Stealcam, the novel decentralized media platform that not too long ago noticed customers public sale off selfies and different single pictures for hundreds of {dollars} apiece, introduced this week that it’s pivoting from its signature “steal to disclose ” mechanism and rebranding with a brand new title.
The platform’s subsequent incarnation, known as Pal.tech, will launch in two to 4 weeks in response to its founders. That platform, as a substitute of permitting customers to steal NFT-based pictures pictures from one another at steadily escalating costs, as Stealcam did, will heart on social tokens—cryptocurrencies, on this case launched on Ethereum scaling community Arbitrum, tied to people and designed to monetize fan communities.
“Stealcam is a really particular product that has some passionate customers,” pseudonymous co-founder Racer advised Decrypt. “On the similar time, now we have new concepts we expect can interact a considerably bigger viewers.”
Although a social token launcher with liquidity swimming pools and different monetary providers could seem a far cry from an off-the-cuff image-sharing market, Stealcam’s creators imagine Pal.tech will distill the weather that made Stealcam briefly acquire the buzzy traction it did when launched in March.
“Stealcam customers would focus on photograph costs as a proxy for social capital,” Racer mentioned. “[That’s where] the concept for the social token launcher got here from.”
In Stealcam’s first weeks, the positioning’s high creators—together with pseudonymous conceptual artist Shl0ms and cosplayer D0unbug—earned hundreds of {dollars} apiece posting mere handfuls of pictures of themselves and/or their work.
The stream of speculative capital flowing into Stealcam has since trickled to a halt, nevertheless. Since early April, the incomes of Stealcam’s high earners have nearly utterly stagnated.
Stealcam’s creators are assured {that a} social token launcher will entice a broad swath of customers intrigued by the prospect of profiting off their associates and favourite creators through bespoke cryptocurrencies.
They’d not be the primary to assume so. Quite a few different social token startups, most notably Roll, have been round for years. Rally, one other outstanding social token platform, shut down in January after failing to generate sufficient “ongoing assist.” The social token pattern seen transient spurts of curiosity and pleasure over the previous few years, however the idea has but to actually catch throughout the crypto world.
Pal.tech’s creators say they’ve discovered from the previous errors of different social token platforms. All profiles on the positioning can be linked to Twitter accounts, and a token will solely be capable to be made within the picture of a Twitter-linked particular person with that individual’s consent. Additional, the platform will—in response to its architects—keep away from “exploitative” tokenomics and as a substitute prioritize security and transparency.
That mixture of options will, so Pal.tech’s designers hope, recreate the preliminary, socially charged speculative frenzy loved by Stealcam in its earliest days—albeit on a a lot bigger and extra sustainable scale.
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