These days, when it comes to fame, anyone with a cellphone and an internet connection can undoubtedly become an “influencer” online. However, not everyone who has a lot of followers is necessarily able to earn money through social media—a new company called LaMint is out to change that.
Jon Southurst caught up with LaMint co-founders and co-CEOs Morgan Coleman and Daniel Street on the latest episode of The Bitcoin Bridge. They say that up to 99% of social media posts are not monetized, and their company aims to enable creators, influencers, and businesses to monetize their content.
And they’re doing it through BSV.
Getting content creators off the “hamster wheel”
LaMint allows users to monetize their content across multiple social media platforms using micropayments. This also means that unlike Relica, which is a self-contained platform, LaMint can be used across different apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Content creators simply need to embed links to LaMint within their posts or profile. Through this, fans and followers can be led to the LaMint platform, where they can unlock and interact with the creator’s content for certain fees. The process is simple and occurs instantly for each party—payments go from fan to creator in a frictionless and peer-to-peer manner.
LaMint is an offshoot of another company that was co-founded by Street: Relica. This venture aimed to transform conventional social media platforms. Specifically, they wanted to build a better Instagram that would allow people to earn through likes, comments, etc.
However, Street explained that Relica’s identity eventually evolved beyond image sharing. And this paved the way for LaMint to take the reins for the model.
“We were doing the tipping model with Réplica,” Street said.
“But then we went down the path to kind of focusing more on maps…So we thought, ‘look, let’s still capitalize on this technology that we built with pay-to-view’, and set up a brand new venture called LaMint,” he revealed.
Street and Coleman met through a mutual friend. Coleman revealed that he initially pitched a different idea to Street, but he then got intrigued about the income generation potential of the Relica model.
“I could see immediately that we can actually provide a good amount of income for someone that’s got 10,000 followers or even less,” Coleman said. “And that just really excited me.”
Coleman went on to explain how influencers nowadays would post free content featuring brands in hopes of getting ad deals. As he sees it, this practice gives the brands—who definitely have the marketing budget—free access to thousands of followers.
“It’s just a shame,” Coleman said.
“What we’re trying to do is really allow our creators to get off that hamster wheel and start earning really good money,” he pointed out.
‘Those limitations don’t exist on BSV’
Coleman came to work on LaMint as a relative newbie to the blockchain space. According to him, Street saw potential in his ideas but also told him in no uncertain terms that he was in the wrong space.
“He proceeded to educate me on BSV and all of the sort of limitations that I was coming up with my other ideas using the Ethereum platform as an example,” he said.
Ethereum, of course, is known for its volatile and often high transaction costs. It is also—unlike the BSV Blockchain—unable to reliably scale massively.
As Street told Coleman, “Well, those limitations don’t exist on BSV. And here’s where you need to be building that.”
Find out more about LaMint on The Bitcoin Bridge with Jon Southurst. Watch the full interview on the CoinGeek Youtube channel.
Watch: The BSV Global Blockchain Convention presentation, Making it easy for creators to earn – using BSV blockchain
New to blockchain? Check out CoinGeek’s Blockchain for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about blockchain technology.
