Setting the Course for Rally.io for 2022

Tech/Network Upgrades
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Hi, Everyone.

Below, please find a few wins for 2021 as well as the top 5 priorities for 2022. Take a look and feel free to drop in any questions below. We’re currently building action plans for each of these priorities and will provide updates via our Discord, as well as our Creator + Developer community calls.

Rally’s mission is to provide communities ownership over the value they create. Rally builds the tools and services that enable the creation, launch and growth of token-based communities inclusive of social tokens and NFTs. We ensure abundant utility and interoperability by building and partnering with the entire creative ecosystem.

Last year, we made incredible strides, working closely with Creators, their communities and developers. Before we jump into our 2022 priorities, I want to first recognize some of the great progress we made in 2021.

  • Drove positive economic impact with Creators and their communities: Out of 266 Creators on the platform, more than 77% have built six-figure token-based communities and six have built token-based communities worth more than $1M USD. To date, Rally has disseminated more than $79M USD in $RLY to Creators and their communities via Community Activity Rewards - an average of $2.3M USD in $RLY each week in Q4. Our growing list of Creators includes Grammy-award winners Portugal. The Man and Megadeth; NCAA and NFL football superstars Kayvon Thibodeaux and Jarvis Landry; popular actress and YouTuber Felicia Day and eSports organizations such as Gen.G and OpTic Gaming.

  • Launched an NFT platform: We have added a major new creator tool to our toolbox with Rally NFTs, with a focus on utility over scarcity. We have continued to adapt our NFT platform with multiple product releases. We’re also able to mint social tokens and NFTs in an eco-friendly manner thanks to the $RLY sidechain. NFTs are just the beginning of our journey into creator tools, and we’re creating a robust developer ecosystem to build significantly more use cases.

  • Expanded the RLY Ecosystem: By decentralizing, we increased the reach and utility of the RLY network and ensured that no one centralized entity governed the network. As a result, the current RLY ecosystem includes Rally, SuperLayer, Unite and RLY Association.

  • Evolved Our Brand and Expanded Our Reach: We adapted Rally.io’s brand to allow for greater participation from a wide variety of creative communities. In September, we unveiled a new website and brand identity. We announced a groundbreaking alliance with UTA, a leading global talent and literary agency, to educate and inspire Creators, artists, celebrities and athletes to launch their own social tokens with Rally. We generated nearly two thousand media placements last year, including pieces in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, ESPN, Deadline, Forbes and Coindesk, and we grew our audience 10x across social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn).

  • Built a World Class Team: We grew the Rally.io team to 37 full-time team members, and added significant engineering resources via 3rd-party partners. The team now covers all the key functions needed to help communities establish and grow their token economies. We assembled a senior team with extensive experience and a passion for Creators and web3, including VP of Engineering Carol Chen (former Director of Software Engineering at Pandora), General Counsel Rob Collier (former head of consumer product legal for Novi at Meta), VP of Product Chris Fortier (former Product of Music at Twitch) , VP of Creator Partnerships Nick Millman (former Global Director of Content Partnerships at Twitter), VP of Global Communications, Social Media and Events Kurt Patat (former Global Head of Consumer and Entertainment Communications at YouTube), VP of Creator Success Stephanie Pereira (Director of Creator Partnerships at Kickstarter), VP of Finance Johnny Tong (former Head of Treasury for Peet’s Coffee) and VP of Payment Michelle Vaultier (Payment Partnerships at Facebook).

Building upon this success of 2021, we’re now laser focused on these top 5 priorities (in no particular order) for 2022:

Launch and grow successful token-based communities with a focus on the US by:

  • Defining successful token-based communities and building systems to foster and protect these communities.
  • Onboarding new Creators who are passionate about our product and who will lean into launching, building and growing their token-based community.
  • Building a data-driven culture and tracking and communicating metrics to the internal team, Creators and community members.
  • Launching features to allow Creators to own and manage their token-based communities.

Build the platforms and operations to launch and grow natively Web3 token-based communities with an excellent creator and community experience by:

  • Becoming a multi-chain platform.
  • Defining, productizing and scaling the creator and community onboarding flow.
  • Strengthening our open platform for community developers.
  • Expanding our regulatory and compliance capabilities and evaluating our current vendor stack and custodial principles.
  • Productizing the backend capabilities for token-based community creation and management.
  • Decoupling backend capabilities from the front end user-experience.
  • Continuing to invest in the foundation of Rally’s platform to address platform usability, stability, security and scalability.

Evolve our brand to become native within Web3 culture by:

  • Fostering a diverse and inclusive culture within the product, company, and community.
  • Building in conversation with our community, progressively moving towards a model of community ownership.
  • Establishing a leadership position within Web3 culture and communities.
  • Continuing to be a leader within the creator economy.

Establish a Rally.io business model that enables a clear path toward becoming self-sustaining by:

  • Mapping out Web3-native revenue streams.
  • Mapping out funding options to fuel expanded vision.

Define and prioritize Rally.io’s community stewardship and governance perspective and establish timelines and milestones.

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Building upon the broader strategy Bremner presents above, below, please find the Rally.io product strategy- including vision, organizational strategy, roadmaps for key areas and how we will measure success.

Rally.io Product Strategy

The intent of this document is to outline the expanded vision and strategy for Rally.io’s product to reflect our expanded company vision as outlined in the Setting the Course for Rally.io for 2022 post. For context, the organizational strategy stack outlines this layer of the strategy as the “functional strategy” that then cascades into “roadmap” and from there “goals.”

Additionally, this is not where our product is today but rather the vision of where we want our product to be in one to two years. The roadmaps will detail how we get from where we are today to where we want to be in the future.

1. Rally.io Product Vision

Rally builds the tools and services that enable the creation, launch and growth of token-based communities. We ensure abundant utility and interoperability by building and partnering with the entire creative ecosystem.

This vision encompasses what we see the product doing now and over the next 2 to 3 years.

Build The Tools and Services

“Tools and services” is a statement that says “we maximize value to creators and community leaders.” Aligning towards a “tools focus” means we care more about the growth of the communities we support than the growth of the Rally brand. It also clarifies and focuses our customer - a statement you’ll see reflected throughout the priorities below. By emphasizing that we build creator and community leader tools, we are committing to:

  • The belief that fungible tokens (aka “Creator Coins) and non-fungible tokens (aka “NFTs” or digital goods”) are core components of this toolbox
  • Constantly expanding Rally’s toolbox with new forms of utility that put ownership in creator’s hands while protecting community participants from mistakes or bad actors
  • Allowing communities to employ the tools they need and not attempting to force a monolithic suite (i.e. you can have “just an NFT strategy” or you can choose not to feature your economy on the Rally.io e-commerce site)
  • Training and guiding our communities toward web3 and empowering them with innovative utility that expands their possibilities

Does this mean that we don’t have an opinion on how to structure your token-based community?

No, this statement means instead that we don’t force that opinion on participants. For example, we will create templates, structures, playbooks and other use cases that demonstrate potential paths for communities of various sizes but community leaders can choose to veer from these paths if they so choose.

Enable the Creation, Launch and Growth of Token-Based Communities

This is our core offering. Communities have dozens of places they can go for tools to communicate, collaborate or even pool resources. Web3 has created a unique opportunity for communities to lean into ownership, tokenization and transparency and use those tenants to make fundamentally new things.

