Proposal: Gate Content using any Rally Coin

Developers Developer Bounty Program
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Overview of the problem

Rally creators such as $WAXM are looking for ways to gate content such as their website using their Rally coin. Gating content using Rally coins allows creators to reward their top token holders with exclusive content, as well as generate more demand for their Rally coins.

The Solution

MintGate would like to build a simple widget and API that would enable any Rally creator and supporter to set up walls on any content on the web from Youtube to Spotify to their personal site using their Rally Coin.

Simple widget that allows creators and any community member to set up a token gate on any content on the web.

An Example - How It Works:

  1. Nathan Stanz ($STANZ) uploads a live stream onto Vimeo (or any web2 content).
  2. He takes the Vimeo link, inputs it into the widget, selects his Rally coin, and sets the minimum amount of the coin needed to access.
  3. The widget generates a new link with the token gating enabled.
  4. $STANZ shares the token gated link on all of his social media.
  5. Any fan, whether or not they own a coin or have a Rally account, can click on the link.
    1. If they do not have a Rally account, they will be prompted to create one and purchase the coin amount to access.
    2. If they do have a Rally account, they sign in to the Rally account to confirm their token amount to access the content. If they have enough coins, they can access the token. If they do not have enough coins, they will be prompted to purchase the minimum amount to access.

Examples of implementation:

  • Widget integration directly into the Creator accounts on the Rally platform.
  • Widget integration onto creator and community personal sites for them to create token gated links without accessing the Rally platform.
  • Create connectors of the widget to different e-Commerce platforms such as Shopify

Complimentary token-gating API with Rally OAuth integration

An Example - How it Works:

  1. $WAXM hires their own or works closely with growing Rally community developers to implement the API on a customized personal website or project.
  2. Once the API is integrated on the personal site, fans navigate to the site.
  3. Sign in to the Rally account to confirm their token amount to access the site. If the user does not have enough of the Rally coin, they will be prompted to purchase at least the amount to access.

Examples of implementation:

  • Implement the token gating API to gate content on personal websites and projects.

Future Plans

We will continue to work with the Rally creator community to explore direct token gating integration via Rally coins with commonly used platforms including Twitch and Clubhouse. As part of this initiative, we will explore creating direct extensions to Rally OAuth and help Rally become the face of social tokens on all web2 platforms. Imagine, a Rally creator can set up gating of their content using their Rally Coin directly on their favorite web2 platforms!

As Rally explores new types of tokens (such as ERC-20s), we want to further advise Rally on token gating via different types of tokens.

We will also refer Rally as an option to mint social tokens for our NFT creators who are interested in creating social tokens.

For all Rally community developers who are building on top of our APIs, we will provide mentorship as well as free access to premium tiers.

Funding

We are looking for more feedback on the funding structure. We are excited about partnering with Rally and are very open to different paths to a partnership.

We are looking for $60,000 in RLY token to build the widget and API via current Rally OAuth for the next two to three months.

In addition, as Rally scales, we are looking to include one or more of these rewards options:

  • For every creator creating more than five links a month via the widget on Rally, MintGate will receive $30 a month per creator via RLY token.
  • For every user who does not have enough coins to access the link and buys more coins through the prompt, we will get a 5% of the token amount.
  • Creators who want to access the APIs directly on their personal sites and projects will be billed directly. Creators and community devs can use the API for free up to 500 calls a month and an additional $50 a month (limited to 500 to 1,500 API calls) in equivalent RLY coin or their coin.

The Impact on Rally

We will target all creators (currently, 92) x an average of 5 links a month per creator = 460 generated token gated links a month x 1,000 views = 460,000 views per month. Out of those views, we would like to target 10% of those users (or 46,000 users) who will create new accounts or buy more Rally coins to access the content.

What is MintGate

MintGate is turning any online content into exclusive rewards using social money and NFTs. Our platform allows creators to use their tokens as a key mechanism to gate exclusive access to videos/music/data, killing the need for passwords. We created a platform designed to make token gated access easier and accessible to anyone.

