At Royal, we've always been committed to innovation and staying at the forefront of technology. For the past eight months, our dedicated engineering team has been diligently working behind the scenes to revamp our backend infrastructure and product development approach.

There are more tools today to build decentralized systems that work at low costs, than ever before. The world of distributed ledger technology has changed drastically over the past three years since we started Royal, which has allowed us to rebuild our core tech.

Learning from the Past:

Our initial version (Royal 1.0) relied too much on our more centralized database and account system for music royalties. This led to challenges like:

• Data Discrepancies: Onchain data (like successful token transfers) sometimes wouldn't reflect accurately in our user interface due to reliance on an internal database.

• Limited Interoperability: We built our token architecture around a single, centralized LDA contract, which, along with features like embedded wallets, made it challenging for our users to engage in the broader web3 ecosystem.

• Scalability Issues: While functional, the current system wasn't built to handle the growth and complexity of royalty payments, especially when dealing with manual artist payouts.

Royal 2.0: Building for Web3

With Royal 2.0, we're shifting gears entirely. This update represents a robust backend infrastructure specifically designed to support the development of powerful Web3-focused products in the future.

• Onchain Truth: The true power of cryptocurrency is the distributed ledger, and through a close partnership with Alchemy Labs, our new app utilizes onchain data to drive our applications as the single source of truth. This also ensures that any third party has access to the same data we do, key to laying an interoperable and composable foundation.

• Factory Contracts: We want anyone to be able to utilize our new smart contract infrastructure, which is why we will no longer be gatekeeping the deployment of new contracts. Our focus is on making decentralized tools that people can use themselves, which starts by making tools as opposed to just the finished products.

Sunset of the Marketplace:

As part of this transition, we'll be sunsetting the Royal marketplace, including trading and edition pages. The current version relies heavily on centralized data. Rest assured, you'll still be able to trade your tokens on OpenSea and claim royalties through our site.

What’s next?

Despite pausing new sales of royalty rights, our commitment to leveraging blockchain technology to solve complex challenges in the music industry is unwavering. One of those challenges lies in music AI provenance as the proliferation of AI-generated music explodes.

Our first experiment at the intersection of generative music and crypto was Sonic, we gave fans the opportunity to co-create a song with 3LAU using a model trained on his catalog and buy 333 licenses.

Keep an eye out for more updates in the coming months. We want to thank everyone for supporting our journey.