eqoty

Project Description

We intend to create a music sales and (eventually) streaming ecosystem with trust-less royalty distribution and ownership opportunities for fans on the Secret Network leveraging the SNIP-721 standard. Secret Network's ability to store private data inside NFTs is vital to enabling music access control in our apps.

Our end goal is the creation of two end-user products.

Native music player apps supporting all platforms (Web, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS). Featuring:
- Purchase of music as NFTs
- Purchase of unlimited monthly passes in order to stream music
Music Investment Marketplace. Platforms: TBD
- Browse and buy/sell fractionalized royalty shares to songs listed for sale by artists or royalty holders.

Problem

Artists are dependent on record labels and their historically predatory deals to make a living creating music
Artists don’t have control over their music and distribution
Fans have no way of truly investing in their favorite artists
Existing music distribution platforms take a disproportionally high percentage of proceeds.

Solution

Eqoty is an end-to-end music ecosystem for artists to release, sell, and stream music. Additionally, Eqoty empowers artists to self-raise capital (through the creation and sales of fractional royalty tokens to investors). Royalties are backed by the proceeds from both music sales and subscription streaming. All proceeds from sales are immediately and automatically distributed to royalty token holders (both artists and individual investors/token holders).

Detailed product description

A key component of our dapp is the ability to purchase music NFTs, and automatically distribute the proceeds to the holders of the song's complementary royalty NFT [1].

Our dapp consists of one main 721 contract called EqotyRelease, with two sub 721 contracts called EqotyPurchase and EqotyRoyalty. To release a song on eqoty, an artist would use our app to encrypt and upload their audio files (including associated metadata) to IFPS. Then our app would call the minting function in our EqotyRelease contract supplying public metadata containing all public song information, and private metadata containing a decryption key and the URI of the audio file stored on IFPS.

The mint function in EqotyRelease does two things: mints a new SNIP-721 NFT with both public and private metadatas, and instantiates a new instance of EqotyPurchase and EqotyRoyalty. Finally, it uses the EqotyRoyalty instance to mint a royalty NFT with a fractional value of 100% which the artist receives in their wallet. The artist would have the ability to split up their 100% royalty NFT into fractional pieces if they wish to do so at this point. For example, they can choose to split their royalty token in half and sell one half to an investor.

After an artist mints a new song, the music player app (which displays all minted EqotyRelease tokens) will immediately show that the new release is available for purchase. And while a user (music purchaser) can see which music NFTs are available for purchase, as well as all associated public information, they cannot access the secret metadata to decrypt and play the song without purchasing the song. Only after the purchase of a song will a user be permitted to access the secret decryption key accessible through the EqotyPurchase contract and thus have the ability to play the song.

Purchasing a song in-app will handle transferring the required amount of funds from their wallet by calling an EqotyPurchase instance's purchase minting function. EqotyPurchase mints a purchase NFT for them and transfers those funds to its paired EqotyRoyalty contract instance.

When EqotyRoyalty receives these funds, it will lock those funds inside the contract ready to be claimed by royalty holders. EqotyRoyalty has the property that it maintains a list of claimable royalty balances for each minted royalty NFT and will divvy up new funds for each minted royalty NFT according to their royalty percentage. For example, in the case where two 50% royalty NFTs have been minted for a song: both would have half the payment added to their claimable royalty balance. The holders of the NFTs will be able to claim these balances in-app, and the contract will transfer their balance to their wallet.

[1] Music Release and Purchase Flowchat:

Crypto Music

We will also explore the distribution of artists' revenue from external platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) using our royalty tokens, similar to https://royal.io to increase the inherent value of royalty tokens while our platform is growing.

Go-to-Market plan

We'll focus on deploying an MVP dapp with support for releasing music, buying music, and music purchase revenue distribution to royalty token holders. We will start with a hand-picked set of about 1-3 artists so we can personally engage with them and their communities while learning quickly from their feedback. Then we can rapidly onboard up-and-coming artists plus focus on getting one big-name artist to release at least one single on our platform. To find these artists, we will leverage our existing relationship with two small and medium-size artists with cult followings who have indicated an interest in our project. For the big-name artist, we have direct contact with the OVO group which, if we are successful in getting one of their up-and-coming artists on our platform, will generate the necessary buzz to bring in more well-known artists.

Current Project State

We have implemented the contracts as described in Solution, written in solidity on the Ethereum network (without encryption). And a primitive app on web, desktop (jvm), and mobile which interacts with the contracts.

Below is a short demo of the web app splitting and merging fractional royalty NFTs, purchasing 2 copies of a purchase NFT and the proceeds being delivered to the claimable balances of the fractional royalty NFTs. eqoty-demo

We are currently learning how to build and deploy Secret snip721 contracts in Rust.

Development Roadmap

We are looking to fund the first four months of our development to help get us to a profitable state. We have two senior-level developers working full-time, at a total cost of $98,000. Based on $75/hr 40 hour work weeks.

