Using Creator coins to purchase goods from creators

Tech/Network Upgrades
#1

I noticed that Sellah (3Cr8) Creator coin has the option to purchase some physical goods with their creator coin. I intend to buy one for a friend who I know is a fan, but it got me to thinking…I imagine this will be increasingly important with other musicians like Portugal the Man wanting to leverage creator coin for goods, services, access etc…

There are a couple of issues with using Creator coins to purchase goods vs. Services:

  1. User experience. I have to purchase coins and wait for the transaction to complete, and then I need to donate the coins in a separate transaction.

  2. The UI for donate prompts me for an amount of coins, but I must calculate the value. This could fluxuate a meaningful amount, wildly even at certain points along the sigmoidal TBC or with larger transactions. While the average user might reasonably think to simply multiply the coin price times the number of coins. Additionally, other sales could happen that would further change (for higher or lower) the amount of my donation. $RLY coin price could also change, though we should expect that to stabalize in the longer term. Ultimately, this offers a suboptimal experience for both the fan and the creator, particularly as Creators may have more flexibility with cost of services over goods that have more or less fixed costs (CD, poster, hoodie etc…).

It’s really important that Creator coins can capture all the economic activity in a creator economy, so it’d be great if we could develop or implement a more seamless solution. How can we enable fans to donate a precise amount to their creator using creator coins…Solution?

  1. Create an option to purchase and donate in a single transaction. This would in effect mint and transfer the coins in a single transaction. The value at minting could then be verified by (or provided to) the creator. Additionally, the fan will have an easy time knowing precisely how much they have donated in fiat.

  2. Alternatively, one might want to purchase say 50$ of coins and donate 20$. While adding a step to the process, it might make sense to have a prompt to allow for a partial transfer at the purchase time. Would you like to donate part of your purchase to the creator? Not as big a fan of this, as I see the need to solve for the goods - particularly for those fans who simply want to buy the CD etc… and aren’t interested in engaging further in the creator coin.

Not to overcomplicate things, but we could even create tools for Creators to programmatically burn a portion of each donation, say 1%. This would smooth out redemptions, and could even set this aside from their current redemption caps. Perhaps an idea for another thread!

Welcome further thoughts!

Cheers,
Grand

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#2

Excellent idea and write up, thanks Grand!

This is a topic I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about… Being able to capture all the economic activity in the creators community is crucial.

It’s technically possible right now with some estimation/risk, but it’s far from optimal…

I’ll chat with the rally engineers to see if we can get some insight on the best way to approach this.

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#3

Love the thinking here.

One further thought on seamlessness… I think you’ve done a great job of articulating the seamlessness on the fan side and offered an initial thought on seamlessness on the creator side (i.e. automatically burn 1% of donations). I think it’s worthwhile to push this a bit further. Perhaps the following categorization could be helpful:

  1. Transfer – a quantity of coins is transferred from one person to another, value remains in coins on the receiving side
  2. Purchase – a fiat denominated amount of coins is transferred (after purchase for fiat if necessary) from one person to another. The coins received are immediately redeemed for USDC keeping the fiat denomination very clear and the value exchange is not governed by redemption caps
  3. Donation – a quantity of coins is transferred from one person to another. The coins received are immediately burned for RLY leaving open an easy option to exit to fiat without impacting redemption caps.

These might not be the right terms or categories but the general thinking is: what should the unit of the transaction be (creator coin, RLY, or fiat) to best align expectations for both the sender and receiver; and what should the until of value received be in order to best align with the most logical disposition of value received for this particular transaction type.

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#4

Very cool! One could imagine then that when you click to purchase a cd or the like, it defaults to “Purchase” but say an on stream shout out or twitter repost and the like could default to “Transfer or Donation”, perhaps per Creator preference. Actions taken on Rally.io would allow the full suite of choices.

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#5

And don’t forget the local taxes…

#6

This was really interesting to read. Thanks for writing this and processing this out more.

Also, once your friend has an account let me know his/her user name. I would love to send them some of our Selah 3CR8 coins!

Take care

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#7

Thanks everyone for sharing their experiences and ideas here.

With Rally finishing up its network economy loop it’s now the perfect time for us to address the topic at hand. We are preparing for UX improvements throughout Rally, particularly around mobile support and the transactional improvements mentioned here.

Some improvements we can make sooner than later:

  1. Improvements to transactional flows when donating with a 0/insufficient balance so that users don’t have to go initiate both a buy and donate flow separately.
  2. Ability to donate an exact amount of fiat/coins so that users and creators don’t have to deal with cumbersome calculations and also support goods at fixed costs.

A bigger discussion that needs to happen is the follow through of a purchased good. Say a creator has a list of 10 users who have donated X USD amount of coin to get a digital good or a physical good.

  1. How do we collect/validate info? Will physical goods be shipped internationally?
  2. Who will distribute the goods? Rally? The creator?
  3. How will they be distributed? Automated emails for digital goods?
  4. And so on…

There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to goods. We’re looking forward to working with Creators, BD, and Product to come up with next steps.

2 Likes
#8

Ajun,

Easier transaction workflows and the ability to guarantee a specific output amount are both awesome features.

Rally wont be responsible for anything past expanding Auth/API access for other developers to create any # of use cases that people want. Rally wont be responsible for anything like the delivery of goods, shipping, customer service,

I do think at some point it may become necessary for Rally and the Community to approve specific apps, as to ensure apps that my be harmful to the ecosystem.

#9

@ajun @PlatformProAlex @mike I think the best way to think about transactional flows is to think about Rally as the payment network. Much like Stripe doesn’t think about how to deliver goods that a merchant sold, I think about Rally as both the payment network (Stripe) AND the medium-of-exchange itself (dollars, or in Rally’s case Creator Coin).

This means that Rally shouldn’t be the commerce service itself. While this is a dramatic network simplification, I think it is a constructive framework to unlock Creator usage of crypto anywhere Creators are, as opposed to always drawing users to Rally.io

If we enable other ecommerce sites, blogs, Discord servers, Twitch channels, etc to all have transactional commerce activity that the developer (in Discord and Twitch’s case it’s a bot) can call and the user signs (Web3 style), Rally can just focus on being the network protocol for:

  • CC (Creator Coin) Creation
  • CC Price and Liquidity via TBCs
  • CC Ownership ledger
  • CC Transfers
  • Capital Flow Controls

Web3 projects typically focus on using smart contracts themselves as the trustless ways to interact with other Web3 services. Rally, due to our approach of making crypto usable for the next 100 million users, can use Web3 for the $RLY governance token but focus on Web2 style APIs for Creators Coins to any traditional consumer internet site to integrate CC into their commerce activity.

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