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:

• Last year, Showtime showed a strong interest towards less financial and more socially-driven web3 products. Since our original website (also known as tryShowtime) last year, we learnt a lot. Back then, NFTs had just gone viral. Dozens of thousands of digital art creators used Showtime to curate, customize and showcase their art collection from all NFT platforms – all in one user-friendly interface. Although today’s NFTs are still mostly collectibles, tryShowtime was a sneak peak into a very bright future for web3 social networks.
• From now on, we will be testing out many web3 social features, starting with Free NFTs. This past month, the NFT landscape has drastically shifted away from mindless speculation, and as always, we’re thinking ahead. We are launching Free NFTs imminently, letting anyone claim a free NFT from their favorite creator (more details later in this article). Next, we are excited about non-financial primitives such as creator tokens (read our CEO Alex Masmej’s on a16z Future) and soulbound tokens.
• We are committed to building bleeding-edge web3 social features. Despite the extreme market environment, we stay true to our mission: make web3 accessible, friendlier and social. Success for us means that people tell their friends to use Showtime. Thanks to our world-class investors including Paradigm, Dragonfly and Naval, we are fortunate to be playing the long game as a healthy company; in fact, we are currently hiring! Check out our open roles here.

Now that we caught up, let’s breakdown the major changes coming with Showtime 2.

From digital artists to all content creators.

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:

• Web3-curious musicians. Musicians are infamously struggling to live off their passion. Not only do streaming services like Spotify don’t pay well, but their complete lack of transparency prevents artists to communicate and engage with their listeners. And unlike the dozen hobbyist collector per digital artist, musicians have thousands and even millions of hardcore fans (“NFTs and a Thousand True Fans“, Chris Dixon). Music NFTs are nice collectibles, but what tool can we build for the millions of dedicated listeners who can’t afford expensive NFTs? This is what we at Showtime want to figure out.
• Tech-literate content creators. Content creators also have a hard time monetizing their content, and tech-centered creators are more eager than ever to experiment with novel ways of engaging their communities. For example, Adam Levy is the host of Mint, a podcast discussing the web3 creator economy. Mint audience is crypto-native, so it wouldn’t be hard for his audience to experiment with new ways to create value and reward engagement. Adam gifted listeners “Participation NFTs” as a proof that they were early fans of the podcast.

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: Claim a free NFT from your favorite creator.

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:

• You guessed it: entirely free! Free to drop, free to claim, zero gas fees.
• Grow your web3 audience: each claimer will automatically follow you on Showtime, so creators will be able to engage with their holders.
• Creators make money only if fans make money: thanks to EIP-2981, secondary sales on OpenSea and any Polygon-supported NFT marketplaces will earn royalties for their creators.
• Owned by creators: each drop is a collection minted via Zora Editions, meaning that a creator has total control over their drop. They can display and sell it outside of Showtime, and even add features via tools such as such as Guild.xyz (NFT-gated group chats) or Coinvise.co (NFT-gated airdrops).

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.

A universal app (iPhone, Android, web) powered by our open-source design system.

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.

The end(?) of marketplaces aggregation: focusing on Showtime NFTs

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.