words in your video title or description would get you demonetised on YouTube.
None of these platforms work in the Kreators’ interests, and some even actively throttle your reach if you don’t produce the content the platform desires — you have to keep pumping out engagement farming content, really unpaid work that the platform desires in order to keep users on the app as much as possible, without getting much back. Your authenticity and creative process doesn’t matter. Those platforms do very little to help Kreators keep in touch with existing Fans nor reach sustainability, let alone maximise creative time.
Do you want to keep pumping out mindless Instagram Reels on the daily just so you can reach a maximum of 10% of your Followers or do you actually want to post what you want to post, and have genuine conversations with your community?
Will there be any risks when using your platform? How are you tackling the regulatory environment? Will your platform require KYC?
Our protocol, indexer, front-end, and back-end are all open-source — so anyone is welcome to make open risk assessments. We’ve set aside a treasury of 17,500 ADA for bug bounties, and have already paid out 2,500 ADA (the 17,500 ADA is the remainder) in bug bounties during our Testnet and Mainnet Alpha. We’ve been frank about being in Alpha, and now, Open Beta. Our risk mitigation strategy is to be as transparent as possible. Whether your smart contract is closed- or open-source, a bug is still a bug: but by being transparent and maintaining a substantial bug bounty program, we’re able to draw on the collective strength of the entire community to keep our ecosystem safe.
KYC is not required. Transactions are anonymous at the protocol level. Making a Page on Kreate doesn’t require KYC, though Kreators may implement their own process of KYCing the wallets that subscribe to them. Because Cardano does not have an accessible Decentralised ID (DID) system yet, we encourage Fans to do research and confirm whether their favourite Kreator has actually posted on Kreate or not. We are looking to integrate trustless verification systems to tie Pages to DIDs in the future.
In addition to user self-flagging, we use open-source AI content moderation to hide potentially sensitive material behind a content advisory. Browsing Kreate should be a pleasant experience. We’ll investigate community reports and delist Pages containing malicious and fraudulent content; governance will be implemented post-Beta.
Thank you for your time. Any closing remarks? Where can people learn more about Kreate?
We want everyone to be able to earn a fair and sustainable livelihood from what they kreate. We care about our worldwide community of artists and innovators — that’s the chief motivation driving our desire to build this platform. That’s why we partnered with Helios, incubated OpShin Toolchain for Cardano, and are excited to onboard independent artists from throughout the community.
If you have any feature requests? Pain points you’d like addressed? Questions about anything? Hit us up on Twitter, or join our Discord if you’d like to speak with our engineers one-on-one. Our Calendly is open for calls, too — you can find all our links below.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the people interviewed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG. Moreover, this content is for educational purposes, it doesn’t constitute financial advice.