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Well-written proposal. Question on this piece:
“Out of those views, we would like to target 10% of those users (or 46,000 users) who will create new accounts or buy more Rally coins to access the content.”

Can you elaborate on what the word “target” means in this context? Or is it more like a desired goal?

Also, are the gating options permanent, or can they be time-locked/modified? For example, I make the link and on the first day or two it’s xx token but free after 7 days.

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Hello Davey,

“Out of those views, we would like to target 10% of those users (or 46,000 users) who will create new accounts or buy more Rally coins to access the content.”

Can you elaborate on what the word “target” means in this context? Or is it more like a desired goal?

We assume that out of the 460,000 users that attempt to view the content, 30-50% of them would either not have enough coins to access or a Rally account. Our desired goal is to have 20 to 30% of those fans will set up a Rally account and/or purchase more coins to access the content.

The Breakdown:

460,000 users * 30 - 50% do not have enough coins = 138,000 to 230,000 users do not have enough coins to access or a Rally account
138,000 to 230,000 users users do not have enough coins to access or a Rally account * 20% to 30% of these users will create an account and/or purchase more tokens to access = roughly 46,000 new users or existing users who are purchasing more creator coins

Why We Believe This
In our early data with our standalone MintGate product, 30 to 50% of users showed intent to buy more coins. When they did not have enough tokens, they are prompted a Buy More Tokens button that linked to Uniswap (in our Rally widget, we can prompt them to sign in to Rally OAuth).

Also, are the gating options permanent, or can they be time-locked/modified? For example, I make the link and on the first day or two it’s xx token but free after 7 days.

Currently, we are considering the permanent option but we can integrate a time lock. We could add to the proposal that we could implement a simple time lock as you mentioned, after a certain time period, the link does not exist anymore or is free to access.

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aha! Thanks for that MintGate data on “intent to buy”, makes sense!

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Jennifer - it’s really amazing to see this proposal out in the wild now! Looking forward to see how the community receives it :slight_smile:

For context: Over the last few month or so we’ve been starting to see some common trends in creator tool requests in terms of needing easier ways of token gating Web2 content in this growing Web3 ecosystem.

I met Jennifer back in January when MintGate was working on some different tool-kits, however, both Rally and Mintgate were in more primitive forms and there was not much room for a synergistic partnership at the time.

With the recent needs of creators and new development efforts being undertaken by MintGate, I believe now is the time to pursue a strategic partnership with MintGate to further build out new tools (and dev legos) for Rally Creators and their Communities to leverage.

I’ve had the pleasure of jamming with Jennifer and the Mintgate team over the last few weeks on these ideas and I sincerely believe that a partnership with MintGate would benefit the Rally Ecosystem and Social Token space by building new innovative tools for Social Token usage.

Looking forward to a vibrant community discussion on this! :smiley:

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Alex, thank you so much for the kind words! I sincerely appreciate all that you have done to onboard me and my team to the Rally Community. I am impressed with Rally’s commitment to open their APIs and tools for all developers to build on top of the social token space, something not done in the space until now.

I believe that MintGate and Rally, with our visions to make social tokens mainstream, can grow together.

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Interesting proposal!
I lack the technical understanding to weigh in on the 60k RLY amount, but I did like how this other proposal broke out the cost: Treasury Proposal: Content Curation System to acquire 'Mainstage' EDM Artist

I also liked that the tool was developed in such a way that it created this functionality for Jauz and $BTX community, but that the tool is open source and available for any creator to reskin and repurpose. Importantly for Rally as a network, the ongoing operational cost is left with the creator.

Rally distinguishes itself as a fee-less platform. So this idea would be difficult to justify in my mind: “For every user who does not have enough coins to access the link and buys more coins through the prompt, we will get a 5% of the token amount.”

I think it’s excellent to prompt and link users to purchase more tokens, but the incentive(reward) for Mintgate should be to enable fans to use the service. Then you’ve justified the creator subscription fee to the service that you offer without charging the fan a 5% fee.

So, my strong preference would be for a comprehensive proposal where Rally funds the development and implementation such that it is readily available to creators. Ideally including some free for basic/limited usage, perhaps even only through some trial period.

