The problem Treasur solves

The current structure of YouTube provides no scope for decentralization or control over revenue. By building Treasur, we aim to give creators the opportunity to unlock revenue of their content which they put in so much effort for. YouTube undercuts creators by charging exorbitant fees on ad revenue and channel memberships (30% for the latter, as of now). We aim to provide a way for creators to be able to give their content at whatever price they are comfortable with, as collectibles for subscribers to own and trade. This means that we can finally provide a decentralized solution over and above the current monetization capabilities of a centralizated structure. Finally, by having an existing marketplace with sufficient liquidity, it can be a revenue stream for the vast number of creators that are underfunded on YouTube, by attaching creator fees and resale value to NFTs. The most important belief here is the idea that we are potentially in the position to introduce NFTs to a portion of the internet that is really untapped and therein lies our value proposition.

Future plans

The first iteration of this project plans for a fully L2 deployment on the Polygon chain, this will allow us to bootstrap our preliminary idea for a sufficient while. The future plans for Treasur are for a Ethereum mainnet service that mints NFTs on a side chain and has a bridge for L1-L2 transfer. We also plan to expand Treasur out of the YouTube realm into a product for creators on various platforms. This would potentially increase the seed funding and functional requirements of the project but we are prepared for it.

Challenges we ran into

We decided to take some hard decisions with a long-term view of our project and its potential for a future wide-scale product. This meant we were going to establish some baselines, such as using more complicated utilities (e.g. redux-toolkit, backend demarcation) and infrastructure (e.g. Cloudflare and AWS). This potentially took up some valuable time but we believe they will pay off in the long run. We also wanted the ideal balance of decentralization and centralization where the UI/UX is good enough to justify the entire flow of our product. We also wanted to ensure that our smart contracts were up to the mark and written efficiently, as a way to learn and also for future usage. Due to the slightly complicated nature of our project, this meant that we had to separately work on Solidity and React to ensure each aspect was complementary and worked as intended.