Rally.io has learned tremendous lessons from executing on a more centralized version of the web3 ethos in the form of the Forte sidechain. We have taken to calling this web2.5 as it combines elements of both sides of the cryptocurrency revolution. As we expand our offerings, we believe there will remain a need for the improved and trusted UX of web2 and will look to bring options to our token-based communities that can range from centralized (sidechain or our web2.5 offering) to decentralized (native L1 or our fully web3 offering).

What is a token-based community?

A token-based community is a collaboration model that allows community members to participate in the creation and exchange of value within their own community. These communities create an economy composed of a variety of tokens that work together to facilitate the interactions between community members (e.g. rewards for contributions or enabling the purchase of collectibles or access). Additionally, this model enables communities to self-govern and self-fund. This model enables communities to “win together”, “exchange value between participants” and create “collective ownership” opportunities. See the post above for additional context.

By working with communities and enabling them to become token-based, we are:

  • Enabling support for all kinds of communities (including both “creator led” and “headless communities”)
  • Leaning into the link between “finances” and “community building” such as acknowledging and rewarding digital labor (like moderation, social support and community engagement) and supporting communities in raising funds
  • Committing to an easy journey for community leaders to launch and manage tokens
  • Ensuring our tools can adjust or scale to a wide variety of community types
  • Providing tools to help communities understand their token performance and anticipate what the future will bring for them
  • Enabling the future of community connection and creativity by returning ownership to the hands of Creators and their fans

Abundant Utility and Interoperability

We believe that web3 succeeds when it is able to solve real world problems. We think that ponzi-flation (or the idea that tokens should accumulate just for the purposes of bigger numbers) does not create long term value for companies, communities or employees. We also believe that interoperability is core to the DNA of web3 and that a decentralized and vibrant ecosystem can build more than we possibly can. This means that we are:

  • Continually improving the capabilities offered by our fungible and non-fungible tokens
  • Finding specific community pain points and creating new tools that solve for them using the best thinking in web3
  • Bringing our offerings wherever communities want to build (chain agnosticism)
  • Not building a marketplace or an exchange for social tokens and instead providing tools to help communities build things of value for themselves
  • Not going to prioritize financially motivated actors unless they are also committed to deep community participation

Building and Partnering with the Entire Creative Ecosystem

We are devoted to making the world better for communities and creators and we will partner with anyone who feels the same way. This means our tools and capabilities must resist silos and operate in harmony with those of other participants in this broad ecosystem. To achieve this, we must:

  • Enable anyone, not just a chosen few, to develop using our tools
  • Open our capabilities to as many communities and as many interaction points as possible
  • Always build with a focus on interoperability and the decentralization of future dev
  • Make key partnerships with existing participants to allow communities to seamlessly integrate our new tools with their existing livelihoods and workstreams

A note about chain agnosticism:
To support and build for the most vibrant communities, we need to be where these creative and developer communities are building and thriving. Additionally, we need to be able to provide interoperable tools and services with the growing tooling that exists throughout the broad ecosystems that we participate in. This expands our total addressable market, reduces the burden of developing with us and increases the amount of developers able to build for our token-based communities. This does not mean that we need to divorce ourselves from our sidechain environment but rather that moving to a chain agnostic architecture includes sidechain and mainchain compatibility. The sidechain offers fertile ground for experimenting with token uses, especially incentivizing community-minded behavior. It also enables seamless fiat onramps and account security and recovery that are appealing to many communities new to web3. A pure web3 / mainchain offering will be paired with a clear, step-by-step process for migrating sidechain tokens to the mainchain. Communities will have three options for launching and growing their token-based communities: launch directly on the mainchain, launch on the sidechain and remain there, or launch on the sidechain and subsequently migrate over to the mainchain.

2. Product and Organizational Strategy

Our Current Feature Set

With this product strategy as a framework, we can articulate the value proposition of our current features in their appropriate contexts:

  1. Creating and launching token-based communities
  2. Growing those communities
  3. Building Utility into our core tokens
  4. Partnering with others to build Utility across the ecosystem
  5. Building the Infrastructure we need

Laying out the existing feature set like this helps to both articulate the individual PM portfolios using our current capabilities and serves to frame our understanding of Rally.io.

TOKEN LIFECYCLE
PM: Rajesh

  • Fungible Tokens

    • Token Bonding Curves and Liquidity
    • Low Cost / Zero Fees
    • Sidechain Enabled “Admin Access”
    • Launch customizations / Purchase controls
    • Genesis Stakes and Vesting

  • NFTs

    • Minting
    • Distribution
    • Wallet

COMMUNITY GROWTH:
PM: Alec

  • Easy participant access to e-commerce style token purchases
  • Value creation through the NFT marketplace
  • Growth experiments
  • Weekly rewards

TOKEN UTILITY
PM: Skot

  • NFT Royalty Allocations
  • Discord Bot
  • Twitch Bot

PARTNERSHIP UTILITY
PM: Robert

  • Community Tools (Rallybook)
  • Distribution Tools (Bonfire)
  • Integrations with Major Platforms (Shopify)
  • Dev Community ($PLAY coin, early Kyro, etc)

INFRASTRUCTURE:
Web 2.5 and Web 2
PM: Caroline

  • Embedded ERC-20 token ($RLY)
  • Real Value / $RLY offramp
  • Forte Sidechain
  • Value Onramps (Bridge-in, Crypto-in, fiat)
  • Value Offramps (Bridge Outs)
  • Rally Network Backend (“RNB”) / sRLY and RLY backing and offramp
  • Accounts / security and recovery
  • Risk/Fraud
  • Scaled KYC

3) Individual Roadmaps for Key Product Areas

Our Top Priorities
Over the course of 2022, we need to fund each of those verticals to an appropriate degree in order to be successful. There’s no utility without creation and certainly nothing stands without infrastructure. But we also need a razor to guide our investment decisions and understand where we believe the highest return on our dev investment can be achieved. These are our top priorities:

  1. Become native to an L1 (Chain Agnosticism)
  2. Grow our token-based communities (via both community growth experimentation and the improvement of Weekly Rewards)
  3. Drive novel utility from our existing feature set (includes both internal and partnership dev)
  4. Continue to progress on the individual roadmaps of each product area outlined above, particularly for mission critical Infrastructure

We want to be transparent with ourselves and with the community - we want to “build in public.” That means we’d like to lay out our first pass of things we are committing to for this year as well as a longer term roadmap for the following year. We are rebooting our product management processes as part of this effort - a big component of that reboot means that we will be empowering individual product managers to be agile, responsive and able to adapt to changing circumstances.

We offer these roadmaps to show what we intend right now and what we believe to be possible, but things will change! We will keep our community informed as our thinking on these priorities evolves. Finally, improvements in our engineering and project management capacity may accelerate some of our efforts and we are pushing on those areas as hard as we can.

TOKEN LIFECYCLE:
PM: Rajesh

Near Term (2022)

  • Independence from RNB for Coin launches
  • Easy and open access for social token launches
  • Token Bonding Curve Migrations
  • Automated vesting

Future (2023+)

  • NFT-only token-based communities
  • rUSD (Stable Coin) Acquisition
  • Creator-focused tools site
  • Launch pre-sales

COMMUNITY GROWTH:
PM: Alec

Near Term

  • Weekly Rewards v2
  • Links and Attribution
  • Bulk Sends

Future

  • Earn Mechanisms
  • Productize the most promising growth experiments

TOKEN UTILITY
PM: Skot

Near Term:

  • NFT Utility
  • Community roles and delegation
  • Campaigns v2

Future:

  • rUSD (Stable Coin) Transactions
  • Governance and Voting

PARTNERSHIP UTILITY
PM: Robert

Near Term:

  • Developer Portal
  • Koji

Future:

  • Improved 3P Account Creation

INFRASTRUCTURE:

Web3

  • PM: Chris

Near Term:

  • Solana Native Token Economies (will not be completed in 1H2022)
  • Rulebook for token migrations from sidechain to mainchain

Web2.5

  • PM: Caroline

Near Term:

  • Account Security
  • Transaction Queuing
  • Publishing sidechain stats for Rally.io performance
  • Mobile App

Future:

  • rUSD (Stable Coin) Infra

USER EXPERIENCE
Owner: Katie

Near Term:

  • On-going user experience improvements will occur to the site and the NFT marketplace

Measuring Success

The conclusion to Bremner’s post includes the below statement:

“Right now, the most meaningful metric we can move is Total Creator Coin Holders.”

