<aside> 🔮 Showtime's mission is to onboard billions of people to crypto through a familiar social media interface. A user-owned social media is the vision. It starts as a NFT art platform, the fastest-growing crypto social niche. Once the platform reaches enough users, social tokens (like I did with $ALEX, the first ever personal token) will unlock a new type of financing for creators and users.

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We are live at tryshowtime.com! Our launch tweet:

https://twitter.com/tryShowtime/status/1371815217412341765?s=20

Problem

• Online creators lose the wealth they create to rent-seeking social networks. By preventing financial interactions between creators and users, not only do both parties miss out— the total value generated is smaller.
• Social platforms are in for a change: people now dislike the status quo. Twitter's Jack admitted that Trump censorship is ultimately their failure. Growth of consumer social platforms like Clubhouse, TikTok, Signal or Discord show people are trying out new apps.

Why crypto

• Digital items (NFTs) let users monetize their own content. We can unlock new economic activity by making each piece of content a tradeable asset.
• The NFT art space grew 10,000x in volume in the past year.
• People don’t understand DeFi— but they love creators. Whilst DeFi is the internet-native way to move money, our bet is that digital items are the first thing normal people will use crypto for. Creators like 3LAU, RAC, Lil Miquela, Beeple, Deadmau5, RAC released digital art to 10M+ followers combined in the past 2 months.
• Content moderation can be managed by credibly neutral, user-elected third parties instead of one ruling platform or jurisdiction.

Graph by Richard Chen from 1Confirmation, as of March 18. Source: cryptoart.io/data.

Current NFT art platforms

Despite its immense social potential, existing solutions are transactional, optimizing for price tags and eBay-style interfaces. There is no way to own your reputation in crypto, and creators have to rely on Instagram and Twitter for NFT distribution. In addition to that, today's platforms lack the following properties:

• scalable curation. NFT platforms are either:
  • permissionless but not curated: too many items, no way to sort by popularity. It brings the price of the average digital item down.
  • curated but not permissionless: an editorial team manually picks great digital items. Users can only see the items on said platform. This does not curate at scale and is bad for the long tail of small creators, which defeats the purpose of crypto.
• showcasing and social signaling. One of the largest NFT collectors, Metakovan, has no reason to reveal their identity: there is no upside to it. For crypto to get to mass adoption, the best NFTs and their owners should go viral.
• focus on distribution. There is immense value to be captured by making the product attractive to non-crypto users— a successful NFT platform could eventually own the infrastructure (minting) layer. Platforms today start as infrastructure, and build a product. Because NFTs have recently grown, Showtime can afford to do the opposite.

Showtime: Discover and showcase your digital art.

Showtime today looks like the Instagram for NFTs. It aims to turn likes into money: in a platform optimizing for social capital, NFT's utility can grow from intrinsic (artistic) to extrinsic value (impressions), which is valued by advertisers. A social NFT platform could thus allow creators to monetize directly from advertisers, bypassing centralized social media. This would expand the market from "artists" and "collectors' to "creators" and "advertisers". Features of the MVP include: