We're changing the way we're structured for the benefit of everyone involved in the project, past, present and future.
This blog post lays out what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how we’re setting this up for everyone to benefit.
We’re making Endlesss free to use for everyone, forever.
We’re building an economic model where we will only make money when creators who use the platform make money. If you want to make money from what you create on Endlesss, we will give you that opportunity. If you don’t want to, you and what you do will remain a vital part of the Endlesss ecosystem.
We believe creative tools and economic opportunities should be free for everyone to use. We believe that making money from what you create is a choice and that everyone from tool-makers to creators to curators should benefit when value is realised.
Endlesss will continue to maintain and improve the products it offers today while also establishing the Endlesss Foundation, a community-owned foundation, to develop open-source software and decentralised infrastructure which will become the global operating system for the Endlesss creative ecosystem. Anyone will be free to build on this infrastructure and use the open-source code to participate in the Endlesss economy.
By doing this, we’re opening Endlesss up to an opportunity far bigger than was available to us before. We’re opening this opportunity up to everyone who wants to be a part of our mission and benefit from the value of the ecosystem as it grows.
We will give everyone who has helped make Endlesss what it is today a stake in this new, bigger ecosystem - investors, team members, top community contributors, Kickstarter backers and those who have purchased our products to date.
We’re planning to announce this publicly on 14th December 2021 when we will drop all paywalls, launch the Windows version of Endlesss and a new browser-based jam radio service.
We recommend reading this entire document to fully understand how we will deliver value to everyone who has been part of making Endlesss what it is today. Additionally you can download an extended version of this document with extra appendices for all stakeholders.
Our Aspiration
We have always aspired to provide tools that empower communities to come together in a context that intensifies and amplifies creativity and facilitates and deepens social bonds.
Before the industrial revolution, creativity was a social interaction. Music-making, dancing and story-telling were activities we did together, not products we consumed alone.
Today, creativity has become an industrial production process characterised by complex, monolithic production tools, saturated distribution networks that divide producers from consumers, and ever-dwindling revenue streams for producers.
Our mission has been and always will be to recreate the primal joy of pre-industrial social creativity for a modern, digital world. Now we are expanding that mission to build a 21st century digital economy around this that will enable anyone who wants to put creativity at the centre of their lives to do so.
Background 1 - Funding with the “Silicon Valley” Model
We have always known our mission would involve spending more money than we would generate from revenue for a number of years.
When we started out, there was a tried and tested system for building software platforms like this, the same system that brought us Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber and AirBnB. This system enabled sophisticated investors with large amounts of money to buy shares in multiple new companies in the hope that shares in a handful of these companies will multiply in value and yield returns significantly higher than the total invested across all the companies.
Embedded in the legalities of this system are a number of obligations that result in value being delivered to a company’s shareholders before their customers, for example dopamine-activating social features that prioritise generating engagement above empowering expression. These obligations create a gradient towards an end-game where the minimum number of shareholders extract the maximum amount of value from the maximum number of platform users.
In short, these platforms exploit creators. We simply don’t want to be one of these platforms.
Background 2 - Building on the Internet
Today, Endlesss is built on the same fundamental internet technology which has become the backbone of our digital economy over the last three decades.
When the internet came to prominence in the mid-90s, it was built on open-source technology which connected a decentralised network of nodes to transmit data without a single point of failure. The resilience of this decentralised communications network is the key factor in the internet becoming the back-bone of our global economy.
But internet technology has no capabilities to track the origin or value of what is being transmitted through the network. Internet nodes simply forward packets of information on to their destination address, without keeping a record of what information has been passed on. Storing data (our ‘content’) and its history (our ‘timelines’), falls to centralised companies who build on the connectivity of the internet to collect and use our data.
What is created or uploaded online can be infinitely replicated and distributed at near-zero cost, making traditional manufacture-and-supply business models that drive the tangible economy impossible online.
The new business models that have evolved in the internet age rely on realising the value that internet connectivity adds to the tangible economy, rather than the value that is created online. Successful internet businesses either accelerate existing industries (Amazon, Uber, AirBnB), aggregate and sell the attention that emerges from social network effects (Facebook, TikTok, Google) or offer convenient services-to-rent (Spotify, Netflix, Slack).
The combination of legacy legal structures and internet technology has led to extractive platforms which harvest value from large networks of value-creators.
New Opportunities to Open-Source, Decentralise and Track Value
Recently, new technologies have reached maturity which offer potential solutions to both the problems of the internet - lack of decentralised data tracking and verification - and the funding models that fuelled the rise of internet giants - legacy legal structures designed to concentrate rather than distribute ownership.
These technologies build on the connectivity of the internet to create decentralised networks which store a fully-attributed, cryptographically verified history of all operations that take place on the network in a distributed ledger. They also allow for scripts called smart contracts which execute automatically on the network in response to specified events and inputs. Each node on the network takes part in a verification process of everything that happens on the network and establishes a consensus with the other nodes about what actually happened. Each node also keeps a record of everything that has ever happened on the network.
