A great example of mainstream companies’ partnerships with cryptocurrency companies in recent times is the shotvideo platform TikTok integration with Audius. Audius is a blockchain-based decentralized music streaming platform, built on ethereum and solana blockchain.Audius is a music streaming platform where there is no middle man between artists and followers/fans. Recently, partnership with TikTok has significantly impact to increased the $AUDIO token, the native token of Audius platform. Since its launch audius managed to onboard 100,000+ artist ant 5 million active monthly user on it’s platform. Many predicting that audius will be the next spotify built on blockchain. In this article I going to tell you everything about audius, where it come from? what next? Future of $AUDIO token? and more.
What Is Audius?
Audius is a decentralized, community-owned music-sharing protocol and app. It provides a censorship-resistant alternative to SoundCloud/Spotify that helps artists distribute anything they want directly to fans, creating a unique and differentiated catalog. The mission of the project is to give everyone the freedom to share, monetize, and listen to any audio.
Who found Audius?
Audius was founded by Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning. Both are seasoned computer scientists with ivy league degrees under their belt, and they’ve been dabbling in crypto since 2011.
Rumburg and Forres realise that The biggest problem in the music industry is that streaming is taking off and artists aren’t necessarily earning a lot of money. And it can take three months, or up to 18 months for unsigned artists, to get paid for streams.That’s what crypto really solves. You can pay artists in near real-time and make it fully transparent.
In early 2018, Roneil and Forrest got to work building Audius with the goal of giving musicians a censorship resistant platform and a much a bigger piece of the profit pie.
How Does Audius Work?
The Audius protocol consists of three layers: the app layer, the node layer, and the blockchain layer. The app layer is the Audius website and app(android/ios), if you ever use audius you never feel that you are using a decentralised application. This is primarily because of non-custodial browser wallet created by audius team called hedgehog. Hedgehog is automatically stored private key in the Browser and it’s automatically complete any transaction you make without any promt unlike other browser wallet.
The node layer of audius similar as polygon infrastructure.Unlike Polygon Audius Node Layer is Layer-2 blockchain to improve scaling & speed,build on Ethereum. Audius is using solana blockchain for L-2 solution of ethereum earlier in this year. Audius use custom made IPFS called AUDFC to ensure music can be quickly store by musician & retrive by artist. There are two kind of node working om store & retrival process, Content node and Discovery node.
Also Read: Top 7 Project build on Terra (LUNA) ecosystem
Audius Staking
To ensure that content nodes and discovery nodes do their job, they must stake AUDIO tokens on the Ethereum blockchain which is the third layer in Audius’ architecture
At present, content nodes and discovery nodes must stake a minimum of 200,000 AUDIO to take on the role and earn fees from the Audius protocol. All staked tokens have a 7 day unlock period.
It is possible to delegate AUDIO to content nodes and discovery nodes and this can be done using the Audius Protocol Dashboard in conjunction with MetaMask. The minimum delegated stake is 100 AUDIO. Audius staking Reward somewhere around 23% APY.
AUDIO Tokenomics
AUDIO is a ERC-20 token on ethereum blockchain and circulating started last year. It’s use of staking,governance and reward, has an initial supply of 1 billion, and just 5% of it was airdropped to Audius’ most active artists and listeners. That said, 18% of AUDIO’s initial supply was allocated to the community treasury. 40% went to the Audius team and its advisors which includes famous musicians, and the remaining 36% went to Audius’ investors, which later included Binance Labs and Coinbase Ventures.
AUDIO Price Analysis
In terms of how high AUDIO could go, I’ll start by saying that it’s now or never. AUDIO has another vesting cliff coming in October, and this could suppress its price the same way it has in the past. According to Coin Gecko AUDIO all-time-high price of 4.95 USD at 27th march,2021,as of now AUDIO price is 2.5USD. After TikTok partnership announcement price soar 145% in 1 Day to 4.0 USD.
Audius Roadmap
Although audius has no concrete road map in recent interview founder keep some light on this horizon. Audius decided to swap out its own permissioned layer 2 blockchain with Solana in October last year. This is because Audius’ reported user base is growing so quickly that it needs an even more scalable solution for its final development hurdle, which is the implementation of stablecoin payments. Audius reportedly have 5 million monthly active user on their platform. Till date audius is absolutely free for all but monetization prospective AUDIO will be extremely bullish in future because token will be used for incentivize artist and users.
Audius Concerns
It seems that Audius has quite a few skeletons in the closet, and one of them is a man named Ranidu Lankage, a Sri Lankan pop singer who is apparently one of the co-founders and former CEO of Audius.
Even though there are a few interviews with Ranidu on YouTube about Audius, neither of the other two Audius co-founders ever mentioned that Ranidu was involved in any of their interviews.
There are even bigger questions around Audius’ operations today. According to the Audius dashboard, they have over 5.3 million active users
However, all the metrics for Audius’ social media channels, app downloads, and even the song listens on its platform are a fraction of that number. They suggest a user count in the tens of thousands.
Can Audius Replace SoundCloud/Spotify?
”We built Audius to put artists in control of their content, listener data and relationships with fans,” said Roneil Rumburg, CEO of Audius. “We are passionate about using technology to unleash creativity and disrupt the status quo. Judging by the thousands of people ready to join our platform today, the time to do so is now.”
Some Soundcloud users have pushed back over the music platform’s expanded paid offerings and seemingly random takedown policies. So Audius is differentiating itself is as a “free censorship-resistant, community-controlled platform (that) gives artists the power to share their music and grow their fan base in an industry stifled by corporate influence.”
“Industry stifled” is also code for “we won’t ever take down the music you post.” Audius can attempt to have that policy because it uses an open-source protocol built on the blockchain and does not actually host the music. Instead, the site runs atop the Audius testnet, which launched in August and includes over a dozen decentralized storage and indexing nodes distributed around the world.