This tells us at a high level whether we are growing and making progress on our goals. In addition, our UX and Research team will be partnering with Creator Success to measure sentiment from our community to enhance these growth measures with the community view of product quality.

The specific KPIs for each of the product areas will include:

CREATION and LAUNCH:

  • Total Creators
  • Total NFTs Launched
  • Total Creator Coins Held ($USD Equivalent)

COMMUNITY GROWTH

  • Total Rally.io Accounts (wallet with balance greater than zero RLY or creator coin)
  • Total Creator Coin Holders
  • Holders per Coin

UTILITY

  • Total Amount of Community Transactions (i.e. fan to creator token sends)
  • Economic Activity through Channel (Internal / External)

INFRASTRUCTURE:

  • Web3
    • Exists
  • Web2 and 2.5
    • Fraud
    • KYC
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Thanks for putting these bi-weekly dev meetings on YouTube and providing a space to discuss here on the Rally Forums.

I was surprised to not see any priorities placed on decentralization for Rally.io for 2022. With the launch of Superlayer and the RLY Ecosystem DAO, two major entities built to help fund decentralization, one would assume Rally.io would also be on board with this movement by opening APIs to allow for greater access and control by projects which are approved by these new well-funded entities.

Is Rally.io working to ensure new projects launched under Superlayer or Ecosystem DAO are built only off the $RLY token and DO NOT leverage or intersect the Rally.io ecosystem (existing or future), or are there actual plans to decentralize Rally.io? If there are, do those plans exist in 2022? If they do, what are those plans, and is there a reason they weren’t mentioned as a priority?

Thanks in advance!

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Hi Jonathan!

Thanks for the question and for being a member of the $RLY community!

The decentralization that Rally went through in 2021 was intended as a first step towards broad network decentralization - you can read more about that here.

As part of this process, a variety of new centralized, independent entities were created across the $RLY network to build on top of the $RLY protocol. These separate and independent entities are building independently from Rally.io which is the flagship application built on top of the $RLY network.

That said, both Superlayer and Ecosystem DAO projects are building and launching projects on top of the $RLY protocol and leveraging the $RLY token as the basis of their platforms. As a result, there will be natural collaboration opportunities between Rally.io and these entities but since Rally.io is itself an independent entity from Superlayer and the Ecosystem DAO, it would require direct collaboration between those projects to ensure that integration.

That said, core to Rally.io’s mission is to open ourselves up to build in partnership with the creative ecosystem (as mentioned in Chris’s product strategy) and that includes additional investments in our existing API-set, budget for our developer community to build tools and services on top of these APIs and opportunities for us to collaborate with other projects built across the $RLY ecosystem.

Finally, as it relates to decentralization efforts at Rally.io specifically, Rally.io has a company priority within 2022 to " Define and prioritize Rally.io ’s community stewardship and governance perspective and establish timelines and milestones." which is in-line with a progressive decentralization that would allow for greater participation and governance from the community of creators that are building their community economies on top of Rally.io.

Hope this helps.

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Bremmer,

Thank you for the thorough response and opportunity to debate Rally.io’s goals for 2022. I have been beyond impressed with the culture developed here and the team’s ability to candidly speak about the inner workings of Rally in these forums and Discord, which certainly does make the ecosystem feel much more community-owned than most projects launched in the last couple of years.

I agree 2021 was a massive step towards decentralization, and with these entities up and running in 2022, things will only accelerate that direction.

I suppose my question relates to if the Rally.io model continues to be the best product market fit for creator coin tech in coming months (and years), if you would support competitive projects launched through Superlayer or the Ecosystem DAO? Or if there is a concerted effort to push other creator coin use-cases prior to considering supporting competitive projects. This would normally be a question for the folks at Superlayer, but I thought it would be interesting to hear your take. Based on my limited time here I don’t believe the community is ready to support competition through the Ecosystem DAO, but I do believe there are a number of compelling reasons for internal competition (which will only build $RLY stronger).

As a project manager developing in the creator coin music vertical for almost a year now, I’m hoping there’s a place for me to build on the RLY network even if there’s some overlap with Rally.io!

I certainly don’t expect the CEO to respond to every question here, so you certainly reserve the right to have your prior response speak to this topic. Thanks again for your efforts in transparency and community engagement!

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Hey -

Thanks for the clarification on the question!

From my perspective, competition is a great thing and, especially at the early stage of Web3 adoption within the creative economy, I don’t see this as a zero-sum game. A win for another project is a win for the industry overall.

So I would be supportive of other projects that look to help creators make the jump into Web3.

I’m not sure how the folks at Superlayer or the Ecosystem DAO would see it but that’s my perspective.

I also wonder if your ideas around creator coin in music could be built on top of Rally.io versus on top of the $RLY network. Happy to intro you to folks on the Rally.io team to see if building out top of Rally.io’s APIs may make more sense.

Best,

Brem

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Appreciate the perspective and open door Bremmer!

I’m still discovering where we may fit in best with RLY while doing some due diligence of our own. Won’t be long before we start having more open discussions to see if there may be a good fit.

Thanks again for the candid responses here…

Jonny

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Great posts. Yes, the RLY Network will soon be ready to work with 3rd parties to build on the RLY network. This means alternative social token platforms that can serve a different need than Rally.io or Unite.io or SuperLayer projects – we’re all building on what is meant to be a decentralized network protocol.

That said, each entity building on RLY Network doesn’t need to be decentralized. For example, let’s say Patreon or another web2 company wants to build social tokens into their web2 platform using their existing centralized business model. They can do so. Other web3 native communities can experiment with building completely on-chain, decentralized ways for users and creators to build specific vertical communities.

This should be more generally available in Q2 of this year, as the RLY Network is now live on Solana with its core smart contracts and is building out a team to create the social developer-facing materials.

Thanks for checking out the community and look forward to building with you

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Really appreciate you joining in the conversation Kevin!

I agree that project development can move in both directions… existing web2 companies integrating RLY’s web3 infrastructure ($SHOP) or web3 dApps that can be consumed into traditional C-corp’s after proving product market fit (eg. CryptoKitties → Dapper Labs). Looking forward to the first RLY network example of the latter!

We’re getting more into a discussion on project funding within the RLY ecosystem vs. the future of Rally.io, although, I feel like your hypothetical example may have provided me the answer I was looking for. I also believe there’s room for projects who may solve a similar need as Rally.io, but if they can prove appeal to a different segment of the market it would be just as powerful as serving a completely different need. My point is that your response has really helped me consider an avenue which would be more symbiotic than competitive.

I have read a bit about the one way bridge to Solana and upcoming documentation for the dev community. Do you know who is working on building the team to create the developer-facing tools on Solana? I would like to propose it to our dev team, we’ve been looking for a way to become more involved while working in an area that could also help progress our project goals as well.

This has been really helpful, thanks for the attention here!

