June feature roundup: token-gated newsletters, multiple accounts, & sub-newsletters

Over the past two months we’ve been busy at Paragraph, and today we’re excited to announce a handful of new features we’ve been working on.

You can now create token-gated newsletters on Paragraph.

You can gate posts behind ERC20 or ERC721 tokens on Ethereum or Polygon networks. When your readers subscribe to your token-gated newsletter, they’re prompted to connect their wallet and email. After that, every time you publish a new newsletter we only deliver it to your recipients if they’re still holding your tokens.

Don’t have an existing token? No problem - you can mint an NFT on Paragraph for 0 gas fees, on the Polygon network. You can also specify the quantity & price, allowing you to create different tiered memberships (possibly with different benefits associated to each).

We’re still at the early stages of experimenting with tokens & writing, but we believe NFT-based memberships provide a handful of benefits for creators & communities alike:

NFTs are composable, portable, open & permissionless.

NFTs can be used across the entire crypto ecosystem, and new experiences can be built atop them without requiring centralized APIs or intermediaries.

Airdrop your earliest supporters, create token-gated Discord channels to foster closer discussion, sell physical goods in token-gated ecommerce, or bundle newsletters together by providing free access to a shared token-based readership. This open ecosystem is in contrast to closed web2 platforms: without open APIs, it’s impossible to answer simple questions like “is this email on my subscriber list?”

We believe newsletters & written content will be a valuable way of providing even more utility to NFTs across web3.

Readers can get new forms of ownership, upside, and engagement with a writer or community.

Paid subscriptions grant access, but not much more than that. NFTs, on the other hand, grant ownership - they unlock the ability to crowdsource ideas, vote on the next topic to cover, or decide how to direct treasury funds. Create with your audience, instead of just for them.

Readers can also be given upside in your publication: in the future, we’ll add support for distributing royalties to token holders. Your readers already help you grow by sharing newsletters with their friends - why not financially reward them, further incentivizing growth?

Paragraph now lets you divide your newsletter into multiple sub-newsletters (what we call ‘communities’). You can have one for weekly rollups, one for ecosystem news, one for inter-DAO updates, etc. Posts can be published under certain communities, keeping them organized in your publication and sending them only to users that subscribed to a given community.

Best of all - each sub-newsletter one can be token-gated individually!

Writing in a collective (rather than alone) has several benefits: you experience less burnout, you distribute the load, and you can feed off each others creativity. Now, Paragraph lets you add other writers to your publication, enabling you to collaborate together on a single newsletter.

That’s all for now. Any feedback or feature requests, just let us know by replying to this email or joining our Discord!