Community Fees: An Odin Fun Innovation The question to solve is how do you *properly* reward creators and communities? This is a hard problem. We’ve come up with a new solution (Community Fees) and we think you’re going to love it, but before I dive into it, let’s look at a few (poor) examples from other platforms. Pump Fun and Creator Fees Pump fun ties a creator and their stream to a token. The creator earns a percentage of trading volume on their token as creator revenue. Problems: 1. This model incentivizes pump and dumps. Creators receive volume-based fees on their token, so they are incentivized to maximize the volume on their token. Pump it. Let it sit and trade down. Pump it again. Create controversy and make everyone dump. Bring it all back again and pump it again, etc. 2. In fact, the pump and dumps can get so bad that a creator might just straight up rug their token and hope it gets picked up by a community CTO to continue raking in the fees. 3. Some creators don’t actually want a token. Who wants to sign up for 10,000 crazy degens yelling at you to do something to pump your token every day and night on all of your social platforms for the rest of your life? Exactly. Nobody. 4. Tokens aren’t actually the right vehicle for creator monetization. Creators most often want recurring revenue streams for value they provide over time, not a variable pricing structure for a single all-you-can-eat forever purchase per user. I think that early streamers will do well due to early hype on pump fun, but over time this model is not sustainable and the incentives aren’t properly aligned. Opensea and NFT Royalties The NFT creator royalty model is almost as bad as the pump fun model. I love that creators can make money on NFTs and can use that to fund future work, but the model is just bad. Problems: 1. Again, this model incentivizes pump and dumps. Creators receive volume-based fees in perpetuity for all transactions and they are incentivized to generate as much volume as possible for their collections (by any means possible, floor price up and floor price down). 2. It is very rare that a creator needs a fixed 10k supply of anything. Thankfully by the end of the NFT cycle we finally iterated toward more creative mints (smaller collection sizes, open editions, 1:1s, dynamic NFTs). 3. Buy-once-hold-forever can fit in a properly constructed creator monetization funnel, but in most cases creators don’t want buy-once-hold-forever. Creators want pay-me-every-month-forever models. Some creators were able to make it work for a while, but I think overall, creator royalties was always just a race to the bottom for marketplaces (Blur, optional creator royalties, etc). The Odin Fun Model: Community Fees On Odin Fun we are building a new way to reward creators and communities called Community Fees. Community Fees are simple. 1. Anyone can create a community. A community will start out simple (a named designation or affiliation on your user profile). Over time, these communities will grow into more robust spaces with additional features. 2. Every user can pick a community to be affiliated with. You will only be able to select one community as your primary community. Because Odin Fun is a trading platform, you can almost think of communities on Odin Fun as trading communities or trading networks. 3. The creator of the community receives a small fee on all of the volume that their users do on the Odin Fun platform across all tokens. We don't have exact numbers here yet but we should soon. 4. Note #1: a community is not tied to a single token. You can have a token associated with a community, or not. You can have multiple tokens associated with a community, or not. A trading community doesn't have to have a token. 5. Note #2: communities receive rewards for all of the volume across all of their affiliated users across all tokens. This means that to win as a community, you need to onboard users, keep them engaged in the platform trading, and encourage them to keep you listed as their primary community affiliation. The incentivization structure here is beautiful. Communities are directly incentivized to: 1. Onboard more users 2. Onboard high volume users (whales) 3. Keep users engaged on the platform 4. Keep users trading successfully on the platform 5. Give users meaningful experiences in their community Users are directly incentivized to: 1. Align with a community that provides value to them (alpha, friends, success stories, airdrops, rewards) 2. Make money 3. Enjoy time with their magic internet friends These are exactly the kinds of things that we want happening on Odin Fun. We’ve interacted with many of the communities that exist on Odin Fun already, and there are some massive communities. We want to give people opportunities to be explicitly affiliated with communities, grow their communities, get rewarded by their communities, and help communities earn community fees on the platform. Current Progress The initial work for this feature is already underway. The smart contract work is done and we’re sending it out for auditing now, the frontend work is nearing completion, and the backend/API work is getting close. So we still have a while before we’ll push this feature out. But I wanted to give you all some insight into why we’re working on this and get some initial community feedback on the idea. What Else? To all of you wondering what else is going on, right now I'm really excited about: 1. Bitcoin perps 2. Lock LP tokens, staking, LP rewards 3. Airdrops, claims 4. Solana integration, BRC-20 integration 5. A million different fixes, improvements, features, etc So tons going on and we're always in the trenches building!