Two years ago, onchain media was a distant future. Today, we're seeing hundreds of thousands of transactions a day across the EVM to mint art, writing, ads, moments, memes, and more.
Creators are making meaningful revenue by bringing their work onchain. Collectors are having more fun supporting work directly, building onchain connections with the creators they care about.
While the tooling around collecting onchain media has gotten significantly better over the last 6 months, we're still in the early stages. For the mint economy to grow, we need better ways for collectors to opt-in to supporting a creator's work onchain without needing to take action on each and every individual token.
With Hypersub, there’s been a shift in both creator and collector activity toward mint subscriptions. Rather than minting each token as a creator releases it, collectors opt-in to receive every token a creator mints by subscribing in perpetuity.
This has two main benefits:
For the creator, they get predictable revenue and have a better understanding of who their core fans are without needing to worry about offchain distribution (tokens are automatically minted into collectors' wallets).
For the collector, they get to collect entire bodies of work without needing to be always-online and often at a discount by subscribing vs. minting individually.
This behavior evolved organically. As creators saw the value in subscriptions, they asked for better support in integrating other creator tools into their Hypersubs. Here are a few examples:
Coop Records Club is airdropping a song a day from Sound.xyz to their subscribers. By subscribing, every member gets a 57% discount over manually minting each individual song.
Paper Boy enables collectors to support 0xDesigner's "Design Everydays" up-front, so subscribers can rest easy knowing that the latest crypto-native designs are hitting their wallet every night.
Artcaster is a curator mint subscription. The Hypersub partners with artists to airdrop a piece of art monthly to subscribers. Members are subscribing for the taste rather than the creator.
Almost every Hypersub is experimenting with mint subscriptions in one way or another, and we'll likely see many more experiments in the near future.
Mint subscriptions are a new business model for onchain creators, tapping into the power of the mint economy while providing a much more sustainable, consistent UX for creators and collectors alike.
Higher.
