As reported by The Block, Yahoo Finance and Benzinga today, we're thrilled to announce the latest milestone for Paragraph: we've raised a $1.7 million pre-seed round, led by Lemniscap, with participation from Binance Labs, FTX Ventures, Global Coin Research, Sfermion, Seed Club, and many others.
This funding is helping us expand our team, establish exciting new partnerships, and further our mission to help creators build media empires using novel web3 technologies.
A Paradigm Shift for Content Creators
It's a golden age for content creators.
There are more individuals earning a living off of their own digitally native content than ever before. TikTokers, YouTubers, bloggers - millions of creators across the media spectrum are foregoing traditional jobs and charting their own professional trajectory, choosing to sustain themselves by their own means and creations.
Despite this explosive Creator Economy growth, existing platforms for content creation are plagued with inefficiencies including misaligned incentives, lack of ownership, and inflexible distribution. Recent developments in web3 are powering a paradigm shift: there are new means of digital ownership, allowing creators to reward supporters, supercharge growth, and introduce new mechanisms for incentivized content creation & engagement. Additionally, open and permissionless protocols are streamlining the distribution of content across all of web3 while ensuring creators are in direct control over their communication.
Roderik Van der Graaf, Managing Partner at Lemniscap, puts it well:
"There is no denying the current proliferation of Web3 and blockchain technology in traditional media, alongside the rapid evolution of the Creator Economy. The confluence of these trends has created a perfect storm opportunity to revolutionize the media landscape.”
Where we're headed
Ultimately, Paragraph is focusing on using web3 technologies to drastically improve the status quo in three core areas: content creation, distribution, and monetization.
Content creation
New methods of collaboration, storytelling, and bottoms-up IP creation will unlock novel ways of tapping into creativity and imagination. Creators should be able to involve their community for co-creation in meaningful ways.
Additionally, technologies like Arweave and IPFS are ensuring content gets persisted forever, in a censorship-resistant and composable permaweb.
Distribution, discovery & community building
In web2, it's challenging for creators to gain exposure and get discovered. Building an audience typically means a reliance on social media, but traditional social networks are closed ecosystems: you’re unable to interact with your followers outside the confines of their walled garden.
This contrasts dramatically with web3: permissionless and composable social graphs now means your audience is portable and can be accessed across all of web3. You - not platforms - own the relationship with followers. Additionally, this type of open and permissionless ecosystem unlocks new ways of engaging with your audience. We launched our first Farcaster integration earlier this month to demonstrate this, and we're excited to continue exploring new means of distribution and discovery that simply aren't possible in web2.
Web3 is also providing better ways of building communities: by distributing ownership in your creations, you can align incentives and turn your fans into supporters by involving them in governance and allowing them to participate and contribute in more meaningful ways.
Monetization
Creators that produce valuable content should be rewarded. Existing monetization mechanisms in web2 - including ads - often misalign incentives across creators, platforms and readers. Web3 is providing new ways for fans to support creators, while cutting out intermediaries and empowering creators with more freedom.
Join us on our journey!
Today, we're a team of three, with decades of experience across both web2 and web3 at companies like Google and Coinbase. We're excited to pioneer new methods of helping creators build media empires, and continue being at the forefront of the intersection between media & web3.
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