How Matters.News redefines the creator economy with its massively popular web 3 decentralized blogging platform

6 min readNov 8, 2021

Author: Matters.News
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mattersw3b

Web 3.0. Blockchain publishing. NFT collectibles. These are some of the biggest buzzwords disrupting the Internet today that young people are hyped about and for good reason: blockchain is shaping the future of just about every industry. The creators of Matters.News, an open-sourced, decentralized blockchain publishing community with 100,000 content creators, is the latest success in showcasing the future of Web3, the next evolution of the Internet.

The vast majority of blockchain projects today are flashy ventures to stimulate fear of missing out rather than investing in truly valuable services for its community. So far, Matters.News is the only platform to not only empower creators with financially viable and autonomous self-publishing, but will also be the harbinger of Web 3.0, a new era of the internet where users own a part of the services & networks they contribute to.

“Matters.News is just the tip of the iceberg, and our most successful experimentation with our web3 technology to date,” says Guo, co-founder and engineer behind Matters, “we hope that in the future we will create a freer and fairer digital economy for everyday content creators.

By November 1st, Matters.News will be also launching highly-anticipated NFT social media avatars that function as a logbook where every buyer can leave a message. A pipeline of exciting NFT experimental ideas are in the works: projects include the Public Space Project, which brings together NFT, Harberger Tax, and Universal Basic Income concept in an open-source community, and other Web3 products like crowdfunding with revenue sharing and decentralized personal page.

Matters.News is the biggest successful application of blockchain and IPFS publishing in the world today, with 100,000 content creators publishing an average of 300+ articles daily and 6 million page views every month. Currently, it is in the Chinese language, but that is about to change as Matters Lab, the backend platform powering Matters.News, opens up to investors, content creators, developers, and NFT enthusiasts globally.

Read on to learn more about Matters.News, and we’d love to hear what you think (Please send emails to hi@matters.news)

What is Matters.News?

Created out of an urgent need for open discussion and debate across the political spectrum in the wake of Hong Kong’s political protests, Matters.News began as a blockchain media experiment and testing ground to empower creators and artists in a public discussion space. Today, Matters.News has grown to:

How it works:

An online web 3.0 publishing platforming that publishes 10,000 articles monthly from a community of 100,000 content writers
Massive readership with 6 million monthly page views from Chinese speakers globally
Integrated with LikeCoin: readers can “clap” which turns into LikeCoin that can be traded, transferred, or exchanged
Users can support writers with both fiat currency and cryptocurrency, open to anyone with a credit card
Content creators have a dedicated hub to build and monetize readership, including paywalls, broadcasting, and community space
Writers have been awarded as much as USD$2,000 per article
Powered by IPFS: this means the content is hashed with unique fingerprints and stored on peer-to-peer nodes rather than a central server, guaranteeing 24/7 accessibility, security, and inalterable content.
Truly empowers content creators to be independent through decentralization, complete control and later, content as NFTs for readers to crowdfund content
Completely open-sourced platform open to developers via GitHub
A team of journalists and cyber anarchists/engineers committed to user experience, quality content, and free speech rather than crypto-trends of the moment.

“Matters.News is just the beginning and the harbinger for the full potential of our web 3.0 platform and framework, Presstack,” comments co-founder Guo, “there are so many powerful applications of our web3 platform to create a more equal, decentralized, trustless world.”

How Matters bring web 3.0 to life

Introducing Two NFT Projects: Traveloggers + Public Space Project

NFTs, which stands for Non-Fungible Tokens, are unique and non-interchangeable digital assets. If cryptocurrency is a store of value, then NFTs are a store of culture: photos, videos, and audio. Through blockchain technology, NFT establishes a public proof of ownership and has soared in value in recent months, with sales hitting $2.5 billion just during the first half of 2021.

We love the idea of developing NFTs because its application truly empowers creators by offering more autonomy for earnings and content rights. On November 2nd, we launched exclusive NFT social media avatars, Traveloggers: the first NFT artwork that can be directly integrated with social media profiles and features a logbook, in which every owner can add their message. With every successive trade of the NFT, the new owner of the avatar does not only own the artwork, but also the collective messages left on the logbook from past owners. This turns the trading of avatars into a mutually beneficial collaboration between content creators and collectors.

To learn more, visit: https://traveloggers.matters.news/

Other exciting NFT applications are in the pipeline, including NFT content that can be crowdfunded, tokenizing topic tags on Matters.News, and The Space Project, which brings blockchain applications to concepts like the Harberger Tax and Universal Basic Income (UBI). to solve the dilemma between public and private ownership.

The Harberger Tax is a clever system to optimize the distribution of public resources with the power of the market to increase the general welfare of society. Although widely discussed and admired, it has so far no real implementation with real users.

Our upcoming The Space Project will be the first large-scale experiment of the Harberger Tax. Combined with the idea of the Universal Basic Income, it transforms the community into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) with minimal rules. Stay tuned on the development of this project by following us on Twitter, which will redefine “public” and “private” in Web3.

Awards + Media Coverage

Matters.News has been covered in Columbia Journalism Review, Rest of World, Protocol and more. Matters.News also won the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge Award 2020 and received Flagship Grant for the Web by Mozilla Foundation and Creative Commons & Coil. Here are some things the media has said about Matters:

“Blockchain allows Matters users to collectively determine its rules, and to decide what content has value…Matters is one of the few remaining online venues where users from across the political spectrum can engage in discussion and debate.” — Rest of World

“Matters give Chinese citizens a way to speak out that cannot be erased by censors.” — Columbia Journalism Review

“The [Chinese-language media’s] attempts to adopt new technology to weather financial and political turbulence can inspire the West…allowing Matters users to trade NFT avatars empower users to independently open censorship-resilient sites, turning their work into a part of the Ethereum blockchain as a public ledger and selling it,” The Protocol

Who is behind Matters Lab?

Matters.News began when veteran journalist, Annie Zhang Jieping, became concerned about the rapidly diminishing space for free speech in China and especially in Hong Kong. She was intrigued by the idea of a decentralized platform that is easy for anyone to use, and hard for authorities to censor. Launched during the height of the West’s blockchain media mania, Matter.News went on to become a successful blockchain publishing platform while other similar platforms gradually closed down. Today, together with co-founders Guo Liu based in Los Angeles and Beryl Liu based in Hong Kong, the mission of the team is to create a freer and fairer creator ecosystem through the next evolution of the Internet, Web3.

Zhang Jieping (Annie), Founder, Taipei — Serial entrepreneur, award-winning journalist, influencer.

Guo Liu, Co-Founder, Los Angeles — Engineer, data scientist, cyber anarchist.

Beryl Liu, Co-Founder, Hong Kong — Operation, crypto finance management.

Get in touch

Email to us: hi@matters.news
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mattersw3b