Haura founder Ben Wung: Transforming live streaming with blockchain tech

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“Haura will change how streamers and viewers monetize,” Ben Wung tells CoinGeek Backstage. In an interview on the sidelines of the London Blockchain Conference, Wung talked about his vision for the livestreaming industry and why it’s only possible on the BSV blockchain.

Haura is a next-generation livestreaming platform that offers streamers and their viewers a new monetization model. Currently, streamers depend on donations from their viewers and advertising revenue. The former is unreliable, says Wung. After the first three donations, “the drop-off is pretty significant.”

This forces streamers into a never-ending quest for new viewers to capitalize on the donations and virtual gifts. They usually have to stream for hours on end “because if they don’t, they can’t generate revenue.”

Haura is flipping this model on its head. It allows the streamers to receive micropayments
from their viewers via the BSV blockchain. In return, the viewers can mint specific moments on the stream as non-fungible tokens. Wung, however, prefers the term “collectibles” as NFTs have gained a negative reputation as purely speculative tokens with no utility.

The collectibles gain value over time depending on the success of the streamer. If, for instance, a viewer mints one minute of a song that wins a Grammy, the collectible’s value will skyrocket.

Wung started as an Ethereum developer, building smart contracts and deploying them on its Layer 1 blockchain and, later, on Layer 2 networks like Polygon. Early on, he got frustrated by the scaling bottlenecks of the Ethereum network on both Layer 1 and Layer 2, which limited the ambitions and business models of the ecosystem’s applications.

He later discovered BSV blockchain and migrated his platform to the only blockchain network that can scale unbounded.

“We have the peace of mind that if our platform goes viral and we get a lot of users, we just don’t worry it’s going to break,” he noted.

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