If the Mintgate proves useful (hopefully essential) to creators, they’ll be ready to pay to continue to use it - $30/month doesn’t seem like a stretch though you’ll want to run the numbers on what makes sense. It’s clear that discord bots that gate communities by creator coin and RLY holdings have proven to be a central use case for many creators.
Those creators who want to lean into the tool (or continue past a reasonable trial) can sign up with Mintgate for premium usage that can be structured in whatever way you structure it.

Seems like a very useful tool for creators - and I’d love to hear feedback from any current creators here! I reached out to another community that spoke highly of their use of Mintgate as well. Ultimately, I think the partnership should be designed such that the Rally network is not providing ongoing subsidies for a tool used by a subset of creators, because it would be doing so at the expense of all other RLY holders. My preference would be for a design that allows you to offer the service as I described above in a way that those creators using it subscribe and pay a fair amount for it. That’s my opinion anyway!

Cool idea and hope to see more thoughts on this. Have a nice weekend!

Cheers,
Grand

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Hello Grand,

Thank you so much for the feedback!

I lack the technical understanding to weigh in on the 60k RLY amount, but I did like how this other proposal broke out the cost: Treasury Proposal: Content Curation System to acquire ‘Mainstage’ EDM Artist

Thank you for sending this over - I was initially worried about putting a flat price on the proposal - I think that updating it with breakdowns of time estimates would be super helpful for everyone. I can do that over the weekend and then update everyone!

I also liked that the tool was developed in such a way that it created this functionality for Jauz and $BTX community, but that the tool is open source and available for any creator to reskin and repurpose. Importantly for Rally as a network, the ongoing operational cost is left with the creator

I will check on the team’s thoughts on this and what we would like to open source. We would like to keep the current general MintGate product (token gating ERC-20s, ERC-721s, and ERC-1155s) still properitary but make the Rally OAuth version open-source. Let me check with the team!

My preference would be for a design that allows you to offer the service as I described above in a way that those creators using it subscribe and pay a fair amount for it.

Excellent point. Though we want every Rally creator to use this product, you’re right that not every creator will or will use it right away.

For example,

  • After 5 token gates created on the Rally creator page, it could prompt the creator to pay a subscription to MintGate. Does Rally have an integrations page where creators can see what third-party products are offered through Rally partners (example: DAOhaus)?

If not, we could help build out or brainstorm on the page (and add to the proposal if applicable).

If the Mintgate proves useful (hopefully essential) to creators, they’ll be ready to pay to continue to use it. $30/month doesn’t seem like a stretch though you’ll want to run the numbers on what makes sense.

Our biggest cost is maintaining the servers - the higher the volume of fans trying to access the links, the more server data. We will analyze average creator following more closely and make estimates. We would hate to charge a smaller community technically more because we are factoring high volumes from the top Rally creators so we may consider tiers based on the creators’ following. Thoughts on this structure?

I reached out to another community that spoke highly of their use of Mintgate as well.

Awesome, what community was this?

Have a wonderful weekend as well!

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Rally/CCs are in the early stages, we are still learning what works and does not work for creators [from looking afar]. If we have a program that does not service everyone equally I would not be in favor of it. If we had 1000 creators then I would not have a problem with an proposal like this. Right now we are just approaching the 100 mark. Only a percentage of creators have really “crushed it”. We need some case studies to understand why we only have 20% of those types [meaning no outside help except the creators entrepreneurship]. I am all for innovation but I will stand firm in making sure every creator has equal access to tools [extra] to be successful at this stage of our growth.

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Thank you so much for the feedback! I agree that we would want to align all proposals, including ours, to service all creators and align rewards and treasury issuance so that creators who do not use our product are not unfairly contributing.

That being said, what does success look like to a Rally creator? What KPIs would a creator reach to “crush it?”

I would love to learn more and do early tests with creators to see if token gated content would help them grow their Rally base. Though we have not built out the Rally OAuth integration, we could help a Rally creator mint NFTs, use the NFTs to token gate content, and then track the success of the link (in terms of number of users accessing it and number of NFTs sold). From there, we can develop case studies and learnings on the effectiveness of token gating.

