We Solve The Community Crisis

Goldman Sachs Research projects the creator economy will reach $480 billion by 2027, growing at a 14% CAGR from $250 billion. Our initial beachhead: the $60B+ intersection of music, NIL, and performance communities.

Creators are losing their communities. Scattered across Discord, Patreon, Instagram, and a dozen other platforms—fans slip away, revenue leaks, and no one truly owns their audience. Project Backstage is the operating system that gives creators and their people a permanent home.

The creator economy has matured beyond content production into a full-stack commercial ecosystem requiring payments, audience management, scarcity mechanics, and multi-channel distribution. Current solutions are fragmented, expensive, and locked to single platforms. We built the community layer that sits on top—neutral, owned, and creator-controlled.

Backstage infrastructure is already deploying across biological performance communities and professional networks, proving the ownership protocol works independently of content vertical.

The Opportunity

Creators' exclusive products are resold on secondary markets generating billions in GMV. The creator receives $0 from every resale transaction. StockX alone processed $1.4 billion in sales in 2025 across 50 million lifetime trades. GOAT Group generated $248 million in revenue at a $3.7 billion valuation. Both platforms charge sellers 9% to 25% in fees. Creator royalty on every one of those resales: zero.

Market Validation: The Weverse Case Study

Weverse, HYBE's fan community platform, proves the vertical integration model at scale. With 9.8M monthly active users and $246M in 2023 revenue, they've demonstrated that superfans will pay premium prices for direct creator access, exclusive content, and community belonging.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Why Weverse Can't Scale Horizontally

Weverse is structurally limited: it's owned by HYBE, a record label with proprietary artist relationships. Their incentive is to extract maximum value from their existing roster, not to enable competitors. This creates a gap in the market for neutral infrastructure—a platform with no label agenda.

• 137 trapped labels: Dozens of music labels want Weverse-style fan engagement but refuse to build their communities on a competitor's platform. They're trapped, waiting for a neutral alternative.
• Exclusivity trap: Weverse's value proposition depends on scarcity of access. Opening to all creators would dilute their premium positioning.
• Label economics: HYBE takes 30%+ as the label, then another 30% as the platform. Creators without label deals need a different path.
• Geographic concentration: 70%+ of Weverse revenue is K-pop focused. The $40B+ non-K-pop creator market is unaddressed.

Industry Validation: The Majors Have Already Surrendered

In the span of 14 months (December 2024 to February 2026), Universal Music Group—the world's largest music company—executed a series of strategic moves that collectively represent the most significant structural shift in the music industry since streaming. The Big Three are no longer fighting the independent movement. They are spending billions to align with it.

UMG's $2.75 Billion Superfan Strategy

Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, wrote in early 2026 that UMG would "accelerate efforts with emerging platforms focused on special events and products for superfans." Here is exactly what UMG has done:

UMG is not building superfan infrastructure internally. It is acquiring and partnering its way into the space. This confirms two things: (1) the direct-to-fan / community ownership model is validated at the highest level, and (2) the infrastructure layer is so valuable that even UMG would rather acquire it than build it.

The EVEN Partnership: Validation and the Gap

The UMG-EVEN deal, announced February 18, 2026, is the single most relevant validation event for Project Backstage's thesis. EVEN is a direct-to-fan platform where artists sell music and content before streaming release. Launched April 2024, it has onboarded 500,000+ artists across 3,000+ labels in 110+ countries, onboarding approximately 50,000 new artists per week. Sales report to Luminate for Billboard chart eligibility. J. Cole is an equity investor.

EVEN vs. Project Backstage: What They Built and What They Didn't

The Broader Industry Shift: All Three Majors Are Moving

The Independent Market by the Numbers

What This Means for Project Backstage

• The thesis is confirmed: The three most powerful music companies on earth are spending billions to align with independent infrastructure and superfan monetization. They are not fighting creator ownership. They are racing to be positioned inside it.
• The distribution layer is solved. The community layer is not: DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby solved distribution. EVEN solved direct sales. Nobody has built the persistent community hub where creators and fans live together—with scarcity mechanics, secondary markets, and perpetual revenue. That is Project Backstage.
• The timing is optimal: UMG validated superfan infrastructure with EVEN four days ago. The Downtown acquisition closed two days ago. Independent market share is at an all-time high. WMG's CEO is publicly building a superfan app. No one has built the community ownership layer.
• The partnership opportunity is real: Just as UMG partnered with EVEN rather than building D2C infrastructure themselves, they will need to partner with the platform that solves community ownership. Project Backstage is that platform.

