How Celebrities Are Building ‘Unstoppable Communities’ With NFTs

Celebrities may seem like they have the world at their feet—but like the rest of us, they’re at the mercy of centralized gatekeepers, in their case the social media platforms that connect them with their fans.

Those platforms can cut creators off from their audiences at a stroke, explained Andras Kristof, CEO of “unstoppable communities” platform Galaxis. “If YouTube gives you three strikes because their AI mistakes something, or for any reason, the owner of a platform decides that he doesn’t like you, you’re cut off from the community you built on that platform,” he said.

Web3 offers creators the opportunity to “directly reach out to your community,” Kristof explained. “You can use any and all platforms to actually deliver your message,” he said, but if a platform cuts a creator off, “then you still have your community—you need to find another way to deliver your value to them, but you don’t need to start rebuilding it.”

Galaxis has worked with celebrities including Steve Aoki and Mike Tyson, and brands like the NBA, to help create Web3 communities based on their fanbases. The firm builds the underlying infrastructure for online communities based around NFT “digital membership cards,” which offer holders benefits like redeemables and access to specific private channels. “What Galaxis has built is a combination of Kickstarter and Patreon,” Kristof said. “It’s a funding and monetization framework that’s based on digital membership cards.”

“What we wanted to give them is a way that they can give value to their community members,” he told Decrypt. “That value is the value of their definition, not some universal value or attention or anything like that—it could be very different from community to community.”

For Tyson, for example, “one of the redeemables was that if you had that particular NFT, you could actually contact them and get a physical meeting with Mike Tyson.” The lucky holder spent three days on Tyson’s ranch, “and Tyson even sparred with the guy,” said Kristof. That holder went on to become one of Galaxis’ early investors, he added.

Galaxis’ collection for the NBA, meanwhile, featured player cards that received perks and upgrades “dynamically, based on their performance on the basketball court,” he explained. “They got upgraded on the data provided to us by the NBA.”

For William Rudolf Lobkowicz, a scion of the Czech royal family, Galaxis developed a community platform for the Lobkowicz art collection, using QR codes attached to the artworks that could be collected. “You could pick up NFTs and put them on the digital membership card, basically creating an experience that incentivizes people to visit physical spaces like art galleries and libraries,” said Kristof.

Building infrastructure

Galaxis’ focus is on building the underlying infrastructure for these communities, which is “not an easy task,” said Kristof. “Yes, we can put the important things on blockchain, but you still have to have web servers, you still have to have centralized infrastructure that can actually be stopped.”

The firm’s digital membership cards store all the perks, benefits and other redeemables on chain, he said, while it’s currently building out the infrastructure that will enable the creation of fully “unstoppable communities.”

“The whole infrastructure behind Galaxis was already built in such a way that when you create your own community, it’s not created in the big database of the Galaxis web server,” he explained. “Everything that is needed to run your own community is a set of microservices that are being created for you and for you only—so there is no big Galaxis database, there is no big Galaxis server. Every new community runs it in its own container.”

In subsequent releases, Kristof explained, “we can give this container to you,” so that users can run their communities on their own terms. Version 3 of Galaxis will “put all of this into a distributed system,” built atop decentralized data storage and distribution technology platform Swarm. “If you put together the best features of the Tor network, of IPFS and of BitTorrent, you get Swarm,” he said. “It’s basically an IPFS system that’s fully encrypted and has crypto economic advantages for you to run a node.

“With Swarm, you can actually deploy websites,” he said. “Long story short, Galaxis technology with a Swarm backend can create a truly unstoppable community, as long as you have access to the internet.”

Playing the Trump card

Galaxis has recently been involved in what may be its biggest project yet—providing the underlying Web3 infrastructure for Donald Trump’s NFT collections, which Kristof called “a huge success.”

On December 15, 2022, Trump launched his first NFT collection, featuring 45,000 digital trading cards priced at $99 each. “We had one year to sell it out, and it sold out in one day,” Trump said during an interview with Bloomberg on his initial NFT launch.

Subsequent releases followed, including—memorably—a “MugShot Edition” collection, released after the Republican presidential candidate’s arrest in Georgia. It’s a striking illustration of how NFTs can enable media personalities to respond to breaking events in the news cycle, addressing their communities directly.

“The natural next step would be to turn that into a long-term and and self-sustaining community,” said Kristof, “with proper membership cards and potential monthly payments.”

“In many ways, I do think times are changing, and for better or worse, crypto has become one of the hottest topics of the election,” said Kristof, with Trump’s embrace of NFTs acting as a bellwether for his pro-crypto platform.

Eventually, other political figures and even political parties could theoretically follow Trump’s lead, launching their own “unstoppable communities,” Kristof said. “If there is a Kamala Harris community, then I don’t think anything would stop them from utilizing this sort of digital membership card to keep track of community members.”

“It’s important to highlight that who we work with doesn’t necessarily reflect my personal views,” Kristof said. He added that it would be “hypocritical” to refuse to work with certain parties because they don’t share those views, given that Galaxis is intended to let people “create communities, even if others don’t like them.”

Ultimately, Galaxis is intended to function as “infrastructure,” he said. “The goal is to create a framework where I don’t have to work with them, they don’t have to work with me. They can do it on their own.”