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The Association is building the developer-facing tools on Solana.

@jowyang is taking on a bigger role there, and will let him introduce himself when he’s ready as he’s getting up to speed!

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Rally Update, February 2022

Over the past few months, the Rally.io team has changed dramatically - following the $RLY network decentralization, we’ve assembled a fresh and experienced leadership team that have been heads down building a shared vision for the future of Rally.io.

Now that we’re emerging from this internal planning period, I’m excited to begin sharing consistent monthly updates on progress and momentum.

Wallet Growth: In January, the team aligned around Wallet Growth as a key performance indicator.

  • Wallet growth: +3,040 unique wallets in February (9.4% increase from January)
  • Total number of unique wallets: 35,299

Other Stats:

  • From January 25 to February 28, Rally generated more than 500 media placements, with an advertising value equivalency of nearly $7M USD, and a potential reach of 713.3M
  • Rally generated ​​198,576 impressions across its social media accounts (Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn), a 19% increase over the previous month.
  • Rally’s total social media audience increased by 6% over the last month, totaling at 46,413 followers.

Report Card:

Launch and grow successful token-based communities with a focus on the US:

  • 15 New Creators launched in February:
Vertical Creator Count
Sports RC3, DBO, MOTV8, BP4, FLIPR 5
Art ARTE 1
Gaming HYDRA 1
Digital LADDR, IDEA, FREE 3
Music MASHI, T45, DADA, CRNDO, DOVE 5

  • Creator Case Studies and Education:

  • $RLY Network Growth Challenge:

    • 500 new wallets via the Creator Signup Bonus Campaign
    • 75 applications via the Creator Referrals Program - 1 launched in February

  • Launched Mint Sprint:

    • Mint Sprint is a pilot program designed to allow creators with smaller communities than would normally qualify for a Rally social token to prove their community’s engagement and overall fit. Creators will have the opportunity to mint an open edition NFT of their choice on the $R Coin creator page. If the creator is able to sell 150 individual NFTs or more, they will qualify for a social token with Rally.
    • There are 4 creators in the pipeline that are planning to launch their “Mint Sprint.”

Build the platforms and operations to launch and grow natively Web3 token-based communities with an excellent creator and community experience by:

  • Product Wins:

    • Token Vesting: First fully automated vestings have occurred. Genesis vesting was an unfunded feature so this represents a substantial catch up on our creator promises. The new genesis schedule should be applied before the end of the quarter.

  • Dev Ecosystem Funded Apps:

    • Developer Community Applications: Twitch Watch-To-Earn extension and Token-Gated Calendly are in the process of being built by the developer community, adding more utility for two of our biggest categories of creators: streamers and thought leaders.
    • Token-Gating for Wordpress Sites: Temple Fans, recipients of our first CDC grant, have completed their token-gate for Wordpress sites and are now in beta for token-gated Shopify stores.
    • Tipping within YouTube: A new bot for YouTube Live Streams is in QA which will allow fans and creators to airdrop and tip each other in chat.
    • Mobile Rally.io Experience: Mobile Beta anticipated soon

  • Infrastructure, Payments, and Ops:

    • Payments & Infra Product
      • Anti-Fraud and Compliance: Added multiple features that give the team additional tools to combat fraud, monitor transactions, and seamlessly collect user KYC information.
      • Payments: Shifted card transaction to Rally’s own payment processor, giving Rally greater control and flexibility over fiat-in experience.
    • Payments and Infra Ops
      • Anti-Fraud and Compliance: Instituted new processes to quickly identify and prevent multi-accounting.
      • Customer Service: Updated, streamlined, and normalized all Customer Support (CS) responses and designed and drafted automated replies.

Evolve our brand to become native within Web3 culture

  • Marketing Strategy:

    • Deanna Dong joined us in late January as our new VP of Marketing and is formulating a go-to-market plan based on a refined scope of our target audience and a sharp focus on specific use-cases for social tokens & NFTs.
    • Kicked off stakeholder interviews and assessment of existing marketing initiatives
    • Working with cross-functional partners to identify priority target audiences and corresponding use-cases.

  • Events:

    • Rally was a presenting sponsor of ETHDenver and hosted a panel on the future of the creator economy which included Director of Content and Education Brian Mark.
    • Rally’s Director of Fine Arts Partnerships, Tam Gryn, gave a talk on NFTs and Social Tokens at ZONAMACO, the largest fine arts festival in Latin America. The presentation drew the highest number of attendees in ZONAMACO history
    • General Counsel Rob Collier appeared on Kaufmann Foundation/BladeCon’s New Frontiers and the Future of Black Innovation panel
    • VP of Creator Success Stephanie Pereira served as a panelist on the “Bridging Web3 & the Creator Economy” session as well as “The New Creator Distribution Model: Company Ownership” at the Web3 Virtual Conference

  • Thought Leadership:

    • While our editorial focus to date centers around educating and inspiring creators, there’s also a strong opportunity for Rally to carve out a share of voice in the web3 space. Recently, Rally launched a blog on Mirror to share web3 thought-leader pieces and longer pieces that speak to the more crypto savvy audience.
    • VP of Product Chris Fortier byline that compare the current music NFT movement with the torrenting boom in the early 2000s was featured in TechCrunch
    • CEO Bremner Morris filed a piece for Rolling Stone that highlights how developers and creators can parner to build creator-first, web3 tools on top of NFTs and social tokens to give way to a new middle class of creators and artists.
    • Director of Fine Art Partnerships Tam Gryn’s “11 Reasons Why Artists Shouldnt Be Afraid of NFTs” was featured in Create Magazine and will also run in Bankless’ arts newsletter
    • Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr contributed commentary to BeInCrypto about the future of music in web

  • Media Relations:

    • From January 25 to February 28, Rally generated more than 500 media placements, with an advertising value equivalency of nearly $7M USD, and a potential reach of 713.3M

  • Crypto Coverage

  • Mainstream Coverage

  • Social

    • Rally generated ​​198,576 impressions across its social media accounts (Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn), a 19% increase over the previous month.
    • Rally’s total social media audience increased by 6% over the last month, totaling at 46,413 followers.
      • The Rally Twitter account grew by 1,818 followers, a 23.6% increase in growth compared to January 2022
      • The Rally Instagram account grew by 343 followers, a 49.1% increase in growth compared to January 2022.
      • The Rally LinkedIn page grew by 415 followers, a 22% increase in growth compared to January 2022.
    • Rally’s cross-platform engagement rate for the month of February 2022 averaged at 4.2% — a 55.4% increase from January 2022.
    • Created a group thread with the social leads of SuperLayer and Unite to drive cross-promotion across the RLY ecosystem.

Establish a Rally.io business model that enables a clear path toward becoming self-sustaining by:

  • No update

Define and prioritize Rally.io’s community stewardship and governance perspective and establish timelines and milestones.

