[ANN] Unlock Protocol - a blockchain-based monetization membership protocol

[sinedust]

Unlock Protocol

Unlock is a decentralized, permission-less protocol that allows anyone to sell access to their work, without going through a middleman

About
For creators, Unlock provides simplicity. Unlock gives them a JavaScript snippet which lets creators embed locks on their own websites that restrict access to people who have the right key. A lock is just an “access control list”: the list of consumers who are allowed to access their creation (because they own a key). It makes adding a membership layer to your website, or even to a single article, just as easy as embedding an ad.

For users, Unlock provides consistency. Up until now, subscriptions have been totally chaotic, with hundreds of different approaches, requiring you to keep a collection of accounts — and passwords! — to access all the things you care about. There’s no intelligent way to connect them together, unless you’re the platform that controls the network. The blockchain allows Unlock and creators to know only who has access to what, and nothing more.

What can you do with Unlock?

• An open paywall

As publishers move away from advertising-based business models, they’re increasingly looking to replace ads with direct revenue. Paywalls are the most common way to do this. Newsrooms across the world, from the New York Times to Die Zeit, use paywalls to meter access to their content and drive membership revenue. You could set up a hard paywall and require payment for all content — or you could require payment after a user has read four or five articles. As a publisher, you could negotiate with a paywall solutions provider, or work with a payments processor. The process could take months and cost you tens of thousands of dollars. In contrast, Unlock doesn’t require you to ask anyone for permission, and you can start taking payments on your content in just a handful of minutes.

• Recognizing your community

Let’s say you’re running a local newsroom. You produce journalism in the public interest, so you don’t want to lock your content away with a paywall — but you want to give your readers who can afford it the opportunity to support you. To be clear, you need that support. Instead of a paywall, you place a patronage ribbon on your site. Visitors with the means can support you — and you can display their names (if they want). With this kind of patronage, you get revenue, and your supporters are publicly recognized in their community for having supported an important resource.

Just as with the paywall, there’s no need to sign up for an account somewhere, or wait to be approved for a patronage service that will take a hefty cut. You can build this level of community reward right into your website, either by embedding a patronage widget from us or another host, or by integrating directly with the protocol using your own code.

This model has worked well for the Guardian and Wikipedia, among others, and Unlock makes it available to everyone.

• Licensing software

Unlock isn’t just for content. The same principle that makes a paywall work can be used for software licensing. This gives the opportunity to independent developers to license applications in just one click, without having to depend on a centralized provider — or giving them a giant 30% cut. Because Unlock is a permission-less, decentralized protocol, developers get to keep 100% of the price of a license, and there’s no approval or banning process.

Unlock allows you to experiment with revenue models. Maybe licenses or subscriptions aren’t right for you —every business is different. You could use patronage to allow your community to support development. Developers could choose to automatically embed the names of supporters on their websites or GitHub pages.

Most importantly, you don’t need to fit someone else’s service into your software user experience. You can use the Unlock protocol to built a licensing or support system that fits right into what you’ve already built.

• Selling tickets

Unlock can be used to sell tickets to real-world events. Attendees purchase “keys” to attend, from the event’s own website — and then show up with a QR code representing the key at the event itself. (Who knew QR codes would come in handy after all?) Event hosts can check people in using a very similar mechanism to other event services.

Most importantly, because Unlock is an open protocol, you don’t need to use our event app. Anyone can write an event service or app on top of the protocol. That means each kind of event, or each event owner, can run their own code (and capture attendee data) that best suits their context.

• Reaching a premium newsletter audience

Unlock can be used to create premium newsletters. Readers buy a “key” to the mailing list, leaving their email address as part of the process. All it takes is one click. At any time, the mailing list owner can export the complete list of email addresses, and import it into Mailchimp, HubSpot, or whatever they use for mailing lists (including their own software). The result is that paid newsletters can use an ecosystem of different apps and services, rather than squeeze themselves into a one-size-fits-all model.