The Sector: Why This Is Bigger Than It Looks

The distribution layer for independent creators is solved. DistroKid, TuneCore, and CD Baby handle that. The direct sales layer is being solved. EVEN proved superfans will pay 10x streaming rates. But the community ownership layer has no operating standards, no benchmark data, and no playbook. Nobody knows how creator-owned community economies actually work at scale because nobody has built the environment where those economic relationships play out in a structured, measurable way.

Instagram has engagement metrics. YouTube has view counts. Patreon has subscription data. Spotify has listening data. None of them capture the full lifecycle of a community economy: initial membership pricing dynamics, secondary market behavior, community support fee velocity, retention patterns tied to creator activity, cross-community migration, or the correlation between community health and cultural momentum.

That category of data does not exist because that category of economic relationship does not exist yet outside of Project Backstage.

Every creator community on Backstage generates structured behavioral data about how cultural economies work. The first 25 creators are not beta testers. They are the founding case studies for an entirely new sector. By 100 creators, Backstage holds the only structured dataset on creator community economics in existence. By 300, we are setting the operating standards for a sector that will define how the next generation of creators builds, maintains, and monetizes their communities.

The Path to Sector Definition

The Data Moat: What Niantic Built, What We Are Building

In March 2026, Niantic Spatial revealed that the 30 billion images captured by Pokemon Go players over a decade were not just powering augmented reality games. That data now trains a Large Geospatial Model that helps delivery robots navigate city streets with centimeter-level accuracy. Niantic has partnered with Coco Robotics, deploying roughly 1,000 delivery robots across Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Jersey City, and Helsinki.

The players thought they were catching Pokemon. They were building the most ambitious mapping operation ever assembled.

Project Backstage follows the same structural logic. Members think they are engaging with creator communities, buying Diamond Keys, trading on the secondary marketplace, participating in exclusive drops. They are. And the natural byproduct of that genuine engagement is structured behavioral data about how cultural economies actually function.

Data Categories

Structural Parallel: Niantic vs. Project Backstage

The experience is real and valuable on its own. Creators configure their own revenue split (default 88%), perpetual community support fees, and a secondary marketplace. Members get community access, cultural belonging, and an asset that can appreciate. The data is a natural byproduct. The sector emerges from the data. And the dataset compounds with every creator who joins.

Sources: MIT Technology Review, Fortune, PetaPixel, Niantic Spatial press release. All March 2026.

The Meta Contrast: Proof By Failure

Meta spent $73 billion on Reality Labs since 2021 trying to build a new sector from the top down. They built the infrastructure first (Quest headsets, Horizon Worlds, the entire metaverse stack) and waited for the behavior to follow.

It never did.

Horizon Worlds never drew more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users. Total consumer spending on the platform: $1.1 million. After $73 billion invested. In January 2026, Meta cut 1,500 employees from Reality Labs. By March 2026, they reversed course on VR entirely, pivoting to AI and smart glasses.

Project Backstage inverts the model completely.

We do not build the sector and hope people come. We build the tool that lets creators do what they already want to do: own their communities, build real economic relationships with their fans, capture value they have been leaving on the table for 75 years. The behavior comes first. The data emerges from the behavior. The sector emerges from the data.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up: A $73 Billion Lesson

Sources: Technology.org (March 20, 2026), Android Central (January 28, 2026), TheStreet (March 19, 2026), Yahoo Finance (December 5, 2025).

The Moat: 5 Patent-Pending Innovations

Our defensibility comes from a stack of interconnected innovations, each patent-pending, that compound in value when combined. Competitors can copy one layer; replicating the integrated system requires 18-24 months of development.

1. Diamond Key Scarcity System Proprietary tiered-access mechanism that creates verifiable, tradeable scarcity for community membership. Each Key is unique, numbered, and permanently tied to the fan's identity—driving both exclusivity and secondary market value. Patent Pending
2. Perpetual Community Support Fee Engine Automated community support fee infrastructure that ensures creators earn on every secondary transaction—forever. Unlike one-time sales, this creates compounding passive income as a creator's catalog appreciates over time. Patent Pending
3. Geo-Gated Verification System Compliance-first architecture that automatically enforces geographic restrictions for NIL athletes and regulated creator categories. Built-in geo-fencing ensures legal compliance across all 50 states. Patent Pending
4. Community-to-Business Integration Single API that bridges fan communities to commerce—merch, experiences, content, and payments all unified. Creators connect once; we handle Stripe, Shopify, Discord, YouTube, and 40+ integrations automatically. Patent Pending
5. Secondary Marketplace Architecture Built-in resale marketplace where fans can trade access passes, collectibles, and experiences with full provenance tracking. Every transaction triggers creator community support fees, transforming one-time drops into perpetual revenue. Patent Pending

Every transaction type added inside the ecosystem deepens the data moat, increases switching costs, and expands platform revenue. Once a fan holds Diamond Keys, exclusive merchandise, and experiences inside Backstage, the switching cost becomes their entire portfolio.