  • Shared and gathered input on our updated product, creator partnerships and creator success and community strategies via the Rally forums and Community Meetups (archived for the Community here on Youtube).
  • Launched Community Award and Activities page on the website to highlight the amazing things we are doing for and with the community:
    • Expanded the scope of the Innovative Use Awards (IUA) to the CAC Awards Program
      • Innovative Use Case Awards - this is what we had previously where the CAC rewards experimentation and unique use cases
      • Rally Community Participation Awards - we wanted to recognize and reward Creators and communities that are making the Rally Community better by fostering knowledge sharing and being involved in community activities. Some of the things we will be awarding for are participating in the Creator Mentorship Program, creators who are helping our community developers by QA-ing their tools and features, and participating in our bi-weekly Creator + Dev meetings to present how they are using their token in their communities.
      • Independent Development Awards - are for Creators and Communities that are taking it upon themselves to work directly with independent developers or doing development themselves in order to build a unique use case or tool for their token economies.
      • Community Sponsorship Awards - can help Creators and Communities fund the launch of campaigns or community activities with a potential annual sponsorship cap of up to 25,000 $RLY
    • Launched the Mentorship program which connects newly minted creators to veteran members of our community for mentorship, guidance, and more. Over the course of six weeks, mentors guide their mentees through the launch process and beyond.
      • 6 Creator mentors & 8 mentees have already enrolled in the program
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Welcome to the second monthly Rally.io update for March 2022. Included below are the following:

  • Executive summary;
  • Summary of KPIs;
  • Asks and areas you can support the Rally.io team;
  • A detailed report card against our top 5 priorities for 2022

Please let me know if you have any questions and feedback on things that you’d like to see in this report going forward!

Executive Summary:

During the month of March, Rally was named one of the top 5 most innovative companies in social media by Fast Company alongside companies like Shopify, Koji and Tinder. This was a great acknowledgment of all the hard work and initial momentum for Rally over the course of the past few years!

We launched 15 new creators across the Music, Media / Editorial, Gaming, Business Professional and Film / TV categories. Excitingly, we worked with a number of existing creators (including Megadeth, Duncan Robinson, Mark de Clive Lowe, Brandon Powell, Jaylen Clark and Tyger Campbell) to initiate unique and creative campaigns targeted towards new participation within their communities. Overall, we saw an increase in ~2,000 new wallets over the course of the month.

We participated in a number of industry events, including hosting the creator economy track at NFT LA and sponsoring Floodfest at SXSW. Stephanie Pereira, VP of Creator Success, joined a Twitter Spaces panel called “Top Women Trendsetters in Web3” and Director of Content and Education, Brian Mark, joined a Twitter Spaces conversation on The New Creator Economy.

We continued to be featured in a number of thought leadership pieces (across Entrepreneur, Billboard, NASDAQ, Bankless, Hypebeast and Hypebot) and produced educational creator case studies to continue to validate the concept of social tokens within the creator economy.

Our ecosystem of developer partners continued to deliver exciting use cases for social tokens & NFTs including launching token-gated wordpress sites and working on token-gated Calendly links, token-gated slack communities and coin-based polling capabilities. We partnered with the Friends With Benefits community on a hackathon that saw a number of teams riff on different utility concepts for social tokens and NFTs.

Finally, we released a number of features that creators had been asking for including bulk NFT creation, NFT burning, detailed transaction reports and we soft-launched our mobile app in Canada! Our payments and ops teams reduced chargebacks by 29% and maintained a stable rate of payment fraud over the course of the month.

Wallet Growth:

  • Wallet growth: +2,194 unique wallets in March (+6.2% increase from Feb)
  • Total number of unique wallets: 37,567

Other Stats:

  • Fast Company: Rally was named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2022, joining companies like Shopify and Tinder in the top 5 most innovative companies in the social media space.
  • From March 1 to March 31, Rally generated more 155 media placements and mentions with advertising value equivalency of nearly $700k USD, and a potential reach of 73M.
  • Rally generated ​​670,692 impressions across its social media accounts (Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube), a 227.5% increase over the previous month.
  • Rally’s social media audience increased by 5.53% month-over-month, totaling at 48,969 followers.
  • Rally’s leadership team’s audiences on Twitter grew by 172 followers across accounts (Bremner Morris, Stephanie Pereira, Chris Fortier, Tam Gryn) and received 77 key mentions across accounts, a 4,285.7% increase compared to the previous month
  • Rally hosted its first Twitter Spaces focused on community building in web2 and web3, drawing 415 listeners and building 14,496 impressions through promotion of the event
  • Rally sponsored and attended several key consumer and crypto events including NFT LA (sponsor and speaker) and SXSW (presented Flood Fest) generating more than 10M impressions.
  • Rally.io Discord saw 9% growth month-over-month
  • Newsletter views increased 18% month over month, and blog page views are up 5% month over month.

Areas You Can Support:

  • We’re hiring for some important roles:
    • Engineering Roles (including Lead Software Engineer-Payment & Account Security, Lead Software Engineer - New Solana Project, and Lead Front End Engineer)

Report Card:

Launch and grow successful token-based communities with a focus on the US:

  • 15 New Creators launched in March:
Vertical Creator Count
Music KARI, EAZY 2
Media/Editorial HBCU, EBONI 2
Gaming BOX 1
Business Professional AUTH 1
Film/TV HEART 1
Inbound Pipeline GINO, DUB, FEM, GRIT, CORN, BBT, JAS, RUSH 8

  • Notable Creator Launches and Campaigns:

    • Megadeth Guitar Giveaway and Exclusive Merch Sale: Megadeth launched two new promotions exclusively for $MEGA holders including a signed guitar giveaway from lead singer Dave Mustaine for fans holding at least one $MEGA, as well as a newly designed band t-shirt for $40 worth of $MEGA. As a result, their total economy grew nearly 30%, marking a 5% increase in unique wallets.
    • ACIB Token Tournament for Rally Creators: ACIB, a talent management group overseeing the token economies of several creators on Rally, hosted a token tourney this March. Eight participating token communities, including those of Brandon Powell, Jaylen Clark, and Tyger Campell, battled head-to-head weekly to compete for the highest % growth in coin supporters. The winning token community of each round was rewarded with the opposing teams coin. The result was a 54% average increase of total supporters for each of the tokens that participated. The winner of the token tournament, Jaylen Clark ($JROCK), increased his total unique wallet by 500.
    • Duncan Robinson’s March Madness Bracket Challenge ($DBO): Duncan created a tournament challenge where $DBO holders can enter their March Madness bracket to compete for the grand prize of tickets to a Miami Heat game & a guest appearance on The Long Shot Pod. His community is highly engaged. Out of the 263 unique wallets in $DBO, there were 86 token-holders who entered in the bracket challenge, a 32% participation rate.
    • Mark de Clive Lowe incorporates his Creator Coin to his ERC-20 ($MASHI): MdCL previously executed a Mirror crowdfund to purchase back rights to his masters via his $BUYBACK ERC-20 token. We soft-launched $MASHI in Feb and with new Bonfire functionality he is running an eth-gated $MASHI airdrop via Bonfire. He’s included a robust "what is $MASHI” landing page + instructions for fans to claim the various airdrops, as well as active Twitter bounties + community engagement to earn $MASHI directly. Read more about $MASHI here.

  • Creator Case Studies and Education:

    • Newsletter views increased 18% month over month, and blog page views are up 5% month over month. We’ll be transitioning our newsletter from Medium to Hubspot in April, allowing us more customization and audience management.
    • Tam Gryn, 11 Reasons Why Artists Shouldn’t Be Afraid of NFTs: Originally published in Create, we featured Tam on the blog and in the newsletter as she breaks down common misconceptions artists might have regarding NFTs and the art world. Read more here.
    • Rapper Ben Miller of Mayday on Preparing for the Launch of the $MORSE Coin: Our interview with Ben Miller of $WREK paves the way for the forthcoming launch of his second token project, $MORSE. He shares deep insights regarding what worked best for him as he launched his token, and why he’s excited to build further momentum with Rally. Read more here.
    • How Rebel in Venus is Embracing Social Tokens in the Dance World: We caught up with $REBEL creator Marissa Alma Nick regarding her plans for the future of $REBEL, the genesis of the project, and how she’s defying expectations in the dance community with the help of Rally. Read more here.
    • How I Built My Token Economy: Joe Pulizzi, $TILT: The first in a new series, we’re going deep with creators on the secrets to their success with Rally. Up first, Joe Pulizzi, whose $TILT coin just turned one year old! Read more here.
    • Mike Sorgenfrei of Encore on Making the Connections Between Creators and Fans More Seamless: We’re working to highlight more of the builders who help bring the Rally ecosystem to life. Mike and the Encore team are building incredible utility for our creators, and we’re excited to highlight our convo with him here.

