Kickstarter moves to blockchain – and creators aren’t happy
Yesterday Kickstarter announced their plans to move the crowdfunding platform to the blockchain.
The news came via a blog post made on the official website, which explained what was coming next for crowdfunding creative projects. Essentially, the functionality of supporting creatives and projects on Kickstarter will move to become open source in order to decentralize the crowdfunding platform.
The blockchain they’ve decided to use is Celo. Celo is described as being “carbon negative” – which doesn’t seem possible even after reading this section on the official Celo blog – public blockchain. Because of the open-source of this new platform, Kickstarter states that it will be used by “collaborators, competitors, and independent contributors from all over the world to build upon, connect to, or use” in order to promote their projects.
“This openness enables everyone who is interested in the promise of crowdfunding to help build its future and have a say and stake in how it works.” The blog reads. “Blockchain will also open the potential to be rewarded for contributing to the systems that you use everyday.”
Those who use Kickstarter will not see a change to the platform’s functionality. “As a user, whether you’re a creator or a backer, the Kickstarter experience you’re familiar with will stay the same,” the company wrote on their blog. “You won’t ‘see’ the protocol, but you will benefit from its improvements.
The company also stated that, regardless of the crowdfunding platform moving to a public blockchain, backers would still be able to “utilize normal credit and debit cards to pledge to campaigns, and creators can continue to receive normal currency to fulfill their projects.”
The response to Kickstarter moving to blockchain has been far from positive, with many creatives responding negatively to the original tweet made by the platform on Twitter.
Regardless of which creative industry those that have protested the move are in, all seem to come back to the very same thing: Kickstarter moving towards the use of blockchain will hurt creators more than help them. Considering that some game developers – particularly LGBTQ+ and marginalized developers – use the crowdfunding platform to help bring their ideas to life, the concern and backlash shouldn’t be surprising.
As of now, Kickstarter has not addressed the comments it has received.
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