The problem Tortoise solves

Overview

Tortoise is a music platform built on Base and Farcaster that redefines how digital music creates value. Since launching March 25, 2025, Tortoise has become the most used music platform on both Farcaster and the Base app. We're creating a new economic model where platform success directly aligns with artist success.

The Problem

The streaming economy is fundamentally broken. Spotify's business model optimizes for reducing royalty payments. Their ideal user pays $12/month to listen to royalty-free muzak. Artists receive $0.003 per stream while providing the soundtrack to people's entire lives. The gap between music's cultural value and economic capture has never been wider. Meanwhile, vinyl sales have grown for 17 straight years, proving people will pay for identity and ownership even when streaming provides free access.

The Solution

Tortoise separates access from ownership. Music streams free for everyone, but users pay to collect songs, not for exclusive access, but for social proof and identity. This mirrors how music already monetizes through merch, vinyl, and concerts. You don't buy a band shirt to hear their songs, you buy it to show you're a fan.

Digital ownership was impossible without decentralized infrastructure. Now, Farcaster provides social context and Base enables true ownership. Your collection becomes part of your identity, visible and valuable across the network.

The $TORT Flywheel(Coming Soon)

The $TORT token creates a powerful ecosystem flywheel. Users stake TORT in their "shell" to unlock pro features like enhanced curation tools, premium discovery, and platform benefits. Every time they collect a song, they receive TORT rewards directly to their shell, incentivizing both curation and collection. This mechanism ensures the most active participants accumulate governance power while maintaining skin in the game.

Token holders become platform tastemakers, with their success tied directly to attracting great artists and engaged collectors. Unlike Spotify, where artists are cost centers, every Tortoise artist increases platform value. We only win when artists win.

Why Tortoise?

Tortoise represents the antithesis of what the status quo is for music and tech. Musicians are told to constantly make content and always be available. Technology companies are all about moving fast and being futuristic. Tortoises are slow and ancient, giving a message to musicians and their listeners that it's ok to move slowly and unplug. It's okay to tune out and focus on what you love.

Vision

We're not competing with Spotify's background shuffle. We're creating a place where music becomes meaningful again, where collecting supports artists, ownership creates identity, and participation builds wealth

Challenges I ran into

$TORT Traders vs Artists and Collectors

One of the biggest challenges I have faced is balancing the needs of short term minded TORT token traders with the long term vision of the project. On one hand, the long term vision is what I am passionate about and what the world needs, but on the other hand, I need the liquidity that trading volume on the token provides to keep going. This has ultimately been a good thing all around because it has forced me to focus on marketing and storytelling more than I would have without a token. It has taught me that until product market fit is reached, narrative is everything.

Uncertainty

Another challenge has been emotionally dealing with the uncertainty. I have been living on just revenue from the project and savings, and most people in my position would not consider this viable. This has two sides. Sometimes it is helpful because it is motivating and sometimes it puts me in a bad place because it is stressful. I have coped with it by accepting the hand of fate. Things will work out if they work out. And even if they don't work out quickly, this is an idea I have been passionate about for many years and I am not going to stop building it any time soon regardless of how much energy I am able to give it in the short term.

Technical Challenges

There's also been a bunch of technical challenges of course. A big one has been navigation. Because the app often opens from different pages like certain songs and profiles, it can't just rely on navigation history to go back. For instance, when opening a song, the back button goes to the home page even though the user was not on the home page previously. There's also generally some quirks with caching in mini apps that make navigation more difficult. Tortoise navigation is still not perfect but it's gotten much better. Another big challenge has been creating songs from base app smart accounts. Songs in Tortoise are editions in an erc1155 collection, and for some reason I still haven't figured out, there are quirks with songs created from the base app that make them not work quite right. The layer of abstraction added with smart accounts makes it very difficult to debug. I am meeting with Dylan this week to work on this.

Copycats

Copycats have been yet another challenge. This is maybe not the most substantial thing in reality but I found it a challenge dealing with them in terms of not letting it anger me. I experienced it in the past when sharing my thoughts in the crypto music space, and would often see those same thoughts echoed by "KOLs" shortly after. Recently someone released a mini app that is basically an exact copy of tortoise, right down to the marketing copy and UI design. This has been difficult to see other people extracting from my work like this. Probably the best thing I can do is to just keep innovating and be aware that it will get copied quickly.

Smart Contract Address(es)

0xf7465C185Cc511Bd15B570866875c0d48A6B0be0

Other Onchain Proof

$TORT token address: 0x601410d1d3093cF469fCA4e1EfB2Fb67B4E225c6