  • Community Engagement Stats:

    • Rally.io Discord saw 9% growth for a total of 2232 subscribers total, and with retention up 2% from last month. We have been experimenting with more @ messages, and saw twice as many mutes as the previous month (from 9 to 22).
    • Community Newsletter: Held steady with nearly 40% open-rate / 14% CTR on avg.
    • Community Meetings: Nearly 100 people joined our Dev Weekly, and 93 joined the bi-weekly Community Meetup, with nearly 150 views of the video recordings. While we had more attendees at our Community Meetup overall, the rest of our numbers for community events are slightly down. This is likely due to extra attendance / video views being driven by leadership roadmap presentations.

  • Creator Onboarding: The Onboarding team matched 3 mentor-mentee pairs, held 9 info and education sessions for 14 people, minted 15 new Coins, and 524 NFTs. They also welcomed a new team member, Alijah Kopelman.

  • Partnerships and Dev Ecosystem:

    • In March we funded the development of one bounty - Token Gated Calendly, aimed at our business focused creators
    • Two of our previous bounties (Token Gated Slack and coin based polling) are on the verge of going live, currently in QA
    • Through our hackathon with FWB, we reviewed over 30 submissions and have engaged 5+ companies about their interest to continue building for Rally
    • The CDC funded 3 new projects - Play Arcade, SeedR, and Tournament Bot
    • One former grant recipient, Temple, went live for gating Wordpress sites
    • On the platform side, we made meaningful strides with companies like Cameo, Twitter, TikTok, Community, and Laylo

  • $RLY Network Growth Challenge:

    • 500 new wallets via the Creator Signup Bonus Campaign
    • 2 Creators launched from the Creator Referrals Program

  • Mint Sprint:

    • The Rally Mint Sprint project launched with a bang March 19th, as our first Mint Sprint candidate successfully sold out her 100 NFTs in just over 26 hours (and has sold out of the 150 max editions!).
    • We learned a lot with the first two Sprints, and have granted one creator a do-over as we worked with them to better understand the challenge.

Build the platforms and operations to launch and grow natively Web3 token-based communities with an excellent creator and community experience by:

  • Recent Product and Engineering Wins:
    • Bulk NFT Creation: Enables creators to mint up to 500 distinct and unique NFTs simultaneously with a single action.
    • Accounts: Supporting our customer’s transaction reporting with self-serve downloads of Rally.io transactions.
    • Burning NFTs: Creators can now burn editions of an NFT that are in their wallet, enabling new utility use cases.
    • Open Edition Instant Minting: NFTs can now be minted on demand while leaving the edition open for future users, satisfying a key customer pain point.
    • Mobile App: Rally.io’s mobile app has been soft launched on Android in Canada.
  • Infrastructure, Payments, and Ops
    • Payments / Customer Support: Internal tooling feature improvements that increase visibility into users’ experience and improves customer service responses and timeliness.
    • Transaction Monitoring: Implemented Sardine for risk and fraud mitigation. This capability (currently in “listening mode”) lets us assess data around logins, account creation and sidechain transactions to determine whether activity is likely to be fraudulent.
    • Key Fraud Stats:
      • Reduced Chargebacks by 29% (37 to 11)
      • Payment fraud rate is stable at 1.98%
      • Suspended 13,790 fraudulent accounts in March
  • Features In Development:
    • Community NFT Minting: Enabling community members (as opposed to Creators who have issued coins) to mint NFTs.
    • Enhanced NFT Royalties: Opens up creativity in paying our NFT sale royalties by allowing NFTs themselves to be designated as the recipient for payments.
    • Engage to Earn: Setting up a prototype of our Web 3 Loyalty Program for Creator and Community Member feedback.

Evolve our brand to become native within Web3 culture

  • Marketing Strategy:

    • Kicked off a refresh of our marketing messaging to better articulate Rally’s value proposition. This will inform an update of our website, which will be our focus in Q2.
    • Initiated a cross-functional workstream to build out a playbook of how Gamers / Streamers can use tokens and NFTs to drive engagement and community growth.

  • Events:

    • NFT LA: Rally was a presenting sponsor of the Creator Economy track at NFT LA, alongside Ripple.
      • Director of Strategic Partnerships Alex Hooven spoke on a panel at NFT LA titled: How the Creator Economy and NFTs Intersect.
      • Estimated Impressions: 10k (including audience of 200, hundreds watching via the livestream, and nearly 6k social impressions)
    • SXSW: Rally partnered with Flood Magazine to power their Floodfest festival, including Rally logo presence on-stage, as well as digital and physical flyers.
      • Estimated impressions: 11.2M (including nearly 6k live audience members, physical and print flyers, and social media impressions)
    • Top Women Trendsetters in Web3: VP of Creator Success Stephanie Pereira joined a Twitter Spaces panel hosted by Entrepreneur reporter Sarah Austin called “Top Women Trendsetters in Web3” along other execs in the space including the Head of Communications at Rarible.
    • The New Creator Economy: Director of Content and Education Brian Mark joined a Twitter spaces conversation with several creator economy focused projects including JellySmack and Broadhaven Ventures

  • Thought Leadership:

    • Entrepreneur: Entrepreneur featured a contributed piece from CEO Bremner Morris on how building sustainable ecosystems requires a restructuring of the creator/fan relationship and how web3 can provide the roadmap.
    • Billboard: Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr contributed commentary to Billboard offering advice for artists looking to web3 to connect with fans
    • NASDAQ: Director of Strategic Partnerships Alex Hooven contributed a piece to Nasdaq about how DAOs could shape the future of film finance.
    • Bankless: Director of Fine Arts Tam Gryn contributed an article to Create Mag titled “11 Reasons Why Artists Shouldn’t Be Afraid of NFTs,” which was also picked up in Bankless
    • Hypebeast: Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr contributed commentary to Hypebeast on how music NFTs enable artists to explore additional direct-to-fan revenue streams.
    • Hypebot: Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr contributed a piece to Hypebot about IP rights and music NFTs.

