Former Ripple CTO jump starts new platform to micropay content creators

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A former Ripple director, their previous CTO, Stephen Thomas, has started a new blogging platform that allows content creators to get paid in cryptocurrency. The model is a pay per view model where the reader would pay according to how much time they spend on a page.

The San Francisco based startup has launched its public beta recently after having seen some initial success with how the system functions during a 1000 test user closed beta. The closed beta was released in August of last year and had the users get involved by paying $5 monthly subscriptions for the service.

The platform then pays the users who create content for the platform pretty much the same way Spotify does with music. You get paid depending on how much time people spend on your content. The payments were made in Ripple, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Wallets and Competitors

CEO and founder Stephen Thomas said that the company has collaborated with the Stronghold digital wallet service, making cashing out earning a distinct possibility. The company hopes that the free, bonus content that it will start offering to users will entice them to begin tipping and paying to use the service.

While XRP is the main currency, the content creators can choose to accept any currency that is available on the backend. It is not the first company to try and implement such a system with Yalls and  Brave coming before it. The amount of money coming through Coil seem to be quite small.

Yalls, lightning enabled blog, delivered 20 000 invoices in 7 months. This is in addition to the higher number of members received on that platform. Cent, which uses Ethereum, is a similar platform. It currently has 50 blogs whose creators brought in as little as $55 and as much as $326. This sits in stark contrast to how much Avi Kabani made in the trial. He has written many nonfiction books all in the love and relationships niche. He earned just 21XRP in tips and Coil payments. He spent around $20 of his own money watching Twitch users of the Coil platform.

Thomas Silkjaer, who is a Forbes contributor and is using the Coil platform as well, says that the Coil platform has the chance to replace current paywall systems.

A new paradigm for a new economy

The shift to microtransactions has been swift in videogames. No massive game comes without some form of microtransaction baked into the game itself. The same goes for adult entertainment. Many in the crypto industry see a platform such as Coil being able to upset the apple cart when it comes to paywalled systems.

The Coil is built on open standards and is interoperable. This puts it ahead of the competitors that are currently making more money for their users. If people can quickly bring their websites, blogs or videos in the ecosystem then they will start to have a much larger base of users to flaunt to browsers. Should Coil become a standard feature on browsers, it could revolutionize print and media.

A major problem these days is that there is tiny way to monetize views on news sites. They either hide their content behind a paywall or put in a lot of ads. Many people do not want to get a subscription just for one or two articles they might be linked to a month, the new platform launched by the ex-Ripple CTO is going to tackle all said issue rather nicely. Let’s see how the market responds to it.

Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.

Ali Raza: Experienced in web journalism and marketing, Ali holds a master degree in finance and enjoys writing about cryptocurrencies and fintech. Ali's work has been published on a number of valuable publications.