The problem Shards World solves

In our survey of over 200 content creators, we identified viewer retention, plateaued growth and monetization as key challenges. Compared to existing Web 2.0 solutions, Shards introduce a sense of digital ownership for viewers and align incentives for creator and community.

Viewer retention
Through the introduction of “Shards” each creator can leverage token incentive models for his audience and define custom on-/off stream rewards for Shards holders. Examples of rewards include voting mechanisms, exclusive access or actions on-stream. Aside from increasing on-stream engagement, Shards are platform agnostic ensuring content creators can retain their audience when moving across streaming platforms.

Plateaued growth
Owning Shards give viewers a sense of ownership and incentivizes fans financially to support a creator’s growth. Content creator may also choose to distribute shards to early supporters and moderators to reward them for their support. This occurs at minimal financial cost to the content creators which currently often struggle to adequately compensate active community members.

Monetization
By using the Shards World incentive system, creators benefit from an additional revenue stream with both a share of the platform take rate on transactions as well as appreciation of their Shards. Crucially, Shards are complementary to existing revenue streams such as subscriptions.

Overall, we are convinced that the Web 3.0 technology credibly solves some of the key problems faced by live stream content creators today. We are committed to onboarding the first generation of live stream content creators and their communities and redefine community engagement in the space.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into is how to design tokenomics for creators that don’t require the initial funding of an AMM, because this would be a significant barrier to entry. A simple curve, based on the number of existing shards, doesn’t work because it wouldn’t account for the share of the creator.

The solution we came up with, is to allow users to buy “chests” during an initial period of X days. Along with the chests, users would receive early-shards which can already be used for in-stream interactions. Once the initial period is over, chests convert into shards depending on the amount of chests that were purchased. The amount paid for all the chests acquired is used to fund the AMM, and subsequently, shards can be bought and sold like every other ERC20 token.