STAYGE uses two kinds of tokens. The first is the ACT, or Community Activity Token, issued individually by each of STAYGE’s countless communities to reward fans for their activity. Fans can use the tokens to purchase albums, tickets, posters and other merchandise. As individual communities are responsible for their own governance and economic systems, ACT can be used only within the community that issues it.

The second is STG, or STAYGE Coin, the key currency of the ecosystem. Fans and artists can convert their ACT into STG, which they can save for business purposes or turn into fiat currency through coin exchanges, with which the token shall soon be listed. Baeg says, “When artists do business with other entities in the entertainment industry, they can pay with STG tokens that provide smart contract features, which can make a more transparent business environment.”

Currently, fan activity is measured in terms of inbound and outbound traffic. STAYGE will gradually expand the scope of fan influence, however, with the ultimate goal of including offline activities such as attending concerts and organizing fan meet ups.

Entertainment and IT: No easy mix

The biggest challenge was getting artists and tech professionals to play nice. Baeg says, “Artists and engineers never understand one another, so it was hard to mix the two industries because they cannot talk.”

This failure to communicate was one Baeg learned the hard way. Prior to founding STAYGE, he was a software engineer for a game company, led a media company’s online business development and worked for a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. At all of these places, he witnessed countless entertainment-oriented projects fail because artists and engineers hold diametrically opposed views of the world.

“Artists cannot see the platform,” says Baeg. “They only see the profit just in front of them. They cannot see the long-term view of the platform for their business. It is pretty hard to get them involved in a platform with just future value.”

Meanwhile, the IT professionals – and more to the point, their investors – had no clue how the entertainment industry worked. He says, “I saw so many failures through our venture capital experience, projects that focused on bringing artists first, bringing big names first, spending a lot of money for them and bringing in fans later. But it never works.”

When he founded STAYGE, Baeg took the opposite approach. “Our main strategy is bringing the fans first and then make the artists come into the platform,” he says. “I believe this approach is more scalable, more expandable. Artists always want fans, and if we have fans, artists will come to the platform on their own.”

Try telling that to the money men, though. “Everyone in the IT industry, investors, they constantly told me that you have to bring in big names to your platform to start your business. I never agreed with them, however, so I couldn’t get investment.”