  • Media Relations:

    • From March 1 to March 31, Rally generated more 155 media placements and mentions with advertising value equivalency of nearly $700k USD, and a potential reach of 73M

  • Mainstream Coverage:

  • Crypto Coverage:

    • Edge of NFT: Director of Strategic Partnerships Alex Hooven appeared on the Edge of NFT podcast with the organizers of NFT LA.
    • NFT 365: Brian Fanzo ($ADHD) podcast on how he thinks about utility with his social token

  • Media Briefings:

    • CNBC: VP of Creator Partnerships Nick Millman highlighted Rally’s sports strategy during a background conversation with Jabari Young.
    • Washington Post: Head of Comms Kurt Patat updated Taylor Lorenz on Rally’s early success record with creators and their communities
    • Billboard: Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr highlighted Rally’s music strategy with Kristin Robinson at SXSW
    • Rolling Stone: Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr spoke with Larry Dvoskin at NFT LA
    • Bloomberg: Communications Manager Joe Coufal and Director of Strategic Partnerships Alex Hooven spoke with Hannah Miller at NFT LA. Hannah previously covered Rally at her last role as crypto reporter at The Information. She explained her new beat (crypto startups) at Bloomberg and relayed her new contact information.
    • Business Insider: Head of Communications Kurt Patat updated Geoff Weiss on Rally and discussed a Vidcon panel opportunity
    • CoinDesk: Communications Manager Joe Coufal and Director of Strategic Partnerships Alex Hoovenmet with Eli Tan (NFT beat reporter) at NFT LA.
    • Decrypt: Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr and Communications Manager Joe Coufal spoke with Kate Irwin at NFT LA
    • Cointelegraph: Director of Strategic Partnerships Alex Hooven spoke with Tracy Zhang (CEO of Cointelegraph China) at NFT LA. Communications Manager Joe Coufal will follow up to put her in touch with Unite.io.
    • Hypebeast: Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr had a background phoner and introductory with Rosie Perper meeting at NFT LA
    • Hypebot: Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr met with Bruce Houghton during SXSW.

  • Social

    • Rally generated 679,992 impressions across its social media accounts (Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube), a 232% increase over the previous month.
    • Rally’s social media audience increased by 5.5% over the last month, totaling at 48,969 followers.
      • The Rally Twitter account grew by 1,711 followers, a 5.93% increase in followers compared to February 2022.
      • The Rally Instagram account grew by 274 followers, a 22.8%% increase in followers compared to February 2022.
      • The Rally LinkedIn page grew by 524 followers, a 21.3% increase in followers compared to February 2022.
    • Rally received a total of 44,655 engagements across accounts, a 382.9% increase over the past month, as well as a total of 20,951 social link clicks, a 1,434.9% increase over the past month.
    • Rally’s cross-platform engagement rate for March 2022 averaged at 6.6% ER, a 47.3% increase from February 2022.
    • Implemented a high ROI and cadence strategy for paid social media ads across Twitter and Instagram — Paid advertising for Facebook and LinkedIn will be added in the coming months.
    • Published several thought leadership and Rally success stories, targeting and engaging with web3 audiences.
    • Rally’s leadership audience grew by 172 followers across accounts (Bremner Morris, Stephanie Pereira, Chris Fortier, Tam Gryn) and received 77 key mentions across accounts, a 4,285.7% increase compared to the previous month (Project Blue Check)
    • Rally hosted its first Twitter Spaces focused on community building in web2 and web3, drawing 415 listeners and leveraging 14,496 impressions across promotional content

Establish a Rally.io business model that enables a clear path toward becoming self-sustaining by:

  • No update

Define and prioritize Rally.io’s community stewardship and governance perspective and establish timelines and milestones.

  • Launched the Mentorship program which connects newly minted creators to veteran members of our community for mentorship, guidance, and more. Over the course of six weeks, mentors guide their mentees through the launch process and beyond.
    • 6 Creator mentors & 8 mentees have already enrolled in the program
  • The Creator Advisory Council distributed $43,750 in Awards to 18 Rally Creators.
  • The Community Developer Council made 3 grants totalling $180,000 to support $Play Arcade (phase 2), SeedR (a website builder for creators), and Tournament Bot (allowing folks to bet coins 1v1) project.
  • The Rally team drafted Community Standards and went through several rounds of review with the Councils before introducing them.
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Welcome to the third monthly Rally.io update for April 2022. Included below are the following:

  • Executive summary;
  • Summary of KPIs;
  • Asks and areas you can support the Rally.io team;
  • A detailed report card against our top 5 priorities for 2022

Please let me know if you have any questions and feedback on things that you’d like to see in this report going forward!

Executive Summary:

Over the course of April, the Rally.io team spent much of their time preparing for upcoming creator launches and campaigns alongside prepping for a variety of industry events including the Creator Economy Expo, VidCon and Consensus.

We launched 9 new creators across the Music, Sports and Business Professional categories. Tim & Barry, Ebonee Davis, Katja Glieson and Together Art Class ran novel campaigns to help grow their communities on Rally and deliver additional utility to their coin holders. We launched our new Creator Guide page on Notion to help creators launch and grow their token-based communities on Rally.

Additionally, we initiated work on the “Treasure Box” capability built on top of Solana to begin the process of bringing social token capabilities to Solana. We’re excited to share more about these plans soon!

Wallet Growth:

  • Wallet growth: +1,902 unique wallets in April (+5.1% increase from March)
  • Total number of unique wallets: 39,469

Other Stats:

  • From April 1 to April 30, Rally generated more than 125 media placements and mentions with advertising value equivalency of nearly $2.7 million USD, and a potential reach of 294M
  • Rally’s social media audience increased by 6.4% over the last month, totaling at 52,086 followers.

Areas You Can Support:

  • We’re hiring for some important roles:
    • Engineering Roles (including Lead Software Engineer - New Solana Project, and Lead Front End Engineer)

Report Card:

Launch and grow successful token-based communities with a focus on the US:

  • 9 New Creators launched in April:
Vertical Creator Count
Music ANGEL, MAYDAY, KATJA 2
Sports BALLER 1
Business Professional ACIB 1
Inbound Pipeline SALES, METAL, TGA, WTWH, VIPER 5

  • Notable Creator Launches and Campaigns:

    • Tim & Barry Beat Competition ($TAB) - TAB ran a competition where producers in their community can submit their take on the intro music to the series to win $TAB as well as first place being featured as the new series theme. With submissions ranging from multi-platinum selling producers to up-and-coming talent active in their Discord server, TAB was able to almost double (2x) their total server member count and attract an eclectic group of creative minds for future campaigns. $RLY Backing for their overall economy increased by over 120% throughout the competition and the community have generated over 100K $RLY in rewards from the competition.
    • Ebonee Davis NFT Poetry Lounge ($EBONI) - Ebonee Davis held an in person NFT Poetry Lounge event at Soho Works and gave an airdrop and commemorative NFT to everyone who attended.
    • Katja Glieson Pre-Save to Earn ($KATJA) - Katja Glieson is doing a pre-save coin airdrop for her latest single, Better View, by redirecting fans from FFM to a Bonfire claimable link.
    • Together Art Class POAP ($TGTHR) - Together launched a POAP NFT to commemorate Crypto for Creatives: A New Renaissance class that they hosted alongside our very own Director of Fine Arts, Tam Gryn.

  • Creator Case Studies and Education:

    • Content Stats:
      • We’ve moved our newsletter from Medium, and while we lost some subscribers in the move, subscribers on the new list increased 4% this month, with an open rate of 21% and CTR of 11%.
      • Rally Blog - Rally saw a major increase in site traffic in April, up 660% month over month, with a total of 12,542 pageviews. Average pageview time was shorter at 0:55, down from 1:10 in March.
    • Launched our new Creator Guide page on Notion: Designed as a resource for new Creators to find resources and inspiration for token utility, we’re excited to offer this new resource to existing and new Rally Creators. This will be a living tool that grows and evolves over time.
    • Guide to Growing your Token Community Through Airdrops: Diving deep into airdrop how-to and “why”, we’re delivering more of this high-utility content via the site, creating clear, actionable guidance for new Creators looking for ways to deliver value to and connect with their communities. Read more here.
    • Digital Futurist Brian Fanzo on Why He’s Buying a New NFT Every Day: Part of our “How I Built My Token Economy” series, we went deep with Brian of $ADHD on how he’s built one of the most successful, sustainable token economies. Read more here.
    • Portugal. The Man Rewards Fan Pre-Saves and Boosts Rally Rewards: Highlighting specific utility for creators and their fans is a priority of the Editorial team, and this PTM activation is a great example. We’re highlighting best-in-class and innovative applications for Rally Creators. Check it out here.
    • Crescendo’s Greg Bresnitz on Bringing Social Tokens to Podcasting: Highlighting new creators is a great way to reward them for launching on Rally, and helps showcase the diversity of creators launching on our platform. Greg is using $CRNDO to reward his podcast fans. Learn more here.
    • Four Strategies for a Successful Social Token Launch: Snackable content for creators is an important way to drive engagement and awareness. We’ll be featuring more content like this going forward.

