Steal This Article—And You Could Make Its Author Very Rich

This text was alleged to make me a really rich man. Perhaps it nonetheless might.

After I uploaded a JPEG of this story’s first web page to Stealcam, I sought my style of the current profit-fueled bonanza that led a single cosplay photograph to fetch a worth of $2,662 value of ETH, and a web page of romantic fiction to go for $343.

These aren’t regular photographs, nevertheless. You may’t see what they’re before you purchase them, they usually may also disappear at any second—endlessly. That’s as a result of anybody can purchase them off of you at any time when they’d like, with out your consent. Until, in fact, you’re prepared to pay a fair greater worth to win them again. 

Welcome to the newest Web3 experiment vying to upend media.

Steal to disclose

In late March, a duo of pseudonymous Web3 builders referred to as Shrimp and Racer soft-launched Stealcam, a decentralized media distribution platform that goals to unite the content material sharing course of with blockchain tooling and the frenzied, financialized ethos of crypto.

What began as a quiet experiment in gamification shortly ballooned right into a high-stakes ecosystem teeming with artists, softcore pornographers, enterprise capitalists, imposters of all stripes, and no less than one wealth-curious reporter.

One such early Stealcam prospector, D0unbug—a pseudonymous software program developer who posts cosplay and health club pic selfies on Twitter—was informed by Racer that it may be an ideal match for e-girls. D0unbug doesn’t know if she considers herself an e-girl however figures most individuals in all probability do. She gave Stealcam a shot, albeit with low expectations. 

“You by no means understand how lengthy issues are gonna final in Web3,” she informed Decrypt. “I wasn’t certain if it was gonna be a long-term factor, or a grift, to make use of that phrase.”

D0unbug paused her Twitter posting and uploaded 12 selfies to Stealcam as a substitute. Inside days, these photos traded between Stealcam customers dozens upon dozens of occasions, routinely for over $2,000 in ETH apiece.

Stealcam operates on a easy premise: Anybody can add something to the web site—as long as it could seem as a single picture. The picture then turns into an NFT residing on Ethereum scaling community Arbitrum, and customers can’t see it until they steal it.

The primary consumer to steal a pic will get it without spending a dime; the particular person after that has to pay .001 ETH (beneath $2 at writing). Each subsequent thief has to pay 10% greater than the final one did.

Let’s say you pay 0.8 ETH ($1,475) for what you thought could be a selfie of your favourite e-girl, however the truth is seems to be an image of a carrot. If that picture is stolen from you for its subsequent asking worth of 0.88 ETH, you then’ll be repaid in full. The excess 10% distinction is then break up: 45% to the earlier proprietor, 45% to the picture’s creator, and 10% again to Stealcam.

After all, there’s the outsized likelihood that nobody steals the picture after you do. In that case, you actually did simply pay virtually $1,500 for an image of a carrot. That’s the crypto ethos at work.

Keen thieves

D0unbug has to date netted over $8,000 in creator funds on Stealcam, making her the second highest-paid creator within the web site’s brief historical past. That diploma of high-impact exercise was not what Racer anticipated after they invited D0unbug to the newly launched web site in March.

“We have been imagining a very excessive worth for a photograph being $10,” Racer informed Decrypt, “so seeing some stolen forwards and backwards for a whole lot or hundreds of {dollars} is sort of mind-blowing.”

The positioning’s present prime creator, the pseudonymous conceptual artist Shl0ms, has made virtually $10,000 within the final month, promoting items which will or is probably not artwork, and will or is probably not fascinating investments. 

“As an NFT artist, there’s a variety of strain to maintain a top quality of labor,” Shl0ms informed Decrypt. “However [with Stealcam] there’s form of this implicit settlement that no matter it’s, you’re gonna be glad, and nobody’s gonna be pissed off that another person paid nevertheless a lot for some silly image. That basically reduces the strain to create and share stuff.”

Shl0ms’ first Stealcam add reached a worth of seven.17 ETH after being stolen 70 occasions. The artist doesn’t wish to spoil the enjoyable by revealing what the picture even appears to be like like—that’s a secret greatest saved between him, the piece’s 70 previous house owners, and whoever’s presently caught holding it after shelling out $12,209 value of ETH for it.

Not everybody making their mark on Stealcam, nevertheless, has an current fanbase to leverage. Ben DeMeter, a Houston-based copywriter and graphic designer, by no means beforehand launched any artwork collections earlier than discovering Stealcam. However then he began listening to tales of younger Stealcam creators placing gold.

“Different marketplaces that exist for [Web3] artwork are sort of already settled, and have big artists which might be already on there,” DeMeter, who now goes by ArtGhost, informed Decrypt. “It is onerous as a brand new artist to get eyes in your work on another market. However Stealcam’s large open.” 

ArtGhost resolved to develop into Stealcam’s first native artist. After a crash course on synthetic intelligence, he started importing AI-assisted summary artwork items to the positioning day by day, and diligently promoted them on Stealcam’s nascent, 90-member Discord server. Already, he is climbed into Stealcam’s prime 20 creators, netting about $1,500 in revenue from his 46 items.

“I hope that because the platform will get larger,” ArtGhost stated, “individuals will keep in mind that this was the primary actual artwork assortment that ever dropped on Stealcam.”

The experiment expands

How massive can the positioning develop? That query has already turned the heads of enterprise capitalists like Li Jin, co-founder and normal accomplice at Web3 investor Variant Fund. Variant is continually on the hunt for Web3 tasks with the potential to upend current paradigms in media and social media; Jin thinks Stealcam could possibly be a type of tasks.

Why? As a result of not like the quite a few Web3 social media tasks presently banking on how a lot individuals care about phrases like “decentralization,” “transparency,” and “neighborhood,” Stealcam’s worth proposition is tied to the one phrase that put crypto on the map within the first place: “cash.”

“I do not suppose that many individuals care about ideology,” Jin informed Decrypt, “however revenue is a common want.”

Jin, who wrote fanfic in highschool, lately started importing pages of a Montana-set wilderness romance she wrote onto the positioning. These single pages have already routinely traded on Stealcam for between $250 and $415 a chunk, lifting her to sixteenth on Stealcam’s creator leaderboard.

However cash isn’t every thing. Jin believes that for Stealcam to succeed, the positioning has to foster real connections between creators and their respective fan bases alongside the traces of a patronage community, to forestall revenue alone from changing into the positioning’s guideline. 

“In any other case, it is simple for only a purely speculative community to break down in on itself,” she stated. 

Stealcam hasn’t collapsed but. However it could be deflating. New Shl0ms items on the positioning—which simply final month have been usually promoting for no less than $400 every—at the moment are going for about $70. D0unbug stopped posting on Stealcam totally after her selfies capped out at decrease and decrease ground costs.

“Folks did not wish to threat shopping for in too late,” she stated. “It ended up changing into a sizzling potato sport.”

She’s contemplating coming again, as soon as Racer and Shrimp revamp the positioning for mass launch later this yr. However is the magic already over? Are Stealcam’s rivers of untold riches already operating dry? 

After I uploaded the primary web page of this story to Stealcam, I anticipated both a whole lot of {dollars} in novelty-induced revenue—I’m the primary journalist to make use of the positioning, or no less than so I informed individuals—or an abysmal failure.

The outcome was someplace in between. My picture has been traded 13 occasions since then, most lately for .021 ETH, or virtually $40. However buying and selling on the picture has since slowed to a probable everlasting halt. All in all, I’ve netted about $18 in revenue. 

A tiny, shiny fleck in my miner’s pan; proof that there’s nonetheless gold in these waters. Simply not as a lot as within the tales I heard.