Please let me know your thoughts!

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Very thoughtful responses, thank you!

I’d check in on Rally discord through the developer channels for an answer on this:

Our biggest cost is maintaining the servers - the higher the volume of fans trying to access the links, the more server data. We will analyze average creator following more closely and make estimates. We would hate to charge a smaller community technically more because we are factoring high volumes from the top Rally creators so we may consider tiers based on the creators’ following. Thoughts on this structure?

If higher fan volume translates to higher costs, then the structure to charge creators could be based on usage tiers: 10 fans accessing the links, 25, 50, 100 etc…so the subscription is flexible to move up a cost tier if engagement increases. I’m not sure how industries where server costs are their largest expense tend to monetize, but usage based seems plausible. I feel like tiered pricing would be pretty straightforward and you could tune it in time as you gather more data on usage.

What I think could be really rad is to have the creator settle automatically monthly through a smart contract that transfers CC from their own holdings to you based on the subscription usage. Smart contract (might require some manual work as well or for a time) could equally burn the CC for $RLY and send to an on-chain wallet to hold and participate in governance or convert further. It’d be nice if you had the option. Again, not my specialty here.

Panvala is the community!
From me:
“They brought forth a proposal that seems promising if creators in the network are at all keen on a service to gate exclusive Web2 based-content behind creator token holding thresholds. Could likely be a foundation for other services, or perhaps even a template for further businesses built on top of Rally that empower creator/fan communities…it’s up to the $RLY community to judge!
Thanks for the endorsement of Mintgate! Appreciate the quick response here.”

Might also want to reach out to a handful of creators on their discord channels and see what kind of interest is there for the service if you haven’t already! Last thing I’ll add seeing your response to Sixy is that the core Rally team is working on some NFT features for creators, but the only details on it that I’ve seen are from Kevin Chou’s Coinlist presentation that you could pull up on youtube.

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Epic, thank you so much for the response! I just asked the question about the integrations page in the dev channel and will ping creators for more feedback on the fee structure. I’m so shy sometimes about asking questions on Discord and on community dev calls.

Usually, major companies buy up lots of server space to account for any massive usage but we’re quite early-stage so we have not bought a bunch of server space (and also considering looking into more decentralized options as well).

What I think could be really rad is to have the creator settle automatically monthly through a smart contract that transfers CC from their own holdings to you based on the subscription usage. Smart contract (might require some manual work as well or for a time) could equally burn the CC for $RLY and send to an on-chain wallet to hold and participate in governance or convert further. It’d be nice if you had the option. Again, not my specialty here.

This is a great thought! I love this idea as it automates billing for creators (they need more automation from all of the Rally conversations that I have been on) as well as allows us to earn $RLY to be part of the community (as opposed to just collecting fiat).

Michael said in the last dev community call that community developers will not have access to the smart contracts any time soon as a follow-up to the feature request on Smart contract support for CCs | Voters | Rally.io. I am following up with this use case to further justify access to smart contracts right now! Please add if you have any more ideas on this thought.

Panvala is the community!

Thank you so much for reaching out to them! They are a great (early) community partner of ours in addition to Uniwhales DAO and Global Coin Research. Let me know if you want to talk to other communities about their experience to better evaluate us!

Last thing I’ll add seeing your response to Sixy is that the core Rally team is working on some NFT features for creators, but the only details on it that I’ve seen are from Kevin Chou’s Coinlist presentation that you could pull up on youtube.

Ah, okay, I know that the community behind $ART coin released a joint OpenSea NFT collection of works of Elon Musk smoking weed and I’m sure that there are more artists looking into NFTs. If the community is concerned about token gating not being of the value of them right now, in the next couple of weeks, we could work on testing out the value for current creators who have other tokens. Since our current standalone works with any ERC-20 tokens and ERC-721 and ERC-1155 NFTs, we could focus instead on working with a Rally creator to gate content using existing non-Rally coin tokens and then assess the value. It might help us answer some questions about funding as well.

