Ive been quiet for a few months related to work being done in and around Magi but this time I have a major announcement to share with you guys. The launch of the first social media site utilizing Magi smart contracts. Lumen brings a fundamentally different creator economy to Hive: users don't just have followers, they have holders.
Lumen, put simply is a Hive frontend. Thats the boring way to say it.
The honest way: Lumen is me taking the three things that have been strangling this chain for years and building the fix instead of writing another post complaining about them. Lumen was also a challenge I set for myself. I asked the question:
Can a non-developer like myself, using just Claude, spending only $200-$300 USD, build a Hive frontend with more meaningful features than the frontends the DHF has spent close to $2 million USD on over last couple of years.
I believe I have managed to achieve that. Lumen is not perfect, it is still rough around the edges, and will require more work, feedback will be what drives further adjustments.
Lite accounts. Sign in with Google, Bitcoin or Ethereum wallets.
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On Lumen you pick a name and youre in. Once you are ready you make a full Hive account. Maybe you dont even care about writing, or blogging, then you dont have to. Bitcoin and EVM wallets can hold Meritum tokens regardless.
And youre not a second class citizen for it. Lite accounts show up in the feeds like everybody else. People follow you, you follow them, and it works in every direction between the two kinds of account. Your posts land on Hive through a Lumen publisher account.
To add in incentive to create full Hive accounts, a lite post declines rewards. The day you want to earn, you upgrade.
The Discovery - The feed does not care about payouts
Trending on Hive has been basically a leaderboard of "big number go top". It had nothing to do with what people care about. It had nothing to do with Hive itself. All it was is a lazy choice by frontends to rank content. We have all known this for years. Everyone was just ok with it while Web2 iterated on content discovery, the primary job of a social media site, we have done very little in that regards. Kept funding with no expectations. Nobody for a second thought to themselves:
Maybe, just maybe, Ned Scott didnt solve social media and didnt get it right 10 years ago.
Thats why Lumen ships with a working algorithm using the Hive social graph, taking account of engagement primarily. It adds a popularity lane across all of Hive so something genuinely big outside your bubble still reaches you instead of dying in a community you dont follow. The chain math is untouched, ofc. Downvotes still do exactly what they always did to a payout. They just dont decide what you get to see anymore. Downvote whatever you want, all you want. You dont get to run the feed with it or affect its visibility. What people forget is that none of this has anything to do with Hive itself, it only has to do with the choice of Hive frontends.
Read more here: /@lordbutterfly/killing-hives-social-potential-pob-based-content-discovery
Meritum. Your own token, your own community token, in about twenty seconds.
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This is the big addition to Lumen. It is what sets it apart from any other Hive frontend.
Social media users have followers. On Lumen you have holders.
Press launch. Three screens. Name three things youll genuinely do for people and what you charge for them. Hold the coin down and your market is open. Maybe you want to create a token for your own community and create an economy for that specific community, you can even do that.
No contract to write. No liquidity to set up. No pitch deck, no permission, no waiting on anybody. It costs nothing to launch and the first month is free. After that its about $10 a month to stay listed. Why? Monetization.
The curve
The curve rises, slowly, and on purpose. Your first token costs about 1.01 HBD. The hundredth costs 1.81 HBD. The thousandth costs 11.50 HBD. Put a thousand dollars into a new Meritum token and you get 380 of them, and you move the price 4.3x. Put the same thousand into a friend.tech key and you get 26, and you move it 676x. Their hundredth key cost $1,550 against our 1.81. A curve that goes vertical in twenty buys doesn’t serve a community. It's a shearing pen, and your own fans are the flock. Creating an exploitative system is something I did not want to do.
Six week maturity
Sell before six weeks and you pay an exit fee that starts at 15% and slides straight down to zero as you hold. Half of it goes to the creator, half to Lumen. And the maturity travels with the token. Buy from somebody whos held five weeks and you inherit their five weeks. This of course exists to stop fast flipping, hurting your community, it is supposed to facilitate the actual user economy that this creates.
And then the actual point of the whole thing
Holders can ask you for work.
Users set the USD price of their content or services. Users acquire that creator’s token through the market and spend it to purchase what the creator offers. If demand for the creator’s work increases, more users need their token, and the market price can rise, not because the creator promised investors a return, but because more people want to consume what they produce.
The creator receives the same token as payment and can either use it within the ecosystem or sell it back into the market. But creators and users operate under the same rules: an exit tax applies over the full term, discouraging short-term pump-and-dump behavior and aligning incentives around actually using the token.
The result is a new creator economy where attention can become demand, demand becomes token utility, and utility creates a market around the user’s work.
It’s not simply a token attached to a person. It’s a marketplace for what that person creates.
Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets can hold Hive creator tokens
This is the piece nobody else has, and its the reason any of the rest of it matters.
Meritum tokens live on Magi smart contracts, and Magi doesnt only speak Hive. Hive accounts, Ethereum addresses and Bitcoin addresses are all first class identities on it.
So a guy with nothing but MetaMask can hold and trade a Hive user token. And a Hive account can hold and trade one launched from a BTC wallet. Same market, same contract. Somebody sitting on Bitcoin can back a Hive creator, and get paid to do a job for one, without ever making a Hive account.
Thats what interoperability was supposed to mean before the word got worn out.
So thats it
If anyone is interested in trying it out, let me know. Feedback welcome, especially the harsh kind. Thats the useful kind. For direct interaction. Join the Magi discord. There is a specific room there for Lumen. https://discord.gg/qm9VqAtJ2
Posted via Lumen
