Snake Nation tapped into the creative community to bring to life content creation for independent music artists. We paired Cape Town rapper Spike P with SSK UK music Producer to create a custom track with the app usage included.

Project Update

It has been over a year since we started our project; "making our wallet ILP capable", which saw busy months with a lot of research and experimentation with tons of community engagement. Our goal is to allow creatives on the Snake Nation platform to participate in WM without needing an additional (outside of the user assigned VNM wallet) wallet to handle ILP earnings.

Brief refresher, Snake Nation is a culture, content and technology company with a mission to build a pathway to the digital creative economy for Multicultural Millennial (M2) creators as a way to reduce youth unemployment and poverty. Our creator platform allows our members to monetize their creative work and grow their audience, globally. We are focused on creating sustainable value in the creative economy, benefiting young creative rebels, emerging talent, and established professionals through the creation of an open and inclusive platform and community. The new shared creative economy will be defined by the direct connection between creators, their audience, and value-driving opportunities within the Snake Nation platform.

The use of both traditional and digital platforms for the distribution of creative content, ultimately promotes unrestricted economic growth and freedom of expression for creators. This will enable the establishment of sustainable future careers for the M2 creatives. The Snake Nation Platform is an application for content tracking, rewards, and ownership that uses blockchain technology & now Interledger protocols to transfer value. It is an extension of the existing Snake Nation community which comprises real-world places, university societies (clubs), and digital platforms helping to create an unrestricted globally inclusive creative economy.

While we have our platform available, mostly as native apps on the Playstore and AppStore, the goal for this project was to allow our members to obtain a payment pointer from their wallet. This would also be accompanied with integration instructions on their external websites, allowing them to integrate WM on their personal websites and blogs. Since their payment pointers would be connected to their Snake Nation account, their WM earnings would automatically be streamed to their VNM wallets.

Progress on objectives

1. Project research, consultation and fact gathering: We have moved from research and fact gathering into market testing with early versions of the Snake Nation App. Current research has been based on user feedback, conferences, and ongoing interviews with users and influencers on what features are needed.
2. MVP development, Cloud infrastructure & ILP connector configuration: The MVP was initially supposed to be a showcase of our ILP integration on the testnet. We managed to set up a local ILP network during our research phase, however, because the research phase took longer, with the experience we now have and support from our development partners we are going to move directly to a Mainnet integration.
3. BETA launch of Mobile App at CPUT University :
4. Promotion of Web Monetization and ILP to our Student members through Hackathons and other means such as our own platform: We have executed multiple events, panels and hacks with our app and community. A hackathon in Cape Town, where we explored the future of financial technology and participants would integrate fintech into their business, with a focus on looking at ILP and WM. We also hosted a panel themed “Creative economy and web monetization” at the 2022-AIC (Africa in Color) MOCA (Movement of Creative Africa) in Rwanda, where we where joined by local & International artists, leaders from gaming companies, music and tech industry. There in Kigali we also spoke about the intersection of fintech with the digital creative economy.
5. We educated upwards of 1200 users on FinTech and ILP, specifically how they use their wallet to participate in WM. To date we have had 14,804 transactions utilizing the app and micropayments tied to social media activity within the platform. We have been focused on increasing the utility of the app, wallet and VNM token which also increases the adoption of the ILP payment pointers and micropayments.

Key activities

Fintech Hackathon

Snake Nation held a 24h FinTech Hackathon where Students from Cape Peninsula University of Technology received a briefing on how and why Interledger is important to solving ledger problems in FinTech and also a talk by Cape Town municipal officer on economic development. Students grouped themselves by company where they ideated and built mockups and pitched their companies and creations. The winners were awarded R10k and opportunity to be incubated in the BIIC (Business Innovation Incubation Center).

Fintech.mp4