Empowerment through Access

Helping the next generation of digital artists thrive

From the very beginning, building Koii was about creating and expanding access. In the first days of the project, Koii’s predecessor (‘Goldfish’) was on the path to being a powerful, decentralized web crawler. Powerful because there weren’t a lot of capable, usable solutions like it. Decentralized because one of our core beliefs is that information, and therefore knowledge, should be accessible to all.

As it currently stands, most of our information is regulated by the wealthy or the winners. When you use Google to search, you see what provides Google with the most ad revenue. When you open a history textbook, you see history as defined by those who won the war. As a young child in school (in the United States, as just one example), I learned about Christopher Columbus “discovering” America and the “Indians” “helping” colonizers take over their land. It wasn’t until much later that I learned about smallpox blankets, genocide, and the problematic nature of calling people indigenous to the Americas “Indians.”

We shouldn’t have to rely on the powerful for access to truth or being found on the internet. Koii is dedicated to helping all kinds of creators (digital artists, musicians, developers, people who write funny tweets, journalists, theatre makers, writers… I could go on) thrive instead of survive.

I’ve spoken with artists and musicians who’ve had to take their work down because website hosting fees were much higher than the revenue the work on the site brought in. Making their work publicly available became a financial burden. We are dropping the fees and raising the revenue. With Koii, digital creators no longer need to pay annual or monthly fees for hosting. The only cost to publish is a one-time storage fee, fractions of a penny per megabyte (try it out yourself with Finnie). Once the work has been posted, you receive attention rewards every time someone views your piece. Tell your mom to check it out every day and you’ll earn just from that.

This means that any creator with access to the internet, anywhere in the world, can put their work online and know that it will safely stay on the permaweb to gather rewards if it gains any traction. Artists are no longer dependent on elitist galleries to select their work before taking 50% commissions on sales. If you live in Nigeria, but you make great music that the German techno scene will love, you’re in luck because now you can get your beats in front of the right audience.

Until now, you had to be the right artist, in the right place, at the right time, and then appeal to the art world’s moderators. Matching the creator with the right audience across continents was made possible by the internet. Koii is fueling the fire so that you don’t have to work for free for six years (not feasible for most of the world’s population) before your rock climbing videos start generating revenue. More artists will be able to continue creating what they are passionate about instead of deciding to get a “real job” because the art doesn’t pay the bills. As a former theatre artist, I know the struggle (hello, I work in tech now). Because we know how personally difficult it can be as a creative, we are holding our Koii Cares contest (you could win an iPad, stylus, lots of KOII tokens, and $5,000 USDT)— all you have to do is register your art on Koii. Check out the contest details here.

The world is made better and more compassionate by having more art in it. People are happier when working on something they love. Koii is dedicated to making this vision a reality because we need a better world with more art, more compassion, and more love.

With your help, that better world can be a reality.

Check out the Edge of NFT blog and podcast here for more.

To learn more about how you can help Koii succeed, check out this blog. Follow us on Twitter Join our Discord Get on the whitelist for our upcoming public token sale

If you’re interested in the information access part of this piece that I didn’t really get into, I will be diving more into the importance of public records and seeing the truth from different points of view in a future blog.

Continue the conversation and join Koii’s official community Telegram channel, Koii’s Discord, and follow us on Twitter. 100K KOII, Enter to win!