Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) offer the opportunity to earn money in a decentralized way or without relying on centralized platforms like YouTube, Instagram or Facebook. This was pointed out by Michael Smolenski, an entrepreneur from the world of blockchains, who today is the CEO and founder of the Lightstreams network.
Smolenski was presented today on the stage of the event BlockDown which this year is celebrated in Croatia. There he explained how users can actually own and control their digital content, turned into NFT.
To explain in detail how to achieve this, the software developer used an example of how an influencer like Kyra Pro, with a large number of followers on various social networks, such as Instagram and Tik Tok, could earn money by converting its contents into non-fungible tokens.
“Surely Kyra’s thousands of followers on Instagram would be bored if she offered them a series of collectibles on NFT, but what if instead she asked them to pay a small sum of money to access certain content that otherwise it would not be visible? What if this influencer starts selling exclusive videos?” Smolenski wondered.
To understand what the entrepreneur and developer explained, you must first understand that social networks pay influencers when they accumulate a good number of views. In the case of Instagram, in November of last year, it offered a bonus of USD 35,000 to content creators who accumulated more than 58 million views in a month, according to a publication from Business Insider.
Nevertheless, Smolenski’s proposal is that influencers like Kyra do not have to depend on Instagramnor of any centralized platform, but that they are able to maintain control of the digital content that is published on any type of social network.
The content in NFT and the limitations to overcome
As Smolenski commented, NFTs hosted on a public blockchain present problems because the digital content that has been linked is not really protected.
The limitation to overcome is the one in the smart contract of most NFTs today. There is a URL that points to digital content that is hosted on some server. But the problem is that this URL is public, so with a link, anyone can download the content that has that NFT linked to it, which means that no one has control over those NFTs.
Michael Smolenski, CEO of the Lightstreams network.
In addition to this, Smolenski spoke of another drawback of most NFTs currently in existenceas is how public and transparent some of the blockchains are that they are hosted on.
“If you want to exchange information via a smart contract on, say, the Ethereum network, not only is that exchange visible to any onlooker, but it’s also incredibly expensive to store anything that exceeds a few kilobytes on-chain,” he said. the developer.
The problems raised by Smolenski have already been revealed in the ecosystem and have been reported by CriptoNoticias. For example, there are falsifications or plagiarism they copy, the NTFs presented on a platformas well as other difficulties, raised by the communities, where it has been manifested how much they affect the industry.
How to protect and monetize digital content in NFT?
To address some of the issues NFT creators face today, Smolenski introduced his startup, which has apparently found a possible solution.
It is the Lightstreams network, based on a new protocol of authorized blocks that uses smart contracts to grant, block or revoke access to digital content in NFTfor specific users.
With this solution, an influencer like Kyra can publish her content on NFT and, as the owner of that smart contract, she can grant access to all the users with whom she wants to share that content after they pay the indicated amount. But Kyra will also be able to sell the rights to that NFT so that other users can freely publish it on various platforms.
Michael Smolenski, CEO of the Lightstreams network.
Another feature of Lightstreams described by Smolenski is that your system for NFT hosting has IPFS storage (Interplanetary file system or p2p storage) with enhanced permissions and high hosting capacity for files of any size, as detailed.
With this we offer a different system than a public blockchain, whose data is transmitted to all the nodes of that network. On the contrary, with the extension of the ipfs protocol that we have integrated, when someone pays the required sum, they are granted access to be able to download the content linked to a certain NFT, but by doing so they will not have access to the data, so these remain protected.
Michael Smolenski, CEO of the Lightstreams network.
With this proposal Smolenski believes that heNFTs now offer the opportunity to reinvent social networks and the entire industry based on content creation.
From his point of view, his concept would also reformulate the algorithms of social platforms, since these will no longer be based on the consumption of user data to start looking at the payments that users will make to access content.