TheStory
Portugal the Man (PTM), an artist who has protected their fanbase with more care than a lioness, made the plunge into crypto by releasing the $PTM CreatorCoin on the platform Rally one year ago last week. We thought it would be a good time to review the coin’s utility and trading history.
Rally has attracted few top-level artists (PTM, Megadeath, and BT being an almost all-inclusive list), likely due to their business model targetting a Web3 version of Patreon. With the recent addition of the former COO of Patreon, we believe the long-term play is to integrate Rally technology into Patreon itself, allowing current members to easily integrate CreatorCoin technology. That being said, Rally’s bread and butter is focused on medium-sized creators with goods and service offerings (something that is a difficult sell to the world’s top musicians).
However, PTM has been building value to their coin holders since Day 1 and continues to bring new offerings to the table. Holding PTM coin allows exclusive digital access including: unreleased live audio recordings, digital meet-ups, pre-sale codes and VIP discord access. A great example of digital offerings that could appeal to artists who have already achieved top-tier status.
PTM has yet to release an NFT on the Rally platform. Instead, the band recently teamed up with Deadmou5 for an NFT release in December of 2021 on Mint Base using the Near Protocol. The NFT includes Arweave integreation, something we’ll likely see as a gold standard for music content releases via NFT. This move goes to show how far CreatorCoin focused NFT platforms have to go to reach widespread adoption. We’re hoping Rally’s move to Solana will expand the utility and marketplace adaptability of NFTs minted from coins who launch and/or migrate to Solana.
TheNode
$PTM coin on Rally was once the most invested coin on the platform, but has since been on a steady decline. This is mostly due to the sheer volume of initial support and the structure of Rally Rewards, which only rewards accounts (and holders) with a net positive weekly change in support volume compared to previous weeks.
It took nearly 6 months since the coin’s release to hit bottom before taking an upward turn and becoming available for Rally Rewards in January of 2022.
The story of the $PTM coin price is one that shows how far we have to come on musician coins following some resemblance of value in relation to the real world. With Rally Rewards having far too large of an impact on trading behavior, it will be some time before these coins move with relation to the value of the asset they represent in reality.
In Rally’s defense, the Founders claim the platform is not structured to encourage speculative trading and instead is meant to be a utility mechanism for building a community relationship between the creator and their fans. But this is a difficult sell when fans are seeing significant drops in the value of their $PTM coin due to speculative trading. If Rally really doesn’t believe in speculative trading, they could have adopted a flat bonding curve when they had their chance during the previous community-voted measure to change bonding curves. With the second version of a bonding curve still rewarding speculative trading (PTM still exists on the V1 bonding curve), it appears that Rally, in practice, isn’t ready to give up on CreatorCoin speculation.
$PTM Coin on Rally Since Release:
