Ankit Shubham [email protected] twitter.com/ankitshubham97

Introduction

I believe creator economy is going to benefit disproportionately from web3. Creators can NFTize their digital properties. This would help them in directly monetizing their fans instead of going the indirect route which involves the sponsors and web2 platforms as middlemen. Further, the middlemen command a huge control on:

  1. The income of the creators,
  2. The discoverability of contents. The middlemen make the creators abide by a ton of regulations and policies.

This calls for a infrastructure-level change in how things should be working in the creator economy. Web3 seems to be resolving most, if not all, of the problems. One de-facto flow is the following:

  1. Wrap the membership and passes/tickets to their digital/IRL events & contents as NFT. Let’s call this family of wrapped membership/ticket/pass as web3-pass for brevity sake.
  2. Put a gate between their content and the outer world and only let the web3-pass owners to pass through.

This opens new opportunities for both creators and their fans:

  1. A creator is owning their content in the true sense.
  2. Creator and their fan, both own each other in the true sense. This builds a deeper level of connection that was just not possible as of now.
  3. Fan can trade their web3-pass.
  4. Creator earn royalty income from the trade.

But as fancy as it sounds, we are still in the nascent phase. There are web3 products which are somewhat solving this problem. But there are some problems:

  1. Some products are trying to build their own closed ecosystem. If a creator wants to launch their web3-pass, they have to sign up with the ecosystem. Then only, they could launch the web3-pass on the ecosystem’s chain. Further, they would have to put up the content or performance in their ecosystem. This defeats the very purpose of freedom.
  2. Some products are implementing token-gating but they are centralized; hence the choke point. They are like SAAS which provide the token-gating feature. But the creators have to put up the content or the performance on their application. Even though less severe when comparing with the previous pointer, it still snatches away some degree of freedom.

Solution

As the web3 revolution paces, creators will move away from centralized web2 platform and start adopting decentralized web3 platform. One key piece would be to have a token-gating authorization-cum-authentication in place. This is the niche that the current product aims to solve: an OSS SDK for authorizing-cum-authenticating users based on NFT possession as credentials. With this piece in place, a creator can use a good OSS for hosting their performance(e.g. owncast) or store their content on storage (e.g. IPFS): all in a truly decentralized way, yet the owner having full control on his digital creations.

Protocol

Moved here: https://ankitshubham.notion.site/NFT-Auth-Protocol-4de9641932a24ec3a59665adc97b3ebb

Architecture

The Auth consists of two component:

  1. Auth Client: This component is included at the app end. It is responsible to collect and verify wallet address, request token from the auth server
  2. Auth server: This component is included at the backend. It is responsible to check the validity of the access token and issue it, verify the ownership of the said NFT.