PeerPatron aims at becoming an alternative to centralized crowd patronage such as Patreon (small monthly subscriptions from patrons let a creator earn a steady income; the creator can make exclusive content available for patrons as a reward). These services are managed by companies playing the role of intermediary in every transactions. By using a blockchain (Tezos, for now), PeerPatron technically enforces safeguards against common pitfalls such as censorship, mandatory fees, centralized and arbitrary power over every user, content and action. The service will enable connections between the creators and the patrons, as well as provide an easy way to interact with smart contracts and user content. Once the subscription contract is created and published on the blockchain, PeerPatron has no control over it. The contract is passed only between the creator and the patron, without intermediary, and only them can amend or end it when they want. Technical details and a lot of code will be free software, so in the event of PeerPatron shutting down, it would be relatively easy to develop a new interface to maintain the existing contracts and content, without interrupting the payments. We plan to use IPFS eventually for decentralized content storage. Besides, we’ll focus on making the app accessible. The user experience will be very close to a traditional web app, though knowledgeable users will still be able to be in control and see what happens on the blockchain.

The user adoption has been voluntarily limited for now to a handful of known and knowledgeable users we can work with to improve the user experience and add features. We plan to make the app truly accessible to everyone. We’d rather advance development further before an official launch. We do believe that the advantages of using a blockchain for this use case can appeal to people outside cryptocurrency who would like more independance and no intermediary when it comes to crowd patronage.

The version we present here is an early alpha. You can browse it, generate and publish smart contract subscriptions to available creators. Account management and reporting is very limited for now, though. We suggest to use it only on Tezos alphanet (though it’s possible to select the mainnet). A demo account with an alphanet key is available for convenience, but any Tezos account can be used.

I’m the only person working on this project currently, but the team should grow soon, hopefully.