Ivan Linn’s blockchain-powered social network is music to content creators’ ears

Ivan Linn, a music director of Assassin’s Creed Worldwide concert, developed an online platform to bring together classical musicians and create a forum for discussions and exchanging of information.

He, however, soon realised that the industry of classical music isn’t large enough to support its own global community.

“I have always wanted to do something that will be influential to the industry,” he recounts the story for e27. “While I believed that music is a way to express and impact the society and community, I knew that Folkspaper could do something more. That’s how I began my startup journey.”

Folkspaper was launched in late 2019 by a team of three co-founders — Linn (CEO), Musasi Hung (Product Designer), and Alex Wu (CTO). Headquartered in Boston, the startup has one of its co-founders based in Singapore.

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In its current form, Folkspaper is a community space, which offers its members creative content protection through blockchain technology. Any content created and shared on the platform will be protected and cannot be stolen.

“When it comes to content creation and protection, a question arises: who is the original creator of that piece of artwork, information, music, or video?” Linn says. “In other words, you can upload a piece of original content onto social media, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you are its owner.”

Sharing more details, Linn adds that with the data-anchoring tech, a creator’s work uploaded onto the Folkspaper platform will be able to be anchored to the blockchain network. This would generate a record in an immutable ledger serving as a hard proof that you are the original creator of that work at that time.

“We all understand when there is a transaction uploaded onto the blockchain, you cannot delete, revise, or modify it. Everything is transparent, and every one of us in this world will be able to check those transactions.

With this technology and data-anchoring, we would be able to serve our users, and benefit them when there is such a case where they would have to provide hard proof as to whether or not they are the original content creator,” Linn shares.

The Power of reward

The platform has a feature to reward content creators when they contribute to the community. If one finds another user’s content interesting and likes it, he/she will be able to tip the user directly.

“The platform has a built-in tipping mechanism where users can reward and support the creators that they love with ‘Power’, our internal currency. ‘Power’ can be purchased using your local currency with a credit card, Google Pay, or Apple Pay and spent within the app. The power that you earn can be cashed out into Bitcoin through the PowerStation,” he explains.

Professionals working in different sectors can be Folkspaper’s users, including journalists, freelancers, college students, or academic researchers.

As for monetisation, Folkspaper has a few revenue channels in place. In addition to running ad campaigns on the platform, it also runs a subscription-based content protection programme. The startup also takes a small percentage when users tip each other.

Talking about the challenges Folkspaper is facing, Linn says that it has always been hard to engage the community and foster user adoption when introducing a new product. “A lot of people initially hadn’t even heard about Folkspaper, and especially with its connection to blockchain or cryptocurrency, it can be quite mysterious to our an average user. It took us some time to start getting traction with the community.”

“Another major challenge is with regard to expansion. Even though we have achieved several million impressions and thousands of users on Folkspaper, expanding further is a bit tricky,” he shares.

Angel coming in the form of a cat

Despite being an early-stage venture, Folkspaper has managed to secure an angel round of US$450,000 so far. Curiously enough, the investment came from an unlikely source.

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“A friend of mine who asked me to take care of his cat ended up being our first angel investor. What happened was that our conversation about the cat turned into business talks. It later turned out that this cat owner was an investor in several other technology products,” Linn laughs.

For the co-founders, the main mission is to create an impact on the industry of content generation and journalism. “When it comes to copyright issues and concerns, there are problems yet to be solved. We believe that by providing easy access to a product, users would be able to register their original work and earn rewards for their content contributions to the community.

We believe that we are entering a new era where people would be able to browse or to absorb information in a new way where content contributed to this community would be compensated and protected,” he signs off.

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