There are two big leaps that this technology affords.
Firstly, what is done on these networks can be tracked and verified without the intervention of any single entity, meaning the value that is created on these networks belongs to and is controlled by those who create it, opening up the possibility for a digital version of the manufacturing economy.
Secondly, this technology also allows for governance and coordination of projects to be carried out using these networks through the formation of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations which formalise governance processes and track and verify decision-making and the management of funds.
These technologies enable projects to be open-source, co-owned and governed by the community while simultaneously creating economic opportunities as an implicit function of the technology itself.
Time to Transition Endlesss
Having spent the last 12 months learning about the opportunity of this new technology, we’re ready to make the transition from a single privately-owned company to a community-owned foundation represented by the Endlesss Foundation and begin the journey to progressively decentralise the technology and operation of the Endlesss ecosystem.
We’re partnering with the Near Foundation to build on the next-generation Near Protocol. Near Protocol uses a verification method called Proof of Stake which is as energy-efficient as traditional internet server technology. Near Protocol is also focussed on making their technology consumer-friendly with a number of innovations such as human-readable addresses and a user-friendly account setup. Near Protocol is also early in its adoption curve, meaning we will get significant support from the Near ecosystem as we grow.
Endlesss Ltd, the Endlesss Foundation and $ESSS token
Endlesss Ltd will continue to operate as the preeminent toolmaker in the Endlesss ecosystem as well as the primary engineering subcontractor developing open-sourced, decentralised technology on behalf of the Endlesss Foundation.
We are incorporating the Endlesss Foundation as a legal entity which will be able to receive funds and distribute tokens. The Endlesss Foundation will create 1Bn $ESSS tokens and distribute these to ecosystem participants past, present and future. Holding $ESSS tokens will allow participation in governance of the technology, business model, promotion and treasury management of the Endlesss ecosystem.
10% of $ESSS tokens will be paid to Endlesss Ltd as a license for technology it has already built and access to the Endlesss channels and user base.
4% of $ESSS will be distributed to customers, kickstarter backers and top community contributors to date.
10% of $ESSS will be reserved for Endlesss core team members
5% of $ESSS will be reserved for advisors
16.5% OF $ESSS will be sold to investors to fund development and capitalise the Endlesss Foundation
54.5% of $ESSS will be held by the Endlesss Foundation treasury for allocation according to the wishes of the Endlesss community
Over the coming months we will work with the community to establish how governance will be handled and which technology and services we will use to manage governance.
To read more about the goals and business model of the Endlesss ecosystem, read the white paper we're working on.
Honouring the Existing Participants in the Endlesss Ecosystem
There are thousands who have participated in bringing Endlesss to where it is today: the community, team, investors, purchasers and Kickstarter backers. We believe it is of crucial importance that everyone who has helped to make Endlesss what it is today is recognised in the token distribution. To do so, we are reserving token allocations for all of these groups.
Account-holders
All 120k+ Endlesss account-holders will be able to claim an NFT badge commemorating their participation in the initial phase of Endlesss.
Top Community Contributors
The top 500 creative contributors on Endlesss will be offered an allocation of 2% of the token supply, 20 million $ESSS, pro-rata to their level of contribution, as well as a 1/500 NFT badge commemorating their participation.
Kickstarter Backers, purchasers and subscribers
Everyone who backed our Kickstarter campaign, purchased a license of Endlesss Studio or subscribed to the Endlesss Infinite subscription will be offered an allocation of 2% of the token supply, 20 million $ESSS, pro-rata to their total spend. This means that your Kickstarter backing or purchase of Studio / Infinite will translate directly into an ownership stake in Endlesss going forward
Kickstarter backers will be offered limited edition NFT badges according to the tier they backed the project at, as well as Endlesss Studio purchasers and Endlesss Infinite subscribers.
Endlesss Ltd shareholders
The Endlesss Foundation will pay Endlesss Ltd 10% of the $ESSS supply, 100 million $ESSS, as a license for parts of the technology which Endlesss has developed, use of the Endlesss brand and trademarks and access to the Endlesss community. Endlesss Ltd will distribute a dividend of at least 50% of its $ESSS allocation to all share holders, according to their share holding. Endlesss shareholders will also be offered a limited edition NFT badge commemorating their investment.
What we don’t know and what we’re learning
We don’t have an answer to everything, which is the way it should be. Rather than coming to the community with a fully mapped-out plan of where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, we want to engage the community to come to a consensus as to what we want to achieve, how we collectively imagine our future and how we will work together to achieve it.
We want to provide a solid start-state and enough guide-rails to focus the conversation, with the guide-rails being held more and more by the group consciousness as we go forward.