Making its public debut on a February 1 announcement from Ditto Music, a groundbreaking new DeFi platform called Opulous is opening doors to independent musical artists and investors with a decentralized, peer-to-peer lending platform that plans to integrate Elastos’ industry-leading DID solution. In the present-day music production landscape, independent musicians starting out and trying to find their way are almost always hampered by financial struggles, and accessing capital makes for a challenging and labor-intensive practice. Likewise, independent investors supplying capital have difficulty connecting with aspiring artists and ensuring returns, making for capital inefficiencies and holding back the creative process. Due to their roles as trustworthy institutions, centralized publishing companies and record labels have effectively consolidated power over the music industry, leveraging their scales of capital and scopes of operation to justify predatory pricing models and drive out competition. Needless to say, Opulous has entered the music industry at a pivotal moment, giving up-and-coming artists and independent investors a path away from dependence on industry oligarchs.
Opulous: DeFi backed Music
Opulous acts as a capital pool from which loans can be accessed and granted. For artists, loans are granted against existing revenue streams, thereby drawing on their copyrights as collateral. On the opposite end, investors can contribute to Opulous’ Music Copyrights Pools, which are set to payout interest at a highly competitive rate up to 10% APR. In addition to investors, active artists will also be permitted to contribute capital to the pool, so they may establish passive revenue streams as well. With Opulous’ launch, artists and investors alike now have a new platform to connect with and empower each other, where trustless blockchain architecture supports capital efficiency and enables the formation of a more meritocratic system of content creation.
Integrating Elastos DIDs
Of course, such a powerful multi-stakeholder application of decentralized finance requires a robust, on-chain mechanism for identification; this is where Elastos’ Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) enter the picture. Most immediately, Elastos DIDs stand to play a major role for Opulous users, who will want to engage the Opulous’ capital pools as securely as possible.
The Bigger Picture: Bluebox
But while enabling both artists and investors to utilize Opulous with their Elastos-issued DIDs certainly makes for a strong use-case, Ditto Music has grander ambitions: Bluebox, the company’s blockchain-based music licensing platform rapidly nearing its beta launch, aims to offer aspiring and current artists of all levels a unique suite of tools to independently manage their career paths, financing, licensing, and publishing ventures. With discussions and research ongoing between Ditto Music CEO Lee Parsons and Elastos VP of Business Development Clarence Liu, a deeper, more comprehensive DID integration project is in the works.
Staking Integration
In addition to DID integration, Elastos will also benefit from staking integration on Opulous. Opulous is being developed on Algorand’s public blockchain, but the platform will support the staking of “ELA on Ethereum” – essentially wrapped ELA in the form of an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain.
As Elastos continues to build new bridges across ecosystems and achieve new use cases for its decentralized technologies, continue to check in here on the official Elastos Info Blog for the latest news and developments.