Financial Model

Three-Year Projection

Operating Expenses (Year 3)

Unit Economics

Perpetual Revenue Engine: The Secondary Market Flywheel

Most platforms capture value once. We capture value forever. Our secondary market infrastructure transforms one-time drops into perpetual revenue streams for both creators and Project Backstage.

How the Flywheel Works

Two-Tier Marketplace Architecture

Tier 1: Diamond Key Holders. Finite supply, first access to everything the creator releases. Economically aligned with creator success through credential appreciation.

Tier 2: Open Marketplace. Where non-Key-holders purchase secondary market items. Every transaction generates platform fees and creator community support fees. Also serves as the conversion funnel for new Key holders.

Every transaction compounds into the most granular D2C behavioral dataset in the creator economy. Year 3 and beyond: anonymized data licensing as high margin recurring revenue.

Secondary Market Revenue Model

Why This Matters: The Multiplier Effect

Traditional creator platforms capture revenue once at point of sale. Our secondary market infrastructure transforms digital scarcity into a compounding asset class. Analysis of comparable markets (StockX, Whatnot, NBA Top Shot) shows:

• Average resale velocity: High-demand items trade 3.2x in the first year alone
• Price appreciation: Early drops from growing creators appreciate 140% on average
• Velocity increases with fame: As creators grow, their back-catalog trades more frequently
• Zero marginal cost: Secondary transactions require no creator effort—pure passive income

Projected Secondary Market Contribution

Credential Architecture: Two Layers of Value

Diamond Keys carry two layers of value that operate independently. The credential itself tracks provenance: when it was minted, which community it belongs to, its full transaction history. This history transfers with the key, making older keys with more provenance inherently more valuable on the secondary market.

The holder builds a separate reputation layer: number of communities joined, total holding duration across all keys, founding member status. This reputation stays with the person even after they sell a key. It cannot be bought. It can only be earned.

Competitive Landscape

The real competitor is not another platform. It is inertia. Creators have been trained to give community away for free and charge for content. Backstage inverts that model. Community is the paid product. Content is the hook. No existing platform has made this shift.

Where Creator Resale Revenue Goes Today

Fanvue raised $22M in January 2026 at over $100M annualized revenue with 450% year-over-year growth and 17 million monthly active users. They proved creator monetization at scale. What they did not build: community ownership, transferable credentials, secondary markets, or perpetual revenue. Fanvue is a subscription treadmill. When a creator stops posting, revenue stops. On Backstage, community support fees flow on every resale whether the creator posts or not.

Risk Analysis & Mitigation

Why Now

The world is tokenizing ownership. Backstage is the infrastructure for the creator economy's version of that shift.

In March 2026, the total value of tokenized real world assets exceeded $12 billion, more than doubling from $5 billion at the start of 2025. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries alone account for $5.8 billion, led by BlackRock's BUIDL fund at $1.9 billion. The DTCC, which settles the majority of U.S. securities transactions, began minting tokenized Treasury securities on blockchain in early 2026.

The regulatory environment has shifted decisively. The GENIUS Act, enacted in 2025, established the first federal framework for stablecoins, requiring 100% reserve backing. The SEC issued formal guidance on tokenized securities in January 2026. The Clarity Act, expected to pass in 2026, will codify how digital assets are regulated across brokers, dealers, and exchanges.

Every one of these developments validates the same thesis: ownership is moving on chain. Financial assets are being tokenized so they can be traded globally, programmatically, and fractionally. But nobody has applied this architecture to the creator economy.

Diamond Keys are tokenized community relationships. Fixed supply membership credentials that carry provenance data, trade on a secondary marketplace, and generate community support fees on every transaction. The same structural mechanics that BlackRock and the U.S. Treasury are building for financial assets, Backstage has built for creators.

Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion to build payment rails for the tokenized economy. Backstage is building the community rails. Backstage applies the same programmable ownership architecture to the $234 billion creator economy, a vertical with zero infrastructure built for it.

Goldman Sachs Research projects the total addressable market of the creator economy will reach $480 billion by 2027, roughly doubling from $250 billion. The three primary monetization vehicles: ad revenue sharing, brand deals, and audience-directed monetization. Backstage sits at the intersection of all three, with the only infrastructure that adds a fourth: secondary market economics with perpetual creator participation.

Regulatory Milestones

Strategic Partnership Paths

Early strategic partners who bring their creator roster to the platform receive equity in AMILLY Technologies. The specific structure depends on the scope of the partnership: roster commitment, co-development participation, and investment capital. We offer two paths:

Both paths are available simultaneously. Details provided under NDA.

Use of Funds