Software Milestones:

Month 1 ($24,500)

Software:
- Port Existing Solidity Contracts and tests to Rust on Secret Network (weeks 0 - 2).
- Implement Access Control in contracts (using a secret decryption key to decrypt downloaded audio) (weeks 2 - 4)
Business:
- Demo existing POC to artists. Get feedback.
- Get commitments from artists to release with equity upon launch.
- Plan an initial content release with at least one artist
- Decide if we need to hire a dedicated designer (would not necessarily require extra funding)

Month 2 - ($24,500):

Software:
- Refine contracts and tests, and implement calling contracts Kotlin apps this requires building an opensource SCRT Network client Kotlin Library as a separate project that we will use (5-6)
- Design and implement UX for MVP release, (weeks 6 - 7)
- Release MVP by publishing to web (if all is going well we can release native iOS and Android apps as well since we have a multiplatform codebase), this release includes content from at least 1 artist (week 7-8)
Business:
- Get commitments from artists to release with equity upon launch.
- Plan content release with more artists if necessary
- Get UX/UI feedback from artists and some of their fans (users)

Month 3 - ($24,500):

Software:
- Make any improvements needed after initial music release based on user feedback from MVP. Implement any missing/backlogged features or bug fixes (weeks 8 - 12)
- NOTE: The schedule is kept intentionally light, in case release needs to be pushed here, or bugs and potential issues from release take longer to remedy.
Business:
- Collaborate with existing artists to release more music on equity and work with their marketing teams to get more fans onboarded

Month 4 - ($24,500):

Software:
- Make an API to allow organizing and searching of music released on eqoty, paving the way for more users and more artists (week 12 - 15)
- Improve UX to take advantage of the new backend API. (week 16)
- Design and plan the fractional royalty trading marketplace
Business:
- Collaborate with existing artists to release more music on equity, and work with their marketing teams to get more fans onboarded

Ideally, we can receive payments in 4 disbursements, one at the beginning of the grant, and one after each month when development goals are completed.

We would be willing to consider part payment in SCRTs, up to 100%.

Team members

Luca Spinazzola - linkedin github
Milad Gueramian - linkedin github

Team's experience

We are two Software Engineers, Milad Gueramian and Luca Spinazzola who met during undergraduate studies at University of Southern California.

Luca has 7 of years software engineering experience. He worked at a startup in Los Angeles leading the design and development of 5 separate mobile Android Apps and one multiplatform Android and iOS app. In 2021, while getting his M.Eng. in CS at Cornell Tech, he lead his group to be a finalist in Cornell's 2021 Startup Awards Competition with his Machine Learning passion project https://strika.ai. Luca has closely followed developments in blockchain technology for the past decade. But this past winter, the enormous potential for commercial applications in web3 has inspired him to fully commit to web3 development. He has been learning web3 development full-time for the last two months, mostly focused on solidity, but now switching to Rust for Secret Network development. He is a lifelong athlete who competed as a competitive swimmer to become a 7x All-American and represent the Italian National Team. He is prepared to put in the work to make this venture successful. And finally, he is an avid music listener who has wanted to work in the field for years and believes secret NFTs can revolutionize the music industry.
Milad Gueramian has 7 years of experience in the enterprise software industry. After receiving his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2016 Milad developed a keen interest in blockchain technology and decided to seriously pursue it. His first work experience was with a nascent blockchain project where he coded in C++, using the QT UI library to improve the macOS desktop wallet application. Milad left blockchain development to continue his career at Originate Inc, a boutique software development agency, but continued to educate himself on the inner workings of blockchain technology by reading Andreas Antonopolous's Mastering Bitcoin Book. Currently, Milad is a Lead Software Engineer at Accenture LLP where he's gained experience with full-stack engineering in the fintech sector. Commercial crypto applications in the news have sparked renewed interest in Milad and he has decided to go all-in on exploring the application of smart contracts. This past winter he's immersed himself in learning web3 and dapp development as well as contributing to Antonopolous's Mastering Ethereum Book Github repo. Milad has first-hand experience with some pain points of royalty distribution from his experience at Originate Inc. and from friends who are professional musicians with small to mid-size fanbases. Hailing from Los Angeles (a major music hub), he is excited to build a product that can empower his friends as well as the many musicians in his city.

Team Code Repository

https://github.com/luca992/eqoty (private, will need to request access. We plan to keep our front-end consumer apps closed source. We may consider open-sourcing our contracts for security purposes).
SecretKotlin client library: (WIP) https://github.com/eqoty-labs/secretk

Additional Information

Building a separate open-source multiplatform SecretKotlin client library as part of our project will be necessary (as SecretJs won't fit all of our needs). We plan to write it in kotlin multiplatform, which will be able to be compiled as a library for many languages (kotlin, java, swift, objective-c, js, java). This library could be useful to many other projects looking to build Secret Apps outside of the js ecosystem.

scrtlabs / Grants

eqoty #44