  • Community Engagement Stats:

    • Community Newsletter: Hovered as usual about about 40% open rate, and CTRs more than doubled to 25%.
    • Community Meetings: 65 people attended our bi-weekly meetings, and 69 attended our dev weekly. Meeting attendance for both is down by about a third on average, though video views for community meetings remains steady.

  • Creator Onboarding:

    • The Onboarding team matched 2 mentor-mentee pairs, wrapped up 3 mentor-mentee relationships, held 4 info and education sessions for 6 people, minted 5 new organic Coins and 5 partnerships Coins, and 56 NFTs.
    • Time in pipeline is down 46%, and application approval rating is up almost 15 points.

  • Partnerships and Dev Ecosystem:

    • In April we had a number of partners go live and built out a resource for our creators to see how they can use their coin
    • Our previous bounty, Coin Gated Polling is now live. The developers also built in the ability to generate single use presale codes for events or discounts
    • The CDC funded 2 new projects - eStreamly and 2Cents Audio for a combined total of $137k
    • On the platform side, we are continuing to pursue partnerships with companies that would both expand our reach and utility.

Build the platforms and operations to launch and grow natively Web3 token-based communities with an excellent creator and community experience by:

  • Recent Product and Engineering Wins:
    • Rally.io Features
      • Automated Genesis Vesting (Token Bonding Curve v2.2)
      • Coalfire Audit Security Improvements
      • Admin Tool Improvements
      • Daily Rewards Communication Banner ready to push live
      • Primary dev on the Baller page underway
    • Labs Features: Primary dev underway on Project Treasure Box to support Solana Launch, Discord bot stability improvements
    • NFT Features: Doubled file size maximum to 100MB, enabled CSV activity downloads
  • Infrastructure, Payments, and Ops
    • Payments & Infra Product
      • Accounts: Launched in Model 2FA setup, decreasing friction for customers adding 2FA
      • Payments / Customer Support: Implemented Webhooks to record changes in payment status including failures, refunds and chargebacks
      • Transaction Monitoring: Sardine implemented in shadow (listen-only) mode at Convert, Swap, Transfer and Bridgeout
    • Payments and Infra Ops
      • Customer Service:
        • Created a workflow for Wiki updates in Notion Spark & Wiki Update Requests
        • Onboarded Developer Support to Freshdesk ticketing system
        • Team is expanding! Hired Zandra Ruiz for Technical Support Specialist, she starts May 9th.
      • Key Fraud Stats:
        • Reduced Chargebacks by 45% (11 to 5)
        • Payment fraud rate is stable at 1.7%
        • Suspended 1548 fraudulent accounts in April
  • Features In Development:
    • Treasure Box: Our Solana SDK to mint new social tokens and initialize Token Bonding Curves
    • Enhanced NFT Royalties: Opens up creativity in paying our NFT sale royalties by allowing NFTs themselves to be designated as the recipient for payments.
    • Engage to Earn: Moving from prototype to production ready feature for our gaming live streamer utility hypothesis

Evolve our brand to become native within Web3 culture

  • Marketing Strategy:

    • Rolling out updated messaging for upcoming events and creator launches. Draft new website copy for upcoming messaging refresh.
    • Pushing forward with a cross-functional team to build out the engage-to-earn use case for Gamers/Streamers and planning roll out with initial interested creators.

  • Events:

    • Infura community call: Rally Head of Product Chris Fortier gave a Rally overview to 1,500 blockchain devs in the Consensys/Infura community. We did an $R coin airdrop on the call, which resulted in 194 new Rally.io wallets created.
    • ArtTable: VP of Creator Success Stephanie Pereira joined ArtTable for a conversation about NFT marketplaces and what makes for a successful NFT project.

  • Media Relations:

    • From April 1 to April 30, Rally generated more 125 media placements and mentions with advertising value equivalency of nearly $2.7 million USD, and a potential reach of 294M

  • Mainstream Coverage:

    • CNBC: Kevin was quoted in an article about Yat Siu betting against Facebook. The attribution mentions Rally as one of the companies he’s founded.
    • Muse by Clio: Head of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr was profiled in Muse by Clio (host of the Clio awards), where he discussed artists entering web3 and a recent $PTM campaign on Rally.
    • Social Media Examiner: Rally was featured in a post about how and why social tokens work for businesses.

  • Crypto Coverage:

    • Cryptoast: Rally and $KSK were mentioned in an article from a French blog about the intersection of soccer and web3
    • Coinyuppie: A blog post about social/community tokens lists Rally first in its description of the competitive landscape.

  • Media Briefings:

    • The Wall Street Journal: Director of Music Partnerships Bryce Carr and VP of Global Communications Kurt Patat met with Anne Steele, the WSJ’s music industry reporter, in Los Angeles. They discussed Rally and how artists are using social tokens to convert their audiences into communities.

  • Social

    • Rally’s social media audience increased by 6.4% over the last month, totaling at 52,086 followers.
      • The Rally Twitter account grew by 2,640 followers, a 54.3% increase in followers compared to March 2022.
    • Rally generated 136,382 impressions, 5,486 engagements, and 1,053 social link clicks for the month of April across its social media accounts (Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube).
    • Rally’s cross-platform engagement rate for April 2022 averaged at 4.0% ER.
    • Created new social templates for Rally’s CAC Awards and Creator Interviews, paired with boosts targeting web3 audiences.
    • Launched new social content highlighting Rally’s Creators and NFTs, paired with focused boosts to the Creator’s audience and web3 targets.
    • Rally’s leadership (Bremner Morris, Stephanie Pereira, Chris Fortier, Tam Gryn) received 38 key mentions across accounts (Project Blue Check).
    • New paid social advertising plans around major creators will be tested and executed each month (e.g. Eric Bellinger for May), as these amplifications achieved the highest ROI in March — especially compared to the Rally content amplifications ran in April (which performed well, but not as lucrative for impressions, engagements, or link clicks).

Establish a Rally.io business model that enables a clear path toward becoming self-sustaining by:

  • No update

Define and prioritize Rally.io’s community stewardship and governance perspective and establish timelines and milestones.

  • The Creator Advisory Council distributed $19,750 in Awards to 9 Rally Creators.
  • The Community Developer Council made 2 grants totalling $173,000 to support eStreamly and 2Cents. We also moved grant reporting to the wiki for transparency and better community involvement. There is a plan to move the grant application process to the forum for the same reason.
  • The Rally team drafted Community Standards and went through several rounds of review with the Councils before introducing them.
14

Is this thread still active? I know Rally.io is going through a bit of a transition right now, and any insight into the process would be massively appreciated. Obviously it’s a private company and under no obligation to provide transparency to the community, but in the spirit of Web 3.0 (well, 2.5), it’d be a nice gesture. It feels like we’ve never been more in the dark.

Just my two cents. At the end of the day, we’re all rooting for Rally.io to succeed. If there’s anything we can do – other than continuing to buy CCs and contribute to their economies, of course – please let us know.