Reporting live from ETH Denver, this is your weekly drop of Dequency alpha. Subscribe to be the first to hear about product releases (psssst: beta is live), our rowdiest discord channels, company news (like when we raise money), and whatever thoughts are top-of-mind as we summarize the week’s events every Friday.
Make it rain on-chain
This week, we got to share the news of our $4.5MM seed round. With this cash infusion, we’ll continue building towards our v1 release, which will include the ability for artists and rightsholders to make their music available for on-chain synchronization. We’re humbled that so many amazing partners shared our vision 🙏🏼
Some quick press hits: Music Business Worldwide, MusicAlly, Digital Music News, FXStreet
ETHDenver Download
We’ve been hanging out at the AlgoRanch (and still are — come by and get a long-sleeve tee!), and Team Dequency has been representing: co-founder George kicked it off with a keynote speech, and then led the panel on The Creator Economy (including co-founder and CEO Keatly alongside Swaneet Singh from Xfinite and Mark Farrington from Illustrated World Series).
Check it out here, starting at ~47:00 for George’s keynote and ~1:15:00 for the panel (sorry in advance for the sound quality… for a company who cares deeply about how things sound, this is not great lmao).
Wen Whitepaper?
A little easter egg for those of you who actually read our blog (hi, mom): link to our Litepaper, giving you a little more detail as to our fundamental raison d’etre, the problem we’re aiming to address, and a dip into the mechanics of our marketplace. This does NOT take the place of our actual Whitepaper, which we are currently working on and will publish in the coming months.
Beta is live! Mint yourself a sync license NFT!
Have you clicked around the beta? Please let us know what you think! We’re thrilled to release our genesis catalog, with ~700 songs featuring artists like Goldfish, Deadly Avenger, and more. We’ll put together a more in-depth walk-through for next week’s update, but for now… see for yourself!
Questions from the Discord
Thought it would be cool to share some of the awesome Q&A happening in our discord in the hopes that it’ll encourage you to hop in and chat with us :)
Question From TechTangle: Would love to hear more on how Dequency represents decentralisation. Will it have a governance DAO, will there be a sync license DEX, etc ? Why does a user require an account?
Answer from Keatly: Great questions. The inspiration for Dequency was to cut out the middle man in sync licensing so that artists take home more of the license fee, get paid immediately and have a say in the governance of the system — i.e. decentralization. We are planning to mint a utility token that also serves as a governance token. It’s important to us that we have the utility built out first before we issue the token. We just think that’s a more authentic way to put a coin out to the world. We’re in this for the long haul and want to create real, lasting value for the community and we want to show not tell. Users need an account and we’ll likely have to KYC to ensure that the people uploading music actually own the rights they say they do. Otherwise we have a potential issue like want happened with Hitpiece. We need to guard against bad actors and we are waiving the flag for legitimate web3 music projects.
Thanks for reading & see you next week!
Team Dequency
PS: if you’re at ETHDenver, come see us for a shirt :)
