Our vision with Portals is to create a network where programmable media meets programmable money. We are starting off with a platform that enables creators to monetize through token-gated access to their content and community, with a focus on token-gated video content that has a public preview for non-members.

Problem:

The problem with Web2 creator platforms such as Patreon, OnlyFans, and Substack charge 8-20% in fees to creators yet barely reinvest their profits towards innovating their platforms. Additionally, when creators use centralized platforms and store their media in centralized databases, they risk losing access to the media if the centralized platform shuts down.

Our Solution:

Portals will challenge the traditional system by:

• Leveraging a decentralized media stack powered by Ethereum, IPFS and Filecoin which gives media a greater chance of surviving long timelines, due to the decentralized structure of the network.
• Creators will not have to pay any fees for the subscription revenue they receive (although there will be some setup costs in deploying smart contracts).

===Future Revenue Generation Ideas=== Instead, Portals plans to generate revenue by: a) Requesting a 2% suggested donation from the fans, when they purchase a creator’s membership subscription b) Offering core add-ons/tools for community management, that creators can subscribe to for a monthly flat rate c) Allowing community developers to submit tools/add-ons to our app marketplace, and only taking a 2% fee on the one-time or monthly cost of using the tool. Tools will be curated and audited by the Portals DAO for security, as will managing fee parameters.

===Future Feature Ideas===

• Integrate with Ceramic for identity management
• Build on top of an L2 such as Optimism or Arbitrum
• Add support for audio and text content
• Utilize NuCypher or a similar technology for decentralized encryption
• Add forums, tasks, and revenue share tools so creators can incentivize their communities
• Integrate with Livepeer for livestreaming which can optionally be token-gated
• Allow creators to mint NFTs of their content and provide members of their community with early (or exclusive) access to drops

The Portals MVP enables creators to monetize through token-gated access to their content and community.

Creators can upload video or images and it will be stored on IPFS & Filecoin using the Web3.storage api. Creators can decide whether their media is accessible to the public or whether a membership token is required to view the content.

For members-only content, we are using a centralized back-end to manage the encryption/decryption, and we use the Unlock protocol to allow creators to generate up to three membership tiers: for 1 month of access, 1 year of access, or lifetime access.

We currently use a centralized backend to authenticate users with their wallets, store metadata about users such as their usernames & bio as well as for proxy requests to IPFS/Filecoin for media upload via web3.storage

===Limitations===

We had a lot of aspirations for what we wanted to build, as we initially had a team of 4 developers. Unfortunately 2 of them were unable to contribute any code in the end, so there were various sacrifices we had to make or items we didn’t catch until the last minute.

• Video upload only works for files up to 3MB - we didn’t test larger files until the very end and realized there is a bug on our centralized backend related to the file size limits. This is an easy fix, but we simply found the bug too late!

• Edit Profile is not fully hooked up and is not using decentralized solutions. We would have loved to use Ceramic, but there simply wasn’t enough time.