Estonia – 22nd October 2018: Budding music artists now have a new route to wealth, stardom and a loyal, evangelical fanbase, it was announced today – thanks to token-generating blockchain technology called Fanbase. The new Fanbase decentralised application (dApp) is set to bring musicians and their fans closer than ever before, by allowing artists to share exclusive content directly with their audience, while rewarding fans for being active promoters and helping the artist to build their fanbase. Access to exclusive content and the ability to interact directly with an artist will be via different membership levels based on the amount of tokens a fan holds for a particular artist. Fanbase is the first dApp to be built on Lightstreams, a blockchain privacy platform built by former Goldman Sachs software engineer, Michael Smolenski whose award-winning protocol for smart contract confidentiality, called Permissioned Blocks; is now at the heart Lightstreams — having won a Blockchain Hackathon award at Consensus 2017. As well as enabling artists to control access to their content, Fanbase has been hailed as a much needed development by Label founder and music producer Happy Walters, who has managed and published artists such as Korn, Incubus, 30 Seconds to Mars and more. “Having spent more than 20 years discovering, producing and distributing the very best emerging talent, Fanbase brings a much needed new form of distribution and copyright for artists. But what is more powerful is what Fanbase can do to enable interaction between artists and their fans,” comments Walters.

Bonding curve technology is being harnessed by Fanbase to allow any artist to launch a smart contract that will mint continuously their own tokens. Ariana Grande might launch the Aria token, for example. The first fan buys an Aria token, by depositing some money into the contract, which issues the first token. Then another fan buys, and another and so on. Each time a fan pays a slightly higher cost per token until a maximum price is reached, and that higher cost is pre-programmed into the smart contract based on a pricing curve, so there is complete transparency about how the model works, and the price remains affordable for all.