• And more

The beauty of Unlock is that you can think of initial apps as proofs of concept. The only limit is what you can build: the open protocol will be there for you. And if you just want a friction-less service that works really well, with the bare minimum of setup and technical integration.

Team:
Julien Genestoux - Unlock CEO/Founder & Lead Dev. He also founded Superfeedr(Superfeedr was bought by Medium in 2016).

News articles:
Forbes publications which writes a lot about the blockchain revolution, is offering the ability to unlock an ad-free experience on their site, using Unlock https://unlock-protocol.com/blog/forbes-ads-free

Guardian backed-fund invests in Unlock, an NFT protocol designed for subscriptions and memberships
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/28/guardian-owner-invests-in-unlock-an-nft-protocol-designed-for-subscriptions-and-memberships/

Unlock raises $4M for blockchain subscriptions for creators, devs, and online communities
https://venturebeat.com/2021/09/28/unlock-raises-4m-for-blockchain-subscriptions-for-creators-devs-and-online-communities/

Coinbase Ventures invests in companies building the open financial system.
https://ventures.coinbase.com/

I'm the founder of Unlock, a membership protocol used by Forbes, The Defiant, in Decentraland, MyCrypto, and more! -- AMA
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pu1xyc/im_the_founder_of_unlock_a_membership_protocol/


Community:
Website https://unlock-protocol.com/
Discord - https://discord.gg/mfaP23bXew
Twitter - https://twitter.com/UnlockProtocol
Telegram (Official) - https://t.me/unlockprotocol
Telegram (Price discussion) - https://t.me/UnlockTrading
Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/unlock_protocol/
Forum - https://unlock.community/
Github - https://github.com/unlock-protocol/unlock
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFpwtvsk_naOwR_w-vKXw-Q/featured
Roadmap - https://docs.unlock-protocol.com/governance/roadmap

Sources:
Ben Werdmuller https://benwerd.medium.com/
Julien Genestoux https://medium.com/@julien51
https://unlock-protocol.com/blog

[mandor]

Is this thread will got update with the ended or upcoming event? is there any documentation about the monthly contributor's meetup on zoom? Feel excited to see how it turned out.
Also found this things that seems worth it to do if anyone skilled, https://github.com/unlock-protocol/unlock/issues/7658
https://twitter.com/UnlockProtocol/status/1450728717349707777

[sinedust]

Is this thread will got update with the ended or upcoming event? is there any documentation about the monthly contributor's meetup on zoom? Feel excited to see how it turned out.
Also found this things that seems worth it to do if anyone skilled, https://github.com/unlock-protocol/unlock/issues/7658
https://twitter.com/UnlockProtocol/status/1450728717349707777

I will be posting major updates/news as they come.

[holydarkness]

First thing to clarify, and I mean no offense at all, you're not part of the team, just an enthusiast supporter who want Unlock to reach bitcointalk because currently team has no official thread? Or were you an appointed manager for their ann thread?

[sinedust]

just an enthusiast supporter who want Unlock to reach bitcointalk because currently team has no official thread

this

[holydarkness]

just an enthusiast supporter who want Unlock to reach bitcointalk because currently team has no official thread

this

It's just a tad unfortunate, because the answer given is not a directly official answer, but I think we can ignore this fact --and thanking your voluntary action-- since I am sure you'll ask team on their official channel for the answer given to my following question and rely them here:

The dual fiat-crypto method of payment helps project reach communities as wide as they can, because accepting both currencies means they're not limiting their project exclusively to fiat community or to crypto community. However, as how it happens in many instances, it raises some concern on the side of crypto holder's, because allowing people to utilize fiat also means decreasing the chance of people buy and then pay with the token. This impose a stunted growth in crypto value because the utilization of the "native" token decreases compared to if the project made all of their users use their token as payment method.

Does Unlock has a solution for this foreseeable situation?

[julien51]

Hi! I am Julien, the Founder of Unlock! Send me a message to sign and I'll sign it with the address used to deploy the first version of Unlock.

Someone sent me this link and I am really happy to be here.

