Grammy-Winning DJ RAC Launches $RAC Community Token on Ethereum
Ethereum’s culture scene has boomed in 2020 thanks to an explosion of activity around NFT art, social money, and beyond. Some major mainstream creators have been paying attention accordingly.
No one fits that bill better than award-winning musician and producer André Allen Anjos, whose stage name is RAC. In recent months, RAC’s participated in all kinds of projects around the Ethereum ecosystem and even released an innovative $TAPE offering therein.
As such, RAC knows the insides of the mainstream music industry as well as anyone, yet he’s also a crypto-native DeFi user that’s well acquainted with Ethereum’s new avenues for empowering artists. Now, the acclaimed DJ is putting that knowledge to good use via the $RAC token.
$RAC for the Community
On October 1st, RAC announced $RAC, a community token to be powered by Ethereum-based, limited-edition goods marketplace Zora.
The idea with the project is to create a new avenue for RAC to capture the value of his creativity while simultaneously empowering his supporters, the artist explained:
“I’ve been fascinated with crypto for years and its applications beyond currencies, and believe that it can create a new paradigm for creative ownership directly between artists and their communities. This new paradigm is what I want to pursue with $RAC and I want to put it in the hands of my existing fans and community.”
That said, the core vision for $RAC includes:
- Rewarding loyal fans who help build the RAC ecosystem
- A tokenized community, e.g. a private Discord, with unlockable perks and content
- $RAC only being earnable, not purchasable
- Usable for RAC merch discounts
- Being spendable for tokenized ad space on RAC’s Twitch account
“Crypto enables communities to capture the value they create instead of being monetized by pre-existing platforms and $RAC is an active experiment pushing the envelope on these primitives,” RAC said.
Distributing $RAC
Out of the gate, 10 million $RAC have been created. The “vast majority” of these will be distributed to fans in the years ahead, but there’s already a roadmap for how the tokens will be distributed to early stakeholders.
Among these plans, 200,000 $RAC will be retroactively rewarded to RAC’s current +150 Patreon supporters, while another 150,000 will be given to the artist’s Twitch supporters. 25,000 has been set aside for RAC’s +1,500 Bandcamp supporters, and 25,000 is slotted for +200 past RAC merch buyers. In the future, RAC is planning to distribute 50,000 RAC per month to Patreon subscribers, and a further 100,000 has been set aside for every redeemer of $TAPE tokens on Zora.
What’s $TAPE?
Back in the spring, RAC launched $TAPE, a token redeemable for a limited-edition cassette tape of his album BOY, via Zora. As there were only 100 copies of the cassette created, there will only ever be 100 $TAPE tokens.
“This [model] enables André to realize the true value of his work, and share in the success of the BOY cassette tape with his community,” Zora said at the time.
Fast forward to this week, and $TAPE redemptions started on October 1st. This means holders can henceforth redeem 1 $TAPE for 1 BOY cassette. If any holders choose to do so, they’ll automatically earn a claim on 100,000 $RAC per the artist’s new token distribution plans. That’s a lot of upside for collectors if the $RAC price ever significantly rises.
Expect Such Experiments to Continue
RAC may be the first major artist to embrace a community token project so directly, but he definitely won’t be the last. Not with the way the winds of culture and creative empowerment are blowing around Ethereum lately.
If anything, RAC’s new token will only serve as a catalyst for bringing the attention of artists both big and small to the cryptoeconomy’s novel possibilities.
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OhNoCryptocurrency via https://www.ohnocrypto.com/ @William M. Peaster, @Khareem Sudlow