Eternal in 2022

Can you believe it was only 7 months ago that Eternal launched?

Since then:

• We have partnered with more than 40 content creators, including some of the biggest streamers on Twitch.
• More than 20,000 people have joined the platform.
• More than 120,000 moments have been collected and traded.
• Our creators have made more than $100,000 in revenue.

None of this would've been possible without the support of our amazing community — we cannot thank you enough.

But this is just the beginning of our journey.  For 2022, we have much bigger plans, and they can be summed up in one word: growth.  We want all our numbers to grow by 100x or more.  So how do we get there?

Who is Eternal for?

Every product starts with a simple question: who is the product for?

At its core, Eternal empowers the creator economy through NFTs.  The nature of NFTs is such that:

• They are collectibles.
• They are tradable.

As such, it became clear to us that for Eternal to thrive as a platform, we MUST have a healthy balance of two types of users:

• Fans: users whose primary goal is to support and form a connection with their favorite streamers.
• Collectors: users who enjoy collecting and trading moments, with less regard for the content creators themselves.

(In reality, most users cannot be strictly categorized as either – this is more of a spectrum.)

Fans and collectors play different roles in the ecosystem.  Fans provide the fundamental demand for Eternal moments, whereas collectors provide liquidity, so that fans can easily buy and sell moments.  Both groups are essential to the success of the platform, and we will always be mindful of the needs of both.

However, when we look at our data today, it is apparent that there is an imbalance — there are roughly 15 collectors for every fan.  This imbalance is unhealthy for the long-term success of Eternal: when collectors significantly outnumber fans, our community sentiments and behaviors become tightly coupled with price actions, making it difficult for the team to develop Eternal's core value proposition, namely helping fans connect with creators through digital collectibles.

Therefore, for the first quarter of 2022, we will be focusing heavily on onboarding more fans, in order to achieve a healthier balance of fans vs collectors.

Onboarding Fans

We have tons of ideas for attracting more fans to Eternal; here we share a few directions that we are actively pursuing.

Creator vs Collector Packs

The best experience that Eternal can offer is opening packs.  As all our users can attest, nothing quite compares to the feeling of ripping open a pack and seeing a rare moment.

This feeling, however, is largely unattainable to the average Twitch viewer.  When a viewer hears about Eternal on stream through our partnered creators, the packs are always sold out already.  To start experiencing Eternal, the viewer would have to buy a moment from the marketplace — a much less engaging experience than buying and opening a pack.

Therefore, our top priority right now is to create a pack perfect for the average Twitch viewer: reasonably cheap, tailored by their favorite creators, and mostly importantly, available.  We are calling these new packs "creator packs" — packs specific to a creator, and only purchasable on stream.

At the same time, we are upgrading the (roughly) monthly pack drops that you know and love.  We will be calling them "collector packs" — packs designed for NFT enthusiasts.  These packs will feature many different creators and have much higher rarities, sold at a price point higher than creator packs.

We will be releasing a separate blog post about creator vs collector packs.

Creator-Fan Engagement

When we talk to the "fans" on Eternal, it quickly became clear that their primary purpose is to form deeper bonds with their favorite streamers.  For example, fans love autographs, because they represent unique acknowledgements from streamers, and fans literally cannot get autographs from these streamers anywhere else.

We think autographs are only the tip of the iceberg as far as what we can do to help fans form deeper bonds with streamers, and we are exploring many new ideas in this area.  One such idea is "sets" — collections of a specific creator's moments, for a fan to complete.  When completed, the fan may be eligible for unique interactions with the streamer.

Going into 2022, we have also prepared customized launches with several hugely popular influencers.  These influencers were heartened by our track record of successfully helping streamers with NFT launches, and are committing to integrate deeply with Eternal and work with us to develop new ways to engage with fans.  We are extremely excited by the possibilities.

Viral Growth

When a fan collects an epic moment of their favorite streamer, or when they get an autograph, they want to tell other fans about it.  As it happens, that's great for our platform — there's no better way to grow than through word of mouth.

However, right now we are not making it easy for fans to showcase their Eternal collections.  Our "showcases" feature is not particularly engaging, and autographs can't be easily showcased at all.

As such, we are exploring better ways for fans to tell each other about Eternal.  For starters, we will be releasing an Eternal Discord bot that will be installed on partnered creators's Discord servers.  This bot will help fans showcase their moments and autographs to other fans, paving the way for viral growth.

Blockchain Integrations

As previously discussed, Eternal needs both fans and collectors to thrive.  The amount of collectors we can onboard, however, is heavily constrained by the blockchain we are running on.

For environmental and performance reasons, we had chosen to build on the Flow blockchain.   However, most of the liquidity in crypto reside on other blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana.

Furthermore, many enterprise partners we talked to have preferences for some other blockchains.  Should we support only Flow, our partnership opportunities would be limited.

For all these reasons, we believe that the future of Eternal is multi-chain — we want to be able to launch NFTs on any chain, and accept cryptocurrencies from any chain.  At the moment, a few leading blockchain projects have offered us generous incentives and committed marketing resources for our launch on their platforms.  You can expect Eternal to run on many more blockchains in 2022.

Esports

Speaking of collecting streaming moments, some of the most memorable moments come from esports.  Imagine one day you could collect this moment on Eternal:

Turns out, that day is closer than you might think.  Thanks to our success in launching moments for streamers, we are now in deep conversations for partnering with several top-tier esports leagues.  For confidentiality reasons, we cannot reveal too many details, but we are optimistic that something will come to fruition in the first half of 2022.

While it's tempting to think that esports moments and streamer moments are two separate markets, there are many reasons why working on esports benefits the streamer side as well:

• Brand recognition: esports leagues have very strong branding (think LCS, ESL, etc.), so being an official partner to esports leagues will help establish Eternal as a trustworthy brand.  This will not only help us onboard larger streamers, but also make it easier to attract fans, who tend to shy away from crypto projects for fear of getting scammed.
• Distribution: unlike regular streamers, esports leagues spend a huge amount of money on marketing.  Eternal will be able to piggyback on their distribution and marketing channels and reach more fans than ever before, most of whom watch regular streamers as well.
• Deep integration: when working with streamers, we have found that their most important resource is time — as an individual, they simply do not have enough time to explore all the exciting opportunities that we can offer.  Esports leagues, on the other hand, can dedicate entire teams to working with us, so we can collaborate deeply and explore resource-intensive projects, such as live-minting moments in real time based on fan votes.

Working with esports entails using in-game copyrighted content.  We are excited to have secured a partnership with one of the top game developers in the world, who owns a large array of esports titles.  Details of the partnership will be announced in early 2022.

Vision

Imagine it's the year 2030.  Alien spaceships just shot down planet Earth, and now we are all space dust.  What would interstellar historians have to say about Eternal?

Here's what we would like them to say:

Eternal made creator economy blossom by enabling content creators to produce and sell digital merchandises directly to their fans.

At Eternal, we recognize that blockchain is fundamentally revolutionary in its ability to assign value to digital goods, which is the missing piece for a truly thriving creator economy.  We believe that the world is a better place when anyone who makes great content can also make a living from doing so, and we will not stop until we have achieved that.