Amber Case joins Unlock
Welcome UX/Monetization Expert Amber Case as Strategic Advisor to Unlock! Here’s the Kind of Applications & Partnerships She'll Help Build With Our Community
Hello everyone! Let me warmly introduce Amber Case to the Unlock community. Someone I’ve known and admired for years, Amber is a UX expert, a Mozilla Fellow working on the future of money, and a powerful advocate of the open web. (Full bio here.)
Amber is joining the Unlock team as a strategic advisor who’ll drive our partnerships with creators, communities, and companies, while improving our protocol’s user experience. And we’re both excited about the wide and amazing variety of applications we’ve already seen bubble up in such a short time, including:
Credit Card/Stripe support/Shopify Support: Announced last June, your customers can now buy Unlock memberships and products with fiat cash/credit -- an important option to grow your revenue base. Amber will also help us perfect our Unlock plug-in for Shopify, the online store/brick and mortar payment system used by nearly 2 million businesses worldwide. Once completed, Unlock users will be able to make retail purchases via their crypto wallet!
Discord integration: The Swordy Bot by community builder Patrick Gallagher limits access to select Discord servers to those who've bought a special Unlock-based NFT; a great way to help sustain a community on Discord.
Decentraland and other games: Unlock community member and grant recipient Henry recently made it simple for fellow Decentraland developers to build memberships on their parcels. We think we’ll see many more game developers using Unlock to grant access to their content, to communities across the Internet. For example, an indie dev could set up a Discord server (see above) with member-only channels mapped to their games' memberships.
WordPress: As I learned during my time with Medium, it remains incredibly difficult to monetize journalism, creative writing and other content on the Internet without having to rely on intrusive advertising or third party donation/patronage platforms. Amber will help us improve the UX for our plug-in for WordPress (the backbone to 1 in 3 websites), which will enable writers and other site hosts to easily create a content unlock for a subscription or micropayment -- with no third party taking a cut of their revenue.
Musicians: We love how Mexican artist Zplit uses Unlock to sell their music. When you go to this page, you need to purchase a key using Unlock Protocol to access the full version. Once it’s unlocked, the audio player will load the full track, and the artwork will start spinning. (This app runs using Metamask on the xDai Network.)
Fundraising/Crowdfunding: Unlock grantee Austin Robey recently concocted an amazing idea for a protocol utilization: a "[dinner dao](https://mmm.page/dinnerdao.mainv", i.e. a dinner club where memberships can be purchased through Unlock until enough funds are raised for the whole group to enjoy a special dinner. While this is a fun way for people to treat themselves to a fun and convivial night out, the very same process can be used to fundraise/crowdfund for an infinite variety of causes.
Ticket sales: Already used by the Ethereum Community Conference last July in Paris, other upcoming conferences (like Liscon are leveraging Unlock to sell tickets (via crypto or fiat) and manage attendees.
With Amber’s guidance, these are just the start to the many use cases that will soon emerge from Unlock. More details soon, and don’t forget to join us in our Discord!