Using the Hedera Consensus Service for Token Registration Within The Creator’s Galaxy
The Creator’s Galaxy Protocol empowers the interactions between Creators and their fans to be more meaningful and productive, creating objective and measurable value within the relationship while increasing monetization for Creators, and so unlocking a new economic paradigm.
Creator’s within the Creator’s Galaxy mint personalized fungible social tokens, called “Creator Tokens”, that their fans can purchase and utilize in various applications for services and offerings from the Creator in question, like video calls, video messages, fan club subscriptions, and direct messages. Creators within the ecosystem can also issue NFT “Collectibles” that represent unique assets with authentic provenance and scarcity.
These tokens adhere to a set of community-governed standards. One notable aspect that is standardized are how the fees for creation and transfer of tokens are denominated in Calaxy Tokens ($CLXY), the ecosystem’s native token. The $CLXY fees are in addition to any fees for the underlying blockchain, like Hedera’s native protocol token, $HBAR. For a Creator Token or Collectible (“NFT”) to be considered part of the ecosystem, it must follow the defined fee structure and other standards the community decides on overtime.
Because The Creator’s Galaxy is a permissionless and community-governed social ecosystem, any third-party application can choose to accept those tokens which adhere to the ecosystem and communities specification, at their full discretion. The vision is that there will be a broad and diverse ecosystem of applications empowering the future of content creators, which can collectively participate within The Creator’s Galaxy, creating a cohesive toolkit for empowering personal monetization. Calaxy App is just the first manifestation of the full ecosystem, helping bring it to life.
While there are certainly intrinsic benefits to allowing anyone to choose their application to integrate with these fungible and non-fungible tokens, this diverse & permissionless ecosystem creates challenges, such as:
- How to ensure that tokens created by the different ecosystem participants conform to the community defined specifications & standards
- How to alert ecosystem participants to the availability of new tokens
The Creator’s Galaxy protocol leverages the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) to address the above challenges. Specifically, use cases include:
- To enable notification of interested applications, wallets, exchanges, explorers, etc., that may be interested in building supporting infrastructure for The Creator’s Galaxy tokens
- Signal to those stakeholders which tokens have been certified as conforming to the rules of The Creator’s Galaxy
Stakeholders will subscribe to specific HCS topic(s) (the topic identifiers communicated through other channels, such as a GitHub or governance portal) in order to be notified of the existence of certified Creator’s Galaxy tokens — both Social & Collectibles. Consequently, when subsequent HCS messages to those topics registered the creation of tokens , those stakeholders would be notified of the new token, and know that they conformed to the requirements of the Creators Galaxy.
Tokens that did not go through this registration via HCS may not conform to the protocol and ecosystem’s specifications and therefore it would be up to each application individually to implement custom support for such tokens. And of course, without a registration mechanism via HCS, the ecosystem would need to rely on other mechanisms to be notified of the existence and availability of new tokens.
The registration HCS topics would have stipulated administrative and submit cryptographic keys, which are natively supported by the Hedera network. Only messages signed by those keys would be accepted. Initially, the expectation is that only a few entities, (e.g. Calaxy Inc. and a variety of ecosystem partners) would be empowered with these keys, and so have the ability to register tokens.
As for other aspects of governance and similar to the ecosystem at large, this model will be continuously decentralized over time. Via the community governance process, $CLXY Token holders will be able to vote for additional members to be added (or existing members to be removed, or the requirements removed entirely) to the HCS topic, allowing additional applications to contribute at the community’s discretion.
It might also be possible for the registration step to bind the verified identity of the Creator to the tokens being announced, such that all stakeholders can be confident of that identity. One possible mechanism would be to include the Creator’s Decentralized Identifier (DID) in the HCS registration message — this same DID also in the token’s memo field and in a Verifiable Credential (VC) issued to the Creator attesting to their influences credentials, e.g. follower count etc. We see Hedera’s Consensus Service as a great toolkit for solving some of these challenges and are looking forward to having other applications supporting this ecosystem.
If you’re building an application and want to learn more about integrating with The Creator’s Galaxy protocol/ecosystem, please get in touch 👋
