Some of these thoughts came out of a conversation with Bonfire’s founder, Matt.

“Mint and watch on my platform” is the wording Latasha used as she released her song “A Ten” onchain a few weeks ago. She used Bonfire as the web3 site builder to power her release site. The drop was eventually minted 25k+ times.

What’s Bonfire?

Bonfire.xyz started as a place for web3 communities to create pages and let their audiences access gated content. You can think of it as a no-code web3 site builder. If I remember well, at the time, Bonfire was directly competing with Tellie, which no longer seems to exist.

More recently, the Bonfire team decided to double down on the creator vertical, focusing on multimedia content creators like music artists releasing video clips, who tend to not have great options in terms of distribution channels that they can own.

What problem is Bonfire solving?

Like Latashá, most creators do not desire or can’t afford to spend time and money to build a custom end-to-end website that encapsulates the experience they want to create for their audience, especially one that integrates with web3 protocols. Bonfire aims to fill this gap and be the go-to website builder for creators like Latasha, who are increasingly putting their work onchain and monetizing there.

There are two main ways to release work on Bonfire at this point:

• Posts, which are simply a release of an onchain media creation that can be minted right on the Bonfire page, like Latashá’s song release.

• Passes, which are a way to mediate access to content. For example, in the case of the Ethereum film, passes were a way to get access to the documentary early. The post is the video itself, and ticket holders can access it—in that case, the content is driving demand. In other cases, the passes are the product. The kinds of experiences that passes could enable are still an open question and a design space to explore. Rae Isla uses passes to give its community access to “exclusive content, early releases, and unique experiences.” On my end, I’m not a big fan of fully gated experiences. At a time where distribution is the hardest thing to build, it feels odd to me to put additional barriers in the way of content consumption. Now, for certain types of high-quality and aspirational products, that might work better. To Matt’s point during our conversation, onchain provenance and interoperability are good primitives for gating and tailoring experiences specifically to each community member—a clear new design space vs. the Patreons and Substacks of the world.

Bonfire is not designed to address distribution

Bonfire will not help you with distribution. It’s a platform and an experience that makes the most sense if you’re confident that you’ll be able to channel different kinds of audiences to it. So that’s a thing for creators that already have an engaged audience, in my opinion.

For example, it looks like Latasha’s collects came mainly from three sources:

• An existing community of supporters, including big supporters in the Lens community, helping increase activity on the minting contract

• A Layer3 campaign, helping increase activity on the minting contract

• As a result of the large minting activity on “A Ten”’s NFT contract, it was picked up by onchain media curation venues like Onchain Summer on Coinbase Wallet or Daylight.xyz as trending mints

And this distribution and monetization aspect is still the hardest part to figure out, in my opinion.

What’s next for Bonfire?

1. Bonfire is looking to work closely with web2 creators that have an established fanbase that is looking for more access to them or to the community around them

2. Coinbase Smart Wallet will enable a very simple experience that should allow web2 communities to use the product through smooth onboarding

3. Season passes, which are now in beta, will be rolling out to more people soon!