Scaling Platform Co-Ops – Lessons From Resonate.is

Summary

OSB: So, what happened to the relationship with RChain we heard about in 2018 and the investment they made with crypto tokens? I imagine the value of the investment plummeted as crypto lost value in 2018?

NM: Rchain and Resonate went through a very hard time towards the end of 2018. We learned some lessons. Funds from the proceeds of RChain’s ICO (Initial Coin Offering) were helpful to us, but we became tied into a solution looking for a problem, and when that solution did not deliver, so we had to rebuild on something simpler, without a blockchain.  We emerged with a stronger commitment to open source and community effort. I’m amazed the project survived at all – it’s a tribute to the concept and the small committed team that kept it going. The reality is that crypto finance is rather like the Venture Capital world – except with less regulation. However rosy and brilliant the initial intent, if the underlying motivations are to extract value you need a solid foundation of good governance to work out if the arrangement makes sense – even more so than with traditional investing institutions.

The original idea was that our music player would sit on a blockchain back-end platform, and that media would be stored on chain – with smart contracts for artists to get credit each time their tracks were played. But we found it a lot easier to do that by building and evolving well-structured back-end code services. We can be more agile and reliable that way. We also found that open source, and open, collaborative governance helps to build human trust.