We could ask creators if they want to pilot this test run when we ask them to provide feedback as well.

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Personally, I am not a fan of this proposal.

I do not like the % based fees on the content.

I also don’t like the utility of gating any URL/Link content.

I would, however, support an “OnlyFans” style platform integrated with our creator coins.

To build the system above thought it’s a quick down and dirty integration that doesn’t warrant the type of bounty requested.

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Hello Gary,

Thank you so much for the feedback! We are willing to take out the % based fees on content as suggested by Grand (since Rally does not have a fee system).

Would love to learn more about what you think is missing or you do not think is valuable with gating content.

Let’s jam on the “OnlyFans” style platform and see how that would look like. Either way, I am a community dev and maybe we post the idea on http://rallyboard.canny.io/ for us or another dev to work on.

Add me on Discord at Jennifer Tran - pythonspacecadet#3780. We can also get an ambassador to join us!

Thank you,
Jennifer Tran

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Just added you. I’m all for innovation but not for charging percentages on anything. I’m just 1 creator on the platform though. :slight_smile:

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In the famous words of Drake - I like all the profit, man, I hardly do percents (I don’t do that shit)

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Jennifer - awesome to see you so actively engaged in our community. I think you’ve addressed my own concerns with making the Rally OAuth open-source (we ourselves use a limited-use open source, such that it’s free for anyone in the Rally community but not for a large corporation to exploit for example) while keeping your other products proprietary. And also your new fee structure by tier of creator followings.

But generally, I’d love to see a creator asking for the product. We’ve done best when we create custom products that a specific creator on the platform is already asking to use. Do you have any customer stories from other creators, or have a Rally creator in mind that would use this?

I’d love to support more organic community projects like this!

Kevin

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Hello Gary, thank you for the comments on Discord. Though you are unable to meet any time soon, I posted your idea on an OnlyFans/Patreon using Rally CCs on our community dev Canny board and I will explain it during our community dev call this week: https://rallyboard.canny.io/community-projects/p/onlyfanspatreon-via-rally-coins.

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Hello Kevin,

Thank you so much for the kind words! Appreciate it a lot!

Yes, $WAXM mentioned that he wanted to token gate his website as well as merch store on his website which prompted more in-depth conversations with other community developers and ambassadors.

In addition to $WAXM, we were thinking of targetting high-content creators who are interested in sharing exclusive content with their top token holders and/or enticing their fans to buy their Rally CCs to access exclusive content. The ideas are limitless but as a high-level, we have thought about these use cases as well:

  • Twitch creators such as $ALLIE and $TINA record and gate a private live stream for their top Rally CC holders.

  • Writers and media gurus such as $WOMXN and $MONTY gate exclusive insights on Ghost blog, Google Docs, etc. on their insights on social media, building community, etc.

  • Communities such as $ART can create membership tiers and gate events, community docs, etc. for specific membership tiers (ex. can only access this community constitution if you are in Cool Factor Tier which requires you to own at least 150 $ART coins).

For our current standalone product, we created the following Discover page on our site: https://www.mintgate.app/discover and docs with use cases: https://mintgate.gitbook.io/mintgate-docs/introduction/use-cases-of-token-gating. Here are several examples of creators with ERC-20 tokens (we know that Rally CCs are not ERC-20s):

  • Harrison First ($FIRST - Roll), a musician based in Sweden, gated a site that contained a newly released album via $FIRST token.
  • Global Coin Research ($GCR - Coinvise), a writing community, gates exclusive artists with specific insights into crypto for their top $GCR holders.
  • Uniwhales ($WHALE), a DAO, gates recording of their Zoom calls via $WHALE token so that only DAO members can access the recordings.

Let me know if you need anything else!

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Hello all! Wanted to provide everyone with an update!

  1. We are still working on calculating our hourly rate and will update with a new grant ask.
  2. We have followed up with several Community Ambassadors who are working with creators who are interested in token gating to create a simple MVP for a pilot.

For example, we are talking to $WOMXN to create a simple site that allows a user to input their userID, have the user balance public ID confirm their balance, and then have the site direct them to another webpage.

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