Staxe [CC7 2023]
Staxe coordinates, structures, and tokenizes music and creative assets and sells these as NFTs for a share of their success.
The Staxe Team
We are a group of experienced professionals and entrepreneurs with shared love for music, building and tech, which quickly converged alongside blockchain tech’s early days for creators.
One of our cofounders Luis Martinez has experience in the Music and Creator space, having hosted or promoted film and music events in the past. His core background is in finance, with much influence from Trading and Fintech.
Our other two cofounders are engineers, with much experience building new products and tech teams. Martin our cofounder and CTO and master architect set the stage for frictionless designing in Staxe. Tom our third cofounder and lead engineer brought the speed and efficiency to such designs and implementing and together all 3 began sketching the first version of Staxe.
We are now supported by our talented team of community managers, marketers, business developers, and advisors who help bring the Staxe vision to life.
Long Description
Our favorite definition of blockchain is a tool for coordinating human activity. From its early days, Staxe envisioned the use of web3 as the means to coordinate a large number of individuals who can organize themselves without the need for a third party which guarantees fair play. We chose web3 because of its ‘trustless’ capabilities. Prior to Blockchain, these participants would require a central figure to ensure fair-play. Today, these same participants can create their own digital economy securely and autonomously by simply having access to the internet.
Web3’s capabilities for orchestrating such coordination through transparent incentive systems (tokens) was the second main reason why we chose web3. NFTs and tokens can bundle many assets and content pieces digitally, making it the perfect ground for generating incentives for like-minded communities that willingly support a given activity.
At Staxe, we believe that there must be a better way for music to be produced, distributed, monetized and consumed. In the end, we think that the existing ecosystem should be replaced by something better, built on the blockchain.
While all problems in the wider ecosystem are worth solving, Staxe will concentrate on the following:
- enable artists and independent labels to seek new forms of financing over our platform
- community building for artists to improve the connection with their most loyal fans
- enable fans to be much closer to their favorite artists
At its most basic level, any creator can come to the Staxe platform and create tokens or NFTs for her upcoming production. As Staxe will be a decentralized platform, it is permissionless, leveling the playing field and removing traditional gatekeepers. The creator will define all parameters before tokens are generated; this includes the amount she wishes to raise, as well as what fans will get in return.
Fans can then buy tokens and NFTs, which on top of the collective value can come with rights and perks as described in the callout. Fans are now more than consumers, they are stakeholders and as such their incentives are aligned with the creator.
The creator, via the Staxe platform, can then tap into his fan base to connect with fans and to promote the production; in the end, fans share in the success of the artist. The Staxe platform will provide many ways for creators to connect with their fans and to further incentivize them (e.g. additional perks for sharing promotional content on social media).
Technical Implementation
At the product level, our goal during the camp was to take our current version of the Staxe dApp and find ways to attach ReFi principles learned to generate impact. We were most knowledgeable about DeFi and NFTs, which is possibly how we came up with our idea for a creator lending pool with regenerative incentives.
Our idea for this upgrade was to implement a very basic mechanism design in a decentralized lending vehicle in favor of climate positive actions performed both by the artists involved and triggering an amplifying effect for these actions as their fans and audiences follow along.
The result of the design intends to use the tokens minted in our dapp as the on-chain asset to be collateralized in the lending pool. We drafted a high-level design of how the lending pool would interact with the dapp’s current flow as well as external Liquidity Providers to connect these dots.
At a high level, the lending pool intends to allow holders of any NFT or token which the pool accepts as collateral to deposit it and unlock access to borrow a liquid token such as cUSD. This would allow both creators and collectors to have access to additional funds in exchange for depositing/collateralizing their tokens in the pool.
While we continue to work and find support for the lending pool implementation, you can follow our Celo deployments via Staxe’s Github or try out our dApp on Alfajores Testnet!
What’s Next for Staxe?
Next in for Staxe is upgrading our product from a consumer dApp (NFTs) to an NFTfi open protocol for creatives, where we can enable creators not only to sell NFTs, but to allow their creator assets to generate opportunities for them in ReFi, as well for their underlying audiences.
Over the next couple of years, we aim to onboard our first 100k users onto web3 to build the Staxe community, which will include artists, labels, promoters, music professionals and of course… fans and collectors!
Asks
Are you an artist, label, promoter or a creative interested to drop on Staxe and get your web3 community started? We want to hear from you! Join our Discord below or find the “are you an artist” section in our website for more!
Are you a fan or collector looking for new ways to discover music and artists, unlock unique content and access and share their success? Join our Discord below!
Are you a ReFi, DeFi project or simply interested in the financialization of NFTs? Let’s talk collabs! Shoot us a message to our Twitter account below or DM us via Discord!
Slide Deck
Check out Staxe’s Deck presented at Celo Camp Demo Day!