@sinedust thanks for posting here! I really appreciate it!

@mandor we record and monthly contributor meetup and post on Youtube. The one from this week (3rd Wednesday of every month at 1pm ET) is there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7w_MDmqeUQ

@holydarkness I will try my best to answer questions here... And @sinedust feel free to join our Discord (if you're not there already!) if there are things you might need help with.
 

The dual fiat-crypto method of payment helps project reach communities as wide as they can, because accepting both currencies means they're not limiting their project exclusively to fiat community or to crypto community. However, as how it happens in many instances, it raises some concern on the side of crypto holder's, because allowing people to utilize fiat also means decreasing the chance of people buy and then pay with the token. This impose a stunted growth in crypto value because the utilization of the "native" token decreases compared to if the project made all of their users use their token as payment method.

I think I generally agree with that statement. The way I see things is that crypto is also a "funnel". People start with something that's relatively easy and "centralized" with UX patterns that they are used to, and then they slowly find their way to whatever degen thing kids do these days, or, better IMO, start minting their own NFT to share the work they create online.
At Unlock that's also the approach we're taking. If you don't have a wallet, we can help you by creating one for you (but we can't help you if you forget the password you used for it and threashed the recovery email we sent when you created the account). Then if you don;t have crypto currencies to pay for the membership, if the creator allows, we will let you pay with your card.
We hope that once you get a bit more familiar you "eject" that account and import it on your own wallet, or at least transfer the NFT into another wallet of yours this time.

I hope this answers your question!

[holydarkness]

@holydarkness I will try my best to answer questions here... And @sinedust feel free to join our Discord (if you're not there already!) if there are things you might need help with.
 

The dual fiat-crypto method of payment helps project reach communities as wide as they can, because accepting both currencies means they're not limiting their project exclusively to fiat community or to crypto community. However, as how it happens in many instances, it raises some concern on the side of crypto holder's, because allowing people to utilize fiat also means decreasing the chance of people buy and then pay with the token. This impose a stunted growth in crypto value because the utilization of the "native" token decreases compared to if the project made all of their users use their token as payment method.

I think I generally agree with that statement. The way I see things is that crypto is also a "funnel". People start with something that's relatively easy and "centralized" with UX patterns that they are used to, and then they slowly find their way to whatever degen thing kids do these days, or, better IMO, start minting their own NFT to share the work they create online.
At Unlock that's also the approach we're taking. If you don't have a wallet, we can help you by creating one for you (but we can't help you if you forget the password you used for it and threashed the recovery email we sent when you created the account). Then if you don;t have crypto currencies to pay for the membership, if the creator allows, we will let you pay with your card.
We hope that once you get a bit more familiar you "eject" that account and import it on your own wallet, or at least transfer the NFT into another wallet of yours this time.

I hope this answers your question!

Thank you for appearing here and officially answering question. If I may be blunt and direct, your explanation nicely cover the point I wanted to know, but I don't think it exactly gives a good solution to the situation your project might face. If I correctly summarize your answer, in a simpler way, it's something like: 'we'll allow fiat citizen who are not familiar with crypto to pay with fiat and hopefully they'll convert to crypto after a while."

I'm not here to argue, though. So, if I may suggest something, how difficult is it to have a small "exchange" built into your website or the paywall --I'm not sure which "page" the customer will technically face when they want to buy access--? So instead of paying with fiat, they actually bought some Unlock as a "credit point", and if there's any "point" left after the transaction, it'll be stored on their account's wallet, which actually a crypto wallet itself.

[mandor]

Hi! I am Julien, the Founder of Unlock! Send me a message to sign and I'll sign it with the address used to deploy the first version of Unlock.

@mandor we record and monthly contributor meetup and post on Youtube. The one from this week (3rd Wednesday of every month at 1pm ET) is there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7w_MDmqeUQ

Thank you, glad to hear it directly from the core team who even dared to sign a message if needed. I didn't expect it, it turns out that there really is documentation about unlocking the developer meet up even from the first time. I would love to hear the discussion in the video.