We are thrilled to unveil Showtime 2, a web3 social network on iOS, Android and web. Showtime 2 flagship feature is “Free NFTs”, the easiest way for a creator to drop a free NFT to their community – similar to POAP for crypto conferences. Showtime 2 is rolling out as we speak: Free NFTs is live this week at showtime.xyz.
So far in 2022, we’ve been quietly rebuilding our entire platform from scratch. This hard work paid off and from now on, it’s showtime, literally: expect features you’ve never seen before to launch soon.
To get yourself up to speed, here is some context on the state of our project until today:
Now that we caught up, let’s breakdown the major changes coming with Showtime 2.
First, we realized that digital artists didn’t need tryShowtime as much as they used to. Since last summer, NFT marketplaces consolidated, OpenSea became the clear category winner, thus making “aggregating NFT marketplaces” not as relevant as it once was. Plus, art collectors represent only a dozen wealthy people per artist on average, a dynamic far removed from social networks like Instagram or TikTok, where popular creators engage with immeasurably larger audiences. Instead of facilitating the occasional expensive trade, we focus on building lightweight, repeatable user interactions that feel familiar to people.
So we asked ourselves: if not digital artists, who today would benefit the most from a web3 social network? Our answer fits into what we call “web3 content creators”. Here are two examples of users we think may benefit from Showtime:
Those kinds of people who are willing to experiment provide a unique opportunity to go beyond buying and selling NFTs, and instead experiment with features that do not require existing capital, like earning digital assets for free.
With that in mind, we are proud to announce our newest feature: Free NFTs.
Free NFTs provide the easiest way for the average internet user to own their very first NFT. With Free NFTs, a creator can easily drop a NFT to their community via a shareable link. In details:
The rationale for Free NFTs is simple: most people are currently priced out of NFTs, so we need to kickstart their web3 journey in a way that doesn’t involve money. We want people to engage with their favorite creators and access experiences they couldn’t have before thinking about perhaps gain value someday. On the other hand, creators don’t want their web3 campaign to be seen as a cash grab, but are always eager to engage with their audience in new and meaningful ways. And since they can add features to their NFT drop, they can create their own exclusive membership pass. Possibilities are endless for creators to make their drop a fun and attractive giveaway. And if the NFT ever resells, both the creator and their earliest fans make money together.
We can’t wait to see how creators will use Free NFTs. Tag us @Showtime_xyz to let us know and we may share your drop if we like it.
As we announced earlier, we took some time to make Showtime the most accessible web3 platform. Following that vision, our new app is available on web, iPhone and Android.
And we’re open-sourcing our app: our frontend lead Axel Delafosse published our design system live at the App.js conference. You can watch Axel’s talk here. Openly contributing to React Native pushes forward the most popular web3 mobile framework: React Native, also used by apps like Rainbow Wallet, Coinbase Wallet and MetaMask. This benefits the entire ecosystem as a whole.
As part of our changes, we took the difficult decision to stop aggregating NFT marketplaces, and solely display Showtime NFTs on our app. This includes our current marketplace and our new Free NFTs feature.
This was a tough call: Showtime got its rapid start last year because it pulled NFTs from Opensea, Hic et Nunc and more. But as we noted earlier, the market has changed and instead of displaying collectibles, we believe that doubling down on our in-house web3 innovation is the best way forward. We may aggregate other NFTs again in the future, but for now, we believe it’s best to reduce our scope.
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We as an ecosystem have a generational opportunity to break free from platforms like Facebook, and give the enormously valuable data they profit from straight to users. Primitives like NFTs, social tokens, non-transferable tokens and more will help us get there.
See y’all in the metaverse,
The Showtime team.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Discord to stay tuned for our upcoming announcements.